Allocative vs. technical spectrum efficiency

Achieving allocative and technically efficient spectrum management is a key aspect of deregulatory reforms in several OECD countries. However, reform legislation offers few clues as to how these objectives should rank when they conflict with one another. An ‘innocent’ prior acquisition of service-neutral spectrum at an efficiently run auction may prove allocative efficient but fail to be technically efficient if the spectrum is left fallow in the short term. Accountability for the productive usage of a public resource and pressures from short-term political cycles may induce regulators to mandate some minimal level of activity. Two plausible regulatory responses are considered: use it or lose it clauses and spectrum trading incentives. The former favours technical efficiency whilst the latter promotes allocative efficiency. The argument is formalised in a simple economic model buttressing the roles of uncertainty and transaction costs to assert the primacy of allocative efficiency over technical efficiency.     

Measuring Hospital Performance in the Presence of Quasi-Fixed Inputs: An Analysis of Québec Hospitals

This research proposes an approach to measure hospital performance based on a generalization of Banker and Morey (1986) and Førsund (1996). This approach considers quasi-fixed inputs explicitly, calculates their implicit cost, and quantifies returns to scale. The performance measure is decomposed into allocative and technical inefficiencies. Based on a very complete data set of Québec hospitals, we find that significant inefficiencies of up to 17% ($700 CAN million) could have been saved through improved performance. Postestimation analyses that include qualitative measures of care suggest that differences in performance are attributable to differences in management or unobservable quality of care rather than patient case mix.     

Rupture or Continuity? Modern and Postmodern Planning in Toronto

The literature on the transition to postmodernism, postfordism and participatory planning stresses the value of the economic and planning process shifts that have occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This paper compares two periods of planning and urban development in Toronto: one running from 1959 to 1962, at the height of modernism, fordism and expert-driven planning, and the other, from 1989 to 1992, set within the postmodern, postfordist and participatory planning era. In line with expectations arising from the literature, the study reveals stark distinctions between the two periods. It documents the breaking up of the modern consensus around the progress ideology into a postmodern constellation of values. As a result, the range of issues debated on the planning scene was much broader over the second period than over the first. Overall, however, results point to a mixture of continuity and change between the two periods and thus diverge from this literature’s strong emphasis on transition. Contrary to expectations, citizen mobilization was pervasive in both periods, although there were major differences in the nature of activism and in the issues that were raised. Over the first period most activism originated from ratepayer organizations dedicated to the protection of single-family-home neighbourhoods from encroachments, whereas the second period featured, along with such associations, advocacy groups championing environmental and social causes. The two periods are also distinguished by different planning implementation capacities. Whereas in the first period, planning had the means to implement its visions, this was no longer the case in the second period. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, planning was thus incapable of aligning urban development with its environmental and social ideals, which meant that, by default, planning practice over the second period proceeded pretty much according to land-use and transportation principles evolved in the early postwar decades. In sum, distinctions between the two periods were far more evident in the discourse than in the implementation sphere. — Les recherches sur la transition vers le postmodernisme, le postfordisme et la planification participative soulignent la valeur des changements qui ont pris place à la fin des années soixante et au début des années soixante-dix. Cet article compare deux périodes de planification et de dévelopment urbain à Toronto: une qui va de 1959 à 1962, durant l’apogée du modernisme, du fordisme et de la planification contrôlée par les experts, et l’autre, de 1989 à 1992, à l’époque du postmodernisme, du postfordisme et de la planification participative. En accord avec les prévisions émanant des recherches, cette étude révèle des distinctions nettes entre les deux périodes. Elle documente le morcellement du consensus moderne autour l’idéologie du progrès et le changement en faveur d’une constellation de valeurs postmodernes. Il s’ensuit que le champ de problèmes discutés en relation avec la planification était beaucoup plus étendu durant la seconde période que durant la première. Dans l’ensemble, cependant, les résultats indiquent un mélange de continuité et de changement entre les deux périodes et divergent donc de la forte emphase sur la transition que l’on trouve dans les recherches. Contairement aux prévisions, la mobilisation des citoyens était omniprésente à Toronto pendant les deux périodes, mais il y avait des différences importantes quant à la nature de l’activisme et dans les problèmes soulevés. Durant la première période, la plus grande part de l’activisme provenait des organisations de contribuables vouées à la protection des quartiers d’habitations contre les empiètements, alors que la seconde période comprenait, en plus de ces organisations, des groupes de soutien aux causes de l’environnement et aux causes sociales. Les deux périodes sont également distinctes en termes de mise en oeuvre. Alors que dans la première période les urbanistes avaient les moyens de mettre leurs idées à exécution, ce n’était plus le cas dans la seconde. Vers la fin des années quatre-vingt et le début des années quatre-vingt-dix, la planification ne pouvait pas intégrer les développements urbains et ses idéaux sociaux et environnementaux. Par défaut, la pratique de la planification durant la seconde période a fonctionnée selon les principes d’utilisation des terrains et du transport développés dans les premières décennies de l’après-guerre. En somme, les différences entre les deux périodes sont beaucoup plus visibles au niveau du discours qu’au niveau de l’application.     

A critical overview of privacy-preserving approaches for collaborative forecasting

Cooperation between different data owners may lead to an improvement in forecast quality—for instance, by benefiting from spatiotemporal dependencies in geographically distributed time series. Due to business competitive factors and personal data protection concerns, however, said data owners might be unwilling to share their data. Interest in collaborative privacy-preserving forecasting is thus increasing. This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art and unveils several shortcomings of existing methods in guaranteeing data privacy when employing vector autoregressive models. The methods are divided into three groups: data transformation, secure multi-party computations, and decomposition methods. The analysis shows that state-of-the-art techniques have limitations in preserving data privacy, such as (i) the necessary trade-off between privacy and forecasting accuracy, empirically evaluated through simulations and real-world experiments based on solar data; and (ii) iterative model fitting processes, which reveal data after a number of iterations.     

Optimal Monetary Policy Rules and Inflation Targets: Are Australia,Canada, and New Zealand Different from the U.S.?

Outwardly, the central banks of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. follow somewhat different approaches to controlling inflation. The U.S. does not explicitly target inflation while the other countries do. Canada and New Zealand have target bands for inflation while Australia has a point target. Results in this paper nevertheless find broad similarities in the monetary policies of these countries. Each can be described as having pursued optimal inflation targeting (explicit or implicit), with heavy interest rate smoothing, but perhaps placing little weight on output variability. We argue that interest rate smoothing is used to introduce gradualism into the response of monetary policy to inflation. We show that given heavy interest rate smoothing, a concern for output variability is redundant.     

Productivity and international competitiveness of agriculture in the European Union and the United States

This study looks at international competitiveness of agriculture in the European Union and the United States. The most intuitive concept is that of price competitiveness. We calculate relative prices for 11 member states of the European Union and the United States for the period 1973–2002. We assume that markets are perfectly competitive and in long‐run equilibrium, so that the observed price always equals average total cost, as measured by the cost dual to the production function. This assumption is used in our calculation of relative competitiveness and productivity gaps between the European Union and the United States and in our decomposition of relative price movements between changes in relative input prices and changes in relative productivity levels.     

An Investigation of Policy Administrative Costs Using Panel Data for the English Environmentally Sensitive Areas

This paper explores transactions costs in the context of agri‐environmental policy schemes based on management agreements. While transactions costs encompass a wide range of organisational costs, the focus here is on the public‐sector administrative costs of policy implementation. Empirical administrative cost functions were estimated to investigate the factors affecting the magnitude of such costs, using panel data spanning five years for the 22 English Environmentally Sensitive Areas. The extent of participation appears to be important in explaining administrative cost variability across areas. The data suggested the existence of size economics with regard to the numbers of agreements made in any one ESA, and a significant effect of scheme experience in exerting downwards‐pressure on administrative costs. Policy budgeting and evaluation should take into account the non‐trivial costs of organisation, particularly if agri‐environmental schemes based on the procurement of conservation goods through management agreements are to be extended in future.     

What Can Acreage Allocations Say about Crop Supply Elasticities? A Convex Programming Approach to Supply Response Disaggregation

This article has two goals. The first is to extend previous results regarding calibration of land‐constrained programming models of agricultural supply against supply elasticities to the general case of multiple constraints. The second goal is to demonstrate how the resulting calibration conditions can be used as a source of identification to disaggregate crop supply elasticities down to the level at which static information on acreage allocations is available. We propose an information‐based disaggregation algorithm to systematically generate regionalised elasticities from a single prior, and provide an empirical illustration.