Outsourcing of Services and the Productivity Recovery in U.S. Manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s

Manufacturing productivity growth recovered during the 1980s and 1990s, while other sectors, particularly services, did not. In the same period U.S. manufacturing has engaged in the “outsourcing” or “contracting-out” of service functions. Has the recovery of manufacturing been accomplished by industrial reorganization--sloughing off sluggish services--rather than technical progress? We analyze this question by reducing service inputs to their consituent elements of material inputs. Service productivity growth is thus imputed to the goods sectors, reducing the recovery of manufacturing productivity growth in the 1980s by one fifth. The recovery lasted through the 1990s, when high productivity performers in manufacturing have been relatively successful at outsourcing sluggishservices.

     

The Location of Comparative Advantages on the Basis of Fundamentals Only

We propose a new way to locate the comparative advantages of two economies linked by international trade. We construct a competitive benchmark based only on the fundamentals of the two economies: endowments, preferences and technologies. The direction of trade is endogenously determined by a linear program with an input-output core. The factor contents of that trade are compared with factor endowments to test the Heckscher-Ohlin model in the presence of different technologies and preferences. We can also evaluate the gains of free bilateral trade. The model is applied to a customs union between Europe and Canada. The Heckscher-Ohlin factor abundance specialization hypothesis is supported by the data.     

The consumer's index

Consumer's surplus measures the area under the demand curve between two prices, but is path dependent. There exists a path such that consumer's surplus tracks utility and an explicit formula is known for CES utilities. This paper shows that the CES‐based formula holds for any homothetic utility, and I call it the consumer's index. The index modifies consumer's surplus in two ways: the change in income is measured by its growth factor and the area under the demand curve is normalized by income.     

Should Higher Education Subsidies Depend on Parental Income?

In many countries, student grants, tuition fees, and subsidizedloans depend on parental income. This paper examines the efficiencyand distributional effects of such conditioning, and assesseswhether it is optimal practice when the government wants toreduce after-tax income inequality in the most efficient manner.Increasing the mean level of education among the work-forcecompresses wage differentials by level of education and therebythe pre-tax income distribution. Hence, subsidizing educationmay be part of an optimal redistribution policy. However, educationsubsidies mainly benefit high-ability students, limiting theirredistributive virtues. Conditioning education subsidies onparental income may enable the government to reduce inframarginalsubsidies, mainly benefiting high-ability students, while preservingthe marginal subsidy, and thus the favourable effect on themean education level which leads to wage compression.     

The initial value problem for the trade cycle in euclidian space

[Ten Raa, 1984] has shown how arithmetics ideas carry over to distributions over space and can be used to solve open, static spatial problems such as the determination of urban equilibrium. This article extends the approach to dynamic spatial economics by tracing spatial distributions through time. It is shown that the basic ideas of ordinary differential equations carry over to the present context, provided that ‘functions’ are spatially distributed valued. The consequent differential equations for the distributions are solved. [Puu, 1982] spatial trade cycle model falls out as a special case and its associated initial value problem can now be completely solved.     

SUPPLY-USE FRAMEWORK FOR INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ANALYSIS

The technical variation between countries in the production of goods and services, in terms of not only input coefficients, but also emission coefficients, creates scope for international trade to reduce environmental pressures. For this purpose we extend the theory of trade and the environment as to accommodate technical variation between countries in production and emissions. We use and steer close to the extended input and output tables, which include emission data. By treating environmental standards analogous to capital and labor capacity constraints, the aggregation problem for economic and environmental measures gets the same format as the well-understood aggregation problem for labor and capital. In a pilot application we determine the gains to free trade in products and emission permits.     

Monopoly, Pareto and Ramsey Mark-ups

Monopoly prices are too high. It is a price level problem, in the sense that the relative mark-ups have Ramsey optimal proportions, at least for independent constant elasticity demands. I show that this feature of monopoly prices breaks down the moment one demand is replaced by the textbook linear demand or, even within the constant elasticity framework, dependence is introduced. The analysis provides a single Generalized Inverse Elasticity Rule for the problems of monopoly, Pareto and Ramsey.      

Firm efficiency,industry performance and the economy: three-way decomposition with an application to Andalusia

An economy may perform better because the firms become more efficient, the industries are better organized, or the allocation between industries is improved. In this paper we extend the literature on the measurement of industry efficiency (a decomposition in firm contributions and an organizational effect) to a third level, namely that of the economy. The huge task of interrelating the performance of an economy to industrial firm data is accomplished for Andalusia.     

Contagion as a domino effect in global stock markets

This paper shows that stock market contagion occurs as a domino effect, where confined local crashes evolve into more widespread crashes. Using a novel framework based on ordered logit regressions we model the occurrence of local, regional and global crashes as a function of their past occurrences and financial variables. We find significant evidence that global crashes do not occur abruptly but are preceded by local and regional crashes. Besides this form of contagion, interdependence shows up by the effect of interest rates, bond returns and stock market volatility on crash probabilities. When it comes to forecasting global crashes, our model outperforms a binomial model for global crashes only.     

Bilateral trade between India and Bangladesh: A general equilibrium approach

India and Bangladesh have pursued policies of trade liberalization since the early 1990s. However, owing to the differential speeds of opening up, Bangladesh's bilateral trade deficit with India widened substantially over the years. This aggravated the economic and the political tensions between the economies. It has been held that promotion of free trade between the two economies may enhance the trade and hence economic cooperation between them. Against this backdrop the present paper proposes a theoretical framework that provides a general equilibrium determination of the commodity pattern of trade and hence locates the comparative advantages of the economies. The empirical implementation of the model considers trade in 25 sectors comparable in the input–output tables of the economies. The study isolates the gains from free trade accruing to either economy. The paper also explores the pattern of bilateral trade when each economy produces goods by utilizing their own as well as the other country's technology. The gains from this trading arrangement are also isolated.