L’EFFICIENCE DES COOPERATIVES DE SERVICES FINANCIERS: UNE ANALYSE DE LA CONTRIBUTION DU MILIEU*

RÉSUMÉ 1 : Le faible niveau moyen d’efficience des institutions bancaires habituellement trouvé dans les études empiriques a été qualifié de « boîte noire » par Berger et Mester (1997) . Cette étude cherche à identifier si les caractéristiques de l’environnement de même que celles qui sont propres à une coopérative d’épargne et de crédit pourraient expliquer une partie des écarts de performance apparaissant dans les scores d’efficience. Le modèle de coût que nous avons estimé est basé sur la valeur ajoutée par l’intermédiation financière. Par ailleurs, pour éviter la perte d’informations découlant de la borne à l’unité des scores d’efficience découlant du DEA, nous avons comparé les résultats d’une analyse avec le score d’efficience et de superefficience. Nos résultats montrent qu’au moins 34% des écarts de scores peuvent être expliqués par un ensemble limité de variables: taille de la coopérative, taux de capitalisation, épargne par membre, nombre de membres et type de marché.     

Strategic Environmental Standards, Wage Incomes and the Location of Polluting Firms

The purpose of this paper is tostudy how the choice of environmental standardsby governments is affected by the existence ofwage incomes when firms locations areendogenous. In developed countries labor isunionized, which allows positive wage incomesto arise. Thus, each government has incentivesto persuade firms to locate in its countrysince social welfare depends on suchincomes. But, as pollution damages theenvironment, each government will only try toattract polluting firms to thecountry, to obtain the wage incomes, whenthe valuation of environmental damage showsthat it is low.     

Income inequality and colonialism

This paper proposes that colonialism is a major explanation behind today's differences in income inequality across countries. We argue that income inequality has been higher in the colonies where the percentage of European settlers to total population was higher, as long as Europeans remained a minority. The countries where Europeans became the majority of the population did not suffer from high inequality. These initial differences continue to hold today. The empirical evidence we provide strongly supports our thesis.     

Testing Temporal Reliability and Carry-over Effect: The Role of Correlated Responses in Test-retest Reliability Studies

Test-retest studies help establish the reliability of contingent valuation (CV) responses but must confront the problem that the initial response may influence subsequent responses, and thus weaken conclusions. We develop a model that tests the influence of heterogeneous preferences and previous responses. By estimating a model of sportfishing, we show that correlation between answers to a CV question is induced by heterogeneous preferences.     

Neutrality in arrow and other impossibility theorems

Summary. Although not assumed explicitly, we show that neutrality plays an important role in Arrow and other impossibility theorems. Applying it to pivotal voters we produce direct proofs of classical impossibility theorems, including Arrow's, as well as extend some of these theorems. We further explore the role of neutrality showing that it is equivalent to Pareto or reverse Pareto, and to effective dictatorship for non-null social welfare functions satisfying the principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives. It is also equivalent to Wilson's Citizens' Sovereignty--which is related to the intuition that symmetry over alternatives makes social preference depend only on citizens' preferences. We show that some of these results are more fundamental than others in that they extend both to infinite societies and to considerably smaller domains of preferences. Finally, as an application of Arrow's theorem, we provide a simple proof of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.Received: 13 April 2000, Revised: 6 December 2002, JEL Classification Numbers: D71, C70.I thank Salvador Barberá, Luis Corchón, Cesar Martinelli, Eric Maskin, Tomas Sjöström, Ricard Torres, José Pedro Ubeda, and an anonymous referee for feedback. The proofs of Arrow's theorem and two Wilson's theorems come from a note I wrote in 1987 at Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (Ubeda [16]). In 1996 Geanakoplos [7] wrote a proof of Arrow's theorem similar but not identical to mine. All work in this paper is independent of his.     

A Public Choice Approach to Strategic and Nonstrategic Environmental Policy

In this paper we take a public choice perspective on strategic environmental policy and international environmental agreements. We examine cooperative and noncooperative environmental policies under governments that are either welfare maximizers (“good dictators”) or tax revenue maximizers (“Leviathans”). We show that Leviathans can perform better in terms of welfare and that good dictators can set higher taxes. We then analyze international environmental agreements and show that the breakdown of environmental cooperation can indeed lead to a welfare gain for all signatory countries. Considering a delegation game between governments, we find that a Pareto‐superior Leviathan outcome can be the unique Nash equilibrium.     

The Origins and Development of the Latin American Structuralist Approach to the Balance of Payments, 1944–1964

The paper offers an historical account of the origins and development of the Latin American structuralist approach to the balance of payments between 1944 and 1964. We focus on the contributions by Raul Prebisch, Celso Furtado and Juan Noyola, all of them members of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) during the 1950s. Prebisch used the foreign trade multiplier concept to distinguish the business cycle mechanisms at the ‘centre’ and at the ‘periphery’. Noyola introduced the notion of external disequilibrium as a feature of the industrialization process. This was further elaborated by Prebisch's formula connecting the relative rates of growth to the ratio of income-elasticities of import. Furtado examined the implications of the external demand constraint for economic growth, an important element of the two-gap models of the 1960s. The main piece of empirical structuralist research was the CEPAL 1957 report about Mexican external disequilibrium elaborated by Furtado and Noyola, not published at the time; we discuss that report in the context of the Mexican devaluation of 1954.     

Changing rewards in contests: Has the three-point rule brought more offense to soccer?

In the mid-nineties FIFA decided to increase from two to three the number of points assigned to the winning team of a soccer match played under traditional round-robin national leagues. Since a game of soccer can be regarded as a contest, FIFA's measure provides an interesting case-study for analysing how a change in the system of rewards (from a zero to a non-zero sum rule) may affect the contestants' equilibrium behaviour. In this paper we try to assess, both theoretically and empirically, whether FIFA's new point rule has changed soccer towards a more offensive game, in which teams adopt more risky strategies. In particular, we evaluate the “na?ve hypothesis” according to which the measure would induce every team to play always more offensively, and we explore the extent to which the change in teams' behaviour may be affected by quality differentials between teams. Our most important hypothesis is that when the asymmetry between opposing teams is large enough, an increase in the reward for victory induces the weaker team to play more defensively, rather than the opposite. By looking at a subset of matches held in the Portuguese first division league, which approximate the conditions of our model, we find support for this hypothesis. First version received: July 1999/Final version received: May 2001