Thirty-five years of journal of econometrics

The paper discusses how the Journal of Econometrics started and has grown over the years. It analyzes a trend in the research areas of the published articles and reviews some of the important papers that have been published. It concludes with an assessment of the future of the journal.     

INTENSIFICATION OF RAINFED LOWLAND RICE PRODUCTION IN WEST AFRICA: PRESENT STATUS AND POTENTIAL GREEN REVOLUTION

The objective of the current paper is to explore the factors influencing the expansion and intensification of rice production in rainfed lowland sites. The village/lowland‐level data show the following: (1) the expansion of lowland rice cultivation has been driven by population pressure and accessibility to the market; and (2) the adoption of water control technologies is enhanced by the existence of immigrants and accessibility to the market. Rice cultivator data show that investment in water supply canals is influenced by land tenure security and that the canals enhance yield. This suggests that investment in water control technologies in rainfed lowland is necessary to realize a rice Green Revolution. Considering the fairly high average yield already achieved with water control technologies and the vast area of lowlands without water control technologies in rural area, there is a high potential of a rice Green Revolution in rainfed lowland in West Africa.     

Team Incentives and Reference‐Dependent Preferences

We investigate a multi‐agent moral‐hazard model where agents have expectation‐based reference‐dependent preferences à la K?szegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). We show that even when each agent's probability of success in a project is independent, a principal may employ team incentives. Because the agents are loss averse, they have first‐order risk aversion to wage uncertainty. This causes the agents to work harder when their own failure is stochastically compensated through other agents' performance. In the optimal contract, agents with high performance are always rewarded, whereas agents with low performance are rewarded if and only if other agents' performance is high.     

Measurement of redistributive effect of tax rates from a longitudinal perspective: an application of the fixed taxable income approach

The primary objective of this article is to explore how the redistributive effects of tax rate change when using the fixed taxable income approach – where tax rates for each year in a period are applied to taxable income for a base year to calculate rate effects – instead of using an existing procedure to compute the rate effects. Standard rate effects are found to differ considerably from those calculated using the fixed taxable income approach in terms of both level and longitudinal trend.     

Do the Rich Save More in Japan? Evidence Based on two Micro Data Sets for the 2000s

Using two household surveys, this paper investigates whether the saving rates of richer households are higher than those of poorer households in Japan. We construct a number of proxies for lifetime wealth, including those original to this study, and find marginally positive correlations between saving rates and lifetime wealth for working age households. We further find that the relationship between saving rates and lifetime wealth differs depending on the life stage of individual households. Older households with higher lifetime wealth appear to be dissaving to some extent, which is more or less consistent with the lifecycle model of consumption.     

Trade Creation Effects of Regional Trade Agreements: Tariff Reduction versus Non‐tariff Barrier Removal

This study uses the most disaggregated tariff line‐level trade data in a large number of countries in the world to empirically decompose the trade creation effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs) into those owing to tariff reduction and those owing to non‐tariff barrier (NTB) removal. Specifically, utilizing our detailed dataset, we employ the standard gravity equation and identify those effects by estimating the trade creation effects of RTAs for ineligible and eligible products for RTA preferential schemes separately. Our major findings are as follows. First, for the whole sample, there are significantly positive trade creation effects owing to tariff reduction while the effects for NTB removal are weak. Second, the trade creation effects of tariff reduction and NTB removal are substantially large in the case of trade among low‐income countries but weak among high‐income countries.     

Changes in risk of foreign firms listed in the U.S. following Sarbanes-Oxley

This study investigates the changes in the riskiness of foreign firms listed in the U.S. following the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), legislation aimed at calming investor fears. While capital market measures of risk increase on average over a shorter-term period, total and unsystematic risk measures decrease on average over a longer-term period. Finding longer-term decreases in these risk measures is consistent with reductions in investor uncertainty. Further cross-sectional analyses show that foreign firms considered to be less uncertain at the time of SOX passage received the greatest risk reductions in the post-SOX period. Thus, it appears that the less uncertain foreign firms especially benefited from the heightened awareness and investor focus that occurred in conjunction with the passage of SOX.     

Experimental Study on Negotiation Process in Participatory Decision Making Process in a Community

In participatory decision making process in a community, plural participants, such as governmental agencies, local municipalities, citizen groups and private companies are involved in the process. For achieving resolution, the methodologies for sharing understanding on a problem and formation of cooperative relationship are important. In this paper, the game experiment for observing people??s behaviors in conflicts is designed. In the game experiment, subjects are asked to negotiate with their counterparts. The games have similarities with typical conflicts which can arise frequently in participatory decision making process. The role of communication in participatory decision making process is also discussed.     

A micro-macro linkage in the measurement of inequality: Another look at the Gini coefficient

The aim of this paper is to help readers understand the significance of the Gini coefficient. We have two major formulae for the Gini coefficient. One of the formulae bases on the idea of aggregation of the microscopic differences between individuals' incomes or wealth. The idea that underlies the other formula is macroscopic presentation of distribution or concentration of income or wealth. We will show an unabridged proof of the equivalence between these formulae to examine how the two conceptions of the measurement of inequality are linked to each other.     

GLOBALIZATION AND PRODUCTIVITY: A SURVEY OF FIRM‐LEVEL ANALYSIS

Abstract Recent empirical studies which utilize plant‐ or establishment‐level data to examine globalization's impact on productivity have discovered many causal mechanisms involved in globalization's impact on firms’ productivity. Because these pathways have been broad, there have been few attempts to summarize the several and detailed mechanisms of self‐selection and learning at the same time. This paper examines seven pathways so that the clear‐cut consequences of the broad picture of globalization become visible. This strategy is useful for detecting missing links within and across the existing studies as well as for finding possible synergy effects among different mechanisms. Insightful policy implications may be derived from the comprehensive comparisons between the seven different pathways of globalization.