the demographic deficit abstract there has been a slowdown in growth in the world s most advanced economies in this paper we argue that changing demographics in particular aging populations combined with increased life expectancy may be part of the explanation for why we observe slower growth falling interest rates and falling productivity growth using japan and the u s in the years prior to the financial crises as a case study we provide estimates of the growth deficit that arises from an aging cohort structure and increasing life expectancy we also provide projections of the impact of predictable demographic changes on future growth in the u s and japan

can falling supply explain the rising return to college for younger men a cohort based analysis although the college high school wage gap for younger u s men has doubled over the past 30 years the gap for older men has remained nearly constant in the united kingdom and canada the college high school wage gap also increased for younger relative to older men using a model with imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age groups we argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly educated workers across age groups the driving force behind these changes is the slowdown in the rate of growth of educational attainment that began with cohorts born in the early 1950s in all three countries

the comparative advantage of cities abstract what determines the distributions of skills occupations and industries across cities we develop a theory to jointly address these fundamental questions about the spatial organization of economies our model incorporates a system of cities their internal urban structures and a high dimensional theory of factor driven comparative advantage it predicts that larger cities will be skill abundant and specialize in skill intensive activities according to the monotone likelihood ratio property we test the model using data on 270 us metropolitan areas 3 to 9 educational categories 22 occupations and 19 industries the results provide support for our theory s predictions

tricks with hicks the easi demand system we invent implicit marshallian demands which combine desirable features of hicksian and marshallian demands we propose and estimate the exact affine stone index easi implicit marshallian demand system like the almost ideal demand aid system easi budget shares are linear in parameters given real expenditures however unlike the aid easi demands can have any rank and its engel curves can have any shape over real expenditures easi error terms equal random utility parameters to account for unobserved preference heterogeneity easi demand functions can be estimated using gmm or three stage least squares and like aid an approximate easi model can be estimated by linear regression

state level implications of federal tax policies abstract the united states federal fiscal policy has differential impact across states we construct a new quarterly state level dataset that we use to analyze the impact of unexpected changes in federal personal and corporate income taxes we find substantial heterogeneity across states with more than half having no significant response to the tax cuts in addition less capital intensive states have larger responses to corporate tax cuts although puzzling in standard models a model with corporate and non corporate sectors is consistent with this evidence overall our results suggest the importance of variation and reallocation across states in evaluating federal policy

a bit is better than a lot bilateral investment treaties and preferential trade agreements the landscape of the global economy is dotted with institutions that regulate investment and trade in recent years the number of bilateral investment treaties bit s and preferential trade agreements pta s in particular has grown at a torrid pace practically every country is a member of at least one if not many of these institutions for all the scholarly attention that these institutions have received however there is little research tying bit s and pta s together this is surprising since both aim to increase commerce by making it more predictable the authors seek to fill this gap in the literature they argue that a bit between a developed and a developing country should make it more likely that this pair of states will subsequently form a pta that said the wrinkle in the story is that more is not better in this regard the authors further argue that a developing country that has many bit s is less likely to conclude a pta with a wealthy state the authors test these hypotheses using annual data on pairs of developing and developed countries between 1960 and 2004 and find strong evidence in support of their argument

the economic implications of housing supply in this essay we review the basic economics of housing supply and the functioning of us housing markets to better understand the distribution of home prices household wealth and the spatial distribution of people across markets we employ a cost based approach to gauge whether a housing market is delivering appropriately priced units specifically we investigate whether market prices roughly equal the costs of producing the housing unit if so the market is well functioning in the sense that it efficiently delivers housing units at their production cost the gap between price and production cost can be understood as a regulatory tax the available evidence suggests but does not definitively prove that the implicit tax on development created by housing regulations is higher in many areas than any reasonable negative externalities associated with new construction we discuss two main effects of developments in housing prices on patterns of household wealth and on the incentives for relocation to high wage high productivity areas finally we turn to policy implications

earnings functions when wages and prices vary by location economists generally assume implicitly that the return to schooling is invariant across local labor markets we demonstrate that this outcome pertains if and only if preferences are homothetic a special case that seems unlikely our theory predicts that returns to education will instead be relatively low in expensive high amenity locations our analysis of u s data provides support for this contention returns to college are especially low in such cities as san francisco and seattle our findings call into question standard empirical exercises in labor economics that treat the returns to education as a single parameter

endogenous gentrification and housing price dynamics in this paper we begin by documenting substantial variation in house price growth across neighborhoods within a city during citywide housing price booms we then present a model which links house price movements across neighborhoods within a city and the gentrification of those neighborhoods in response to a citywide housing demand shock a key ingredient in our model is a positive neighborhood externality individuals like to live next to richer neighbors this generates an equilibrium where households segregate based upon their income in response to a citywide demand shock higher income residents will choose to expand their housing by migrating into the poorer neighborhoods that directly abut the initial richer neighborhoods the in migration of the richer residents into these border neighborhoods will bid up prices in those neighborhoods causing the original poorer residents to migrate out we refer to this process as endogenous gentrification using a variety of data sets and using bartik variation across cities to identify city level housing demand shocks we find strong empirical support for the model s predictions

secular labor reallocation and business cycles we study the eect of mean preserving idiosyncratic industry shocks on business cycle outcomes we develop an empirical methodology using a local area s exposure to industry reallocation based on the area s initial industry composition and employment trends in the rest of the country over a full employment cycle using confidential employment data by local area and industry over the period 1980 2014 we find sharp evidence of reallocation contributing to worse employment outcomes during national recessions but not during national expansions we repeat our empirical exercise in a multi area multi sector search and matching model of the labor market the model reproduces the empirical results subject to inclusion of two key empirically plausible frictions imperfect mobility across industries and downward nominal wage rigidity combining the empirical and model results we conclude that reallocation can generate substantial amplification and persistence of business cycles at both the local and the aggregate level

revenue substitution how foreign aid inflows moderate the effect of bilateral trade pressures on labor rights summary this paper investigates how foreign aid inflows moderate bilateral trade based pressures on the exporting countries labor rights because aid provides additional resources to recipient governments it reduces the importance aid recipient governments attach to the preferences of their export partners consequently aid inadvertently moderates the leverage exercised by importing countries on the governments of exporting developing countries our analysis of a panel of 91 aid recipient countries for the period 1985 2002 lends support to the revenue substitution hypothesis when aid levels are low bilateral trade based pressures are associated with improved labor rights as aid levels rise however the effect loses significance

cost structure and productivity growth in european railway systems the purpose of this paper is threefold first to empirically investigate the coststructure of the railway systems in ten european countries belgium denmark france germany greece italy luxembourg the netherlands portugal and the united kingdom of the european union second to provide measures of economies diseconomies of scale and fully investigate the manner by which economies of scale have affected the cost structure of the system and have been affected by the growth in input prices and technology and third to measure economic efficiency and identify its sources in achieving this purpose the translog technology has been used and the translog model was estimated using time series data covering the period 1969 1993 zellner s iterative method was used in estimating the translog model

micro and macro labor supply elasticities a reassessment of conventional wisdom the response of aggregate labor supply to various changes in the economic environ ment is central to many economic issues especially the optimal design of tax policies conventional wisdom based on studies in the 1980s and 1990s has long held that the analysis of micro data leads one to conclude that aggregate labor supply elasticities are quite small in this paper we argue that this conventional wisdom does not hold up to empirically reasonable and relevant extensions of simple life cycle models that served as the basis for these conclusions in particular we show that several pieces of conventional wisdom fail in the presence of human capital accumulation or labor supply decisions that allow for adjustment along both the extensive and intensive margin we conclude that previous estimates of small labor supply elasticities based on micro data are fully consistent with large aggregate labor supply elasticities jel d91 e24 j22

does institutional change spread across countries explaining spatial patterns in human rights if a country improves its human rights record will neighbouring countries benefit beneficial spillovers could justify intervention by the un or one of the many other organisations that internationally fight human rights violations we document that countries human rights performances often resemble the human rights situation of their neighbours however exploiting time variation in a spatial panel we find that much of that resemblance is simply determined by the shared geographical location changes in neighbouring countries have little influence on local human rights suggesting that contemporaneous spillovers and interactions are limited

the politics of foreign direct investment into developing countries increasing fdi through international trade agreements the flow of foreign direct investment into developing countries varies greatly across countries and over time the political factors that affect these flows are not well understood focusing on the relationship between trade and investment we argue that international trade agreements gatt wto and preferential trade agreements ptas provide mechanisms for making commitments to foreign investors about the treatment of their assets thus reassuring investors and increasing investment these international commitments are more credible than domestic policy choices because reneging on them is more costly statistical analyses for 122 developing countries from 1970 to 2000 support this argument developing countries that belong to the wto and participate in more ptas experience greater fdi inflows than otherwise controlling for many factors including domestic policy preferences and taking into account possible endogeneity joining international trade agreements allows developing countries to attract more fdi and thus increase economic growth

trade based diffusion of labor rights a panel study 1986 2002 this article investigates the nature of the linkages between trade and labor rights in developing countries specifically we hypothesize that a california effect serves to transmit superior labor standards from importing to exporting countries in a manner similar to the transmission of environmental standards we maintain that all else being equal the labor standards of a given country are influenced not by its overall level of trade openness but by the labor standards of its trading partners we evaluate our hypothesis using a panel of 90 developing countries over the period 1986 2002 and we separately examine the extent to which the labor laws and the actual labor practices of the countries are influenced by those of their export destinations we find that strong legal protections of collective labor rights in a country s export destinations are associated with more stringent labor laws in the exporting country this california effect finding is however weaker in the context of labor rights practices highlighting the importance of distinguishing between formal legislation and actual implementation of labor rights

cost structure and productivity growth of the taiwanese international tourist hotels abstract this study investigates the cost structure and economic implications of the taiwanese international tourist hotel industry a multi product translog cost function with three inputs and three outputs is estimated using seemingly unrelated regression estimation and three stage least squares a balanced panel dataset consisting of 47 international tourist hotels in taiwan over the period 1997 2001 was obtained from taiwanese tourism bureau and used to estimate the cost function the results show that both scale and scope economies exist in the taiwanese international tourist hotel industry in addition productivity growth is positive over the study period managerial and policy implications for the taiwanese international tourist hotel industry are also discussed

the economics of density evidence from the berlin wall this paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks the model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to commuting decisions which yield a gravity equation for commuting flows to structurally estimate agglomeration and dispersion forces we use data on thousands of city blocks in berlin for 1936 1986 and 2006 and exogenous variation from the city s division and reunification we estimate substantial and highly localized production and residential externalities we show that the model with the estimated agglomeration parameters can account both qualitatively and quantitatively for the observed changes in city structure we show how our quantitative framework can be used to undertake counterfactuals for changes in the organization of economic activity within cities in response for example to changes in the transport network

international human rights a regime analysis after laying out a typology of international regimes eight international and regional human rights regimes are analyzed in order to 1 examine the utility of regime analysis in noneconomic issue areas and 2 assess the nature extent and evolution of international cooperation on human rights there has been a remarkable growth of international action since 1945 when human rights were not even widely accepted as a legitimate issue area this growth can be explained largely by expanding perceptions of moral interdependence and community increased national commitment the growing ideological appeal of human rights and changes in the distributions of international power these same factors however suggest only limited future growth on a broader theoretical plane the case of human rights suggests a significant if limited and principally heuristic utility for regime analysis especially to the extent that international relations is becoming increasingly concerned with specific issues

macroeconomic implications of agglomeration cities exist because of the productivity gains that arise from clustering production and workers a process called agglomeration how important is agglomeration for aggregate growth this paper constructs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on aggregate growth we combine aggregate time series and city level panel data to estimate the model s parameters via generalized method of moments the estimates imply a statistically and economically significant impact of local agglomeration on the growth rate of per capita consumption raising it by about 10

should the personal computer be considered a technological revolution evidence from u s metropolitan areas the introduction and diffusion of personal computers are widely viewed as a technological revolution using u s metropolitan area level panel data this paper asks whether links between pc adoption educational attainment and the return to skill conform to a model of technological revolutions in which the speed and extent of adoption are endogenous the model implies that cities will adjust differently to the arrival of a more skill intensive means of production with the returns to skill increasing most where skill is abundant and its return is low we show that the cross city data fit many of the predictions of the model during the period 1980 2000 the pc diffusion era

urban population and amenities the neoclassical model of location we develop a neoclassical general equilibrium model to explain cross metro variation in population and density we provide new methods to estimate traded and non traded productivities and elasticities of housing and land supply using density and land area data from wage and housing cost indices the model explains half of u s density and population variation and finds that quality of life determines location choices more than trade productivity productivity and factor substitution in housing matter most but are weak in nicer areas relaxing land use regulations would increase population in the west raising both quality of life and productivity experienced by residents

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

monetary policy and us housing expansions the case of time varying supply elasticities we challenge the assumption in the literature of constant housing supply elasticities across housing expansions using a time varying parameter tvp var model on monthly us data since the early 1990s we find that the response of housing supply to an expansionary monetary policy shock relative to the response of house prices has declined substantially since the great financial crisis gfc our findings are consistent with research suggesting that land use regulation has tightened absent major reversions in regulation our results point to a post covid 19 housing recovery characterised by a sluggish response of housebuilding to demand but a relatively stronger response of house prices

trading human rights how preferential trade agreements influence government repression a growing number of preferential trade agreements ptas have come to play a significant role in governing state compliance with human rights when they supply hard standards that tie material benefits of integration to compliance with human rights principles ptas are more effective than softer human rights agreements hras in changing repressive behaviors ptas improve members human rights through coercion by supplying the instruments and resources to change actors incentives to promote reforms that would not otherwise be implemented i develop three hypotheses 1 state commitment to hras and 2 ptas supplying soft human rights standards not tied to market benefits do not systematically produce improvement in human rights behaviors while 3 state commitment to ptas supplying hard human rights standards does often produce better practices i draw on several cases to illustrate the processes of influence and test the argument on the experience of 177 states during the period 1972 to 2002 i would like to thank mike colaresi dan drezner david lake lisa martin walter mattli john meyer mark pollack erik voeten jim vreeland and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful comments on various drafts of this manuscript as well as the many other people who have helped me by asking hard questions along the way i would also like to thank michael barnett charles franklin and jon pevehouse for advice during the dissertation research that supports this article and alexander h montgomery for assistance in data management all faults are my own for generous assistance in the collection of data i thank the national science foundation ses 2cdz414 and ses 0135422 john meyer and francisco ramirez for support during the writing of the article i thank nuffield college at oxford university and most importantly lynn eden and stanford s center for international security and cooperation

who wins who loses understanding the spatially differentiated effects of the belt and road initiative this paper examines how cities and regions within countries are likely to adjust to trade openness and improved connectivity driven by large transport investments from china s belt and road initiative the paper presents a quantitative economic geography model alongside spatially detailed information on the location of people economic activity and transport costs to international gateways in central asia to identify which places are likely to gain and which places are likely to lose the findings are that urban hubs near border crossings will disproportionately gain while farther out regions with little comparative advantage will be relative losers complementary investments in domestic transport networks and trade facilitation are complementary policies and can help in spatially spreading the benefits however barriers to domestic labor mobility exacerbate spatial inequalities whilst dampening overall welfare

tarnishing the golden and empire states land use restrictions and the u s economic slowdown abstract this paper studies the impact of state level land use restrictions on u s economic activity focusing on how these restrictions have depressed macroeconomic activity since 2000 we use a variety of state level data sources together with a general equilibrium spatial model of the united states to systematically construct a panel dataset of state level land use restrictions between 1950 and 2014 we show that these restrictions have generally tightened over time particularly in california and new york we use the model to analyze how these restrictions affect economic activity and the allocation of workers and capital across states counterfactual experiments show that deregulating existing urban land from 2014 regulation levels back to 1980 levels would have increased us gdp and productivity roughly to their current trend levels california new york and the mid atlantic region expand the most in these counterfactuals drawing population out of the south and the rustbelt general equilibrium effects particularly the reallocation of capital across states account for much of these gains

tipping and the dynamics of segregation schelling dynamic models of segregation journal of mathematical sociology 1 1971 143 186 showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a tipping point all the whites leave we use regression discontinuity methods and census tract data from 1970 through 2000 to test for discontinuities in the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition we find strong evidence that white population flows exhibit tipping like behavior in most cities with a distribution of tipping points ranging from 5 to 20 minority share tipping is prevalent both in the suburbs and near existing minority enclaves in contrast to white population flows there is little evidence of nonlinearities in rents or housing prices around the tipping point tipping points are higher in cities where whites have more tolerant racial attitudes

domestic capacity and the implementation gap in regional trade agreements regional trade agreements rtas all over the world share many of the same institutional features from dispute settlement mechanisms to legalized language to escape clauses and espouse many of the same goals but many of those features are unimplemented in different contexts across the world many observers have pointed to an implementation gap in rtas most of which promise much but deliver relatively little but offer no explanation for this gap i argue that this is explained by domestic capacity in countries where the rule of law is weak and infrastructure is insufficient and particularly when those elements interact it is difficult to implement trade agreements this article utilizes expert survey data to demonstrate that member states with poor infrastructure and little respect for the rule of law are unable to carry out the obligations they agree to in their trade agreements domestic capacity both physical and institutional can explain the implementation gap between what agreements promise and wh

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

the shanghai effect do exports to china affect labor practices in africa summary to investigate whether africa s exports to china influence labor practices in africa we reconsider the debate over trade s influence on regulatory standards in exporting countries the first generation of trade regulation scholars asked whether high levels of exports influenced regulatory standards of exporting countries with inconclusive results the second generation of scholarship focused not on how much a country exported but to whom it exported identifying a california effect by which firms and consumers in mostly developed importing countries projected their high regulatory standards on less developed export partners structural change especially the rise of china as a major importer poses a challenge to these optimistic findings drawing on insights from the analysis of compositional data this paper introduces a third generation of trade regulation research which suggests examining not only with whom a country trades but also how the composition of markets in a country s export basket reshuffles over time specifically we explore the possibility of a shanghai effect whereby african countries begin to reflect the lower labor standards of china which has emerged as a major destination for their exports we show that when a country increases exports to china the net effect on domestic labor standards depends critically on the labor practices of other export destinations compositionally displaced by china exports our analysis of a panel of 49 african countries for the period 1985 2010 produces a small continent wide estimate of china s negative influence on african labor practices in sample simulation at the country level uncovers a moderate shanghai effect for a handful of countries only

toward internationally regulated goods controlling the trade in small arms and light weapons contrary to the general trend of trade liberalization specific goods such as small arms drugs and antiquities have come under increasing international control in recent decades through a set of international regulatory agreements this article offers a theoretical framework of government preferences on the international regulation of these goods departing from conventional models of trade policy the theoretical framework introduces negative externalities rather than protection as the motivation for restricting trade it also takes moral concerns into account i test this framework empirically through an original survey of government views on inter national small arms regulation based on interviewing officials from 118 countries the survey reveals a large variation in government preferences that conforms to the theoretical expectations i employ this variation to explain why the international reg ulation of small arms is weak despite the fact that these are the deadliest weapons of all in terms of actual death toll

sanctions some simple analytics governments often seek influence beyond their borders one way is through what thomas schelling 1960 1966 calls brute force taking direct physical control less extreme methods are to promise rewards for taking desired actions or to threaten punishments for not carrying them out sanctions sanctions involve two parties the sender and the target to help identify pronouns antecedents we consider a feminine sender and masculine target the sender s objective is to influence the target by threatening to impose some measure against him for acting contrary to her interest sanctions have long been important in international relations athens imposed a trade embargo against megara ultimately setting off the peloponnesian war 431 404 bc sanctions are central to such international agreements as the united nations charter the world trade organization and the montreal protocol governing chlorofluorocarbons u s law prescribes the use of sanctions in circumstances related for example to national security human rights intellectual property and international trade do sanctions actually achieve senders objectives a common claim is that they usually fail and are costly to senders recent u s legislation proposes to limit unilateral u s sanctions except trade related ones on the grounds that they cost more than they are worth history provides examples of sanctions that were costly and ineffectual such as the league of nations sanctions against the italian occupation of abyssinia or u s sanctions against cuba united nations sanctions against iraq remain in place having achieved less than full success to say the least see gary hufbauer et al 1990 more systematic studies suggest that sanctions often do succeed particularly when objectives are modest hufbauer et al 1990 examine 116 episodes of sanctions with military or political objectives deeming about one third successful sanctions imposed under u s trade law have worked even better about three fourths of the time see e g sykes 1992 thomas bayard and kimberly a elliott 1994 elliott and j david richardson 1997 here we develop a simple framework to explain how sanctions can worl and what is required for them to succeed our framework exploits advances in the theory of repeated games and bargaining under incomplete information while a game theorist would recognize the flavor of our results the setting here is a fresh one 2 we find success more likely when the threatened measure costs the sender little relative to the gain from modifying the target s behavior while the damage to the target is large relative to his cost of complying with the sender s will results consistent with both intuition and empirical evidence as well as with adam smith 1776 book iv ch i moreover a more patient sender is more likely to succeed while the target s patience can work to the sender s disadvantage 3

power couples changes in the locational choice of the college educated 1940 1990 college educated couples are increasingly located in large metropolitan areas these areas were home to 32 percent of all college educated couples in 1940 39 percent in 1970 and 50 percent in 1990 we investigate whether this trend can be explained by increasing urbanization of the college educated or the growth of dual career households and the resulting severity of the colocation problem we argue that the latter explanation is the primary one smaller cities may therefore experience reduced inflows of human capital relative to the past and thus become poorer

amenities and regional differences in returns to worker characteristics average wages in regions in the united states vary considerably in trying to explain these differences in the average wage across regions a number of studies have found that differences in the returns to characteristics of workers such as years of schooling are as important as differences in the skill composition of the labor force 4 6 10 141 these differences in returns are generally interpreted as reflecting regional differences in demand for worker characteristics coupled with barriers to factor mobility this interpretation is based on the argument that the presence of at least one perfectly mobile factor with perfect information will cause spatial convergence in characteristic prices as that particular factor exploits any spatial price differential 4 p 2161 this paper suggests an alternative to this demand based explanation for regional differences in the structure of wages one based on regional differences in the supply of worker characteristics this explanation does not rely on impediments to the movement of workers or firms and is consistent with an equilibrium view of wages in which regional wage differentials are viewed as compensation for local amenities the theoretical model presented in the following section assumes capital and labor are perfectly mobile with perfect information implying that in equilibrium the utility of workers with similar characteristics is the same in all locations this convergence of utility however does not necessarily imply convergence of characteristic prices equilibrium differences in the returns to a specific worker characteristic can exist if worker characteristics affect an individual s valuation of an area s amenities relative to the individual s demand for land

why has regional income convergence in the u s declined the past thirty years have seen a dramatic decrease in the rate of income convergence across states and in population flows to wealthy places these changes coincide with 1 an increase in housing prices in productive areas 2 a divergence in the skill specific real returns to living in productive places 3 a redirection of low skilled migration and 4 diminished human capital convergence due to migration we develop a model where falling housing supply elasticity and endogenous labor mobility generates these patterns using a new panel measure of housing supply regulations we demonstrate the importance of this channel income convergence continues in less regulated places while it has stopped in more regulated places

the origins of human rights regimes democratic delegation in postwar europe the e ftieth anniversary of the un universal declaration on human rights marks an appropriate moment to reconsider the reasons why governments construct international regimes to adjudicate and enforce human rights such regimes include those established under the european convention for the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms echr the inter american convention on human rights and the un covenant on civil and political rights these arrangements differ from most other forms of institutionalizedinternational cooperation in both their ends and their means unlike international institutions governing trade monetary environmental or security policy international human rights institutions are not designed primarily to regulate policy externalities arising from societal interactions across borders but to hold governments accountable for purely internal activities in contrast to most international regimes moreover human rights regimes are not generally enforced by interstate action although most arrangements formally empower governments to challenge one another such challenges almost never occur the distinctiveness of such regimes lies instead in their empowerment of individual citizens to bring suit to challenge the domestic activities of their own government independent courts and commissions attached to such regimes often respond to such individual claimsby judging that the applicationof domestic rules or legislationviolates international commitments even where such legislationhas been

the hidden hand of economic coercion why do policymakers consistently employ economic sanctions even though scholars consider them an ineffective tool of statecraft game theoretic models of economic coercion suggest the success rate may be understated because of selection effects when the targeted country prefers conceding to incurring the cost of sanctions it has an incentive to acquiesce before the imposition of sanctions the bulk of successful coercion episodes should therefore end with sanctions threatened but not imposed this contradicts the recent literature on sanctions which assumes that sanctions rarely if ever work at generating significant concessions from the targeted country and are imposed for domestic or symbolic political reasons if the game theoretic argument is correct the crucial cases to study are those in which coercion is threatened but not implemented a statistical analysis of data on sanctions in pursuit of economic or regulatory goals strongly supports the gametheoretic argument these results suggest that the significance of economic coercion has been undervalued in the study of statecraft and international relations more generally

an empirical evaluation of explanations for state repression the empirical literature that examines cross national patterns of state repression seeks to discover a set of political economic and social conditions that are consistently associated with government violations of human rights null hypothesis significance testing is the most common way of examining the relationship between repression and concepts of interest but we argue that it is inadequate for this goal and has produced potentially misleading results to remedy this deficiency in the literature we use cross validation and random forests to determine the predictive power of measures of concepts the literature identifies as important causes of repression we find that few of these measures are able to substantially improve the predictive power of statistical models of repression further the most studied concept in the literature democratic political institutions predicts certain kinds of repression much more accurately than others we argue that this is due to conceptual and operational overlap between democracy and certain kinds of state repression finally we argue that the impressive performance of certain features of domestic legal systems as well as some economic and demographic factors justifies a stronger focus on these concepts in future studies of repression

a composite cost function for multiproduct firms with an application to economies of scope in banking the composite cost function the authors propose combines a quadratic output structure with a log quadratic input price structure and is well suited for examining economies of scope subadditivity and other important properties of multiproduct firms to compare the composite model with an appropriate set of alternative functional forms they develop a parsimonious but general specification that nests the standard translog cost function the generalized translog cost function a separable quadratic cost function and the composite cost function an application to economies of scope in banking confirms the advantages of the composite model copyright 1992 by mit press

the determinants and welfare implications of us workers diverging location choices by skill 1980 2000 abstract from 1980 to 2000 the rise in the us college high school graduate wage gap coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage high rent cities this paper estimates a structural spatial equilibrium model to determine causes and welfare consequences of this increased skill sorting while local labor demand changes fundamentally caused the increased skill sorting it was further fueled by endogenous increases in amenities within higher skill cities changes in cities wages rents and endogenous amenities increased inequality between high school and college graduates by more than suggested by the increase in the college wage gap alone jel d31 i26 j24 j31 j61 r23

wages rents and amenities differences among workers and regions what explains persistent regional earnings differences this paper argues that regional differences in amenities can account for the wage differences in contrast cost of living variations do not account for wage differences but actually exacerbate them this conclusion results from a model in which variations in rents and wages are equalizing differences for amenity differences empirical results are consistent with the model

the politics of dispute settlement design explaining legalism in regional trade pacts dispute settlement mechanisms in international trade vary dramatically from one agreement to another some mechanisms are highly legalistic with standing tribunals that resemble national courts in their powers and procedures others are diplomatic requiring only that the disputing countries make a good faith effort to resolve their differences through consultations in this article i seek to account for the tremendous variation in institutional design across a set of more than sixty post 1957 regional trade pacts in contrast to accounts that emphasize the transaction costs of collective action or the functional requirements of deep integration i find that the level of legalism in each agreement is strongly related to the level of economic asymmetry in interaction with the proposed depth of liberalization among member countries

the wider impacts of high technology employment evidence from u s cities abstract innovative high technology industries are commonly described as drivers of regional development tech workers earn high wages but they are also said to generate knock on effects throughout the local economies that host them spurring growth in jobs and wages in nontradable activities at the same time in iconic high tech agglomerations like the san francisco bay area the home of silicon valley the success of the tech industry creates tensions in part as living costs rise beyond the reach of many non tech workers across a large sample of u s cities this paper explores these issues systematically combining annual data on wages employment and prices from the quarterly census of employment and wages the department of housing and urban development and the consumer price index it estimates how growth in tradable tech employment affects the real living cost deflated wages of local workers in nontradable sectors results indicate that high technology employment has significant positive but modest effects on the real wages of workers in nontradable sectors these effects appear to be spread consistently across different kinds of nontradable activities in terms of substantive wider impacts tech appears benign though fairly ineffectual

the kantian peace the pacific benefits of democracy interdependence and international organizations 1885 1992 the authors test kantian and realist theories of interstate conflict using data extending over more than a century treating those theories as complementary rather than competing as the classical liberals believed democracy economic interdependence and international organizations have strong and statistically significant effects on reducing the probability that states will be involved in militarized disputes moreover the benefits are not limited to the cold war era some realist influences notably distance and power predominance also reduce the likelihood of interstate conflict the character of the international system too affects the probability of dyadic disputes the consequences of having a strong hegemonic power vary but high levels of democracy and interdependence in the international system reduce the probability of conflict for all dyads not just for those that are democratic or dependent on trade

identifying human capital externalities theory with applications the identification of aggregate human capital externalities is still not fully understood the existing mincerian approach confounds positive externalities with wage changes due to a downward sloping demand curve for human capital as a result the mincerian approach yields positive externalities even when wages equal marginal social products we propose an approach that identifies human capital externalities whether or not aggregate demand for human capital slopes downward another advantage of our approach is that it does not require estimates of the individual return to human capital applications to u s cities and states between 1970 and 1990 yield no evidence of significant average schooling externalities copyright 2006 wiley blackwell

housing urban growth and inequalities the limits to deregulation and upzoning in reducing economic and spatial inequality urban economics and branches of mainstream economics what we call the housing as opportunity school of thought have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations r

regional trading arrangements natural or supernatural members of the customs union the potential unfavorable effects arise from the introduction of distortions in the relative price between the goods of members and nonmembers in terms of classic customs union theory the trade off is between trade creation and trade diversion the entire exercise assumes that the firstbest solution of worldwide free trade is not attainable for political reasons thus the choice between a status quo of nondiscriminatory most favored nation mfn tariffs and a move to preferential trading arrangements pta s is an exercise in the theory of the second best this paper summarizes recent research by the authors we make an evaluation of the

the estimation and decomposition of tourism productivity this paper estimates a total factor productivity index that allows for a rich decomposition of productivity in the tourism industry we account for two important characteristics first the heterogeneity between multiple tourism destinations and second the potential endogeneity in inputs importantly we develop our index at the macro level focusing on cross country comparisons using the bayesian approach we test the performance of the model across various priors we rank tourism destinations based on their tourism productivity and discuss the main sources of productivity growth we also provide long run productivity measures and discuss the importance of distinguishing between short run and long run productivity measures for future performance improvement strategies

land use worker heterogeneity and welfare benefits of public goods we show that investments in public goods change the optimal land use in their vicinity leading to additional welfare benefits this occurs through two sorting mechanisms first availability of public goods leads to higher population densities second population groups sort according to their preferences for public goods we develop a structural spatial general equilibrium model that accounts for these effects the model is estimated using data on transport infrastructure commuting behaviour land use and land rents for some 3000 zip codes in the netherlands and for three levels of education welfare benefits of investments in public transport infrastructure are shown to differ sharply by workers educational attainment welfare gains from changes in land use account for up to 30 of the total benefits of a transport investment

strategic planning of optimal resource allocation in response to global financial crisis a study of international tourist hotels this study is principally designed to examine the changes in the efficiency effective resource allocation and future operation strategies of taiwan s international tourist hotel in global economic downturn at first we set up critical input and output factors and construct an assessment model using data envelopment analysis dea for analysis of relative efficiency further we apply an allocative efficiency model for additional considerations of each input cost and analyse proper and effective resource allocation finally there are significant changes in overall efficiency of international tourist hotels under global financial crisis we can also reach an effective allocation of the overall resources in such cases lowering cost has become a key issue for sustainable operation of international tourist hotel finally the greatest contribution of this study is to further classify the competitiveness and optimal cost allocation of taiwan s international tourist hotels into seven categories based on the

spatial equilibrium with unemployment and wage bargaining theory and estimation abstract in this paper we present a spatial equilibrium model where search frictions hinder the immediate reallocation of workers both within and across local labor markets because of the frictions firms and workers find themselves in bilateral monopoly positions when determining wages although workers are not at each instant perfectly mobile across cities in the baseline model we assume that workers flows are sufficient to equate expected utility across markets we use the model to explore the joint determination of wages unemployment house prices and city size or migration a key role of the model is to clarify conditions under which this type of spatial equilibrium setup can be estimated we then use u s data over the period 1970 2007 to explore the fit and quantitative properties of the model our main goal is to highlight forces that influence spatial equilibria at 10 year intervals

cost structure and technological change of local public transport the kaohsiung city bus case this study has developed a translog cost function for the kaohsiung city bus kcb to analyse its cost structure and economic characteristics based on monthly data over the time period from january 1996 to december 2000 the empirical results reveal that economies of density in the provision of bus services in kaohsiung do prevail the estimated marginal cost which is less than the average cost but greater than the current bus fare indicates that the subsidy is necessary due to the existence of returns to density rtd the kcb could obtain cost saving benefits by extending its output scale the kcb production technology is also not neutral the effects of technological change on the kcb costs suggest that over the period 1996 2000 technological progress did lead to cost saving the pure productivity growth rate increased from 0 45 in 1998 to 3 in 2000

immigration and inequality immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between highand low skilled workers nevertheless there is controversy over the appropriate theoretical and empirical framework for measuring the presumed effect and over the precise magnitudes involved this paper offers an overview and synthesis of existing knowledge on the relationship between immigration and inequality focusing on evidence from cross city comparisons in the u s while some researchers have claimed that a cross city research design is inherently flawed i argue that the evidence from cross city comparisons is remarkably consistent with recent findings based on aggregate time series data in particular cross city and aggregate time series comparisons provide support for three key conclusions 1 workers with below high school education are perfect substitutes for those with a high school education 2 high school equivalent and college equivalent workers are imperfect substitutes with an elasticity of substitution on the order of 2 3 within education groups immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes together these results imply that the average impacts of recent immigrant inflows on the relative wages of u s natives are small the effects on overall wage inequality including natives and immigrants are larger reflecting the concentration of immigrants in the tails of the skill distribution and higher residual inequality among immigrants than natives even so immigration accounts for a small share 5 of the increase in u s wage inequality between 1980 and 2000

history and the sizes of cities abstract we contrast evidence of urban path dependence with efforts to analyze calibrated models of city sizes recent evidence of persistent city sizes following the obsolescence of historical adv

a typology of political conditionality beyond aid conceptual horizons based on lessons from the european union summary this paper asks how political conditionality needs to be conceptualized and researched to reflect global changes it argues that a diversification of political conditionality beyond aid is now taking place political conditionality reaches across different external policy fields and includes cooperative and punitive measures it has also moved from political rights toward social and environmental rights to capture this diversification conceptually the article presents an ideal typical typology that is then refined based on the example of the european union eu a review of the literature on eu political conditionality reveals a gap in studying the interaction of different political conditionality instruments