Empirical Analysis of Brands: A Survey

In this paper, we survey the empirical analysis of brands. The difficulty in this area of research is that even though a brand is easily identifiable, its economic roles are not directly observable. We first discuss methods where the effect of a brand is measured as the unobservable component of sales or price of a product, which researchers recover as a residual of the sales or price regression. We then describe the approaches to estimate the various roles of brands, such as providing information and increasing the utility of consumption. Finally, we provide examples of research that highlight the role of brands in exploiting the irrationality of consumers for profit.     

An analysis of entry-then-privatization model: welfare and policy implications

This study formulates a new model of mixed oligopolies in free entry markets. A state-owned public enterprise is established before the game, private enterprises enter the market, and then the government chooses the degree of privatization of the public enterprise (termed the entry-then-privatization model herein). We find that under general demand and cost functions, the timing of privatization does not affect consumer surplus or the output of each private firm, while it does affect the equilibrium degree of privatization, number of entering firms, and output of the public firm. The equilibrium degree of privatization is too high (low) for both domestic and world welfare if private firms are domestic (foreign).     

From engineer to taxi driver? Language proficiency and the occupational skills of immigrants

We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired prior to immigration. We first augment a model of occupational choice to study the implications of language proficiency on the cross‐border transferability of occupational human capital. We then explore the empirical predictions using information about the skill requirements from O^*NET and a unique dataset that includes both the last source country occupation and the first four years of occupations in Canada. We supplement the analysis using Census estimates for the same cohort with source country occupational skill requirements predicted using detailed human capital related information such as field of study. We find that male immigrants to Canada were employed in source country occupations that typically require high levels of cognitive skills, but rely less intently on manual skills. Following immigration, they find initial employment in occupations that require the opposite. Consistent with the hypothesized asymmetric role of language in the transferability of previously acquired cognitive and manual skills, these discrepancies are larger among immigrants with limited language fluency.     

Local envy-freeness and equal-income Walrasian allocations

This paper introduces a local version of envy-freeness and investigates its implications in a continuum agent economy with connected preferences. We show that the set of locally envy-free and Pareto efficient allocations coincides with the set of equal-income Walrasian allocations.     

Challenging the human crisis: “The trilemma”

The great increase in world population in the coming century will result in a human crisis of worldwide proportions. A new concept for describing and proposing solutions to this crisis, called the Trilemma, is described by the authors. To feed large and growing populations, humankind is now being forced to make the difficult choice between producing sufficient food for the world population and preserving the environment, or generating economic growth, requiring the consumption of energy and natural resources. These difficult choices present the Trilemma, a new concept that is composed of three dimensions: economic growth, resources such as energy and food, and the environment. None of these three dimensions can be optimized individually as they are mutually interdependent.This paper describes a possible world energy condition in the 21st century. Three scenarios of this energy consumption are presented and compared with the possible energy supply at that time. This supply is estimated from the extrapolation of the renewable energy development of the past and the possible fossil fuel supply. The comparison of the energy supply and the energy consumption indicates that the annual rate of economic growth in the developed region would be only 1% if the gross national product (GNP) per capita of the developing region increases gradually from 1/26 of the GNP of the developed regions in 1990, to 1/10 in 2020, and finally to 1/3 in 2100.Another possibility is that if the GNP per capita of the developing region remains 1/26 of the GNP of the developed regions between 1990 and 2100, the economic growth rate in the developed region could be as large as 3%. In the latter case, an energy shortage would develop in the middle of the 21st century, even if the fast breeder reactor were fully operational by the year 2030. Energy technological developments in Japan are also described as a part of the possible countermeasures against the Trilemma.     

Protection for sale or surge protection?

This paper asks whether the results obtained from using the standard approach to testing the influential Grossman and Helpman “protection for sale” model of political economy might arise from a simpler setting. A model of imports and quotas with protection occurring in response to import surges, but only for organized industries, is simulated and shown to provide parameter estimates consistent with the protection for sale framework. This suggests that the standard approach may be less of a test than previously thought.     

Weak Independence and Social Semi‐Orders

This paper provides variants of Arrow's impossibility theorem, which states that there exists no non‐dictatorial aggregation rule satisfying weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives and collective rationality. In this paper, independence of irrelevant alternatives and collective rationality are simultaneously relaxed. Weak independence is imposed instead of independence of irrelevant alternatives. Social preferences are assumed to satisfy the semi‐order properties of semi‐transitivity and the interval‐order property. We prove that there exists a vetoer when the number of alternatives is greater than or equal to six.     

SZPILRAJN,ARROW AND SUZUMURA: CONCISE PROOFS OF EXTENSION THEOREMS AND AN EXTENSION

This paper extends the classical extension theorem established by Edward Szpilrajn (Fundamenta Mathematicae, 16, pp. 386–389, 1930). Szpilrajn's theorem states that every quasi‐ordering has an ordering extension. Because of its usefulness in various themes of economics, it has been applied by many researchers. Important generalizations have been presented by two authors, Kenneth Arrow and Kotaro Suzumura, among others. First, we provide concise proofs of four extension theorems by Szpilrajn, Arrow and Suzumura. We then show an extension of their extension theorems.     

Intertemporal Labor Supply and Human Capital Accumulation*

We solve and estimate a dynamic model that allows agents to optimally choose their labor hours and consumption and that allows for both human capital accumulation and savings. Estimation results and simulation exercises indicate that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is much higher than the conventional estimates and the downward bias comes from the omission of the human capital accumulation effect. The human capital accumulation effect renders the life‐cycle path of the shadow wage relatively flat, even though wages increase with age. Hence, a rather flat life‐cycle labor supply path can be reconciled with a high intertemporal elasticity of substitution.     

Incompleteness,regularity, and collective preference

This paper examines the incompleteness of collective preference. We provide a series of Arrovian impossibility theorems without completeness. First, we consider the notion of regularity introduced by Eliaz and Ok (2006, Games and Economic Behavior 56, 61–86); it is an appropriate richness property for strict preference when preference is allowed to be incomplete. We examine the implication of imposing regularity on collective preference. Second, we propose responsiveness, a variation of positive responsiveness. This axiom requires that some changes in individual preferences make an alternative weakly better than another. Third, we consider coherency conditions for collective preferences; this conditionally requires the existence of comparable pairs in a certain manner. We prove an impossibility result for each condition using Arrovian axioms.