transferring williamson s discriminating alignment to the analysis of environmental governance of social ecological interdependence institutional fit is operationalized by transferring transaction costs economics tce to the analysis of instances of social ecological interdependence we carefully spell out the differences with conventional tce and outline analytical steps based on discriminating alignment that enable a tce analysis of environmental governance of nature related transactions we illustrate the approach through the example of wildlife management in germany here we find hierarchical governance a prohibition of killing of wolves embedded into a polycentric hybrid monitoring arrangement in applying tce to nature related transactions we argue that characteristics of nature related transactions can be subsumed under the core categories of jointness uncertainty asset specificity frequency rivalry excludability and social relational distance benefits of this approach include its generating a narrow list of descriptors of instances of biophysically mediated interdependence related to one evaluation criterion cost effectiveness the tce of nature related transactions thus identifies sets of stylized contextual factors and aspects related to the governance of hazards of ex post opportunistic behavior that cut across scales they can be used as composite descriptors that facilitate analysis of complex multi scalar arrangements of natural resource governance we propose the concept of governance challenge derived from tce as being useful for building research on environmental governance

property rights externalities and resource degradation locating the tragedy abstract resource degradation in the third world is largely driven by the demands of farm households for fuelwood and land for agriculture since resources are often controlled through indigenous systems of property the tragedy of the commons has been used to explain resource degradation as a result private property is suggested as a solution to resource degradation a dynamic model capable of examining household incentives for resource use under private and common property is developed results of the model reject the conventional wisdom that gives rise to the presumed optimality of private individual property in natural resources and the correlated indictment of group management regimes

electricity consumption and economic growth in south africa a trivariate causality test abstract in this paper we examine the causal relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth in south africa we incorporate the employment rate as an intermittent variable in the bivariate model between electricity consumption and economic growth thereby creating a simple trivariate causality framework our empirical results show that there is a distinct bidirectional causality between electricity consumption and economic growth in south africa in addition the results show that employment in south africa granger causes economic growth the results apply irrespective of whether the causality is estimated in the short run or in the long run formulation the study therefore recommends that policies geared towards the expansion of the electricity infrastructure should be intensified in south africa in order to cope with the increasing demand exerted by the country s strong economic growth and rapid industrialisation programme this will certainly enable the country to avoid unprecedented power outages similar to those experienced in the country in mid january 2008

assessment of the impact of avian influenza related regulatory policies on poultry meat trade and welfare a heckman type gravity model is used to estimate the trade impact of avian influenza related quarantine ex post measures an accompanying spatial partial equilibrium simulation model is developed to simulate related welfare changes the simulation model considers spread and transmission risk according to the disease status of both importers and exporters the econometric results show that the principle of regionalisation is preferred to import trade bans for uncooked meat the simulation results verify the negative welfare impact of currently implemented quarantine policies and indicate that significant trade diversion effects occur according to the disease status of countries a trade ban is a costly measure to address the infection risk resulting from the spread of the avian influenza virus

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis revisited summary more than two decades ago schlager and ostrom 1992 developed a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights the conceptual framework has profoundly influenced research on natural resource governance common property and community resource management however currently natural resource governance has changed dramatically challenging the applicability of the conceptual schema there are now many more social actors involved in resource management than the local communities at the focus of original analysis additionally resource management increasingly provides access to various kinds of benefits from outside the immediate context including indirect benefits such as payments for environmental services and results based payments for redd these changes demand addition of new property rights to the original framework this paper updates the conceptual schema in reaction to changes in natural resource governance proposing three specific modifications on the focus of use rights control rights and authoritative rights to come up with a framework that distinguishes eight types of property rights we apply the framework to three purposefully selected governance interventions in china and laos that include the provision of indirect benefits in addition to the direct benefits derived by local people from natural resources the empirical application shows how contemporary governance changes may not lead to local people s outright dispossession since they continue to possess direct use rights to natural resources however local people may be excluded from control and authoritative rights which are exercised exclusively by state agencies and international actors the latter make available indirect benefits to local people which may or may not translate into use rights in the sense of policy based entitlements the empirical insights suggest the possibility of a wider trend of compensated exclusions in natural resource governance

a global survey and review of the determinants of transaction costs of forestry carbon projects reducing carbon emissions in the forestry sector by means of market based schemes is considered a cost effective measure for tackling climate change impacts however the transaction costs tcs involved are typically unknown or unquantified and therefore often neglected in this study three types of tcs search design and negotiation costs were measured in person days and monetary terms based on a global survey of forestry carbon projects implemented across latin america asia and africa cost estimates vary between zero and 1 201 tco2 for person days and from zero to us 1 738 tco2 for monetary costs key drivers of tcs are identified based on the characteristics of the project in general the transaction the transactors involved and institutional design the latter type of characteristic is shown to have a particularly large impact on tcs

institutions and environmental governance a reconceptualization abstract this article presents the conceptual revisions needed to extend the new institutional approach to environmental governance from its current local and international domains of application to all governance solutions including national environmental and natural resource use policies and multi level governance solutions that are increasingly used to address global environmental change the article suggests that environmental governance is best understood as the establishment reaffirmation or change of institutions to resolve conflicts over environmental resources it also explains why the choice of these institutions is a matter of social justice rather than of efficiency the article suggests a way to understand formal and state centered governance solutions as forms of collective ownership not unlike common property the article demonstrates how institutional analysis can gain resolution by looking at the functional and structural tiers organization of governance functions and formulation of key institutional rules as key aspects of the design of governance institutions

transaction costs of tradable white certificate schemes the energy efficiency commitment as case study this paper analyses the nature and scale of transaction costs tcs borne by obliged parties under a tradable white certificate twc scheme taking the first phase of the energy efficiency commitment eecl in great britain as a case study several sources of tcs were considered such as search for information persuasion of customers negotiation with business partners and measurement and verification activities information was obtained through interviews and a questionnaire distributed to obliged parties results show that the most significant sources of tcs were related to search for information persuading customers and negotiating with managing agents contractors to implement energy efficiency measures perceived high tcs related to contract negotiation and liability risks slightly reduced the low trading level the scale of tcs was estimated to be around 10 and 30 of total investments costs for the lighting and insulation segments respectively the results indicate that despite the presence and scale of tcs the eecl scheme generated energy savings that yielded net societal benefits estimated financial benefits range from 0 6 to 6 p kwh for insulation and lighting savings respectively when avoided external costs due to electricity savings are included estimated economic benefits range from 3 to 8 p kwh several lessons from the eecl can be drawn for twc schemes among others it is found that informative policy instruments to raise awareness among end users are critical if a twc scheme is to deliver cost effective energy savings in all the nature and scale of tcs under twc schemes will differ because of a number of endogenous and exogenous determinants c 2007 elsevier ltd all rights reserved less

property rights to multi attribute fishery resources abstract the united nations code of conduct for responsible fisheries urges governments to manage multiple yield bycatch and habitat attributes of fishery resources the information and enforcement costs of multi attribute management are high however as a result relatively few attributes generally stock biomass age structure and growth are specified in yield targets exposing others e g localized abundance sex to excessive use in the public domain spillovers caused by fishing gear e g gear conflicts bycatch habitat damage generally are regulated with catch limits and area closures that artificially divide or exclude activities which interact due to attribute jointness total fishery income is compromised because tradeoffs are not evaluated at the margin alternative arrangements that bundle fishery resource attributes are suggested bundled property rights could evolve from a comprehensive assignment of usufruct rights which reduce the transaction costs of gathering information on unspecified attributes and of contracting for spillovers markets for harvest rights could resolve the simpler gear conflict and bycatch problems other interactions e g predation habitat requirements would require corporate or collective property rights and governance arrangements that make harvesters and other interested parties the residual claimants of their harvest decisions subject to government restrictions that protect public goods

the role of energy in real business cycle models abstract this paper modifies hansen s 1985 analysis of a real business cycle mode with indivisible labor by explicitly including energy as a productive input and modelling the relative price of energy as an exogenous random process one goal is to determine the extent to which the introduction of energy price shocks reduces the reliance of the real business cycle model on unobserved technology shocks the other goal following christiano and eichenbaum 1991 is to compare the correlation between real wages and hours predicted by the energy inclusive model to that predicted by hansen s model

transactions costs of expanding nutrient trading to agricultural working lands a virginia case study abstract agricultural nonpoint sources nps figure prominently in the design of many water quality trading programs in concept water quality trading programs can create incentives for agricultural operators to supply low cost pollutant reductions while still keeping land in agricultural production in practice water quality trading programs in the united states have produced few trades involving agricultural nps transactions costs are a critical but poorly understood feature of water quality trading programs the objective of this study is to examine the transactions costs associated with expanding the use of nps credits in a water quality trading program in virginia united states to include credits generated from agricultural working lands best management practices bmps findings indicate that transactions costs for agricultural nps trades in virginia are currently relatively low due to the activity being credited simple land conversion based on best available evidence transactions costs of creating credits using management and structural bmps will be 2 to 16 times more costly on a per project basis than for land conversion credits compliance monitoring protocols are a significant driver of costs for working lands credits our results suggest an important cost risk tradeoff between verification costs and compliance certainty for program designers to consider

globalisation and values this paper discusses a central element in globalisation debate little addressed by economists namely the interactions at global national and community levels between globalisation and societally based values social values refer to wider notions of collective identity religious values attitudes towards materialism moral beliefs and a sense of collective awareness and are a broader and more encompassing concept than social capital discussed in recent economics and sociology literature social capital relates to trust honesty and the social fabric of accepted norms central to the successful implementation of individual optimising decisions and denotes a communal asset reflecting strength of joint collective commitment whose amount can be increased or improved upon through investment of time and resources social values are much discussed in sociological literature going back to comte durkheim parsons and others the issues taken up here are how different social values might interact and change as societies and their economies integrate globalise processes of value competition displacement and joint assimilation occur naturally to economists but seem little studied by sociologists who seemingly place less stress on analytical comparative statics scenarios for how values can interact under globalisation are discussed in the text

new institutional economics in the post socialist transformation debate the paper suggests that there is a tension between the basic tenant of new institutional economics nie and the manner in which it has been applied in the debate on post socialist transformation this tension is explored in the context of four main perspectives on nie i property rights ii transaction costs economics iii new economic history and iv evolutionary economics there are two main arguments the first is that the transformation phase should be seen as open ended rather than a closed process where the pure market is the inevitable end result the second is that although the nie literature touches on most of the issues which are relevant to post socialist transformation the insights that it offers are still too general for policy guidance

transaction costs and institutional performance in market based environmental water allocation policy reforms in the columbia basin spurred water rights reallocation for ecological recovery transaction costs have caused implementation to lag this paper examines transaction costs and institutional performance in environmental water allocation it evaluates spatial and temporal performance trends in watershed cases along three dimensions of adaptive efficiency water recovery transaction costs and program budgets performance trends demonstrate intrastate variability and volatility over time due to the importance of local institutional capacity which is uneven within states higher levels of water recovery may coincide with moderate to high transaction costs and program budgets particularly during initial implementation efforts this finding reflects investments in multilevel policy reform to strengthen enabling conditions and adapt to unintended consequences jel q25 q58

transaction cost economics past present and future oliver williamson is the founder and chief developer of transaction cost economics tce in this brief essay on the occasion of his nobel memorial prize i offer a partial discussion of williamson s contributions by first summarizing some of the accomplishments of tce past and then sketching some of the opportunities for tce future most of the topics in both sections tce past and tce future start with a quotation from williamson s early work that i think still speaks volumes today that is while fellow travelers and successors have acted on one set of williamson s insights helping to produce the accomplishments of tce past another collection of williamson s insights has gone relatively unremarked creating some of the opportunities for tce future

why do transaction costs of agricultural policies vary policy related transaction costs tcs is an important issue when evaluating different policy options however tcs are often not taken into account in policy evaluations but may be as important for efficiency as the direct production costs different policies may result in different tcs and the main aim of this article is to explore possible reasons for these differences we compare the level of tcs for 12 different agricultural policy measures in norway and we analyze the causes of the differences along three different dimensions asset specificity frequency and point of policy application at the national level we find that all three dimensions are of importance when explaining the differences while variation in tcs incurred by farmers are mainly due to differences in point of policy application and asset specificity data show that direct price support has the lowest tcs while more direct payments for environmental amenities has the highest

dynamic behavior of a labor managed team an important result in the theory of the labor managed firm is that the firm reduces output when prices go up this issue is considered in a dynamic situation where a firm is defined as a team if the firm wants to grow it has to use existing resources which are used for current production in order to incorporate factors of production into the team it is shown that the long term steady state results remain as before but not the short term impact the labor managed firm will normally increase production when prices go up while the profit maximizing firm will reduce production copyright 1988 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

transaction costs and environmental policy design abstract this article synthesizes the growing empirical literature on transaction costs to identify pragmatic design recommendations for environmental and natural resource policies the new institutional economics literature recognizes that appropriate policy choice and design will be a function of the specific characteristics of the problem the physical and institutional determinants of both transaction costs and abatement costs should be considered in the policy design process due to potential interactions between them analysts also need to incorporate the extent to which the technologies institutional environment governance structures or policy designs can be changed some factors can only be adjusted to or designed around while others can be designed differently this framework highlights the importance of property rights since transaction costs will be incurred to obtain or retain property rights and since the rights assignment may affect both the magnitudes and distribution of costs another implication is that education and extension programs or use of behavioral economics concepts to affect choices can be cost effective in some circumstances policy design should take advantage of economies of scale and foster technical change appropriate sequencing of policy instruments may decrease transaction costs particularly if there is potential for technical change

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

corporate leadership multilevel enforcement and biodiversity regulation globalization incentives the rise of non state actors in unprecedented ways along with the creation of transnational arenas which are neither international intergovernmental nor national domestic but transborder political processes where firms non governmental organizations ngos states and social communities set up rules and provide governance mechanisms to enforce those at local level the article is anchored in the idea that public private governance matters where the primary driver is the market incentive we test the hypotheses that public private cooperation at local level is based on shared knowledge and expertise among firms civil society and state authority dealing with a natural resource which comes from the brazilian biodiversity ngos and companies have developed the ability to act as enforcers as they interpret the public international national regulation and develop an expertise through best practices that are applied to enforce biodiversity regulation at the local level through a multilevel system that operates transnationally

consolidation or diversity choices in the structure of urban governance in very large measure issues of structure in metropolitan area governance can be characterized by a basic organization choice consolidation or diversity along several dimensions a basic policy variable is whether public decisions are to be made by a few large organizations or units of government or many small ones two key dimensions are spatial and vertical organization spatial organization refers to the drawing of political boundary lines over urban space dividing population groups into separate political constituencies the

rules and games this paper reconsiders the relationship between the rules of a game and its outcomes we develop a notion of rule reform that leads to the selection of pareto improved equilibria points we then apply this notion to a series of naturally occurring fishing rules including examples from malaysia india brazil turkey and canada we show that reforming a game is conceptually akin to reforming an economy

the new institutional economics and its applicability to development abstract the several remarkable developments in the social sciences which have come to be known as the new institutional economics nie have not yet been fully exploited for analyzing the determinants and effects of institutional change in the context of development this paper identifies two important components of the nie and illustrates both a potential complementarities between them and b their applicability to various problems and policies in the long term development of developing countries

atheoretical macroeconometrics a critique abstract the spurious nature of the restrictions used to identify many macroeconometric models has led some researchers to advocate a style of econometric inquiry that is less dependent on prior theoretical restrictions of the sort that were central to the approach of the cowles commission this development which we call atheoretical macroeconometrics is summarized and evaluated in the current paper it is contrasted with an updated version of the cowles commission approach we conclude that while some of the exercises of atheoretical macroeconometrics are valid those that have attracted the most attention and appear the most innovative exogeneity testing impulse response analysis and policy analysis using estimated vector autoregressions are based on incorrect analysis

natural resource federalism preferences versus connectivity for patchy resources we examine the efficiency of centralized versus decentralized management of spatially connected renewable resources when users have heterogeneous preferences for conservation versus extraction resource mobility induces a spatial externality while spatial preference heterogeneity drives a wedge between users privately optimal extraction rates we first address these market failures analytically and show that the first is most efficiently handled with centralized planning while the second is best tackled with decentralized management except in special cases neither approach will be first best but which arises as second best depends on the relative strength of preference heterogeneity versus spatial mobility of the resource we illustrate the theory and test its robustness with a numerical example

a comparative analysis of the use of information inputs in the manufacturing sectors of korea and japan abstract the paper examines the use of two information inputs information labor and purchased information services in korean and japanese manufacturing sectors in 1980 marginal products and substitution elasticities are calculated from translog production function estimates for the average manufacturing sector both inputs seem to be relatively more underused in korea second the elasticity estimates suggest several hypotheses about the growth of private bureaucracies in the two economies the results are unlikely to apply to other economies which have not yet attained an advanced industrial structure a simplistic stages theory of economic development based on the growth of the information labor force is rejected

do changes in oil prices affect welfare programs evidence from kern county abstract in this paper the intertemporal causal relationship between oil prices and welfare programs in kern county is studied using monthly data between 1999 7 and 2016 8 results from the autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach show that there is stable long run equilibrium relationship between calfresh caseloads oil prices and unemployment they also show that adjustment in calfresh participation due to changes in oil prices and unemployment is slow and a 10 increase in unemployment led to a 3 3 increase in calfresh enrollment results from a modified granger causality method indicated causality running from unemployment to calworks and no causality from oil prices to calworks participation the girf confirmed that calworks is more responsive to changes in unemployment than to oil price shocks the fevdc results demonstrated that contributions of the oil price shocks in explaining variations in calworks were negligible

factors that influence transaction costs in development offsets who bears what and why abstract environmental policy instruments generate transaction costs to public and private parties there is a growing literature reporting on the size of transaction costs produced by environmental policy instruments this paper extends that literature through an analysis of the factors that influence transaction costs in environmental policy and how this influence occurs the theory based factors that influence transaction costs are categorised as 1 transaction characteristics 2 transactor characteristics 3 nature of the institutional environment and 4 nature of the institutional arrangements we examined how these factors influenced transaction costs through the analysis of two australian based development offset schemes with different policy designs we found evidence of all four theory based categories of influence in the policy case studies the degree of influence and how each factor influenced transaction costs varies across the two policies and between parties policy design as a component of the institutional environment had a particularly large bearing on transaction costs of offset buyers and the policy administrator an important contribution to transaction cost theory assumes the institutional environment as given

contracts entrepreneurs market creation and judgement the contemporary mainstream theory of the firm in perspective this survey gives an overview of the theory of the firm as it is formulated within the contemporary mainstream of economics two groupings of theories are briefly discussed principal agent and incomplete contract models next three of the most recent contributions regarding firms are considered the reference point approach is looked at first followed by a discussion of spulber s book the theory of the firm last we consider the entrepreneurial judgement perspective

the combination of gravity and welfare approaches for evaluating nontariff measures this article explores the link between gravity and welfare frameworks for measuring the impact of nontariff measures first an analytical approach suggests how to combine a gravity equation with a partial equilibrium model to determine the welfare impact of nontariff measures second an empirical application focuses on the effects of a standard that caps antibiotic residues in crustaceans in the united states the european union canada and japan while the econometric estimation of the gravity equation reports a negative impact on imports welfare evaluations show that in most cases a stricter standard leads to an increase in both domestic and international welfare

choices without prices without apologies valuing is usually regarded as a process of compressing information about attributes into a single metric armed with this reduced form of compact information the consumer can consider a particular object with a particular price attached or implied and make an informed decision but the process of valuing is less straightforward than we ordinarily suppose when environmental goods and services become the object of information compaction it is possible that important information is lost we comment on the choice problem germane to environmental goods and services and challenge the presumption that environmental choices made without explicit pricing are inferior to those in which hypothetical valuation studies are undertaken

an interpretive history of challenges to neoclassical microeconomics and how they have fared contemporary microeconomics has witnessed a resurgence of behavioral institutional and evolutionary critiques of the neoclassical mainstream that came to dominate the field during the 1980s today s critiques and proposals for reform have a long tradition in economics while synthesizing the intellectual history of these challenges this article explores the reasons why such critical strands of microeconomics fared poorly in the past and in contrast what factors may account for their partial acceptance into the mainstream in recent times

a transitional institution for the emerging land market in urban china chinese economic reforms since 1978 have been a continuous process of fundamental institutional change the new institution of ambiguous property rights over state owned urban land evolves from the

public benefits private benefits and policy mechanism choice for land use change for environmental benefits the choice of policy mechanisms for encouraging environmentally beneficial land use change should depend on the relative levels of private or internal net benefits and public or external net benefits a map of recommended policy mechanisms is developed depending on the relative levels of these variables positive incentives negative incentives and extension need to be targeted carefully to appropriate projects where private net benefits are closer to zero and or public net benefits are more extremely positive or negative technology development is suggested where private net costs outweigh public net benefits no action is recommended for many potential projects

transaction costs telecommunications and the microeconomics of macroeconomic growth the sources of differences in growth rates across nations are unclear this observation constitutes one of the central intellectual challenges of our time why is the whole world not developed consequently a host of scholars offer various explanations for growth or nongrowth including cultural factors politics and economics 2 the objective of this article is to determine whether a link exists between transaction costs telecommunications and economic growth the article builds on recent research on the macroeconomic determinants of growth as well as on research regarding the significant economic effects of telecommunications on transaction costs it is organized as follows section i reviews the theory of transaction costs section ii the link between transaction costs and telecommunications section iii contains the empirical analysis and section iv some conclusions

the economics of organization the transaction cost approach the transaction cost approach to the study of economic organization regards the transaction as the basic unit of analysis and holds that an understanding of transaction cost economizing is central to the study of organizations applications of this approach require that transactions be dimensionalized and that alternative governance structures be described economizing is accomplished by assigning transactions to governance structures in a discriminating way the approach applies both to the determination of efficient boundaries as between firms and markets and to the organization of internal transactions including the design of employment relations the approach is compared and contrasted with selected parts of the organization theory literature

population growth and agriculture in poor countries a review of theoretical issues and empirical evidence abstract the paper contributes a critical survey of the very extensive literature dealing with various aspects of the economic and institutional responses of agriculture to population growth in poor countries encompassing a discussion of the main underlying theoretical issues such responses are evaluated in the framework of the general population development debate the main conclusion is that although population growth induces adjustments in agriculture in terms of technical progress intensification and definition of property rights optimism may not be justified in the context of very fast population growth and or already high densities especially when the environmental resource base is taken into account

internalization and the mne a note on the spread of ideas this paper examines the reasons for the impact of buckley and casson s the future of the multinational enterprise 1976 on research in international business ib earlier work concentrated on ownership specific advantages or locational determinants rather than the central concept of internalization the few exceptions were incomplete or not well known internalization as applied to the mne spread rapidly because of the appeal to ib researchers of an analytically powerful idea that was based on institutional economics and involved an accessible methodology the spread was also helped by the parallel growth of transaction costs in the domestic theory of the firm and the publication activity of the authors and their associates

property rights regimes in complex fishery management systems a choice experiment application the tonle sap wetland fishery was previously divided into 3 different management zones for conservation open access fishing and private fishing rights to the private fishing zone involved auctions for exclusive rights to temporarily designated plots this paper aims to explore the auction based system by investigating how this fishery management system affects different groups of small scale fishermen and how different characteristics of the fishing lots affect the bidding a choice experiment approach was used to model fishermen s choices in a hypothetical auction market by offering fishermen the choice between purchasing different potential fishing lots and a no purchase option implying fishing only in the communal fishing grounds the preferred latent class model with two segments of fishermen showed that the bidding behavior of the more privileged group out competes the other group irrespective of the lot characteristics this result suggests that it is unlikely that the redesign of the auction system itself would be an effective way of securing access to fishing resources for the two observed groups of fishermen this implies that open access fishing grounds and or other regulations may also be needed in future management as they serve an important role for the poorer segments

blockchain and the evolution of institutional technologies implications for innovation policy abstract for the past century economists have proposed a suite of theories relating to industrial dynamics technological change and innovation there has been an implication in these models that the institutional environment is stable however a new class of institutional technologies most notably blockchain technology lower the cost of institutional entrepreneurship along these margins propelling a process of institutional evolution this presents a new type of innovation process applicable to the formation and development of institutions for economic governance and coordination this paper develops a replicator dynamic model of institutional innovation and proposes some implications of this innovation for innovation policy given the influence of public policies on transaction costs and associated institutional choices it is indicated that policy settings conductive to the adoption and use of blockchain technology would elicit entrepreneurial experiments in institutional forms harnessing new coordinative possibilities in economic exchange conceptualisation of blockchain related public policy an innovation policy in its own right has significant implications for the operation and understanding of open innovation systems in a globalised context

revisiting legal realism the law economics and organization perspective the contrast between american legal realism which ran itself into the sand schlegel 1979 p 459 and the law and economics movement which is perhaps the most important development in legal thought in the last quarter century posner 1986 p xix is dramatic that the one foundered while the other flourished is explained in large measure by the absence of an intellectual framework for legal realism and the use by law and economics of the powerful framework of neoclassical economics

foot and mouth disease and the mexican cattle industry the objective of this article is to analyze the domestic and international effects of a hypothetical foot and mouth disease fmd outbreak in the mexican cattle industry a discrete time dynamic optimization model of the mexican cattle sector is specified and linked to domestic and international markets economic consequences of fmd outbreaks are simulated over time and under different scenarios specific findings and general policy recommendations are provided the study reports a range of outbreaks from localized to large scale and suggests that changes in economic surplus due to fmd range from a positive net gain of 0 89 to 1 6 billion to a net loss of about 67 billion depending on the specific mitigation strategy and outbreak scenario

the race for property rights economics literature on the evolution of property rights has increasingly emphasized the optimal timing for establishing those rights yoram barzel dale mortensen 2 and partha dasgupta and joseph stiglitz 3 for example have shown that competition among firms for the rents associated with innovative devices and ideas can lead to the dissipation of those rents in the process when property rights and the rents therefrom are up for grabs it is possible for expenditures to establish rights to fully dissipate the rents leaving the efficiency gains from privatization in question 4 before any conclusions about the welfare gains from establishing property rights can be reached attention must be paid to the evolutionary

causality between economic growth and immigration an ardl bounds testing approach abstract this paper aims to investigate the causal relationship between immigration and per capita economic growth using the ardl approach to cointegration we find evidence of long run causality from per capita economic growth to immigration but not vice versa

land property rights and resource allocation abstractin this paper we review the most significant empirical literature on the causal effects of land property rights the literature indicates that secure property rights boost investment in both rural and urban areas these effects however do not appear to be the result of improved credit conditions in rural areas clear land rights also lead to increases in productivity and farm earnings in contrast for urban areas the evidence for an effect on earnings is mixed we find little empirical evidence to suggest that land titling programs enhance the development of land markets finally some evidence suggests that land titling induces changes in household structure that foster human capital accumulation and may help to increase the incomes of future generations

improving environmental decisions a transaction costs story abstract a multidisciplinary team of researchers made efforts to influence the design and implementation of environmental policy in australia a focus of these efforts was the development of the investment framework for environmental resources inffer in addition the team undertook a range of communication activities training user support and participation in committees and enquiries transaction costs were relevant to these efforts in a variety of ways environmental managers perceived inffer to involve relatively high transaction costs a balance was struck between the system having simplicity and low transaction costs and delivering environmental benefits transaction costs were factored into the planning and prioritisation processes developed for example public and private transaction costs are accounted for in the calculation of benefit cost ratios and in the choice of policy mechanisms there are diverse roles that transaction costs play in the processes of developing implementing and influencing environmental policy programmes a key observation is that appropriate strategic investment in transaction costs can improve decisions and increase net benefits from an environmental programme a well designed decision process can involve incurring transaction costs at one stage in order to save transaction costs at a later stage

making sense of institutions as a factor shaping economic performance abstract there has recently been a resurgence of interest in how institutions affect economic performance a review of this literature reveals that the concept of an institution means different things to different scholars both within economics and across the social sciences we discuss what factors unify the different definitions of institutions and develop a concept of institutions useful for the analysis of economic performance and economic growth in particular specifically we develop the notion of institutions as standard social technologies economic growth results from the co evolution of physical and social technologies

local labor market impacts of energy boom bust boom in western canada abstract the impacts of energy price boom and bust are analyzed through the differential growth in employment and earnings between local labor markets with and without energy resources in western canada the estimated differentials attributed to the boom induced labor demand shocks show significant direct and indirect impacts on the earnings and employment within the energy extraction and other non energy local sectors respectively the local job multipliers indicate that job creation within the energy extraction sector leads to modest job creation within the non energy local sectors during boom periods for every ten energy extraction jobs created during a boom period approximately three construction jobs two retail jobs and four and a half service jobs are created

flexible and semiflexible consumer demands with quadratic engel curves in this paper we introduce three flexible consumer demand systems in which expenditures on goods are quadratic functions of income we view these alternatives as to the demand systems used heretofore in the empirical modeling of rank three demands namely those in which expenditure shares are quadratic functions of the logarithm of income curvature conditions required by theory can be imposed locally during the estimation for each and a semiflexible version can be estimated for illustrative purposes we estimate various forms of two of the systems using canadian data on seven categories of goods for the period 1947 to 1995

gender property rights and natural resources abstract attention to gender differences in property rights can improve the outcomes of natural resource management policies and projects in terms of efficiency environmental sustainability equity and empowerment of resource users although it is impossible to generalize across cultures and resources it is important to identify the nature of rights to land trees and water held by women and men and how they are acquired and transmitted from one user to another the paper particularly examines how the shift from customary tenure systems to private property in land trees and water has affected women the effect of gender differences in property on collective action and the implications for project design

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis the term common property resource is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one it is also used for property owned by a community of resource users such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis in this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user to claimant to proprietor and to owner we apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the maine lobster industry

rhetoric and reality in protected area governance institutional change under different conservation discourses in mount elgon national park uganda abstract the approach to governance of protected areas has been in transition over last decades partly driven by evolving policy discourses that shape the ways in which conservation is thought to be delivered the most influential discourses are the fortress approach community conservation and back to the barriers how different discourses translate and are instituted on ground are however complex and disputed inclusive policy strategies in relation to local involvement in developing countries are of particular concern the study analyses how conservation policy discourses have become manifested taking the case of mount elgon national park menp uganda it outlines main conservation policy discourses analyses actor s interests and power relations and further examines how institutions for park governance have evolved and changed according to the different discourses the results indicate that conservation discourses and donor support come and go while menp seems to outlast all the worrying reality is that menp administration strongly influenced by the interplay of path dependent institutional forces rooted in the fortress discourse simply sticks to its guns maintaining the application of law enforcement as key management instruments in its approach to governance especially to local people interactions there is an apparent gap between rhetoric and reality in protected area governance

four formal izable theories of the firm in this essay i define and compare elemental versions of four theories of the firm these elemental theories are distilled from important contributions by hart holmstrom klein williamson and others although these contributions have been widely cited and much discussed i have found it difficult to understand the commonalities distinctions and potential combinations of these seemingly familiar contributions in this essay therefore i attempt to clarify these issues in three steps i begin with informal summaries of the theories then turn to simple but formal statements of each elemental theory and finally nest the four elemental theories in an integrative framework

the impact of iso 9000 diffusion on trade and fdi a new institutional analysis the effects of iso 9000 diffusion on trade and foreign direct investment fdi have gone understudied we employ panel data reported by oecd nations over the 1995 2002 period to estimate the impact of iso adoptions on country pair economic relations we find iso diffusion to have no effect in developed nations but to positively pull fdi i e enhancing inward fdi and positively push trade i e enhancing exports in developing nations

allocation of goods by lottery i introduction many goods such as hunting permits oil drilling leases cellular telephone licenses and rights to fishing berths as well as some buds such as the military draft jury duty and who is to be thrown overboard on a sinking life raft are or have been allocated by lotteries in neo classical welfare economics the random distribution of property rights does not affect allocative efficiency as long as transferability is allowed and the transactions costs are non prohibitive lottery allocations however are generally not transferable thus lottery allocations are inefficient since the goods are not ultimately allocated to the users who value them the most a number of authors such as aubert 1959 fienberg 1971 eckhoff 1989 and elster 1989 36 122 have argued that lotteries are chosen as the allocative instrument because it represents a fair or just means of allocating the goods rawls 1971 374 and eckhoff 1989 have noted that where it is impractical to divide the goods equally among those who desire them a lottery serves to satisfy both the requirement that the process be fair and that the allocation problem be resolved relatively costlessly elster 1989 113 however notes that lotteries are not the only fair allocation mechanism for example he points out that in jewish ethics the problem of allocating an indivisible good such as life saving resources is resolved by denying it to everyone even economists would probably prefer a lottery to this resolution the fairness hypothesis has a rich history in the old testament lotteries are deemed a fair way of allocating goods such as the inheritance of land numbers 33 54 lotteries are also used to allocate bads in perhaps the most famous biblical example of use of lots jonah was chosen by lot to be sacrificed to appease god who had brought a storm that threatened to wreck the ship the story goes that the lot selected jonah because he was shirking his duties elsewhere and should not have even been on the vessel jonah 1 6 1 notice that fair here is taken to mean just given this theological foundation it is not surprising that the lottery has seen frequent use in legal history as well one of the most interesting cases occurred in swedish and finnish trials in the 17th and 18th centuries in cases where a man was murdered by a mob lotteries were used to allocate punishment since the law required an eye for an eye no more and no less eckhoff says that if it was impossible to ascertain which of them had dealt the mortal blow the courts determined that one of the responsible parties be sentenced to death and that the person be selected by lottery 1989 19 a similar use of lotteries occurs in military history to deal with cases of mass desertion in roman armies every tenth man was executed decimated and the remainder pardoned in more modern times the lottery has been used in u s law 2 first of course is the use of a lottery to decide who shall sit on a jury a connection between fairness and lotteries however has also appeared in the common law in an 1842 case u s v holmes which has been discussed by fienberg 1971 eckhoff 1989 and elster 1989 a ship sank in a heavy storm and the lone surviving life raft was in grave danger of sinking the crew threw overboard fourteen male passengers in an effort to save the rest when back in port after being rescued a crewman named holmes the only crew member who had not disappeared upon arrival to port was brought to trial for the deaths of the passengers the court ruled that the non essential members of the crew should have been thrown overboard before any passengers and if that was not sufficient then passengers should have been selected by lot which is the fairest mode elster 1989 65 the fact that a human life presumably a large cost was at stake ex post did not affect the decision 3 the environmental economics literature contains a number of references to the social preferences for and benefits of lottery allocations

transaction costs risk aversion and the choice of contractual arrangements publisher summary this chapter discusses transaction costs risk aversion and the choice of contractual arrangements every transaction involves a contract and the transactions conducted in the marketplace entail outright or partial transfers of property rights among individual contracting parties the contractual arrangements through which these transfers are negotiated are several and varied the chapter presents a theory that states that economic efficiency is the same under various land tenure arrangements subject to the constraint of private property rights although transaction costs exist in the real world the theory enables the understanding of much of the farming behavior however the presence of a variety of contractual arrangements under the same constraint of competition poses the question of the choice of these arrangements if a firm can increase efficiency in production by employing productive resources of more than one resource owner a contract to combine the resources will be obtained the formation of the contract involves partial transfers of property rights in one form or another such as leasing hiring or mortgaging

import restrictions in the presence of a health risk an illustration using fmd we present a simple model linking infection risk from imports to a tariff the risk causes the exporter of the infected product to face a higher tariff than would otherwise be the case a numerical example is developed for u s beef imports from nations with foot and mouth disease fmd the additional tariffs are sensitive to the specification of risk and the expected magnitude of loss due to an fmd outbreak for a low risk of importing fmd the tariffs levied against the exporter of fmd infected beef are not prohibitive but become so as the risk or expected output loss rises

cointegrating institutions the time series properties of country institutional measures abstracta country s political and economic institutions are critical for economic prosperity the literature abounds with institutional measures precisely because institutions are multidimensional we use panel unit root and cointegration tests to examine the time series properties of several institutional measures to answer two questions first do institutional changes tend to be permanent second which subsets of institutions tend to converge or move together these answers have important implications for whether permanent institutional reform is possible and whether reforms can be undertaken one institutional area at a time or instead must simultaneously encompass multiple institutional areas

transaction costs power and multi level forest governance in indonesia since 2005 there has been considerable international interest in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation redd a program intended to finance protection of tropical forests through the sale of carbon offsets or from donor funding requiring the collaboration of local and international civil society stakeholders firms and donor and host governments redd is inherently a multi level governance project but to date participation in redd and coordination across governmental levels have been weak combining literature on multi level and polycentric governance of socioecological systems with transaction cost economics we argue that transaction costs structure cross level information sharing and collaboration relationships among organizations engaged in redd policy development at the national and provincial levels in indonesia using an exponential random graph modelling approach with data collected from interviews with over 80 organizations between 2010 and 2012 we find that powerful organizations tend to dominate cross level connections though this effect is somewhat mediated by organizational similarity which reduces transaction costs we suggest that explicit efforts to help local organizations overcome the transaction costs of building cross level relationships will be a central component of building an effective and equitable multi level governance system for redd in indonesia

impact of state and civil institutions on the operation of rural market and nonmarket configurations abstract the approach undertaken in this study is based on the concept of configurations configurations are shaped by specific combinations of characteristics of the following elements the item transacted the actors and the underlying physical technological cultural and policy environment configurations can be either market or nonmarket configurations in turn transactions are endogenously determined within given configurations the impact of government intervention on the performance of a number of prototypical rural configurations and agrarian institutions such as the food and cash crops market configurations the farm household sharecropping and the rural official and unofficial credit markets is evaluated critically

does acquiring venture capital pay off for the funded firms a meta analysis on the relationship between venture capital investment and funded firm financial performance abstract researchers and practitioners frequently propose that venture capital vc is an important resource to increase the performance of funded firms especially in environments of uncertainty in this paper we scrutinize these theoretical propositions following an evidence based research approach we synthesize 76 empirical samples on 36 567 firms we find a small positive performance effect of vc investment on funded firm performance however the effect vanishes if researchers control for industry selection effects furthermore we find that the performance effect mainly relates to firm growth while profitability is unaffected we also uncover that performance effects are reduced when the funded firms are very young or very mature in addition studies focusing on ipo events which constitute the majority of studies determine a substantially smaller performance effect we discuss theoretical implications and offer suggestions for future research on vc

influences of transaction costs in environmental policy abstract there is a growing literature reporting the extent of transaction costs for environmental policies however understanding why transaction costs occur and why they are small or large is also important for efficient policy selection and evaluation following an analysis of the organisational economics literature and reports of the extent of transaction costs for a number of environmental policies three key influences to transaction costs in environmental policies are identified these are the following 1 the characteristics of the transaction for the environmental good 2 the nature of the transactors and 3 the current institutional environment and arrangements these affect transaction costs to the government and all other parties influenced by a policy transaction costs occur due to actions of information collection and policy design policy enactment and establishment implementation and contracting administration and monitoring and enforcement an interrogation of transaction cost influences reveals that 1 the influence varies between parties and is affected by the actions and interactions of and between all parties to a policy 2 how transaction costs are experienced varies across time and 3 who experiences transaction costs depends on the policy itself future policy selection and refinement will benefit from empirical analysis of the causes of transaction costs

the economical management of multispecies fisheries resource based theory implicitly assumes that property rights to resources are secure extant property rights theory enables us to relax this assumption to take into account processes where there are struggles in establishing property rights that enhance

contracting problems and regulation the case of the fishery the inefficiencies of common property fisheries are of continuing concern to economists the early work by scott gordon 1954 and anthony scott 1955 outlined the problem and later studies by james crutchfield and giulio pontecorvo 1969 and frederick bell 1972 provided empirical estimates of the losses that result those studies were followed by the dynamic models of colin clark 1976 and james quirk and vernon smith 1970 of optimal harvest rates and the use of corrective taxes or quotas to achieve them but in spite of a large and growing literature and the persuasiveness of the outlined efficiency criteria most fisheries retain common property aspects with overcapitalization and excessive labor input why those conditions persist and the failure of the regulatory response to them are the issues addressed in this paper we examine a number of fisheries but focus on the texas shrimp industry which is one of the nation s most valuable fisheries for a single species and which shares the common property characteristics observed elsewhere it is considered overcapitalized and catch per unit of effort is falling 2 examination of the fishery reveals the many margins along which rent dissipation occurs and the nature of the regulations necessary for controlling fishing effort to avoid those losses the regulatory environment in texas is complicated by conflict within the fishery between inshore and offshore fishermen the latter assert that bay shrimping reduces the number of shrimp that successfully migrate to the gulf the inshore fishery is highlighted by another issue the recent resettlement of some 30 45 000 vietnamese refugees including many fishermen along the texas coast marine advisory service paul starr their entry has been met by hostility and violence from existing shrimpers who recognize that they are in an environment characterized by the absence of property rights bay shrimpers have lobbied the texas legislature for broad limits on new entrants yet ironically the sale of additional boats by individual shrimpers to the vietnamese has facilitated entry of the refugees into the fishery regulations in the texas shrimp and other fisheries are incomplete leaving many options for rent dissipation uncontrolled because of high contracting costs among fishermen and political factors that mold government actions contracting costs are high among heterogeneous fishermen who vary principally with regard to fishing skill 3 montana state university and texas a m university respectively we benefitted from comments by terry anderson raymond c battalio gardner brown oscar burt micha gisser wade griffin john r moroney anthony d scott peter temin and participants in workshops at texas a m university and the university of washington research assistance was provided by scott barnhart and phil mizzi funding was provided by sea grant texas a m university throughout this paper we use the terms common property and open access interchangeably here the terms describe a situation where no property rights group or individual exist s for the resource 2catch per unit of effort in the inshore texas gulf and federal gulf waters is presented for 1963 77 by w l griffin c g tydlacka and w e grant they show catch per unit of effort generally falling in inshore and offshore waters while catch per unit of effort fluctuates from year to year it falls from approximately 360 kg shrimp per unit of effort to 220 kg from 1963 to 1977 the common property nature of the fishery is reflected in the following statistics since 1975 the number of vessels has grown by 23 percent nelson swartz for fish houses the record of entry is similar between 1970 a d 1977 the number of firms grew from 259 to 287 though during that period many left the industry as others entered the number of fish houses was calculated from license data supplied by the texas parks and wildlife department the record of entry by fish houses suggests that monopsony as discussed by colin clark and gordon munro is absent in the fishery 3there may be minor differences in labor leisure choices and capital but our statistical evidence and discussions with fishermen indicate that catch variations are largely due to skill government regulations in the texas bays restrict capital and our empirical evidence shows boats to be relatively homogeneous

subdividing the commons distributional conflict in the transition from collective to individual property rights in kenya s maasailand summary this paper suggests that explanations of property rights transformation need to move beyond models of relative price change and state enforcement to include accounts that accommodate conflict and competition among actors and the possibility that state actors may not provide the enforcement that is often taken for granted the transition from collective to individualized holdings in kenya s maasailand is burdened with politics and procedural problems that can undermine the gains anticipated in that move moreover in semi arid ecological settings individualization results in unstable land holdings necessitating re contracting and reaggregation by individual parcel owners

inside the coasean firm why variations in competence and taste matter abstractronald coase s signal achievement relates to the role of transactions costs in two contexts the formation and maintenance of the firm and the systematic analysis of social costs these transaction cost explanations however do not offer a complete explanation of the variations observed in the internal structures of firms which are elucidated by noting the irreducible role of variations in individual competence temperament and taste in explaining both why firms are formed and how they are structured thus some firms are organized as partnerships and others as straight employment arrangements with many permutations in between sometimes these differences are driven by tax and regulatory considerations that coase well understood but these differences remain prominent even in wholly unregulated markets understanding the internal construction helps explain the difficulties faced by regulation in areas as diverse as employment discrimination law capital markets and tort liability

looking for a theory of the firm future challenges in this paper we present the main developments of the theories of the firm rooted in coase s coase r h 1937 the nature of the firm economica new series 4 386 405 seminal article we show that the two important topics of the nature and boundaries of the firm as well as the internal organization of the firm give place to essential contributions we present those contributions and their limits and then their possible developments finally we introduce the papers of this issue

the economic efficiency of backward vertical integration in the international petroleum refining industry a benefit of backward vertical integration in the petroleum refining industry is reduced uncertainly in the supply of crude oil for refining however there is no a priori reason to believe that refiners are more skilful in managing combined refining and crude oil production operations than are specialists in these functions using the concept of frontier production functions efficiency differences between firms with differing degrees of backward vertical integration are estimated backward vertical integration improves scale efficieny and reduces business risk significantly but it reduces both technical and overall economic efficiency this is the first comprehensive empirical test of the efficiency of vertical integration in the literature

a multi criteria evaluation framework for tradable white certificate schemes recent years have witnessed regained political momentum on energy efficiency and interest in establishing markets is growing as a result tradable white certificate twc schemes of differing design have been implemented in great britain italy and france much attention is being paid to justifying and evaluating such schemes in this paper we develop and apply a multi criteria framework for evaluating twc schemes an approach that attempts to cover their individual design features a broad evaluation is conducted regarding energy saving and environmental effectiveness economic efficiency cost effectiveness transaction costs political feasibility administrative burden and technical change the results show the design and performance of twc schemes to be case and context specific and generalisations are thus inappropriate this evaluation supports the cost effectiveness modelled for the british scheme and the assumption that a twc scheme is an economically efficient policy instrument for the other more complex twc schemes more data and experience are needed to judge their ex post merit on the whole the proposed multi criteria evaluation requires considerable data and complementary methods however the framework improves the understanding of the broad effects and attributes of twc schemes it deals with various empirical and normative aspects that can be applied in their evaluation