a theoretical and empirical analysis of family migration and household production reply of her household production as factors in the family s migration decisions 38 in this paper the research on family migration will be extended in three ways a formal model of household production and family migration will be developed and used to generate testable hypotheses about family migration variables which otherwise would not have a clear economic interpretation are incorporated into the model the model will then be estimated and some policy implications will be discussed one policy implication concerns the efficiency of the labor market labor market efficiency needs to be judged not only in terms of the efficiency of the job search of single individuals but also in terms of the efficiency of the joint job search of double income families this paper is organized into five sections first a comparative static household production model of locational choice is developed 2 next this model of locational choice is used to develop a theoretical model of family migration third the data and empirical model are discussed fourth the empirical results are reported and interpreted in terms of three different types of migration estimates of the impact of selected variables on the distance of the move are also considered the final section summarizes the general findings and offers some policy implications

environmental policy and international trade when governments and producers act strategically some environmentalists express concern that trade liberalization may damage the environment by giving governments incentives to relax environmental policies to give domestic producers a competitive advantage support for such concern may be given by models of imperfectly competitive trade where there may be rent shifting incentives for governments to relax environmental policies but there are also incentives for producers to act strategically e g through their investment in rd ii allowing governments to act strategically increases the incentive for producers to act strategically iii welfare is lower when both parties act strategically and iv strategic behavior by producers and governments is greater when governments use emission taxes than when they use emission standards

place to place migration in colombia the determinants of lifetime and recent place to place migration in colombia are investigated using unpublished data from the 1973 census the data cover 12 zones rural and urban segments of 6 regions and are analyzed for the population as a whole and for eight specific demographic groups including four educational categories and the two sexes the basic proposition is that areas economic opportunities play a central role in determining the spatial allocation of the population the results give strong support to the economic model of migration overall and in explaining differences in migration behavior among demographic groups excerpt

exchange rate target zones a survey of the literature this work selectively reviews the literature on exchange rate target zones and their theoretical and empirical methodologies and examines whether they can be used to clarify to what extent this type of exchange rate regime could contribute to greater exchange rate stability we discuss the main contributions of the first and second generations of exchange rate target zone models in an attempt to reconcile the poor empirical performance of the krugman model with the reality of exchange rate target zone regimes this line of research integrates target zones with alternative underlying economic models such as imperfect credibility intra marginal interventions and sticky price models it was thus possible to understand the correlations observed between the exchange rate its fundamentals determinants and the interest rate differential and to explain the fact that the statistical distribution of the exchange rate is hump shaped rather than u shaped this implies that the initial emphasis of target zone models on nonlinearities honeymoon effect smooth pasting and marginal interventions has vanished exchange rate target zones are better described as similar to managed floating regimes with intra marginal interventions with some marginal interventions when the exchange rate reaches the edges of the floating band

an analytical approximation of target zone exchange rate functions the technique of collocation abstract this paper applies the analytical approximation technique of collocation to the stochastic sticky price exchange rate target zone model the technique can be used to trace out the resulting nonlinear exchange rate path with remarkable accuracy while requiring comparatively little computational effort

equilibrium pollution taxes in open economies with imperfect competition abstract this paper argues that imperfect competition in global markets creates a strategic interaction between governments that can lead to the inefficient distortion of pollution taxes this distortion can be decomposed into a rent capture effect and a pollution shifting effect the rent capture effect lowers equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to gain a competitive advantage over its trading partner and thereby capture foreign rent through net exports the pollution shifting effect raises equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to transfer production and its associated pollution to the other country this effect vanishes if pollution is perfectly transboundary because shifted pollution causes as much damage to the domestic environment as does domestic pollution the net effect on symmetric equilibrium taxes is negative except in the special case of perfect competition with no transboundary pollution in this case the two effects are mutually offsetting and the nash equilibrium is efficient when pollution is at least partially transboundary there also arises the usual transboundary externality and this reinforces the negative net strategic effect giving rise to equilibrium taxes that are lower than what is globally efficient

why exchange rate bands monetary independence in spite of fixed exchange rates abstract the paper argues that the reason real world fixed exchange rate regimes usually have finite bands instead of completely fixed exchange rates between realignments is that exchange rate bands counter to the textbook result give central banks some monetary independence even with free international capital mobility the nature and amount of monetary independence is specified informally and in a formal model and quantified with swedish krona data altogether the amount of monetary independence appears sizable for instance an increase in the swedish krona band from zero to about 2 percent may reduce the krona interest rate s standard deviation by about a half

target zones and exchange rate dynamics this paper develops a simple model of exchange rate behavior under a target zone regime it shows that the expectation that monetary policy will be adjusted to limit exchange rate variation affects exchange rate behavior even when the exchange rate lies inside the zone and is thus not being defended actively somewhat surprisingly the analysis of target zones turns out to have a strong formal similarity to problems in option pricing and investment under uncertainty

stochastic saddlepoint systems stabilization policy and the stock market abstract we examine the effects of introducing stochastic shocks into a linear rational expectations model with saddlepoint dynamics generated by a forward looking asset price we derive the fundamental differential equation governing the path of the asset price as a function of the sluggish variable the equation does not admit closed form solutions in general but we provide a complete qualitative characterization of the solution paths which are symmetric about equilibrium these are the relevant solutions to consider in the presence of symmetric boundary conditions we present an application of the analysis to fiscal stabilization policy where public expenditures are only adjusted when gnp moves outside a threshold around a target level the impact of such a policy on the level of the stock market is considered and it is shown how the market will anticipate such state contingent policy changes whether the expectations are stabilizing or not is shown to depend on whether the stock market is positively or negatively correlated with gnp

migratory labor and agriculture farm workers are shown to respond strongly to economic incentives to seasonally migrate for work the economic model is specified with separate earnings structures for migratory and nonmigratory work and a reservation wage for migration is specified to reflect the choice between migratory and nonmigratory work the empirical model adjusts for self selectivity in the sample and demonstrates that domestic farm workers sort themselves into migratory and nonmigratory workers in a manner consistent with the theory of comparative advantage implications for immigration and government employment and training programs are considered

why do the young and educated in ldcs concentrate in large cities evidence from migration data do the young and educated in ldcs have a greater preference to locate in big cities if so this may help to explain how cities spatially concentrate the educated and young and why the rising share of these workers in many ldcs may contribute to city growth this paper explores migration flows into and out of egypt s three largest cities we study whether the higher shares of such workers in cities arise because these workers perceive relatively greater benefits from living in cities given relative urban rural wage rates or because the relative demand for these workers rises with city size

firm behaviour under pollution ratio standards with non compliance this paper compares a firm s short run optimal production and abatement rules under emission level standards and standards expressed in terms of emissions per unit of output ratio standards the models allow for non compliance with standards with expected penalties dependant on either level or relative violations of the standard in question it is shown that ratio arguments make a difference to the optimal decision rules derived for a profit maximising firm for example for a given level of emissions the firm both produces more and abates more under a ratio standard so that ratio and level standards cannot be used interchangeably to achieve the same combination of emissions and output the implications for the efficiency of pollution control are briefly discussed

macroeconomic stabilization and intervention policy under an exchange rate band abstract macroeconomic stabilization and foreign exchange market interventions are investigated for a small open economy with a nominal exchange rate band in a first best situation a band is not advisable from a stabilization perspective even though with money demand shocks no welfare losses are incurred with goods demand shocks narrowing the band affects the optimal coefficient of intramarginal monetary accommodation with restrictions on intramarginal interventions a band may be desirable in particular with supply shocks and no intramarginal interventions a narrower band is desirable when the central bank attaches a relatively smaller weight to price as opposed to output stability

determinants of internal migration in israel expected returns and risks a multinomial logit model of place to place migration focusing on economic geographic and demographic factors is applied to empirical data on inter regional migration in israel in 1980 it explains 75 of the cross sectional variance in the data the results presented in this paper depart from previous empirical work due to its industrialized context and its focus on risk aversion as a determinant of the migration decision the results support the harris todaro 1970 hypothesis and indicate that regional similarities in the structure of industrial employment promote migration

on the informational superiority of quantities over prices in the presence of an externality in this study we investigate the convexity of the profit function of a regulated firm with respect to the random shocks in the marginal costs and the demand intercept and its implications regarding information disclosure when these shocks are revealed to the firm at a future stage we illustrate that information disclosure is attained when the firm is regulated through the use of a quantity rather than a price instrument to do so we argue that increased convexity obtained under complete information is a sufficient condition as a policy implication we suggest a new argument which favors the use of quantities over prices these implications are more pronounced once we allow for multiple firms

erratum standards versus standards the effects of different pollution restrictions when economists refer to pollution standards they almost universally mean uniform restrictions on pollution emissions e g william j baumol and wallace e oates 1975 ch 13 susan rose ackerman 1973 david besanko 1978 however in practice standards take many forms not only emissions restrictions but restrictions on pollution per unit of output or per unit of an input restrictions on the use of a polluting input or mandated use of a particular pollution control technology these specifications of regulations will have a variety of effects on a firm s resource allocation decisions for instance allowing pollution per unit of output as the standard instead of directly restricting the level of pollution gives the firm some choice in addition to reducing pollution it can increase its output to dilute the pollution this paper examines the effects of five different forms of pollution standards on input decisions the level of production and firm profits the results show that the different standards by providing firms with different incentives change the firm s allocation decisions and affect the relative profitability of the standards section i reviews the existing literature on the incentives of different instruments the following section describes the model to be used five different forms of pollution constraints are individually examined in section iii using a graphical approach their relative effects as well as some special cases are assessed in section iv finally section v raises the case of different standards when firms are not identical

prices versus quantities in a second best setting the choice between taxes and tradable permits has been independently analysed by two distinct research traditions the first proceeds from weitzman s partial equilibrium sto chastic model and concludes that a tax should be preferred if the marginal abatement cost curve is steeper than the marginal environmental benefit curve the second utilises deter ministic general equilibrium models with pre existing distortionary taxes it concludes that non revenue raising instruments e g grandfathered tradable permits are costlier than rev enue raising ones e g a tax on every unit of pollution or auctioned permits to build a bridge between these two traditions we introduce in weitzman s model a positive cost of public funds due to pre existing distortionary taxes the tax admits a greater comparative advantage over the permits as compared to weitzman s classical result then we assume that the regulated industry blocks any proposal that poses it too high an expected burden this may require a transfer to firms in the form of freely allocated permits or lump sum tax rebate it turns out that if this acceptability constraint is binding then the comparative advantage of taxes over permits is still reinforced quantitatively even if the marginal benefit function is 50 more steeply sloped than the marginal cost function the price instrument should be preferred we also compare the expected net benefit of these two instruments to a contingent instrument which leads to the ex post optimum the superiority of the contingent instrument over the quantity one is higher than in first best

forward rate target zones and exchange rate dynamics abstract a target zone for the forward exchange rate is developed using a log linear monetary model exchange rates are driven by a wiener process a central bank purchases or sells foreign exchange forward to keep the target forward rate in a specified band defending such a target zone does not require regulated wiener process for the central bank s forward exchange intervention can avoid disturbing the money supply a forward rate target zone can stabilize the spot rate against a free float and its stabilizing effects become more significant if the delivery term applying to the target forward rate is shorter

correlated uncertainty and policy instrument choice abstract for two decades environmental economists have generally maintained that benefit uncertainty is irrelevant for choosing between price and quantity instruments but that cost uncertainty matters with the identity of the efficient instrument depending upon the relative slopes of the marginal benefit and cost functions but in the presence of simultaneous correlated uncertainty such policy instrument recommendations may be inappropriate with plausible values of relevant parameters the conventional identification of a price instrument will be reversed to favor instead a quantity instrument the opposite reversal from the choice of a quantity instrument to a price instrument seems less likely to occur

are exchange rate bands better than fixed exchange rates the imported credibility approach this paper explicitly incorporates exchange rate bands into the barro gordon model of inflation this is a non trivial extension focusing on markov perfect equilibria we specify the properties of the optimal policy functions exchange rate dynamics and hence the arguments for and against target zones the attractiveness of alternative exchange rate regimes i e fixed flexible and target zones and the position of exchange rates inside the band depend on the inflationary performance of the center country

harmonization and optimal environmental policy in a federal system with asymmetric information abstract should environmental policy be set at the federal level to counter incentives for environmental dumping when states act non cooperatively assuming that environmental damage costs are known only by state governments i ask whether this asymmetry of information could rationalize a federal government harmonizing environmental policies across states i show that asymmetric information narrows the difference in environmental policies across states relative to full information but does not justify harmonization the welfare loss from harmonization rises sharply with the variance in damage costs across states and can erode the benefit of setting policy at the federal level to counter environmental dumping

second best energy policies for heterogeneous firms this paper investigates second best issues in the regulation of external costs of energy use by heterogeneous firms the efficiency of regulatory energy policies depends in general on the policy incentives given for both output reduction and input substitution the resulting endogeneity of firms supply functions appears to lead to complicated policy rules in contrast to earlier efforts the analysis considers an arbitrarily large number of non identical price taking firms in a joint market a large variety of possible production functions including varying levels of economies of scale and possibilities for input substitution and elasticities of market demand which may vary from completely elastic to completely inelastic two second best instruments are considered namely output taxes and energy efficiency standards and are compared to the benchmark of first best energy taxes the underlying market factors determining the relative efficiency of these second best instruments when used optimally are identified

exchange rate hysteresis large versus small policy misalignments abstract using a monetary model in the spirit of dornbusch 1976 and a sunk cost model of trade hysteresis we show that a sufficiently large policy misalignment can induce hysteresis in the trade balance and thereby alter the steady state real exchange rate hence exchange rate dynamics are path dependent since hysteresis in our model can entail industrial dislocation and the scrapping of sunk assets we suggest that these factors constitute a welfare cost of large policy misalignments that have not been considered formally additionally since the long run exchange rate is path dependent standard empirical tests of exchange rate models may involve a misspecification

exchange rate bands with price inertia this problem by committing member states to taking suitable action to prevent cross parities from straying outside some given publicly announced range and williamson s proposal for target zones was explicitly aimed at preventing exchange rate misalignment among the principal industrial countries subsequently the louvre accord struck between members of the group of seven in i 987 involved unpublished commitments designed to constrain fluctuation between the u s dollar and the currencies of its major trading partners funabashi i988 given the obvious practical importance of understanding the implications of such policy commitments for the economy in general and the exchange rate in particular it is perhaps not surprising that the seminal work by krugman i 988 i989 on exchange rate determination within a band has aroused considerable interest under the assumption that the velocity of money follows a brownian motion process he obtains an explicit solution for the exchange rate as a function of the fundamental which shows that the presence of a commitment to intervene so as to defend the band exerts a stabilising influence on the exchange rate even before any such intervention takes place in their contribution to this emerging literature froot and obstfeld i989 note that krugman s minimalist stochastic specification can be derived from a monetary model of exchange rates where prices are perfectly flexible and full employment prevails where international interest differentials match expected exchange rate changes and the exchange rate preserves purchasing power parity cf mussa 1976 and they show that the behaviour of the rate inside a currency band can be obtained using results on regulated brownian motion processes cf harrison i985 using the same framework and techniques flood and garber i989 indicate how the rate will respond to noninfinitesimal intervention and svensson i 989 examines the effect of bandwidth on the stochastic behaviour of interest rates klein i989 considers the effects of uncertainty about the width of the band

modelling the ff mm rate by threshold cointegration analysis this paper investigates a sticky price model of exchange rate determination extension of krugman s target zone model with price inertia applied to the french franc a novel theoretical argument is considered threshold cointegration such that the long run relationship between the parity and its fundamentals is dormant within a certain range of disequilibria but is restored when the system crosses the boundaries over the period 1987 1993 nonlinearities in the ff dm rate consistent with the credibility of this target zone were detected by pointing out a band reversion mechanism a shock persistence analysis which highlights a nonlinear reversion of the exchange rate deviation is also implemented

the signaling effect of emission taxes under international duopoly we analyze equilibrium emission taxes under international cournot duopoly in the presence of asymmetric information between firms when each firm does not know the production cost of its rival located in the other country the government of each country can use its emission tax as a signal of the competitiveness of its domestic firm we show that owing to this signaling effect the equilibrium emission tax and expected welfare of each country can be higher than those under symmetric information between firms or even higher than those obtained if the governments were to non strategically set the tax rate equal to the expected marginal damage from pollution i e the pigouvian tax level our results suggest that the presence of asymmetric information between firms can mitigate a race to the bottom in strategic environmental policymaking

vertical structure and strategic environmental trade policy abstract the idea that environmental trade policy can be used to achieve competitive advantage in international markets has important implications for the way we conceive free trade this paper considers strategic environmental policy in a model that makes explicit the vertical structure that supports production of the traded good including intranational vertical relationships in the analysis of strategic environmental trade policy has substantial qualitative effects when vertical contracts are allowed the optimal policy to levy on a polluting input under both quantity and price competition in the international market is the pigouvian tax

a simultaneous equations analysis of urban development migration and industrial growth in israel s new towns abstract this study analyzes recent patterns of development of israel s new towns through application of a simultaneous equations econometric model this approach enables us to specify and test causal interactions among migration industrial investment employment and other structural and policy variables affecting urban development our results affirm the importance of economic opportunity agglomeration effects population socioeconomic and ethnic composition and access in determining migration flows at the same time unemployment and investment indices are affected by local labor market conditions government incentives and regional development effects as well as by population composition and migration flows policy implications of the analysis are considered

an interpretation of recent research on exchange rate target zones how do exchange rate bands work compared to completely fixed rates between realignments or more precisely what are the dynamics of exchange rates interest rates and central bank interventions within exchange rate bands does the difference between bands and completely fixed exchange rates matter and if so which of the two arrangements is best or more precisely what are the tradeoffs that determine the optimal bandwidth this article will present an interpretation of some selected recent theoretical and empirical research on exchange rate target zones with emphasis on main ideas and results and without technical detail

permit trading and credit trading a comparison of cap based and rate based emissions trading under perfect and imperfect competition this paper compares emissions trading based on a cap on total emissions permit trading and on relative standards per unit of output credit trading two types of market structure are considered perfect competition and cournot oligopoly we find that output abatement costs and the number of firms are higher under credit trading allowing trade between permit trading and credit trading sectors may increase welfare with perfect competition permit trading always leads to higher welfare than credit trading with imperfect competition credit trading may outperform permit trading environmental policy can lead to exit but also to entry of firms entry and exit have a profound impact on the performance of the schemes especially under imperfect competition we find that it may be impossible to implement certain levels of total industry emissions under credit trading several levels of the relative standard can achieve the same total level of emissions

monopoly with incomplete information recent theoretical research on principal agent relationships has emphasized incentive problems that arise when the parties involved are constrained by either asymmetric information or their inability to monitor each other s actions here we concentrate on the former constraint and consider the case of a single principal the monopolist the main contribution is to show that under a separability assumption strong conclusions can be drawn about the nature of optimal incentive schemes although the primary focus is on optimal quantity discounts in a monopolized market the results also shed light on related topics such as optimal income taxation and commodity bundling

cyclical and causal patterns of inflation and gdp growth empirical foundations for the view that high inflation impairs gdp growth are examined using annual data for 115 countries over the period 1960 1995 taking into account country heterogeneity and time specific symmetric shocks as well as endogeneity of inflation and dynamics of gdp growth dynamic panel data models of the effects of inflation on growth are estimated no evidence is found supporting the view that inflation is in general harmful to gdp growth on the other hand there is a negative correlation between contemporaneous intra country inflation and growth for periods characterized by positive oil price shocks

migration trade and foreign direct investment in mexico part of the rationale for the north american free trade agreement nafta was that it will increase trade and foreign direct investment fdi flows creating jobs and reducing migration to the united states u s since poor data on illegal migration to the united states make direct measurement difficult data on migration within mexico where census data permit careful analysis are used instead to evaluate the mechanism behind predictions on migration to the united states specifications are provided for migration within mexico incorporating measures of cost of living amenities and networks contrary to much of the literature labor market variables enter very significantly and as predicted once possible credit constraint effects are controlled for greater exposure to fdi and trade deters outmigration with the effects working partly through the labor market finally some tentative inferences are presented about the impact of increased fdi on mexico u s migration on average a doubling of fdi inflows leads to a 1 5 to 2 percent drop in migration

agrarian structures urbanization and inequality summary this study examines the impact of agrarian structures on income inequality over the long run first it exhibits the relationship between land and income distribution by developing a theoretical model based on harris and todaro 1970 and lewis 1954 high land inequality increases income gini coefficients in the urban sector as well as the rural sector not only by creating congestion in the urban subsistence sector but also by feeding the growth of the urban reserve army of labor which pulls down the wages in the urban capitalist sector next the study investigates the empirical relationship between land inequality level of urbanization and income inequality using cross country datasets the estimation results support the theoretical model and indicate that the level of land inequality has a significant impact on determining the level of urbanization and urban and overall income inequalities moreover the analysis finds that overurbanization increases income inequality the empirical analysis controls for institutional factors like education inequality and the level of democracy the results present a stronger evidence on the land inequality s influence through urbanization than through education and democracy these results suggest that policymakers should have a broader view as to the importance of agrarian policies a progressive land reform or and subsidies protecting small peasantry can also reduce urban income inequality and poverty over the long run

taxes and subsidies for pollution intensive industries as trade policy abstract this paper constructs a model of international oligopoly with negative externalities in production in which optimal environmental policy responses to foreign emission tax and subsidy programs can be calculated it is shown that by granting subsidies for abatement efforts or for a heavily taxed polluting input domestic net welfare is improved by capturing a greater share of the world market since the subsidy programs are supposed to improve the quality of the global environment they can be justified on environmental grounds in addition we show that a pigouvion emission tax restores efficiency in natural resource allocation whereas subsidy programs are in principle used as instruments in imperfectly competitive international markets

strategic environmental policy clean technologies and the learning curve in the political discussion it is often emphasized that the environmental service industry which produces a clean factor of production benefits from an early and strong environmental policy this is especially likely if the costs of production are decreasing over time due to learning curve effects surprisingly the environmental service industry has not been integrated into the theory of strategic environmental policy yet our main question is whether a national leadership in environmental policy can pay off if profits of the environmental service industry are taken into account we consider a two period model with one firm in each country competing on a third market emissions can be substituted by the clean factor when deciding upon the production technology the unit costs of producing the clean factor in the second period are decreasing in the quantity produced in the initial period we derive the optimal environmental policy for both periods from a national point of view and show that the presence of the environmental service industry can indeed lead to a national leadership in pollution control

optimal pollution taxation in a cournot duopoly it is well known that the optimal pollution tax in a competitive industry is equal to the marginal damage inflicted by the pollution it has also been shown that the optimal pollution tax on a monopoly is less than the marginal damage in this paper i derive the optimal pollution tax for a cournot duopoly if firms have different production costs the optimal tax rate may exceed the marginal damage this is so because the tax may be an effective instrument for allocating production from the less to the more efficient firm it is also shown that if one firm has a positive most preferred pollution tax the sum of consumer and producer surpluses will be declining in the tax at this level

on emissions trading and market structure cap and trade versus intensity standards this paper examines the interdependence between imperfect competition and emissions trading we particularly analyze the long run equilibrium in a two sector clean and dirty model with cournot competition among firms who face a fixed cost of production the clean sector is defined as the sector with the highest long run cost margin on emissions we compare the welfare implications of a cap and trade scheme with an emissions trading scheme based on relative intensity standards it is shown that a firm s long run equilibrium output in the clean or dirty sector does not depend on the emissions trading format but only depends on the fixed cost of producing in the respective sector intensity standards can result in clean firms selling allowances to dirty firms or dirty firms selling to clean firms the former outcome yields higher welfare it is demonstrated that cap and trade outperforms the intensity based trading scheme in terms of long run welfare with free entry and exit with intensity standards the size of the clean sector is too large

commitment through renegotiation proof contracts with third parties the paper analyzes contracts as means of strategic commitment that is commitment against outside parties to the agreement it considers the example of an incumbent firm which enters a contractual relationship with its workers in order to deter entry it assumes away the possibility for the parties to precommit not to make pareto improving renegotiations of the agreement once entry has taken place under symmetric information the contract is thus found to be useless for entry deterrence if the incumbent firm or workers possess some private information excessive post entry production levels can however be sustained ex post since output reductions may not be incentive compatible while information asymmetries are usually welfare decreasing when the goal is optimal risk sharing they can thus be welfare improving for the contracting parties when commitment against outsiders is the goal of the contract the role of the renegotiation process as a constraint on sustainable agreements is stressed in the paper and the general relevance of strategic contractual commitment is discussed

expectations information and migration the case of the west bank and gaza this study evaluates the determinants of palestinian migration from the west bank and gaza data are employed for the post 1967 period of israeli rule to specify and test competing models as well as the structure of expectations in the migration decision results of the analysis support a simple static expectation formulation as is consistent with much of the short term low mobility cost migration between the west bank and jordan findings further point to the importance of various israeli palestinian economic and political economic interactions in the determination of this controversial movement of population including those associated with employment opportunity for palestinian labour in israel elements of israeli west bank settlement policy and changes in local standard of living various policy implications of the research are indicated

the emergence of migration theory and a suggested new direction abstract the literature on internal labour migration is surveyed using a fourfold taxonomic scheme the potential migrant as presented in the existing literature can be viewed as a supplier of labour an investor in human capital and a consumer of regional amenities such as public goods the paper develops a fourth approach which treats the household rather than the individual as the migrating unit and which views the potential migrant as a producer of home produced commodities the continuities as well as the contrasts between the four approaches are discussed in the paper

the economic implications of using haccp as a food safety regulatory standard abstract this article discusses the nature and role of hazard analysis critical control point haccp as a food safety control system and in particular its role as an element of public food safety regulation the notion of efficiency in food safety regulation is discussed and related to the nature of food safety controls it is suggested that if appropriately applied haccp is a more economically efficient approach to food safety regulation than command and control cac interventions the economic implications of haccp are discussed with reference to estimates of the costs and benefits in particular for the food industry finally the use of haccp as an international trade standard and the facilitation of trade in processed food products is considered

strategic environmental policy under incomplete information this paper introduces incomplete information into recent analyses of strategic environmental policy it is shown how asymmetric information between planners and producers affects national incentives to impose strategic environmental standards on domestic industries in international oligopolistic competition relative to the full information case incomplete information is likely to mitigate allocative distortions originating from strategic behaviour a countervailing effect tending to raise distortion is however revealed from the analysis this effect is absent when governments intervene in free trade through direct production subsidies the results suggest that incentives to capture foreign rents are less reduced due to private information when environmental standards rather than direct production subsidies are the strategic instrument

a univariate analysis of ems exchange rates using a target zone model summary the models in the literature on exchange rate target zones imply a non linear time series model for the exchange rate we show how the parameters of such models can be estimated and develop maximum likelihood and method of simulated moments estimators for the target zone model of krugman 1991 the maximum likelihood estimator is based on a computationally attractive approximation to the exact predictive density of the continuous time model monte carlo experiments are used to assess the properties of this estimator in the empirical part we estimate the model with data on recent ems exchange rates we find that the krugman 1991 target zone model is not able to explain the full observed kurtosis and conditional heteroscedasticity of the exchange rate returns

the term structure of interest rates in a sticky price target zone model abstract the term structure of interest rates in a sticky price target zone model with perfectly credible marginal central bank intervention is identified by means of an arbitage free valuation we find that an explicit credible target zone for the exchange rate is associated with an implicit target zone for the long term interest rate where the nonlinearity of the exchange rate function translates into a corresponding stabilizing nonlinearity of the long term interest rate imposing a target zone reduces the variability of short term and long term interest rates and induces a steeper term structure relative to freely floating exchange rates

stabilization with wage indexation and exchange rate flexibility abstract this survey examines the role of wage indexation and exchange rate policy in dampening fluctuations in output around its target level it is demonstrated that the appropriate choice for wage indexation and exchange rate flexibility is highly sensitive to the nature and the relative importance of the shocks impinging upon the economy as well as to the relevant parameters in the economy moreover the question of the desired flexibility of the exchange rate should be studied in the context of wage indexation and vice versa this interdependence raises the possibility of both policies being complements or substitutes to each other depending on the number of shocks that perturb the economy

optimal investment policies for a polluting firm in an uncertain environment in this paper a stochastic dynamic model of the firm is used as a framework to study the optimality of abatement investments production causes pollution as an inevitable byproduct and in this model the latter is taxed by the government the firm can diminish these tax payments through reducing its pollution output by carrying out abatement investments it turns out that provided that its liquidity position is sufficiently strong the firm performs a growth policy such that expected marginal revenues of productive and abatement investments are balanced growth stops as soon as marginal revenue equals the shareholders time preference rate at that time dividend is paid out we also obtain that the emissions tax rate must exceed a certain lowerbound when the government wants emissions to decrease during the firm s growth phase

effects of asymmetric information on airport congestion management mechanisms abstract we study and compare three different mechanisms for capacity slot allocation in a congested airport when airlines have one dimensional private information direct allocation of slots differentiated tolls and slot auctions with perfect information direct allocation is a first best policy which can be implemented through pigouvian taxes or slot auctions the mechanisms are equivalent in terms of social welfare with the introduction of asymmetric information this equivalence is lost direct allocation is always ex post inefficient and in some cases tolls and subsequent quantity delegation is a better alternative social welfare wise auctions may be superior or inferior to tolls we further show that naive application of pigouvian tolls is sub optimal when imperfect information exists

emissions trading ercs or allowances emissions trading takes place from two alternative baselines 1 emission reduction credits ercs in which the baseline is existing regulations which are often activity based or 2 cap and trade which specifies the total allowable emissions this paper examines the effects of these two tradable permit systems on marginal and average costs for the firm using electricity generation as an example the erc system subsidizes the activity level to which it is tied and fails to incorporate the full cost of external harm into the product price if the permit limit is chosen ef ficiently the cap and trade system is more effi cient

investment and adaptation as commitment devices in climate politics the strategic roles of adaptation and technological investment in international climate politics have been analyzed within various approaches what makes this paper unique is that we investigate the combined impact of adaptation and investment on global mitigation and we compare the subgame perfect equilibria for different sequences of decisions considering a purely non cooperative game theoretic framework we find that by investment countries commit to lower national contributions to the global public good of mitigation moreover the order of adaptation before mitigation might reinforce this strategic effect of technological investments as a consequence the subgame perfect equilibrium for symmetric countries yields a globally lower level of mitigation and higher global costs of climate change when countries engage in advanced adaptation besides this theoretical contribution the paper proposes some strategies to combat the unfortunate rush to adaptation which can be currently observed in climate politics

weitzman revisited emission standards versus taxes with uncertain abatement costs and market power of polluting firms studies dealing with the optimal choice of pollution control instruments under uncertainty have invariably taken it for granted that regulated firms face perfectly competitive markets by introducing the product market into the stochastic framework of weitzman rev econ stud 41 477 491 1974 this paper shows for the case of a polluting symmetric cournot oligopoly that weitzman s policy rule for choosing emission standards versus taxes with uncertain abatement costs is biased in the presence of market power since the oligopolists take into account their influence on the market price their total abatement effort including the restriction of output is less vulnerable to miscalculations of the tax rate compared to price taking firms consequently the comparative advantage of instruments is shifted in favour of taxes in a further step the provided policy recommendations are generalised by abolishing the assumption that firms are symmetric

pollution standards vs charges under uncertainty conventional analysis of pollution control policy under uncertainty does not properly account for the potential cost effectiveness difference between standards and charges thus drawing misleading conclusions for the case of inefficient standards correcting for this anomaly the following conclusions can be drawn when uncertainty involves the position of the marginal damage cost schedule rather than policy indifference a charge is always superior to an inefficient standard when uncertainty is about the position of the marginal control cost schedule policy indifference may occur but if it does it must be the case that the slope of marginal damage cost exceeds that of marginal control cost

monetary and real shocks and the optimal target zone abstract an exchange rate target zone is analysed in a model where the economy is disturbed by shocks to money demand and goods demand the stabilising properties of a target zone are compared to those of fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes it is found that a target zone offers a compromise between these two extremes it is also shown that when there are shocks to both money and goods demand a target zone is better than either a fixed rate or a floating rate in the sense that it minimises the variance of output and prices

performance versus design standards in the regulation of pollution abstract this paper presents a model of pollution regulation in an oligopolistic market two forms of regulation are considered performance standards which regulate pollution directly by an upper limit on emissions and design standards which regulate pollution indirectly by a minimum usage requirement of an enissions control input equilibria under each regulatory regime are characterized a welfare analysis reveals that performance standards are preferred to design standards if the objective is minimization of emissions plus pollution damage costs however the comparison is indeterminate if the regulator s objective is total surplus less pollution damage an equivalence between emissions taxes and performance standards is established so the above welfare comparisons also apply to emissions taxes versus design standards

prices versus quantities with incomplete enforcement abstract i study whether incomplete enforcement of a regulation has any impact on the choice between price e g taxes and quantity e g tradeable quotas instruments results indicate that a second best design accounting for incomplete enforcement can be implemented equally well with either instrument as long as the benefit and cost curves are known with certainty if these curves are uncertain to the regulator however the quantity instrument performs relatively better than the price instrument the reason is that the effective amount of control under the quantity instrument is no longer fixed which makes this instrument come closer to a non linear instrument

monetary contracting between central banks and the design of sustainable exchange rate zones abstract an exchange rate system is a contract which commits central banks to intervene in the foreign exchange market the design features of the system include the rules of intervention the limits placed on exchange rates and the crisis scenario describing possible transitions to new regimes this paper considers the various trade offs one faces in designing an exchange rate system one of these pertains to the amount of reserves which the central banks must have on hand in order to forestall a speculative attack and make the system sustainable the amount of reserves needed depends crucially on the assumed crisis scenario

target zone models with price inertia solutions and testable implications many recent papers suggest that the basic flex price target zone model does not perform well empirically this paper investigates the testable implications of a sticky price target zone model and finds that to a limited extent it has a better empirical performance than the simplest flex price model however in terms of nominal variables the sticky price model is found to be observationally equivalent to the flex price model when the latter is extended to include intramarginal intervention and realignments copyright 1994 by royal economic society

big effects of small interventions the informational role of intervention in exchange rate policy abstract in this paper we demonstrate how an infintesimal unsterilized foreign exchange intervention may cause a very large discrete change in the exchange rate we analyze an example in which there is a target zone policy in place but the actual width of the target zone is not known by participants in the foreign exchange market in this case intervention both affects fundamentals and conveys information about policy the exchange rate jumps in response to intervention with the size of the jump related to the uncertainty about the true band width also in this model the relationship between the exchange rate and the fundamental depends upon both the history of the path of the exchange rate and whether or not intervention has occured

wages and unemployment in an urban african labour market this paper argues that urban labor markets in africa exhibit a wage curve similar to those found in the united states britain canada and other developed countries drawing on data from the ivory coast the author finds that urban wages are depressed by higher levels of unemployment this result is robust to changes in model specification and level of aggregation it is consistent with the model of wage determination developed by c shapiro and j stiglitz 1984 and d blanchflower and a oswald 1995 but not with claims that urban wages are invariant to unemployment copyright 1996 by royal economic society

environmental policy when market structure and plant locations are endogenous abstract a two region two firm model is developed in which firms choose the number and the regional locations of their plants both firms pollute and market structure is endogenous to environmental policy there are increasing returns at the plant level imperfect competition between the home and the foreign firm and transport costs between the two markets at critical levels of environmental policy variables small policy changes cause large discrete jumps in a region s pollution and welfare as a firm closes or opens a plant or shifts production to from a foreign branch plant the implications for optimal environmental policy differ significantly from those suggested by traditional pigouvian marginal analysis

the lifetime of a unilateral target zone some extended results abstract in dumas and svensson journal of international economics 36 1994 467 the lifetime of a krugman quarterly journal of economics 106 1991 669 682 type target zone model is found to be extremely long this paper shows that the lifetime of the identical target zone regime can be much lower when real disturbances occur in particular the mean lifetime is found to be very low when real disturbances occur and the real exchange rate elasticity of the demand for domestic goods is very low it is also shown that allowing for monetary disturbances to have real effects has very little effect on the lifetime the results indicate the conditions under which real disturbances might trigger currency crises

north south negotiations on emission reductions a bargaining approach this article models north south negotiations on emission reductions where the north provides side payments in exchange for the south s adoption of a more stringent emission standard we find that depending on where firms compete strong asymmetry among regions the two regions different valuations of side payments and climate change damage can produce self enforcing cooperative agreements moreover the south s optimal standard choice can be one of two polar cases i e either the cleanest or the dirtiest irrespective of the continuum of standards available the results above can also hold true when both parties bargain over the south s emission tax

fundamentals uncertainty bubbles and exchange rate dynamics abstract using a monetary model of exchange rate determination we study exchange rate dynamics with bubbles which depend on stochastic market fundamentals these dynamics can be either stochastically stable or unstable and either monotonic or non monotonic including cyclic in an extreme case they converge with probability one and exhibit cyclic movements implications for the analysis of time dependent regime shifts are also explored exchange rates with bubbles are likely to appear less volatile than the fundamentals in finite samples both the variance bounds and cointegration tests might thus be ineffective in testing the absence of bubbles under fundamentals uncertainty

the impact of public scrutiny on corporate philanthropy this paper proposes that a corporation s vulnerability to public scrutiny drives its corporate giving the hypothesis that companies donate for strategic motives is tested against the alternative that they do so for altruistic reasons court cases and news articles were selected as proxies for public scrutiny macroeconomic variables were used to gauge the level of public charitable need and test for altruism through examining the philanthropic behavior of 40 fortune 500 companies over 7 years this paper finds that companies are strategic and altruistic in their giving

international r d rivalry and industrial strategy this paper presents a theory of government intervention which provides an explanation for industrial strategy policies such as r d or export subsidies in imperfectly competitive international markets domestic net welfare is improved by the capture of a greater share of the output of rent earning industries although the subsidy ridden noncooperative international equilibrium is jointly suboptimal behaviour of governments and firms is modelled as a three stage subgame perfect nash equilibrium the assumption that the government is the first player in this game allows it to influence equilibrium outcomes by altering the set of credible actions open to firms

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

voluntary environmental agreements good or bad news for environmental protection abstract there has been growing interest in the use of voluntary agreements vas as an environmental policy tool this article uses a simple model to determine whether vas are likely to lead to efficient environmental protection we consider cases where polluters are induced to participate either by a background threat of mandatory controls the stick approach or by cost sharing subsidies the carrot approach the results suggest that the overall impact on environmental quality could be positive or negative depending on a number of factors including the allocation of bargaining power the magnitude of the background threat and the social cost of funds