Optimal Welfare-to-Work Programs

A Welfare-to-Work (WTW) program is a mix of government expenditures on various labour market policies targeted to the unemployed ( e.g. unemployment insurance (UI), job search monitoring (JM), social assistance (SA), wage subsidies). This paper provides a dynamic principal–agent framework suitable for analysing chief features of an optimal WTW program, such as the sequence and duration of the different policies, the dynamic pattern of payments along the unemployment spell, and the emergence of taxes/subsidies upon re-employment. The optimal program endogenously generates an absorbing policy of last resort ("social assistance") characterized by a constant lifetime payment and no active participation by the agent. Human capital depreciation is a necessary condition for policy transitions to be part of an optimal WTW program. The typical sequence of policies is quite simple: the program starts with standard UI, then switches into monitored search and, finally, into SA. The optimal benefits are decreasing during unemployment insurance and constant during both JM and SA. Whereas taxes (subsidies) can be either increasing or decreasing with duration during UI, they must decrease (increase) during a phase of JM. In a calibration exercise, we use our model to analyse quantitatively the features of the optimal program for the U.S. economy. With respect to the existing U.S. system, the optimal WTW scheme delivers sizeable welfare gains to unskilled workers because the incentives to search for a job can be retained even while delivering more insurance and using costly monitoring less intensively.     

Evaluation of cooperative research

This report looks at evaluation studies of a number of cooperative academic-industrfy research programmes in Europe, and suggests that indirect economic benefits should be taken into account as well as motives and goals of participating firms.     

Technology level evaluation methodology based on the technology growth curve

Technology has been the driving force of development for knowledge-based economies. As competition in technology innovation among nations becomes more intense, there is a growing need for improved judgment, evaluation and prediction of scientific technology capacity in order to enhance national competitiveness. Until now, a country's technology level has been evaluated on a relative basis by comparing it with that of the country with the world's best technology. However, this kind of static methodology makes the interpretation of results unclear and makes time series analysis difficult. One of the most important limitations of this methodology is that it cannot be used to establish a strategy to improve the technology level. This paper examines the methodological problems of technology level evaluation and develops a dynamic methodology by applying the technology growth curve model. We also analyze the real technology level by using a new model application and review the relevance of this method. Finally, we discuss how to use the results in order to create a dynamic technology strategy.     

战略风险评估7步走

“对大多数公司而言,董事会倾注注意力和时间的重心是理解战略及关联风险并提供指导……以及对高管实施战略和风险管理两方面的业绩进行监管。”由美国全国公司董事协会（NACD）出版的《加强美国上市公司监管的关键议定原则》中如是表示。     

Good News and Bad News: Search from Unknown Wage Offer Distributions

The largest market in national economies is the labor market. Labor market contracting is characterized by job search, often from unknown wage offer distributions. This paper reports experimental tests of finite horizon models of job search in which the wage offer distribution is unknown. Theoretically-optimal search from an unknown wage offer distribution can have the seemingly paradoxical property that some offers will be accepted that are lower than other offers that will be rejected in the same period of the search horizon. Thus the reservation wage property (or lowest acceptable wage path) may not exist. This can occur because an offer that is a priori relatively high (good news) can imply that it is highly probable that search is from a favorable distribution, and such an offer can look unattractive when it is an a posteriori relatively low offer from a favorable distribution (bad news). This paper reports results from experimental treatments for search from unknown distributions in which the reservation wage property does exist and treatments in which it does not exist. We find that the consistency of search behavior with search theory reported in earlier papers is robust to the presence or absence of the reservation wage property and to whether the draws come from known or unknown distributions.     

Sources of Sectoral Growth in an Economy Wide Context: The Case of U.S. Agriculture

Growth in U.S. agriculture is linked to the non-farm economy through domestic terms of trade and factor market adjustments. With almost stable input growth, the relatively large contributions from growth in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) are passed on to intermediate and final consumers in the form of declining real prices for primary farm products. The resulting net growth in the real value of farm output (GDP) is relatively low (0.25% per annum). The decomposition of TFP suggests that public agricultural stock of knowledge and infrastructure are robustly associated with TFP growth, while spill-overs from private agricultural and economy wide research and development (R and D) are positive but, relatively small.