Generalized Progress of Abatement Technology: Incentives Under Environmental Liability Law

This paper considers the incentives environmental liability creates to improve pollution abatement technology. Our analysis considers technical progress in end-of-pipe abatement and in the production technology used, thereby generalizing the approach taken by Endres et?al. (Environ Resour Econ 36:341?C366, 2007). We establish that this generalization has drastic repercussions on incentives under negligence liability, while the performance of strict liability is not compromised. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the social desirability of investment in abatement or production technology (or both) decisively determines how ex-ante and ex-post regulation fare with respect to welfare maximization in the case of negligence liability.     

The implementation of monetary policy in New Zealand: What factors affect the 90-day bank bill rate?

This paper discusses the implementation of monetary policy in New Zealand and its flow-on effects on the 90-day bank bill rate over the 1999–2005 period. The effects of external factors are considered as well. Our findings indicate that the maturity spectrum ratio exerted a positive effect on the 90-day bank bill rate while the allotment ratio did not. This interest rate had a tendency to revert to the level set by its Australian counterpart, though at a relatively slow speed. No such link exists between the NZ 90-day rate and the U.S. 90-day rate. Neither the maturity spectrum nor the allotment ratio contributed to the volatility of the most important short-term interest rate in New Zealand.     

The Non-Trivial Choice between Innovation Indicators

We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of five alternative innovation indicators: R&D, patent applications, total innovation expenditure and shares in sales taken by imitative and by innovative products as they were measured in the 1992 Community Innovation Survey (CIS) in the Netherlands. We conclude that the two most commonly used indicators (R&D and patent applications) have more (and more severe) weaknesses than is often assumed. Moreover, our factor analysis suggests that there is little correlation between the various indicators. This underlines the empirical relevance of various sources of bias of innovation indicators as discussed in this paper.     

Human capital formation,learning by doing and the government in the process of economic growth

We present an endogenous growth model with human capital and learning by doing. Human capital is not an input factor in the production process of final output but it affects the ability to build up knowledge capital as a by‐product of cumulated investment (learning by doing). Human capital is formed in the schooling sector that is financed by the government. The government may run into debt but obeys the inter‐temporal budget constraint. The article analyzes the structure of the model and studies the effects of different budgetary policies as regards the balanced growth rate, transition dynamics and with respect to welfare.     

Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Regulated Labor Market: The Case of Austria

We study Austrian job reallocation in the period of 1978 to 1998, using a large administrative dataset where we correct for spurious entries and exits of firms. We find that on average 9 out of 100 randomly selected jobs were created within the last year, and that about 9 out of randomly selected 100 jobs were destroyed within the next year. Hence, the magnitude of Austrian job flows seems to be comparable to other countries, similar to the well-known results of Davis et al. (1996) for the United States. Job reallocation appears to be driven primarily by idiosyncratic shocks. However, job creation increases significantly during cyclical upswings whereas job destruction rises in downturns. We also find substantial persistence of job creation and destruction. The pronounced pattern of job reallocation rates falling with firm size and age continues to hold when we use a set of controls. Finally, we show that – controlling for sector and firm size composition – Austrian job reallocation rates are only half the rates for the U.S. This result is not surprising given the impact of tighter regulation and labor law in Austria.     

Changes in the Austrian structure of wages, 1996–2002: evidence from linked employer-employee data

Analyzing data from the Structure of Earnings Surveys we find that wage dispersion in Austria increased only marginally between 1996 and 2002. There was an increase in the returns to education which accrued only to male workers. The positive effects of tenure and especially of experience on wages decreased over time. We adopt the Machado–Mata (J Appl Econ 20:445–465, 2005) counterfactual decomposition technique which allows to attribute changes in each wage decile to changes in worker and workplace characteristics and into changes in returns to these characteristics. Behind the small net increase in inequality we document a number of interesting gross effects that influence the change in the wage distribution. We find that both composition effects due to gender, education and age and market-driven effects such as changes in returns and changing workplace characteristics contributed to a higher dispersion of wages.     

Investment in Eastern Europe: The role of multilateral organisations

Director and Chief Economist, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America, European Investment Bank.     

Combining forecasts: An application to elections

We summarize the literature on the effectiveness of combining forecasts by assessing the conditions under which combining is most valuable. Using data on the six US presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, we report the reductions in error obtained by averaging forecasts within and across four election forecasting methods: poll projections, expert judgment, quantitative models, and the Iowa Electronic Markets. Across the six elections, the resulting combined forecasts were more accurate than any individual component method, on average. The gains in accuracy from combining increased with the numbers of forecasts used, especially when these forecasts were based on different methods and different data, and in situations involving high levels of uncertainty. Such combining yielded error reductions of between 16% and 59%, compared to the average errors of the individual forecasts. This improvement is substantially greater than the 12% reduction in error that had been reported previously for combining forecasts.