A Global Ex-vessel Fish Price Database: Construction and Applications

Synopsis We describe the first effort at creating a global ex-vessel fish price database, which is required for understanding the economic behavior of participants in the world’s fisheries. We demonstrate potential applications of the database by linking it to a spatially defined catch database, which makes it possible to attach landed values to species in both time and space. This is the first database available publicly where interested members of the public, researchers and managers can easily find and access ex-vessel prices of the world’s major commercial fish species. Preliminary results indicate that the average real price of a number of species have declined between 1950 and 2002. The estimated landed value of fish globally, in year 2000 dollars, was about US$24 billion in 1950. It increased steadily to about US$90 billion in the early 1970s, reached a peak of US$100 billion at the end of the 1980s, and declined to about US$80 billion in 2000. The top 15 fishing countries cumulatively account for 79% of total real landed value, with Japan leading, even though the value of its landings has been declining.      

The double liability rule

Conventional liability rules do not lead to a first best allocation. Optimal bilateral risk control can be achieved by not compensating any losses and, in addition, charging each party a fine equal to the loss suffered by the other party. In this way, each party internalizes the full accident loss. This paper investigates the properties of this “double liability” rule under risk neutrality and risk aversion of the parties. Finally the use of this rule in the context of multiple-party accidents is discussed.     

The clinton health reform

There are some difficult, even some agonizing tradeoffs, that we have to confront if we want to achieve the objectives of universal coverage and cost containment set forth in the Clinton plan. Will universal coverage lead to uniform results? If we mandate coverage, who is actually going to be paying for it and in what form? Do targeted subsidies based on nonincome classifications of individuals (i.e., employment status) create more distortion than equity? A concern to focus on is whether the Clinton plan will be controlling health care spending or an individual's ability to spend for their choice of health care.     

Has the EMS reduced member-country exchange rate volatility?

Using tests for unit roots, serial correlation, and conditional heteroskedasticity, we find that the stochastic structure of the percentage changes in both the Franc/DM and Lira/DM rates is well described by a low order autoregression with ARCH disturbances. While this assertion is not rejected in either the Pre-EMS or the EMS period, we present evidence indicating a structural shift between sub-periods. In particular, while ARCH is present in each sub-period, its explicit parameterization changes dramatically.Likelihood-ratio tests indicate the desirability of a bivariate analysis, and significant ARCH effects are found in the conditional variances and covariances over both subperiods. Likelihood ratio tests also indicate substantial structural change between the subperiods. The conditional variances of exchange rate innovations are used as natural measures of exchange rate volatility; it is found that volatility decreases substantially for both rates in the EMS period. Furthermore, the Franc shows a relatively greater volatility decrease with the move to the EMS, a result consistent with the narrower parity bands established for the Franc. Finally, the covariation of shocks to the two intra-EMS rates is shown to decrease between the Pre-EMS and EMS periods.     

The double liability rule

Conventional liability rules do not lead to a first best allocation. Optimal bilateral risk control can be achieved by not compensating any losses and, in addition, charging each party a fine equal to the loss suffered by the other party. In this way, each party internalizes the full accident loss. This paper investigates the properties of this double liability rule under risk neutrality and risk aversion of the parties. Finally the use of this rule in the context of multiple-party accidents is discussed.The key result of this paper were first presented at the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE) in Berlin, 1986.     

Financing health care

This article reviews the causes of growth in health care costs and concludes that only changes in the rate of growth in intensity of care are likely to be effective. It proposes a model of consumer choice (with advice) among health plans, and competition among plans on the basis of the rate at which new technology is introduced, as a solution to the problem of picking the appropriate rate. It argues that the existence of the uninsured is evidence of government failure.     

Random Walk or Bandwagon: Some Evidence From Foreign Exchanges in the 1980s

The predicitive performance of the bandwagon expectations model foe weekly spot exchange rates over the 1980–6 period is evaluated. Empirical results generally indicate the presence of significant bandwagon effects in the exchange rate dynamics, as found in survey expectations data. Specifically, we find the the bandwagon forecasting scheme can improve the forecasting accuracy in terms of both mean squared errors and market timing upon the random walk and vector autoregressive models. The results illustrate that bandwagon expectations can be rational, and the exchange rate appears to follow a more general integrated process than a random walk.