Understanding Landscape Stewardship – Lessons to be Learned from Public Service Economics

We argue that public service economics provides a new perspective on landscape stewardship by explaining it as human‐to‐human transfer of partial property rights. These mutually linked exchanges involve rights to use, to access, or to control and allocate land, labour, skills or information. From the perspective of public service economics, we identify the actors involved in landscape stewardship and distinguish entrepreneurial strategies for service provision based on resource orientation, user orientation or competiveness orientation. The difficulties in evaluating the quality of services in general and landscape stewardship in particular result in substantial uncertainty. Three types of contracts that cope differently with this uncertainty can be distinguished: contracts focusing on the technical process, on the intended outcome or on the choice of suppliers based on trust and features of their performance potential. We conclude that a service economics perspective can add to the understanding of landscape stewardship. Due to the fact that ‘public service’ is already a well‐known and broadly acknowledged concept in society, public service economics could possibly provide more rapid progress towards a better co‐ordination of supply and demand for landscape qualities than other more novel concepts.     

The New Deal in Services - A Challenge for Europe

This article is based upon surveys on services and their development carried out by 15 European research centres, within the context of the FASTprogramme of the European Communities' Committee. After an analysis of why the question of services is the object of growing attention on the part of governments, some of the aspects analysed by FAST, such as the new technology/service interaction and the change in the productive system are considered, and the implications of these evolutions for the community policies are discussed.     

When does a developing country use new technologies?

We develop a model of optimal pattern of economic development that is first rooted in physical capital accumulation and then in technical progress. We study an economy where capital accumulation and innovative activity take place within a two sector model. The first sector produces a consumption good using physical capital and non skilled labor. Technological progress in the consumption sector is driven by the research activity that takes place in the second sector. Research activity which produces new technologies requires technological capital and skilled labor. New technologies induce an endogenous increase of the total factor productivity of the consumption sector. Physical and technological capital are not substitutable while skilled and non skilled labor may be substitutable. We show that under conditions about the adoption process of new technologies, the optimal strategy for a developing country consists in accumulating physical capital first; postponing the importation of technological capital to the second stage of development. This result is due to a threshold effect from which new technologies begin to have an impact on the productivity of the consumption sector. However, we show that once a certain level of wealth is reached, it becomes optimal for the economy to import technological capital to produce new technologies. The authors would like to thank the participants to the seminar of GREDEG, especially Richard Arena, Flora Bellone, Jean-Luc Gaffard and Jacques Ravix, and also the participants to a seminar at European University Institute. We are also grateful to the referees for their very thoughtful remarks and criticisms. Cuong Le Van started writing this joint paper with Olivier Bruno and Benoit Masquin in 2005, in GREDEG.     

Not just babble: Opening the black box of communication in a voluntary contribution experiment

We let subjects in a voluntary contribution experiment make non-binding numerical announcements about their “possible” contributions and, in some treatments, send written promises to contribute specific amounts. We find that announcements were responded to both by others’ announcements and by real play, for example announcements led to costly punishment when found to be misleading. We also find that adding pre-play announcements to treatments with punishment can increase efficiency by letting cost-free warnings substitute for costly punishment. The threat of punishing false announcements and promises helps reduce false signals, but only when promise statements can be sent is the effect sufficient for achieving greater efficiency.     

Vertical aspects of male–female disparity in the labor market

The organization based economy model presented by Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (G&RH, 2004) is used to study the vertical dimensions of male–female disparity in the labor market. This sheds a new light on the major aspects of the phenomenon.     

On the economic factors of deforestation: What can we learn from quantile analysis?

The deforestation factors at a global level have been widely studied in the empirical economic literature. However, the high heterogeneity among countries considerably limits the overall significance of the results. Using quantile approach, we show thatsome major deforestation factors are more prevalent in high deforestation countries, giving the insight that those factors have been under-estimated in previous studies.     

Robust equilibria under non-common priors

This paper considers the robustness of equilibria to a small amount of incomplete information, where players are allowed to have heterogeneous priors. An equilibrium of a complete information game is robust to incomplete information under non-common priors if for every incomplete information game where each player's prior assigns high probability on the event that the players know at arbitrarily high order that the payoffs are given by the complete information game, there exists a Bayesian Nash equilibrium that generates behavior close to the equilibrium in consideration. It is shown that for generic games, an equilibrium is robust under non-common priors if and only if it is the unique rationalizable action profile. Set-valued concepts are also introduced, and for generic games, a smallest robust set is shown to exist and coincide with the set of a posteriori equilibria.     

Productivity enhancement at home via cross‐border acquisitions: The roles of learning and contemporaneous domestic investments

We examine whether ex post domestic productivity gains accrue to firms making cross‐border acquisitions. We argue that cross‐border acquisitions can enhance the acquirers' productivity at home, and we posit that these domestic productivity gains will be greater when there are learning opportunities in the target's host country and when contemporaneous domestic productivity‐enhancing investments are made by the acquirer in conjunction with the acquisition. These predictions are supported by data drawn from a sample of French acquiring and nonacquiring firms. Our results indicate that cross‐border acquisitions and investing in productivity at home are complementary: each makes the other more beneficial to firm productivity. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.