Gender Differences in Recruitment Outcomes

The paper tests the hypothesis that female applicants have a lower probability of being hired from a pool of applicants than their male counterparts. The results indicate that male and female candidates have about the same probability of being hired independently of the type of vacancy. The probability of hiring a candidate of a certain sex is therefore determined by the gender composition of the pool of applicants who have selected themselves on the basis of job characteristics, hiring standards and the type of sector. This indicates that male and female job-seekers select themselves in such a way that they have equal probabilities of being accepted.     

Islam-based legal language and state governance: democracy,strength of the judiciary and human rights

Constitutional Political Economy - States embracing Islam-based laws are frequently seen as struggling with establishing democratic institutions, jeopardizing human rights and encouraging executive...     

Regulating an externality-generating public utility: A multi-dimensional screening approach

In this paper, I present a monopoly screening model in which a firm holds private information on fixed abatement costs. Because of the nature of the optimal contracts, bunching is never optimal even with ‘n’ distinct types. A characterization of full and limited information solutions is offered and it is shown that the design standards alone determine the value of an information rent. The variable charge is completely free of any marginal information costs. This allows the variable charge to track marginal damages and thereby ensures that marginal social costs are covered. A fixed charge implements the optimal solution.     

Input versus output taxation in an experimental international economy

This paper presents the results of a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an ‘international’ economy with a relatively small ‘home’ country and a large ‘foreign’ country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems: a wage tax system and a sales-tax-cum-labor-subsidy system. The two systems are applied to the small country, while the wage tax system always obtains in the large country. The main result is that the sales tax system outperforms the wage tax system, using standard economic indicators. Moreover, it turns out that under the sales tax system economic activities appear to be moving toward the ‘better’ of two theoretical equilibria. It is argued that producers’ reluctance to incur costs up-front while being uncertain about product prices can explain these results. Several pieces of evidence are provided to support this claim. The results strongly suggest that behavioral aspects should be taken into account also in applied macroeconomic models.     

Strictness of leniency programs and asymmetric punishment effect

We analyze the impact of leniency programs on the behavior of firms participating in illegal cartel agreements in a two-stage repeated game model. Our approach takes into account asymmetric punishment effect and allows to discuss the design of leniency programs in the setting with asymmetries. The main contribution of the paper is that we consider heterogeneous firms. This heterogeneity results in additional costs in case of disclosure of the cartel, which are caused by asymmetric punishments. Next, following current antitrust rules, we analyze effects of the strictness of leniency programs, which reflects the likelihood of getting a complete exemption from fine even in case many firms self-report simultaneously. Our main conclusion is that leniency programs work better for small companies, since a lower rate of law enforcement is needed in order to induce self-reporting by smaller firms, while big firms are less likely to start a cartel in the first place given the possibility of self-reporting in future. Finally, we analyze optimal enforcement strategies of the antitrust authority and conclude that the authority with limited resources should implement more generous leniency rules the more cartelized the economy is.     

Did Hayek have a monetary theory of business cycles?

Joseph Schumpeter, a careful reader of Hayek, categorized Hayek??s theory of economic cycles as non-monetary. Almost every other source, including Hayek himself, categorized the theory as monetary. The issue turns on the concept of causality being used. The question of what causality concept to apply to complex phenomena has substantive implications for economic theory. A simple concept of causality, appropriate to the study of some physical phenomena, will mislead when applied to complex phenomena. We provide examples of errors in analysis that follow from the wrong choice of a causal paradigm.     

Looking Ahead—Future Issues when Reflecting on the Place of the iConsumer in Consumer Law and Copyright Law

The following is a brief report of the discussion and main comments that were made during a workshop ‘The place of the iConsumer in EU and US law—protecting consumers of copyright protected content’, held in Amsterdam on 14 and 15 of December 2007. The workshop was part of a series of joint events organised by the Berkeley Centre for Law and Technology, University of California (BCLT) and the Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam on copyright and a follow-up to the conference on ‘Copyright, digital rights management technology and consumer protection’ that was held at the UC Berkeley in March 2007. The main goal of the workshop was to confront a consumer law approach with the more commonly discussed approach of internalising user-related questions directly into copyright law. To this end, a selected group of European and US experts in both fields, copyright law and consumer law, were invited. The participants were then asked to share their thoughts and views from the different fields of law with regard to a number of main statements given by the organisers. The transatlantic perspective further added to the discussion. The main purpose of this report is to point to a number of issues that, according to the workshop participants, should be taken into account in future discussions concerning the legal position of the iConsumer. This report summarises the discussion along the three statements that the organisers asked participants to consider. The report gives some background information for each of the statements, to then describe the main arguments made during the workshop, to the extent that this discussion has not already been internalised in the papers that are part of this special JCP issue.

Book review

This article analyses the strategies of the agro-biotechnology industry to control and exploit plant-genetic knowledge, and the dilemmas that these strategies involve. The replicability of plants limits markets for commercial seeds, as it enables farmers to reproduce seeds themselves. The industry has therefore invented genetic-engineering techniques that will block the replicability of plants, and will effectively prevent farmers from saving their own seeds. However, this copy-protection technique— dubbed ‘Terminator’—is widely condemned in farming communities. The technology overrules intellectual property laws that exempt seed saving for private use, and it is likely to have a negative impact on medium-sized and small farming systems in developing countries. In this article it is argued that while copy protection in plants may expand seed markets, it may also seriously damage the reputation of the biotechnology industry. Corporate scientists and strategists should be more open to a public discussion about the fairness and legitimacy of seed production for private use.     

Do data policy restrictions impact the productivity performance of firms and industries?

This paper examines how policies regulating the cross‐border movement and domestic use of electronic data on the internet impact the productivity of firms in sectors relying on electronic data. In doing so, we collect regulatory information on a group of developed economies and create an index that measures the regulatory restrictiveness of each country's data policies. The index is based on observable policy measures that explicitly inhibit the cross‐border movement and domestic use of data. Using cross‐country firm‐level and industry‐level data, we analyse econometrically the extent to which these data regulations over time impact the productivity performance of downstream firms and industries, respectively. We show that stricter data policies have a negative and significant impact on the performance of downstream firms in sectors reliant on electronic data. This adverse effect is stronger for countries with strong technology networks, for servicified firms, and holds for several robustness checks.