An Investigation of Industry Associations,Association Loops and Economic Complexity: Application to Canada and the United States

Various methods were proposed to understand the linkages in an input-output system; however, many have focused only on the identification of key sectors in the economy. An alternative approach, identifying analytically the importance of elements and combinations of elements was proposed as a field of influence theory (Sonis et al. , 1996). The purpose of this paper is to offer a complementary approach to the field of influence and the so-called 'Matrioshka principal' (Sonis & Hewings, 1990); the objectives are to identify simple row-column associations (i.e. statistical dependence), seek hierarchical associations between supply and demand in input-output systems and the decomposition of economic complexity into finite stages. For the identification of simple dependencies between rows and columns, we use a log-linear regression and for hierarchical associations and the identification of complexity stages, we use the data analysis technique known as dual scaling. Results of both approaches will be applied to input-output tables of the US and Canada.     

Ranking of Research Output of Agricultural Economics Departments in Canada and Selected U.S. Universities

In this paper, we rank agricultural economics departments in Canada on the basis of research output as measured by citations, publications, and publications weighted by journal impact factors. The data we employ are from the ISI Web of Science and cover the period 2000–07. In this ranking we include three departments from the United States to assess the performance of Canadian institutions relative to U.S. departments. We also investigate how publication output is affected by academic rank. Several Canadian departments compare favorably to some of the U.S. departments. Dans cet article, nous classant les départements d’économie agricole au Canada sur la base du nombre de citations, de publications et de publications pondéré par les coefficients d’impact des revues scientifiques. Les données sont disponibles à partir de ISI Web of Science^® et couvrent la période 2000–07. Dans ce classement, nous incluant trois départements des Etats-Unis pour évaluer la performance des départements Canadiens par rapport à ceux-ci. Nous examinons aussi l’effet du rang académique sur les publications. Plusieurs départements Canadiens sont très comparables à quelques départements des Etats-Unis.     

Irrigation Technology Adoption and Gains from Water Trading under Asymmetric Information

We develop a water allocation and irrigation technology adoption model under the prior appropriation doctrine with asymmetric information among heterogeneous farmers and between farmers and water authorities. We find that adverse selection reduces the adoption of modern irrigation technology. We also show that even with asymmetric information, incentives for water trade exist and lead to additional technology adoption with gains to all parties. This suggests that under asymmetric information, a thin secondary market improves the allocation of water resources and induces additional adoption of modern irrigation technologies.     

Noise and competition in strategic oligopoly

In this paper, we propose a model where N strategic informed traders who are endowed with heterogeneous noisy signals with different precisions compete in a market with a single risky asset. We explicitly describe the unique linear equilibrium that exists in this setup and derive its properties. Moreover, we focus on the effects of noise on the competition between traders. We show that noise softens the competition between traders. In particular, for N exceeding three and for certain sets of noise in traders' signals, each trader's individual profit is greater than the one obtained in the case of perfect information.