Fighting for Other Folks' Wages: The Logic and Illogic of Living Wage Campaigns

Living wage campaigns have enacted ordinances/policies to raise low wages in over 100 localities. The campaigns galvanize citizens more than national economic issues and allow for pay increases fine-tuned to local realities, but cover relatively few workers. To help the low-paid broadly, the coalitions in living wage campaigns have to scale up to the state or national level while unions and national groups work to devolve labor issues from the gridlock at the federal level to states and localities.     

跨国生产函数之普适性的实证分析

本文运用组数据同积检验法考察覆盖22个国家、跨度从1971年至1990年的相关宏观经济时间序列变量。实证分析显示产出与投入之间同积关系的存在与否——不论这种同积关系是由二要素还是由三要素柯布—道榕拉斯生产函数来代表,关键取决于各国经济发展的独特初始特征和独特时间趋势特征是否被考虑到。我们的发现表明不存在适用于所有国家的通用生产函数,这就对那些在经济发展之国家比较研究中简单假设存在通用生产函数的做法提出了强烈质疑。     

THE IMPACT OF FORESTRY-RELATED ORDINANCES ON TIMBER HARVESTING IN ST. TAMMANY PARISH, LOUISIANA

Local government regulations of forestry practices on private land are often developed independently and without a full understanding of possible economic consequences. The number of forestry-related ordinances is growing, particularly in the southern United States. St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, is a prime example of an increasingly exurbanized area that has passed a number of forestry-related ordinances. Impacts of forestry-related ordinances on timber harvesting activities were examined using seemingly unrelated regression. Results indicate that a significant negative relationship exists between an ordinance requiring a $10,000 road performance bond and the level of timber harvest in the Parish. ( JEL Q23, Q28)     

Intertemporal Effects of Environmental Mandates

Environmental mandates can impose large costs on the businesses that must comply with them. Understanding the effects of those costs on production decisions may require a dynamic framework if environmental damages (and the costs of complying with mandates) depend on cumulative production or the passage of time. This paper focuses on the time dimension of general categories of fixed and variable costs arising from different types of mandates. The paper develops an optimal control model to predict how such costs may jointly affect current production rates, plant closure dates, and cumulative production. Theoretical results, derived from the comparative statics of the system of equations describing the solution to that model, identify circumstances in which the policy goals of greater production and greater environmental protection may not allways be at odds. Statements in this paper do not reflect the views or positions of the Congressional Budget Office     

OPTIMAL EDUCATION POLICIES AND COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE

We consider the optimal education policies of a small economy whose government has a limited budget. Initially, the economy is closed and the government chooses its education policy to maximize welfare under autarky. When the economy trades with the rest of the world the government chooses a new education policy that maximizes welfare under trade. Is it ever optimal for the government to choose its new policy so that it reverses the economy's comparative advantage? We find that if the budget stays fixed when it is optimal to ‘move up the skills chain’ it is not feasible. In such a case, a foreign loan is welfare improving. A move in the opposite direction can be optimal, and when it is optimal it is also feasible.