Effects of international sharing of pollution abatement burdens on income inequality among countries

Improvements in environmental quality will boost output production and hence economic growth. However, although environmental abatement equally benefits all economies in the world, it is shown that, if the private productive resources are not yet accumulated sufficiently in low income economies, income inequality among economies can be widened in the short term not only under equal burden sharing of pollution abatement but even under income-proportional burden sharing. When the marginal productivity is diminishing, the negative effect of the burden is large relative to the positive effect of the improved environment in economies in which resources are not accumulated sufficiently.     

Health Status Risks and the Efficiency of Social Security Systems

We studied the allocative efficiency of a social security system with earning tests focusing on the leisure–work choices of older men. Given empirical findings that health status and social security benefits are the most important determinants of such choices, we incorporated risks with respect to health status into an overlapping–generations model, and analysed how allocative efficiency was changed by the introduction of social security systems. It was found that the effects of a social security system can be broken down into particular categories and that a social security system improves efficiency when the pension system is small. JEL Classification Numbers: H55, I10, E40.     

Explaining Growth: A Contest Between Models

Recent contributions to the empirical growth literature show no tendency to convergence in specification, as researchers seek to identify new variables that can account for significant regional effects in earlier work. We conduct non-nested tests between the models of Barro (1997), Easterly and Levine (1997) and Sachs and Warner (1997). The data strongly prefer an encompassing model, but fail to reject any of the candidate models, implying that each model represents a partial truth. We identify a model that includes most (but not all) of the regressors in the candidate models and is robust to the inclusion of regional dummies.     

Money,inflation, and optimal economic growth

Using a two-asset model of a growing competitive economy, it is shown that the optimal growth path can be achieved via a policy operating exclusively on the rate of growth of the money stock.     

Contribution-proportional remuneration rule for employee inventions and its effects on effort and investment incentives

The practice of the Japanese court in case of a dispute between the employer and employee regarding the amount of remuneration for an employee invention has been to order that the additional profit from the invention be divided proportionally to their respective input contributions. We show that, if the employer’s investment and employee’s effort are weakly complementary, this rule causes the share effect (excessive incentives on the part of each party to expend investment or effort in order to increase his/her share of the surplus) to dominate the probability effect (insufficient incentives arising from the fact that each party obtains only part of the increase in the expected surplus), and thus leads to excessive investment and effort relative to the joint-payoff-maximising levels. If the court cannot capture the employer’s investment as fully as the employee’s effort, the employer’s investment may be too low compared to the joint-payoff-maximising level.     

Regional Developments by Making Intellectual Property Public Domain

In this paper, the Japanese methods of regional developments with media contents are being analyzed. Taking Hokkaido or Sakaimitato as examples, the effects on the tourism with media contents will be explained in detail. Then, as a new idea, the concept of local consumed intellectual property will be proposed. Finally, the measures of solution of copyright which is difficult to deal with when using media contents would be discussed by including legislations.     

Payoff dominance and risk dominance in the observable delay game: a note

We examine whether the payoff dominant sequential-move (Stackelberg) outcome is realized when timing is endogenized. We adopt the observable delay game formulated by Hamilton and Slutsky [Games Econ Behav 2(1):29–46, 1990]. We find that if one sequential-move outcome is payoff dominant, either (i) the outcome both players prefer is the unique equilibrium; or (ii) two sequential-move outcomes are equilibria and the one both players prefer is risk dominant. In other words, no conflict between payoff dominance and risk dominance in the observable delay game exists, in contrast to other games such as (non pure) coordination games. We also find that even if one of two sequential-move outcomes is the unique equilibrium outcome in the observable delay game, it does not imply that the equilibrium outcome is payoff dominant to the other sequential-move outcome.      

The effect of social distancing on the reach of an epidemic in social networks

How does social distancing affect the reach of an epidemic in social networks? We present Monte Carlo simulation results of a susceptible–infected–removed with social distancing model. The key feature of the model is that individuals are limited in the number of acquaintances that they can interact with, thereby constraining disease transmission to an infectious subnetwork of the original social network. While increased social distancing typically reduces the spread of an infectious disease, the magnitude varies greatly depending on the topology of the network, indicating the need for policies that are network dependent. Our results also reveal the importance of coordinating policies at the ‘global’ level. In particular, the public health benefits from social distancing to a group (e.g. a country) may be completely undone if that group maintains connections with outside groups that are not following suit.