Testing Implications of Spatial Economics Models: Some Evidence from Food Retailing

Under certain conditions, spatial economics models predict an increase in product price after entry of new competitors in a market area. However, a review of spatial economics models suggests new competitors should cause lower prices in urbanized markets, although the effect is dependent on distance between the existing and new firms. An empirical analysis of entry in a local retail food market supports this hypothesis for food products but not nonfood products.     

The Impacts of the California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act on Consumers

In late 1987 the California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act went into effect. Like mandatory beverage deposit legislation in other states, this Act is designed to promote returns through the payment of a redemption value. However, unlike traditional legislation, the Act attempts to promote recycling with lower redemption values and more state intervention. This paper presents a methodology for analyzing the impacts of beverage container recycling legislation on consumers. Applying this methodology to California, it is found that the Act will significantly reduce beverage container solid waste and litter, but the net benefits of the Act depend critically on consumers' valuations of intangible benefits.     

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over‐accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra‐economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non‐productive economic activity and pre‐capitalist forms of exploitation.     

Globalization and Uncertainty: Earnings Volatility in Sweden, 1985–2003

Earnings volatility has been linked to economic integration only through contradictory conjectures. We assess globalization’s role by examining volatility trends in manufacturing, private services, and public services. If trade increases uncertainty, volatility trends should differ markedly across industries since manufacturing, in contrast to especially public services, is exposed to international competition. We analyze earnings trajectories in Sweden 1985–2003, a country and period evincing accelerating trade, finding no indications of greater volatility increases in manufacturing.     

RATE‐CUTTING TAX REFORMS AND CORPORATE TAX COMPETITION IN EUROPE

While there is a large and growing number of studies on the determinants of corporate tax rates, the literature has so far ignored the fact that the behavior of governments in setting tax rates is often best described as a discrete choice decision problem. We set up an empirical model that relates a government's decision whether to cut its corporate tax rate to the country's own inherited tax and taxes in neighboring countries. Using comprehensive data on corporate tax reforms in Europe since 1980, we find evidence suggesting that the position in terms of the tax burden imposed on corporate income relative to geographical neighbors strongly affects the probability of rate‐cutting tax reforms. Countries are particularly likely to cut their statutory tax rate if the inherited tax is high and if they are exposed to low‐tax neighbors.     

Financial Education and Counseling—Still Holding Promise

This article reviews the evaluation literature on financial education and counseling for adults in order to synthesize implications for research and practice. Most evaluations report positive impacts, but the findings are often small when compared with valid comparison groups. Many evaluations use self-reported measures, measure outcomes over short time periods and cannot rule out selection bias due to nonrandomized designs, all of which may bias results. Although future research and practice in this field hold promise, more attention to theory-based evaluations and further investment in randomized field experiments may be fruitful.