Using Empirical Point Elasticities to Teach Tax Incidence

Using point elasticities rather than using either arc elasticities or slopes of demand and supply curves provides the best method for teaching students about the economic impacts of excise taxes. Not only does a point-elasticity approach simplify theoretical analysis of tax impacts, but it also allows instructors to take advantage of publicly available empirical estimates of demand and supply elasticities to show students how theoretical results can be applied to real-world tax policy issues. To illustrate these advantages, the authors use several available estimates of point elasticities of demand and supply of raw sugar to calculate the economic impacts of a recently proposed penny-per-pound tax on raw cane sugar grown in the Florida Everglades.     

Changes in volatility of credit spread and market efficiency during rapid growth of credit-related securities

This paper investigates the changes in credit spread volatility during 1993–2001. We find that the credit spreads between junk-grade corporate bonds and Treasury bonds were significantly more volatile in the second half of this period when credit-related securities became popular. In contrast, investment-grade bonds exhibited no significant change in volatility. The junk bonds variance ratios changed from being less than one to greater than one. Using the GJR-Garch model, the conditional volatilities of junk bonds increased in the second half of the period and the mean reversion speeds slowed, suggesting a longer time for mean reversion to occur. Our analysis rules out treasury volatility, credit spread level, equity market return, T-bill rate, curvature of the Treasury curve, financial crisis, quantity of defaults and standard deviation of defaults as explanations for the increase in junk bond volatility. In contrast, volatility of equity returns provides a partial explanation of junk bond spread volatility in the later period.     

Enforcing Emissions Trading when Emissions Permits are Bankable

We propose enforcement strategies for emissions trading programs with bankable emissions permits that guarantee complete compliance with minimal enforcement costs. Our strategies emphasize imperfect monitoring supported by a high unit penalty for reporting violations, and tying this penalty directly to equilibrium permit prices. This approach is quite different from several existing enforcement strategies that emphasize high unit penalties for emissions in excess of permit holdings. Our analysis suggests that a high penalty for excess emissions cannot be used to conserve monitoring effort, and that it may actually increase the amount of monitoring necessary to maintain compliance.The authors are grateful to Anthony Heyes and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments. Partial support for this research was provided by the Cooperative State Research Extension, Education Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station under Project No. MAS00871.     

Health IT adoption,productivity and quality in primary care

Within the last decade, there has been a growing push towards the use of electronic medical records and health information technology (IT) within primary care physician practices. Despite financial subsidies, smaller practices remain reluctant to adopt these information systems. Using a nationally representative survey of physicians, this study explores the relationship between physician, practice and area attributes and the adoption of health IT systems. Controlling for these attributes, the analysis subsequently studies the relationship between health IT, physician productivity and perceived quality of care. It finds that smaller practices and physicians with lower incomes are less likely to adopt health IT systems and that adoption varies with the type of medical conditions the practice typically treats. With regards to productivity, health IT adopters are more likely to see fewer patients and spend a larger amount of time on each visit with marginal increases in time on administrative tasks and no differences in perceived ability to deliver quality health care.     

Dynamic dissolutions and unifications

I reexamine the key results from the literature on the size and number of countries under different political institutions in a simple dynamic model. I find that the canonical static results that democracies lead to too many too‐small countries and that Leviathans lead to too few too‐large countries no longer necessarily hold. The key dynamic element that drives the new results is that public goods are modeled as public capital; this changes the incentives to unify or divide countries. I also show that there are hysteresis effects on the size and number of countries; that is, arbitrary initial configurations of national boundaries may tend to persist because of the initial public capital location decisions they promote.     

The non-productive entrepreneurial process

A large literature explores the importance of entrepreneurship as the catalyst of economic progress. In contrast, this paper argues that entrepreneurs are the driver of economic stagnation. We analyze the non-productive entrepreneurial process and discuss three channels through which non-productive activities have a multiplier effect culminating in economic decline and stagnation. Drawing on examples of non-productive entrepreneurship from both underdeveloped and developed countries, we provide insight into why economic stagnation persists in the former and why economic decline can occur in the latter.     

First-author conditions: evidence from finance journal coauthorship

We study the trend and the author name-ordering rule in finance publication using the publication records of 21 core finance journals during the period from 1990 to 2004. We empirically model the underlying factors that affect the alphabetical ordering rule among multi-authored finance articles. We find that the choice of alphabetical ordering is based on the quality of the article, institutional heterogeneity, team size and cultural factors. The central argument rests upon the need to signal and the importance of signalling within the context of bargaining behaviour among coauthors. The probability of choosing alphabetical name ordering rule is associated with high article quality, higher ranked institutions, smaller research team and the presence of European authors.     

Bringing science to market: commercializing from NIH SBIR awards

We offer empirical information on the correlates of commercialization activity for research projects funded through the US National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award program. Based on this analysis we suggest possible recommendations for improving this aspect of the performance of NIH's SBIR program. Specifically, we estimate a model of the probability of commercialization as a function of the project's ability to attract additional developmental funding, along with other control variables. We find that additional developmental funding from non-SBIR federal sources and from own internal sources are important predictors of commercialization success, relatively more so than additional developmental funding from venture capitalists. We also find, among other things, that university involvement in the underlying research increases the probability of commercialization. Thus, these factors should be considered by NIH when making awards, if increased commercialization is an objective.     

Macroeconomic transitions and the transmission mechanism: Evidence from Turkey

This paper investigates changes to the macroeconomic transmission mechanism in Turkey following a major reform of monetary policy in the early 2000s. We use a Threshold VAR (TVAR) framework to test for and then estimate a model with endogenous transitions between regimes. We detect two regimes, with a clear transition between them in 2003–4. The pre-reform regime is characterized by high inflation, passive monetary policy and persistent responses to shocks. The post-reform regime is characterized by low inflation, active and credible monetary policy and markedly less persistent responses to shocks. Using a model that contains sufficient variables to capture diverse transmission mechanisms, working through the real exchange rate, domestic credit and monetary policy, we find evidence of sharp changes in transmission mechanisms. Post-reform, the response of Turkey to macroeconomic shocks has changed to be similar to those in other modern, market-orientated economies.     

Joining the World Trade Organization: What is the Impact?

Research has called into question the impact of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on trade. This research, however, has been called into question on both modeling grounds for and failing to utilize comprehensive fixed effects. Others have found that when these factors are accounted for, imports rise by significant amounts. This paper seeks to reconcile these findings. I find that the WTO has a larger, though uneven, impact on exports than imports. The results indicate that the WTO frequently causes imports and exports to move in opposite directions negating any increase in overall trade. The regressions with and without fixed country effects generally demonstrate pattern consistency for generalized results that are robust to change. Owing to the finding that imports rise modestly or even fall without country effects while exports rise, the results imply that countries may not be as interested in liberalizing trade as selling to the world.