A Non-cooperative Approach to Bankruptcy Problems

We propose an elementary game form that allows to obtain the allocations proposed by any acceptable bankruptcy rule as the unique payoff vector of the corresponding Nash equilibria.     

Environmental impact of household activity in Spain

The objective of this paper is to analyse the environmental impacts of the Spanish economy by way of water and atmospheric pollution on the basis of a Spanish Accounting Matrix for 1999. Only households were taken as an exogenous account. The pollution measures are estimated for seven categories of pollution: three atmospheric pollutants (CO₂, NO_x and SO_x) and four indicators for water (waste water, nitrogen, metals and biological oxygen demand (BOD)). The environmental data base was obtained from the Spanish Statistical Institute.The analysis reveals that pollution in Spain is closely linked to food production, energy, extractive industries and paper manufacturing. We show that services, taken as a whole, are major polluters, though this is due to the volume of household expenditure they represent rather than their pollution potential as such. We also show that the Spanish economy avoids a great deal of pollution by importing inputs, which pollute where they are produced. Finally, the study also provides per capita pollution values for the aforementioned seven pollutants.     

Social protection during recessions: evidence from Chile

This article analyzes the main labor market risk management strategies adopted by the Chilean Government during the 1999 recession that was initially related to the Asian financial crisis. Their successes and failures can suggest innovative social protection solutions for other countries. It seems that the 1999–2001 labor reforms and a three-year plan to increase the minimum wage intensified the recession’s effects on unemployment. Probit models indicate that households coped with the recession’s effects by increasing wives’ labor supply but not by withdrawing children from schools. The expansion of employment programs probably helped households to adopt these coping strategies.     

Why do patterns of environmental response differ? A stakeholders' pressure approach

The objective of this article is to analyze the strategies or patterns of adaptation of firms for responding to environmental requirements or expectations. We specifically analyze the influence of the different pressure agents or stakeholders on the degree of proactivity of these patterns. We therefore propose and validate four types of environmental response pattern, representing particular configurations of both the scope of environmental objectives and their allocation of internal resources. The analysis, which is focused on a sample of 240 industrial firms, provides empirical evidence enabling us to identify, understand, and evaluate the impact of stakeholders on the choice of environmental response pattern. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The BRICS’s Bank,Institutional Framework,and Other Current Limitations

Abstract:

Based on Polanyi’s concepts of embeddedness, disembeddedness, and the double movement, the aim of this article is to show that the new development bank (NDB) established by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (grouped as BRICS) lacks an institutional context to spur growth and development, similar to the growth that occurred during the Bretton Woods era. First, I examine some of the BRICS’s strengths, such as growth rates, share of world GDP (gross domestic product), and the level international reserves as a percent of the world total. Second, I outline the BRICS’s and other Third World countries’ need for financing. I maintain that the main flaw in the BRICS’s bank is that it follows market rationality in obtaining and granting resources, and that China (the most important member of the BRICS) is still dependent on the G7’s economies. Finally, I remark that as long as the NDB follows market fundamentals, it will be less likely to achieve growth.     

Harvesting Preemption, Industrial Concentration and Enclosure of National Marine Fisheries

This paper explores how harvesting technology can affect firms' internalisation of common pool externalities and the incentives for expanding firm's size. Focusing on supply side non-pecuniary externalities, our closed-entry harvesting competition model suggests that when marginal harvesting costs are weakly sensitive to common pool externalities, atomistic competition is likely to remain, other things equal, as the predominant industrial structure in the fishery. The avenue for increasing industrial concentration is modelled via Stackelberg leadership which offers the option of preempting rivals' production. In our static modelling, a fishery subject to Stackelberg signalling results in higher overfishing versus the case of a highly decentralised harvesting sector (proxied by the use of Nash conjectures). Given that static optimising behaviour could be interpreted as a result of entry controls and other fishing regulations being widely perceived as ineffective controls, the obtained overfishing ranking suggests that in fisheries where strategic preemption in production is feasible, but where entry controls and other important regulations on fishing effort are considered to be ineffective, overfishing is likely to remain the predominant outcome, even if other incentives promote evolution towards a more concentrated industry structure. When the fishery is already overpopulated by numerous small firms, whatever advantages large firms may have in terms of profitability, numerous small-scale fishermen tend to make up for in the political arena. This imposes constraints on the politically feasible fishing regulations. We use a second best welfare benchmark to illustrate resulting policy trade-offs.     

Property rights and long-run capital

Proprietary capital falling into the public domain inefficiently decreases capital accumulation. As a consequence, the market steady state consumption underperforms the planner's by 4.6%–9.1% in a neoclassical infinitely-lived agents economy with constant returns to scale and standard empirically supported parameters. The results extend robustly to an overlapping generations economy, for which the gap is 10.5% when similarly parametrized. A policy decentralizing, in the latter, the planner's steady state instead consists of (i) subsidizing the rental rate of private capital at its depreciation rate, and (ii) taxing households' negative net position between, on the one hand, firm and depreciated capital ownership, and on the other, borrowing. Under this policy, the necessary tax rate on households' negative net position is smaller the bigger the absolute value of the latter and, hence, the bigger the corresponding monetary real balances held by households.