Spillover Effects of Grocery Bag Legislation: Evidence of Bag Bans and Bag Fees

Environmental and Resource Economics - We investigate the unintended consequences of carryout grocery bag (CGB) regulations by looking at the impact on sales of alternative plastic bag products. We...     

A regional analysis of food consumption in China

Two “laws” are used to describe the budget shares of staple food, other food, and non-food in 28 regions in China: Working's model, which describes the budget share of (total) food as a declining linear function of the logarithm of total consumption expenditure, and a second model that describes the ratio of the budget shares of staple and other food as a double-log function of total consumption expenditure. Staple food appears to be an inferior good in the richest regions but not in the other regions.     

Effects of Family Policy Reforms in Norway: Results from a Joint Labour Supply and Childcare Choice Microsimulation Analysis*

Mothers of pre‐school children represent one part of the population that might be able to increase its labour supply. We discuss the effects of family policy changes that encourage the labour supply of these mothers, such as childcare fee reductions and increased availability of centre‐based care. The effects of policy changes are described by using a joint labour supply and childcare choice decision model. Detailed empirical results are provided with respect to mothers' labour supply, families' childcare choices, public expenditures, and distributions of income and money metric utility.     

An empirical examination of factors driving the offshore renminbi market

Following the 2010 establishment of the offshore renminbi market in Hong Kong, renminbi deposits there quickly rose above RMB 1 trillion. In this article, we examine fluctuations between the offshore value of the renminbi in Hong Kong and its onshore value in mainland China. The size of the spot market spread appears to be influenced by stock market sentiment as reflected in the spread between A-shares listed in Shanghai and H-shares listed in Hong Kong. There is also some evidence of a link between the spread and the pace of renminbi deposit growth in Hong Kong.     

Are Preferential Trade Agreements with Non-trade Objectives a Stumbling Block for Multilateral Liberalization?

In many preferential trade agreements (PTAs), countries exchange not only reductions in trade barriers but also cooperation in non-trade issues such as labour and environmental standards, intellectual property, etc. We provide a model of PTAs motivated by cooperation in non-trade issues and analyse its implications for global free trade and welfare. We find that such PTAs increase the cost of multilateral tariff reductions and thus cause a stumbling block to global free trade. This occurs because multilateral tariff reductions decrease the threat that can be used in PTAs and thus the surplus that can be extracted from them. By explicitly modelling the interaction between preferential and multilateral negotiations, we derive a testable prediction and provide novel econometric evidence that supports the model's key prediction. The welfare analysis shows that the current World Trade Organization rules allowing this type of PTAs may be optimal for economically large countries, thus the model can predict the rules we observe. We also analyse alternative rules that constitute a Pareto improvement.     

INDUSTRIAL POLICY IN GREAT BRITAIN AND ITS EFFECT ON TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY IN MANUFACTURING PLANTS, 1990–1998

Industrial policy in any economy has a number of varying and occasionally conflicting objectives, but the overarching intention of the various grants, subsidies and support schemes, arguably, must be to improve the economic performance of the plants they assist directly. However, in the absence of counterfactual evidence, whether or not assistance does improve performance is hard to establish. In this paper, we consider the impact of two UK government industrial support schemes (Regional Selective Assistance and the Small Firm Merit Awards for Research and Technology) on UK manufacturing plant level total factor productivity in an attempt to answer the question, ‘did assistance make a difference?’