The long-run impact of bombing Vietnam

We investigate the impact of U.S. bombing on later economic development in Vietnam. The Vietnam War featured the most intense bombing campaign in military history and had massive humanitarian costs. We use a unique U.S. military dataset containing bombing intensity at the district level (N = 584) to assess whether the war damage led to persistent local poverty traps. We compare the heavily bombed districts to other districts controlling for district demographic and geographic characteristics, and use an instrumental variable approach exploiting distance to the 17th parallel demilitarized zone. U.S. bombing does not have negative impacts on local poverty rates, consumption levels, infrastructure, literacy or population density through 2002. This finding indicates that even the most intense bombing in human history did not generate local poverty traps in Vietnam.     

Decision‐making in the pharmaceutical industry: analysis of entrepreneurial risk and attitude using uncertain information

The main purpose of this study was to investigate judgments made by employees from the pharmaceutical industry and allied health‐care sectors in a set of four different drug discovery and development cases derived from real scenarios. Each case study related to go/no‐go decisions taken from various steps in drug discovery through preclinical and clinical development (investigational new drug) on to market introduction (new drug application) and treatment of the target population. Using a web‐based questionnaire, 52 respondents made five sets of judgment within each drug case whether to continue or halt further project development. For each case, additional details of the developmental scenario were disclosed to the respondent after completion of each judgment response. We also assessed to what extent the individual judgments given by the respondents were influenced by work experience and functional role, education, or their perceived entrepreneurial character. Our study demonstrates that health‐care employees differ substantially in their individual intuitive judgments of benefit and risk in go/no‐go decisions during the drug discovery and development process. This lack of coherence and wide variability with respect to the drug development cases selected may reflect judgment in the real world. Such judgments are usually taken from incomplete information, and individual decision‐making rules vary substantially between experts in the field. Further knowledge about this inherent human functional judgment variability may be helpful to form a better understanding of individual decision‐making in relation to inherent uncertainties. Additional research may also clarify how personal experience within drug discovery and development influences judgment and help to optimize decision outcomes in the drug development sector. Importantly, a deeper insight of the fundamentals and rules that shape individual and group decision‐making of everyday drug discovery and development may help to optimize the decision processes in the pharmaceutical industry.     

Going Beyond Impact Factors: A Survey‐based Journal Ranking by Agricultural Economists

A consistent and comprehensive ranking of journals relevant for agricultural economists cannot rely on impact factors for at least two major reasons: (i) the scientific database by Thomson Reuters, on which the standard impact factor is based, includes only a very limited number of relevant journals; (ii) the standard impact factor cannot be compared across research fields of different sizes. Survey‐based journal rankings may overcome these problems. We report on such a survey‐based ranking initiated by the Agricultural Economics Associations of Germany and Austria. Results of the ranking and a classification of journals, i.e. a rating, are provided for 160 selected journals. Scientific quality is assessed by an index based on the researchers’ perception of the quality standards of each journal and of the quality of its published articles. The survey‐based ranking allows a much more comprehensive and consistent ranking than the impact factor, as specific agricultural economics journals can be directly compared with neighbouring economic and interdisciplinary journals to which agricultural economists submit their work. The low impact factors of core agricultural economics journals are put into perspective. The scientific quality of the top agricultural economics journals is assessed as being rather high and above most of the relevant interdisciplinary journals from agricultural and food sciences that are typically characterised by higher impact factors. Agricultural economists’ perceptions on the scientific quality of the journals vary more across journals than perceptions of their relevance.     

Enforcing Competition Among Governments: Theory and Application to the European Union

Horizontal competition among governments has to be enforced by a higher-level institution, but this institution must not be the federal or union government, parliament or court, because these have a vested interest in intergovernmental collusion and ultimately in monopolization. The European Union institutions have been interested in removing national protection, regulations and subsidies because, by doing so, they could induce the interest groups, politicians, and bureaucrats of the member-states to demand more European protectionist measures, regulations, and subsidies. The establishment of a directly elected European Senate is proposed which would have no other powers than to enforce competition among governments on the basis of qualified minority decisions.     

Zu den zwei Versicherungsbegriffen von Werner Mahr und ihrer Bedeutung in der heutigen Zeit

Werner Mahr differentiates between two notions of insurance based upon either the mutuality or the speculation principle. While Mahr however supposes that these two principles melt into the pure insurance-technological economics through the interplay of the probability principle, the differences will be stressed. In the first step, the (theoretical) distinctions are elaborated between the “ideal” insurance model of K. J. Arrow, based on the mutuality principle, and the “classical” insurance model of K. Borch, building on the speculation principle or the reserve theory according to A. Willett. In the second step, these differentiations are elucidated with the help of three examples: uncertainty about the risks, correlated risks, and macroeconomic, in particular demographic risks.     

Rent seeking and aid effectiveness

We introduce foreign aid and a rent seeking contest for public funds into the Barro (JPE 1990) growth model. We find that aid effectiveness depends on fiscal policies, the level of aid inflows and the quality of institutions that restrict appropriation of public funds by rent seeking agents. These results can be shown to be consistent with the best established findings in the empirical literature on aid effectiveness. Rent seeking may thus indeed be a major determinant of aid effectiveness. We further discuss how aid effectiveness depends on the way foreign aid is disbursed and on the determinants of institutional quality. JEL Classification F35 · D72 · D9 · H2