Costs and benefits of EU enlargement

While the political benefits of the coming EU enlargement are relatively easy to identify, its economic and financial consequences are less unequivocal. The following article examines the likely costs and benefits of enlargement to both existing and future Members, and in particular how it will affect Germany, one of the few present EU Member States which has direct borders with acceding states. The article expresses the personal opinions of the author.     

The New Economy is dead,long live the information economy

The arrival of the 2001–2003 recession caused many to suppose that the so-called “New Economy” was now defunct. This article addresses a number of related issues, including the question of the durability and viability of business cycles in the face of the technological developments of the information age. It asks what went wrong with the New Economy and examines its characteristics as well as its remaining possibilities and prospects for the future. Finally, it considers the spread of the Information Economy to Europe, especially to Germany, the country that one might expect to be the leading European player, but which is not at present actually a strong competitor for that role.     

Approximating unanimity orderings: An application to Lorenz dominance

Stochastic dominance and Lorenz dominance are examples of orderings which require unanimous agreement among an infinite set of indices. This paper considers various subsets of inequality measures that respect Lorenz dominance, and assesses the extent to which a small number of indices can reproduce the Lorenz ordering. Using income data for 80 countries, our results suggest that Lorenz dominance can be predicted with 99% accuracy using just 3 or 4 inequality measures, as long as two of them focus on the extreme upper and lower tails of the distribution. In contrast, confining attention to the index families and parameter ranges normally considered may fail to detect the majority of occasions when Lorenz curves intersect. These results lead us to question the faith placed in procedures based on a finite set of inequality indices, and to suggest that similar lessons will apply to other types of unanimity orderings.     

A Spatial Cross–Sectional Analysis of Elasticity of Demand for Soccer

Several studies estimate the demand for watching English professional football (soccer) as highly inelastic, a puzzling result given that clubs appear to possess a degree of monopoly power. We discuss weaknesses in earlier studies and offer an alternative method of assessing elasticity based on travel costs of spectators living different distances from the grounds. We find that elasticity varies across the 20 senior clubs for which data were available but in almost every case demand is more elastic than reported in the existing literature and pricing policy appears therefore to be more orientated towards profit maximisation than previously thought.     

International Borrowing, Specialization, and Unemployment in a Small Open Economy

The authors show that an increase in international borrowing increases specialization and unemployment in a small open economy that is subject to terms‐of‐trade risks. The economy has a production advantage in the export sector. However, the size of the export sector is limited by the available funds. To insure workers against income fluctuations arising from terms‐of‐trade risks, firms in the export sector offer workers a stable wage rate with the possibility of unemployment. An increase in international borrowing increases specialization in the export sector, which leads to higher unemployment when the terms‐of‐trade shock is bad. A state‐contingent price subsidy can reduce unemployment without inefficiently reducing specialization. The results are robust to the introduction of risk‐averse firms.