Heterogeneity of southern countries and southern intellectual property rights policy

Abstract.  We develop a model with one innovating northern firm and heterogeneous southern firms that compete in a final product market. We assume southern firms differ in their ability to adapt technology and study southern incentives to protect intellectual property rights. We find that, in a non-cooperative equilibrium, governments resist IPR protection, but collectively southern countries benefit from some protection. We show that, in general, countries with more efficient firms prefer higher collective IPR protection than those with less efficient firms. Given the aggregate level of IPR protection, it is more efficient if the more efficient countries have weaker IPR protection.     

Trade-offs in the allocation of prosecution resources: an opportunity cost of overcriminalization

One in every five citizens has a criminal record in Korea. Scarce prosecution resources have been severely skewed toward prosecuting more ‘legislated crime’ than ‘conventional crime’. We estimate the opportunity cost of this prosecutory pattern in terms of spillovers to conventional crimes. The cost was found to be substantial. For example, in 2003, the total spillovers accounted for approximately 25% of the increase in conventional crimes for 3 years from 2000 because of the disproportionate prosecutory focus on legislated crimes compared with that of the 1990s. This article has relevance to those countries with an overcriminalizing trend for legislated crimes.     

Adam Smith's theory of economic history and economic development

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to show that Smith has a theory of economic history grounded in a politico-economic modeling (as well as a sort of economic theoretical modeling). In terms of the politico-economic approach, in the Wealth of Nations (Book III.ii–iv) Smith tried to offer a systematic account of economic development from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. These lead to suggest that the seeming internal inconsistency between the natural and the actual courses of progress in Book III may be resolved, and that Smith may be treated as a precursor of Douglass North, who stressed an inextricable link between the polity and the economy in economic history.     

Standardization in electronic money

Abstract

Electronic money services are provided by the combination of Integrated Circuit (IC) cards and terminals. The compatibility of different brands of electronic money can be enabled by firms' joint adoption of standard terminals. In this paper, we analyse the effect of achieving compatibility among different brands of electronic money. We show that, if the unit production cost of a standard terminal is not so much different from that of a non-standard one, firms' joint adoption of standard terminals will increase the total sales of IC cards and the network size of terminals, thus raising consumers' surplus and firms' profits. On the other hand, if the unit cost of a standard terminal is so high that firms are discouraged from voluntarily adopting standard ones, the government may employ subsides to enhance efficiency. However, if the duty of implementing standardization is placed solely on the firms without subsidies, all the agents, including consumers and retailers, will be left worse off.     

A Pre-purchase Product Trial of a Monopolist with Multiple Products

For the heterogeneous consumers who do not know their individual utilities from a new product, a pre-purchase product trial would be helpful. We found out that a monopoly firm with two similar products would have a strong incentive not to allow a pre-purchase product trial, even though it is socially optimal to allow it. Furthermore, it is more likely for a monopoly firm with a pre-purchase product trial policy to introduce a new product to the market when introducing a new product is socially optimal.     

Nonlinear Mean Reversion across National Stock Markets: Evidence from Emerging Asian Markets

This paper seeks empirical evidence of nonlinear mean-reversion in relative national stock price indices for Emerging Asian countries. It is well known that conventional linear unit root tests suffer from low power against the stationary nonlinear alternative. Implementing the nonlinear unit root tests proposed by Kapetanios et al. (2003 Kapetanios, G., Shin, Y. and Snell, A. 2003. Testing for a unit root in the nonlinear STAR framework. Journal of Econometrics, 112: 359–379. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Cerrato et al. (2009 Cerrato, M., de Peretti, C., Larsson, R. and Sarantis, N. 2009. “A nonlinear panel unit root test under cross section dependence”. Working Papers 28, Department of Economics, University of Glasgow [Google Scholar]) for the relative stock prices of Emerging Asian markets, we find strong evidence of nonlinear mean reversion, whereas linear tests fail to reject the unit root null for most cases. We also report some evidence that stock markets in China and Taiwan are highly localized.     

The Effects of Tariffs and Export Subsidies on Entry Barriers and Investment

This paper explains the effects of unilateral tariffs and export subsidies on entry decisions in an imperfectly competitive industry, and suggests that carefully targeted trade policies play a strategic role in shifting the industry structure and the terms of subsequent competition. The model provides a new justification for tariffs which is different from the traditional infant industry argument; the tariff affects foreign firms' reactions as well as those of the domestic firms. [410]     

The Permanent Export Hypothesis and Foreign Trade of a Centrally Planned Economy: A Case Study of North Korea

Huge outstanding debts of Third World Centrally Planned Economies(CPEs) notwithstanding, their trades with industrialized countries have been continuing briskly. In order to safeguard against an aggravation of current debts of the CPE, however, an industrialized country determines annually the maximum amount of imports permitted for a CPE on the basis of the CPE's permanent exports. This paper attempts to develop a permanent export model and apply it to the foreign trade of North Korea. [F 14]     

Full versus quasi MLE for ARMA-GARCH models with infinitely divisible innovations

We compare the backtesting performance of ARMA-GARCH models with the most common types of infinitely divisible innovations, fit with both full maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and quasi maximum likelihood estimation (QMLE). The innovation types considered are the Gaussian, Student’s t, α-stable, classical tempered stable (CTS), normal tempered stable (NTS) and generalized hyperbolic (GH) distributions. In calm periods of decreasing volatility, MLE and QMLE produce near identical performance in forecasting value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). In more volatile periods, QMLE can actually produce superior performance for CTS, NTS and α-stable innovations. While the t-ARMA-GARCH model has the fewest number of VaR violations, rejections by the Kupeic and Berkowitz tests suggest excessively large forecasted losses. The α-stable, CTS and NTS innovations compare favourably, with the latter two also allowing for option pricing under a single market model.     

Unions and Gender Pay Equity in Academe: A Study of U.S. Institutions

This paper uses 1994-95 faculty salary data from over 1,100 four-year U.S. academic institutions, about one-fourth of them with collective bargaining agreements, to ask if faculty unions make a difference to gender pay equity. Average gender salary differences are negative at every rank and at every category of U.S. institution with or without collective bargaining agreement. Unions may improve gender salary differentials somewhat, particularly at the assistant professor level. There is no evidence that this gain will be lost at higher levels, and mixed evidence that further gains occur for women at the full professor level. The most pervasive and robust consequence of unions is to increase the positive impact that higher proportions of women at senior faculty ranks make on relative salaries at the assistant professor level. However, the influence of these higher-ranked women on gender salary inequalities at the associate and full levels is lower in union schools than nonunion schools. By reducing the flexibility of existing salary structures, collective bargaining apparently reduces the influence of senior women faculty on the salaries of current women faculty members while increasing their attention and influence at entry levels.