Regulation of Mobile Telephony across the European Union: An Empirical Analysis

In this paper I analyze the impact of regulatory policy on prices and demand for mobile telecommunications services across the European Union. I estimate a reduced form model of the mobile industry using panel data for the EU countries from 1998 to 2002. Among others, I find the following effects: liberalization of fixed telephone lines has a negative impact on prices and a positive impact on the demand for mobile services, and the introduction of mobile number portability has a negative impact on prices.*I am grateful to Toker Doganoglu, Gerd Hansen, Eric Kodjo Ralph, Guido Friebel, participants at the 30th EARIE Conference 2003, the 2nd International Industrial Organization Conference 2004 and the 19th Annual Congress of the EEA 2004, and anonymous referees for valuable comments. I would like to acknowledge the generous financial support from the Volkswagen Stiftung and the Munich Graduate School of Economics which made this research possible. All errors are mine.1 Source: European Commission (1994).     

Skill-Specific rather than General Education: A Reason for US–Europe Growth Differences?

In this paper, we develop a model of technology adoption and economic growth in which households optimally obtain either a concept-based, general education or a skill-specific, vocational education. General education is costly to obtain, but enables workers to operate new production technologies. Firms weigh the cost of adopting and operating new technologies against increased profits and optimally choose the level of adoption. We show that an economy whose policies favor vocational education will grow slower in equilibrium than one that favors general education. More importantly, the gap between their growth rates will increase with the growth rate of available technology. By characterizing the optimal Ramsey education policy we also demonstrate that the optimal subsidy for general education increases with the growth rate of available technology. Our theory suggests that European education policies that favored specialized, vocational education might have worked well, both in terms of growth rates and welfare, during the 1960s and 1970s when available technologies changed slowly. However, in the information age of the 1980s and 1990s when new technologies emerged at a more rapid pace, they might have contributed to an increased growth gap relative to the United States.     

Asymmetric effects of industrial production,money supply and exchange rate changes on stock returns in Turkey

The aim of this article is twofold: First, it examines the asymmetric effects of industrial production, money supply and RER on stock returns in Turkey by using the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model over the periods of 1994:01–2017:05 and 2002:01–2017:05. Second, it tries to determine whether there is a change of these macroeconomic variables’ effects on stock returns after the 2001 financial crisis since after 2002 period represents a structural break from the past in terms of economic, political and macroeconomic policy approaches. The study finds that the effects of the changes in industrial production, money supply and RER on stock returns are asymmetric, and the asymmetries are larger after the 2002 subsample compared to the full sample period. The empirical results further suggest that tight monetary policies appear to retard the stock returns more than easy monetary policies that stimulate them.     

International Trade and the Environment: Theoretical and Policy Linkages

I review and extend three approaches to trade and environmental policies: competitive general equilibrium, oligopoly and monopolistic competition. The first two have surprisingly similar implications: deviations from first-best rules are justified only by constraints on policy choice (which motivates what I call a “single dividend” approach to environmental policy), and taxes and emissions standards differ in ways which reflect the Le Chatelier principle. I also show how environmental taxes may lead to a catastrophic relocation of industry in the presence of agglomeration effects, although not necessarily if there is a continuum of industries which differ in pollution intensity. *An earlier version was presented as an invited plenary lecture to the European Association for Environmental and Resource Economics Conference, Oslo, 1999.     

The Monetary Policy of the European Central Bank

The first six years of ECB monetary policy are examined using a general framework that allows central bankers to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation, output and the interest rate from their reference values. The empirical analysis on synthetic euro‐area data suggests that the objective of price stability is symmetric, whereas the objectives of real activity and interest‐rate stabilizations are not. Output contractions imply larger policy responses than output expansions of the same size, while movements in the interest rate are larger when the level of the interest rate is relatively high. The hypothesis of M3 growth‐rate targeting is rejected.     

我国现行环境政策调整与出口产品“环境竞争力”的提升

加入WTO后,我国要在该组织框架下接受贸易自由化与环境保护两股潮流的双重挑战,应对发达国家层出不穷的绿色贸易壁垒。如何合理调整国内现行的一些与WTO规则相矛盾的环境政策,提升出口产品的环境竞争力,促进我国经济与社会的可持续发展,将是我国加入WTO后急需解决的新问题。本文在对环境竞争力概念进行分析的基础上,界定了影响环境竞争力的主要因素。从国际、国内两个方面论述了当前我国环境政策所面临的挑战,及其调整方向。进而,提出今后提高我国出口产品环境竞争力的对策建议。     

技术资本价值增值效应：基本内涵、关键因素与政策取向

作为企业知识创造与应用的重要途径，技术资本具有显著的动态竞争优势、规模经济、范围经济和速度经济等效应，实现了技术研发、生产与市场的结合，促进了技术的有效转化及资本价值的增值。技术资本属性、技术体制等是影响技术资本价值增值效应的关键要素。旨在促进技术资本化的政策，应以促进这些要素积极效应的释放为重点。     

Environmental Policy in Open Economies and Monopolistic Competition

This paper analyses the implications of international trade for non-cooperative environmental policy in the case of local production externalities. A particular focus is on the potential effects of regulations on the variety of goods and the resulting international spillover caused by trade. A tougher domestic standard negatively affects the utility of the households abroad, since such a policy reduces their variety of imports (due to fewer domestic product inventions) or their consumption of each imported brand (due to higher import prices). Ignoring the negative spillover, non-cooperative governments implement inefficiently strict standards in equilibrium. In contrast to this clear-cut inefficiency result, the impact of international trade on the state of the environment is ambiguous.     

Environmental tax policy in a model of growth cycles

Summary. The purpose of this paper is to consider environmental taxation which would control emissions of firms in a model of growth cycles. In the model presented below, the economy may experience two phases of growth and environmental quality: “the no-innovation growth regime” and “the innovation-led growth regime”. Aggregate capital and environmental quality remain constant in the no-innovation growth regime, while they perpetually increase in the innovation-led growth regime. The paper shows that the tax plays a key role in determining whether the economy stably converges to one of the two regimes or fluctuates permanently between them. It also shows that there is a critical level of the tax and that the economy obtains higher growth rates of capital and environmental quality by raising (or reducing) the tax if the initial tax is below (or above) the critical level. Received: April 2, 2001; revised version: March 21, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" This research reported here was conducted within the research project “Project on Intergenerational Equity” at Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University. I am deeply grateful to an anonymous referee for his or her insightful comments, which greatly improved the paper. I also thank Hiroshi Honda, Yasuo Maeda, Yuji Nakayama, and participants in workshops at Hitotsubashi University, Kyoto University, Nagoya University, Osaka University, University of Tsukuba, Yokohama National University, and University of Tokyo for their valuable comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are mine.