Between dependence and deprivation: The interlocking nature of land alienation in Tanzania

Studies of accumulation by dispossession in the Global South tend to focus on individual sectors, for example, large‐scale agriculture or nature conservation. Yet smallholder farmers and pastoralists are affected by multiple processes of land alienation. Drawing on the case of Tanzania, we illustrate the analytical purchase of a comprehensive examination of dynamics of land alienation across multiple sectors. To begin with, processes of land alienation through investments in agriculture, mining, conservation, and tourism dovetail with a growing social differentiation and class formation. These dynamics generate unequal patterns of land deprivation and accumulation that evolve in a context of continued land dependency for the vast majority of the rural population. Consequently, land alienation engenders responses by individuals and communities seeking to maintain control over their means of production. These responses include migration, land tenure formalization, and land transactions, that propagate across multiple localities and scales, interlocking with and further reinforcing the effects of land alienation. Various localized processes of primitive accumulation contribute to a scramble for land in the aggregate, providing justifications for policies that further drive land alienation.     

(Un-)konventionelle Methoden zur Finanzierung der Ampelpläne

The new German government plans to increase investment spending considerably, yet without increasing taxes or reforming the debt brake enshrined in the constitution. This article explores the government’s (un)conventional approaches to squaring this circle.

     

Hosting major sports events: the challenge of taming white elephants

While the literature on the economic impacts of major sports events has grown considerably over the years, the question of utilisation of venues built for these events after the party is over has received little attention. This article fills some of the gaps in the literature. By means of a Stadium Utilisation Index, it measures the post-event utilisation of venues that were constructed of significantly refurbished to host major sports events in the period from 1996 to 2010. It reveals some of the challenges facing the utilisation of the venues once ‘the circus has left town’. The regressions identify that private owned stadiums have a higher rate of utilisation than publicly built venues. The stadiums with the highest capacity tend to have higher utilisation. Last, but not least in terms of importance, stadiums in nations with a high degree of corruption had the lowest utilisation.     

Dissertation abstract: Voting in the laboratory

Almost every week national elections are held somewhere in the world. Many more elections take place at federal and local levels of government. Surely, these are important events to many of us. This thesis aims at providing a better understanding of why and how people vote in elections. Three original modifications of Palfrey and Rosenthal’s (1983) participation game are used to study voter turnout theoretically and experimentally.¹ In the basic game, each voter supports (i.e., prefers) one of two exogenous candidates and privately decides between voting at a cost and abstaining (without costs). The candidate who receives more votes wins the election (ties are broken randomly) and each supporter of this candidate receives an equal reward, independent of whether or not she voted. The first study (published in the American Political Science Review 100, pp. 235–248) analyzes the effects of social embeddedness on turnout, assuming that voters may be influenced by observing the decisions of other voters around them (e.g., a family or working place). Our experimental results show that the social context matters: this information increases turnout by more than 50%. The increase is greater when neighbors support the same candidate rather than when they support opponents. The second study investigates the effects of public opinion polls on voter turnout and welfare. Poll releases resolve uncertainty about the level of support for each candidate caused by `floating’ voters, whose preferences change across elections. This information increases turnout in the laboratory by 28–34%, depending on the fraction of floating voters in the electorate. If polls indicate equal levels of support for both candidates—in which case aggregate benefits for society are not affected by the outcome—welfare decreases substantially due to costs from excessive turnout. In the final study, elections are preceded by the competition between two candidates: they simultaneously announce binding policy offers in which some voters can be favored at the expense of others through inclusion and exclusion in budget expenditure (Myerson 1993).² We observe that policy offers include 33% more voters—yielding a smaller budget share for each—when voting is compulsory rather than voluntary. Moreover, we find evidence of political bonds between voters and long-lived parties. Overall, in all three experiments many subjects strongly react to economic incentives (i.e., benefits, costs, and informational clues), often in line with what is observed outside of the laboratory. JEL Classification C72, C92, D72 Dissertation Committee: Arthur Schram, University of Amsterdam (advisor) Axel Ockenfels, University of Cologne Thomas Palfrey, California Institute of Technology Cees van der Eijk, University of Nottingham Frans van Winden, University of Amsterdam ¹Palfrey, T.R., & Rosenthal, H. (1983). A strategic calculus of voting. Public Choice, 41, 7–53. ²Myerson, R.B. (1993). Incentives to cultivate favored minorities under alternative electoral systems. American Political Science Review, 87, 856–869.     

Do Lower Caseloads Improve the Performance of Public Employment Services? New Evidence from German Employment Offices

The caseworker‐to‐clients ratio is an important, but understudied, policy parameter that affects both the quality and cost of public employment services that help job seekers find employment. We exploit a large‐scale pilot by Germany's employment agency, which hired 490 additional caseworkers in 14 of its 779 offices. We find that lowering caseloads caused a decrease in the rate and duration of local unemployment as well as a higher re‐employment rate. Disentangling the mechanisms that contributed to this improvement, we find that offices with lowered caseloads increased monitoring and imposed more sanctions but also intensified search efforts and registered additional vacancies.     

Intrasectoral structural change and aggregate productivity development: robust stochastic nonparametric frontier function estimates

This paper investigates the sources of total factor productivity growth in the German manufacturing sector during 1981–1998. Decompositions of aggregate productivity growth are used to identify the effects of structural change and entry–exit on aggregate productivity growth. We find a substantial rise in productivity growth after the German reunification. The bulk of this rise can be attributed to structural change and entry–exit. Two methodological refinements are implemented. The first refinement is the application of robust stochastic nonparametric approaches to frontier function analysis, and the second is the calculation of bootstrap confidence intervals for the components of the productivity decompositions.     

Differentiation of innovation strategies based on pharmaceutical licensing agreements: Insight from Korean pharmaceutical firms

The paper aims to show how licensing behaviour can be used to differentiate distinct innovation strategies. Information on in-licensing and out-licensing agreements is used to guide the development of a framework that details the licensing firm’s relational preference for internal and external orientation. Using firm-level data of the Korean pharmaceutical firms, the study categorised the distinct strategic orientations of firms based on the proposed matrix model. The results indicated that firms with higher R&D (research and development) expenditures have a tendency to greater external exploitation of technological knowledge than firms with low R&D spending. The study provides potential avenues for targeting of licensing partners from the perspective of firms seeking to in-license or out-license their innovations.     

Integration, agglomeration and welfare

This paper studies the social desirability of agglomeration, and the efficiency arguments for policy intervention in a simple, analytically tractable new economic geography model. The location pattern emerging as market equilibrium is ‘bubble-shaped’, i.e. it features dispersion both at high and low trade costs and stable equilibria with partial and full agglomeration for intermediate levels of trade costs. We show that the market equilibrium is characterized by over-agglomeration for high trade costs and under-agglomeration for low trade costs, and we work out analytically that a net pecuniary externality is the underlying cause of this market failure. One particularly noteworthy result is that the net pecuniary externality is positive at high levels of trade freeness. However, there is no market under-agglomeration unless this positive net pecuniary externality interacts with an additional congestion force originating in the (per se efficient) competitive housing market.