Excess demand functions with incomplete markets—a global result

The purpose of this paper is to give a global characterization of excess demand functions in a two-period exchange economy with incomplete real asset markets. We show that continuity, homogeneity and Walras’ law characterize the aggregate excess demand functions on any compact price set which maintains the dimension of the budget set.     

跨国公司技术联盟:动因、效应及启示

跨国公司技术联盟是在经济全球化与一体化的国际背景下发展起来的，它被愈来愈多的人认为是一种知识联盟，是一种独立的组织形式。跨国公司进行技术联盟的动因在于：获取与企业核心技术相关的上下游技术、适应网络竞争的需要及促进研究与开发等。跨国公司技术联盟既给合作方带来一定的积极效应，同时也产生相当的负面影响。在当前，跨国公司技术联盟对我国企业进行技术联盟与合作有积极的借鉴意义。     

R&D strategy and Australian manufacturing industry: an empirical investigation of emphasis and effectivness

This research investigates the degree of emphasis placed by the Australian manufacturing industry on Research and Development (R&D) strategy as well as on other organisational strategies such as marketing, HRs (HR), technology, and operations at the functional level. The research extends further to investigate whether the emphasis on R&D strategy differs with contextual factors such as firm size, firm’s generic strategy, type of market, firm’s life cycle stage, etc. A mail survey was carried out to collect information from manufacturing firms across Australia. This was followed by an on-site interview of some of the senior managers of manufacturing firms from three Australian states: South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.The study found that although the emphasis on R&D strategy has received a high priority in the past few years, it has not been as effective as the operations strategy and the technology strategy. The operations strategy has been accorded the highest importance in the past few years and this will continue in the future. The study also indicated that firms, which adopt a differentiation generic strategy, put more emphasis on R&D than the firms, which adopt cost leadership and focus generic strategies. The results did not indicate any evidence of a relationship between firm size and the R&D strategy although large firms are found to put more emphasis on operations and marketing strategies. Relatively higher emphasis was placed on the R&D strategy by businesses: at the growth stage; involved in the manufacture of consumer goods as opposed to industrial goods; involved in exports with a higher sales growth in export markets; and having a higher growth rate relative to their industry.     

Carbon tax simulations using a household demand model

The main objective of this paper is to analyse consumer response and welfare effects due to changes in energy or environmental policy. To achieve this objective we formulate and estimate an econometric model for non-durable consumer demand in Sweden that utilises micro- and macro-data. In the simulations, we consider two revenue neutral scenarios that both imply a doubling of the CO₂ tax; one that returns the revenues in the form of a lower VAT and one that subsidise public transport. One conclusion from the simulations is that the CO₂ tax has regional distribution effects, in the sense that household living in sparsely populated areas carry a larger share of the tax burden.     

Programme Evaluation with Unobserved Heterogeneity and Selective Implementation: The Mexican PROGRESA Impact on Child Nutrition

This paper considers the impact of Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación ( PROGRESA ), a large Mexican rural anti-poverty programme that had an evaluation sample in which overall treatment was randomly assigned to some communities but not others, on child nutrition. When we examine the impact of PROGRESA based on the presumption of randomized allocations, we find that PROGRESA had no or even a negative impact on child nutrition. However, not all children designated to receive nutritional supplements actually did so. Our preferred estimates – child fixed-effects estimates that control for unobserved heterogeneity that is correlated with access to the supplement – indicate a significantly positive and fairly substantial programme effect of the nutritional supplements on children 12–36 months. They imply an increase of about a sixth in mean growth per year for these children and a lower probability of stunting. Effects are somewhat larger for children from poorer communities but whose mothers are functionally literate. The long-term consequences of these improvements are non-trivial; its impact working through adult height alone could result in a 2.9% increase in lifetime earnings.     

The Elasticity of Marginal Utility of Consumption: Estimates for 20 OECD Countries*

In social project appraisal, the policy profile of both distributional welfare weights and the social discount rate has risen considerably in recent years. This fact has important implications for the allocation of funds to social projects and policies in countries, and in unions of countries such as the EU. A key component in the formulae for both welfare weights and the social discount rate is the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption, e. A critical review of existing evidence on e suggests that the UK Treasury's preferred value of unity is too low. New evidence presented in this paper, based on the structure of personal income tax rates, suggests that, on average, for developed countries e is close to 1.4. This particular approach to the estimation of e has previously been under‐utilised by researchers.     

Competitive equilibria with limited enforcement

We show how to decentralize constrained efficient allocations that arise from enforcement constraints between sovereign nations. In a pure exchange economy these allocations can be decentralized with private agents acting competitively and taking as given government default decisions on foreign debt. In an economy with capital these allocations can be decentralized if the government can tax capital income as well as default on foreign debt. The tax on capital income is needed to make private agents internalize a subtle externality. The decisions of the government can arise as an equilibrium of a dynamic game between governments.     

Economic Implications of Alternative Allocation Schemes for Emission Allowances*

For reasons of political feasibility, emission trading systems may have to rely on free initial allocation of emission allowances in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects in dirty industries. Against the background of an emerging European‐wide emission trading system, we examine the trade‐off between such compensation and economic efficiency under output‐based and emissions‐based allocation rules. We show that the emissions‐based allocation rule is more costly than the output‐based rule in terms of maintaining output and employment in energy‐intensive industries. When the international allowance price increases, the inferiority of emissions‐based allocation vis‐à‐vis output‐based allocation becomes more pronounced, as emission subsidies drastically restrict efficiency gains from international trade in emission allowances.     

Cities under stress

This paper studies the effect of terrorist attacks on the internal structure of cities. We develop an urban framework with capital structures suitable for the study of this question and analyze the long and short term implications of this type of events. In the long run, the analysis shows that a terrorist attack will affect urban structure only modestly, relative to the potentially large decrease in the level of economic activity in the city. Land rents will not decline at all locations. In the short run, agglomeration forces will amplify the effect of the original destruction and will reduce urban economic activity temporarily.     

Entry and growth in a perfectly competitive vintage model

A perfectly competitive vintage-knowledge model of Schumpeterian growth is introduced to study the relation between growth, technology-lifetime, entry, and productivity-dispersion. The incentive to innovate is generated by the productivity-dispersion (latent in traditional vintage models) between new and old plants, rather than by monopoly rents. The model has a unique steady-state REE with endogenous growth. The endogenous extent of entry constitutes a buffer, dampening the effect of research-efficiency and completely neutralizing the effect of population size or population growth rates on per-capita income levels and growth rates. Variations of research-efficiency lead to a negative relation between growth and vintage-lifetime and a non-monotonic relation between growth and productivity-dispersion.