Innovative practices in public procurement partnerships: The case of the United States

Public procurement partnerships represent a new approach to conducting government acquisition. These partnerships are predicated on the notion that governments today simply lack the requisite knowledge, skills and financing to provide core public services and acquire sophisticated services, IT and knowledge development by themselves. Instead, governments need to enlist the collective energies of the governmental, business and non-profit (third) sectors. This research looks at the concept of public procurement partnerships in the United States and the major trends promoting their use. Two case examples of public procurement partnerships are presented; one from the perspective of a government partner, the other from the perspective of a private (third) sector partner.     

Trade costs, firms and productivity

This paper examines the response of U.S. manufacturing industries and plants to changes in trade costs using a unique new dataset on industry-level tariff and transportation rates. Our results lend support to recent heterogeneous-firm models of international trade that predict a reallocation of economic activity towards high-productivity firms as trade costs fall. We find that industries experiencing relatively large declines in trade costs exhibit relatively strong productivity growth. We also find that low-productivity plants in industries with falling trade costs are more likely to die; that relatively high-productivity non-exporters are more likely to start exporting in response to falling trade costs; and that existing exporters increase their shipments abroad as trade costs fall. Finally, we provide evidence of productivity growth within firms in response to decreases in industry-level trade costs.     

Regulation and welfare: evidence from paragraph IV generic entry in the pharmaceutical industry

This article estimates welfare effects of accelerated generic entry via Paragraph IV challenges. Using data from 2000–2008 for hypertension drugs in the United States, we estimate demand using a random‐coefficients logit model. We find consumers gain $42 billion whereas producers lose $32.5 billion from entry. This modest $9.5 billion gain in social welfare is consistent with our observation that overall consumption does not increase after entry—generic sales displace branded sales, shifting surplus downstream from producers to consumers, insurance companies, and retailers. We demonstrate significant cross‐molecular substitution and discuss challenges in determining what fraction of downstream surplus actually goes to consumers.     

消减城乡公共产品供给差异的策略——基于政治支持差异假设的探视

本文认为导致城乡公共产品供给差异的根本原因是地方政府官员根据不同主体能够给予的政治支持做出的理性选择。文章强调了政治支持差异对地方官员行为的影响,并把上级政府、城市居民和农村居民的政治支持纳入一个统一的分析框架,分析了地方官员从不同主体获得的政治支持权重大小顺序,给出了其最优策略的均衡条件。如果要实现基本公共产品均等化目标,则需优化政治支持结构。     

Incentive Regulation and The Cost Structure of The Local Telephone Exchange Network

This paper combines an engineering process model of the cost of local exchange telecommunications firms with an analytical model of optimal incentive regulation (with ex post cost observability), to study empirically the properties of the optimal regulatory mechanism. Relying on detailed properties of the cost function, we examine three issues: (i) the extent of natural monopoly when informational rents associated with regulation are taken into account; (ii) the extent of incentive correction, which expresses the divergence of pricing under the optimal mechanism from optimal pricing under complete information; (iii) the implementation of optimal regulation through a menu of linear contracts. Our findings are that, for fixed territory, strong economies of scale allow local exchange telecommunications to retain monopoly characteristics even when the (informational) costs of regulation are properly accounted for, the incentive correction term is small in magnitude, and that optimal regulation can be well approximated through relatively simple linear contracts.     

Are There Differential Effects of Price and Policy on College Students’Drinking Intensity?

This article investigates the impact of campus bans on alcohol use and the price of alcohol on college students'drinking intensity. The impact of a campus ban on drinking appears to depend on the ability of students to substitute off-campus access to alcohol for on-campus access. Where few off-campus alternatives exist, campus bans reduce the odds that a student becomes a heavy drinker but have no impact on the odds of transitioning from abstainer to drinker. Where off-campus alternatives are more plentiful, campus bans are less effective. Increasing the price of alcohol appears to be equally effective at reducing the likelihood of drinking and heavy drinking. (JEL)     

Sectoral and aggregate technology growth in Spain

In this paper we analyze technological change in the Spanish economy by constructing adjusted Solow residuals, where the adjustment attempts to correct for the bias associated with the potential presence of imperfect competition, increasing returns, variable input utilization and, especially, sectoral reallocation of inputs across sectors. We refer to this modified Solow residual as a technology index. Sectoral reallocations and variable input utilization are key determinants of the differences between the aggregate Solow residual and the technology index resulting from the aggregation of estimated sectoral technological growth. We show that starting in the mid nineties, there has been a deceleration in the aggregate growth rate of technology which is basically due to the behaviour of the manufacturing sectors. Finally, our results imply that aggregate technology growth is less volatile than aggregate productivity as measured by the Solow residual.     

Do departures from democratic accountability compromise the stability of public finances? Keynesianism, central banking, and minority governments in the Canadian system of party government, 1867–2009

This paper is concerned with the effectiveness of Westminster parliamentary institutions in ensuring the stability of a nation??s public finances. Our starting point and major hypothesis is that the governance structure embodied in Canada??s parliamentary system has contributed importantly to the maintenance of fiscal stability. The fact that the Government of Canada, like the central government of many other modern democracies, has survived for over a century without default on its public debt means that in some meaningful sense, long run responsibility with respect to the nation??s finances has in fact been achieved, and we show that this is in fact the case. Hence a more meaningful test of our main hypothesis requires the designation of specific sub-periods when the ideological background for political policy making changed and/or when the institutions and organizations for operationalizing policy varied in ways that either improved or discouraged responsible fiscal performance. We consider ideational and institutional factors that are predicted to either enhance or detract from accountability and fiscal stability, including central banking, the adoption of Keynesianism, inflation targeting and periods of minority government, and test for their effects on long run stability of the debt to GDP ratio using data for almost the entire history of the modern state from 1867 to 2008.     

The New Nomos of Europe

According to Carl Schmitt, in his late work The Nomos of the Earth, published in 1950, the long evolution in the relation between humans and the earth has been decisive for the nature of traditional legal order. The historical links to European international jurisprudence (ius publicum Europaeum) have decayed with the old world order that supported them. Territoriality, once the foundation of the nation-state has evolved, causing a parallel change in the nation-state paradigm of sovereignty and the fabric of international law which has its basis in that paradigm. If Schmitt is correct in his prognoses about the end of a global era and the rise of a new yet uncharted world order in the mid-1940s, then the architects of the nascent European Coal and Steel Community face the same conditions, and must carry out their work with the same cultural, social and juridical raw materials, against the backdrop of the same concrete historical experience. This article will attempt to continue the trajectory of Schmitt's historical analysis of the ius publicum Europeaum, suggesting how its central concepts and theses map onto the grand geopolitical and civilisational project of European construction from 1950 to 2004 and beyond. It will explore the applicability of the concept of nomos for the nature of EU evolution, and interpret general elements of the European legal system in terms of the concept of nomos.     

Toward a Constructive Theory for Anti-poverty Policy

A bstract . What the "ideal" anti-poverty policy is cannot be answered without a validated theory of income deprivation. Such a theory is not yet available from economics. And sociology cannot yet provide a verified theory of why particular people are poor. The cultural and situationist hypotheses offer no adequate explanation of poverty and hence billions spent on policies based on them produced no results. Network analysis extends the institutionalist hypothesis but remains to be validated. However, empirical studies strongly suggest (though they do not prove) that structural changes in educational or employment opportunity are more realistic than compensatory or general aid programs.