the impact of the german feed in tariff scheme on innovation evidence based on patent filings in renewable energy technologies abstract over the last two decades feed in tariffs have pushed the massive expansion of electricity from renewable energy sources in germany between 1991 and 1999 feed in tariffs were prescribed through the electricity feed in law the so called stromeinspeisungsgesetz seg at relatively moderate rates from 2000 onwards the seg was replaced by the renewable energy sources act the so called erneuerbare energien gesetz eeg with much higher subsidy rates the rise in subsidies to renewable power generation under the eeg came along with a substantial increase in electricity prices provoking an intense public debate on the benefits of renewable energy promotion in our regression analysis we assess one popular justification for feed in tariffs the demand side effect of induced innovation we find that the innovation impact of the german feed in tariff scheme over the last two decades supports the positive innovation hypothesis however the inducement effect of the feed in tariff scheme under the eeg is not significantly different from that of the seg given the drastic cost of the eeg we caution against the appraisal of the eeg feed in tariff scheme solely on the grounds of its impact on technological innovation

does environmental policy stringency foster innovation and productivity in oecd countries abstract in this paper we test the weak and strong versions of the porter hypothesis using data from 14 oecd countries over the period 1990 2011 our analysis makes two contributions to the literature on the topic first we use a newly released environmental policy stringency index eps provided by the oecd as an indicator for the stringency of environmental regulations which addresses the multi dimensionality of environmental regulations second as a suitable method to deal with asymmetric distributions of the dependent variables we use a panel quantile regression model which allow us to test whether or not the hypothesis holds for all quantiles of the distribution of the corresponding dependent variable the findings indicate that in the short term a more strict environmental policy is associated with an increase in the number of patent applications and in total factor productivity tfp for the highest quantiles of the distribution of patents and for all quantiles of tfp respectively moreover environmental stringency has a positive effect on research and development expenditures rd only in the lower quantiles 10 25 in the long term the eps is affecting rd patents and tfp in all quantiles and hence more stringent environmental regulations promote cleaner production processes that could help improving energy efficiency

technical change external economies and the porter hypothesis abstract michael porter introduces the idea that environmental regulations may benefit affected firms this paper derives results consistent with porter s hypothesis by employing a general equilibrium framework with a large number of agents external economies of scale in production and discrete changes in technology the model shows that endogenous technical change makes porter s hypothesis feasible however a policy that produces results consistent with porter s hypothesis is not necessarily optimal

the impact of progresa on food consumption abstract in this article we used data from the mexican poverty alleviation program called progresa programa de educacion salud y alimentacion to examine whether eligibility for a cash transfer provided by the program conditional on children s regular school attendance and regular visits to health centers is also associated with increased consumption of food we used a longitudinal sample of approximately 24 000 households from 506 communities a distinguishing characteristic of this sample was that some of the communities were randomly selected for participation in progresa while the rest were introduced into the program at later phases exploiting this feature in our analysis we found that eligible households in the villages covered by progresa increased caloric acquisition compared with eligible households not receiving these benefits by november 1999 median beneficiary households in treatment localities obtained 6 4 more calories than did comparable households in control localities perhaps eve

information inequality and mass polarization ideology in advanced democracies growing polarization in the american congress is closely related to rising income inequality yet there has been no corresponding polarization of the u s electorate and across advanced democracies mass polarization is negatively related to income inequality to explain this puzzle we propose a comparative political economy model of mass polarization in which the same institutional factors that generate income inequality also undermine political information we explain why more voters then place themselves in the ideological center hence generating a negative correlation between mass polarization and inequality we confirm these conjectures on individual level data for 20 democracies and we then show that democracies cluster into two types one with high inequality low mass polarization and polarized and right shifted elites e g the united states and the other with low inequality and high mass polarization with left shifted elites e g sweden this division reflects long standing difference

the value of hiring through employee referrals using personnel data from nine large firms in three industries call centers trucking and high tech we empirically assess the benefit to firms of hiring through employee referrals compared to nonreferred applicants referred applicants are more likely to be hired and more likely to accept offers even though referrals and nonreferrals have similar skill characteristics referred workers tend to have similar productivity compared to nonreferred workers on most measures but referred workers have lower accident rates in trucking and produce more patents in high tech referred workers are substantially less likely to quit and earn slightly higher wages than nonreferred workers in call centers and trucking the two industries for which we can calculate worker level profits referred workers yield substantially higher profits per worker than nonreferred workers these profit differences are driven by lower turnover and lower recruiting costs for referrals jel codes j24 m51 j30 j63

using employer hiring behavior to test the educational signaling hypothesis this paper presents a test of the educational signaling hypothesis if employers use education as a signal in the hiring process they will rely more on education when less is otherwise known about applicants we nd that employers are more likely to lower educational standards when an informal more informative recruitment channel is used so we conclude that education is used as a signal in the hiring process

strategic responses to automobile emissions control a game theoretic analysis abstract this paper examines the dynamics of standard setting regulation under technological uncertainty and asymmetric information about technological capability a two period model which allows fully strategic action is developed and applied to the regulation of automobile emissions a situation in which standards have been used to force innovation it is found that the initial level of r d activity caused by regulation increases with the intrinsic technical capability of industry this result done not depend on marginal productivities of research that favor high capability types and implies that a poor capability industry will not attempt to compensate for its inability to innovate with increased research activity it is also found that the regulator s ability to induce investment is greater when r d is likely to be unsuccessful

environmental regulation and competitiveness empirical evidence on the porter hypothesis from european manufacturing sectors abstract this paper investigates the weak and strong versions of porter hypothesis ph focusing on the manufacturing sectors of 17 european countries between 1997 and 2009 the hypothesis that well crafted and well enforced regulation would benefit both the environment and the firm was originally proposed by porter 1991 and porter and van der linde 1995 to date the literature has analyzed the impact of environmental regulation on innovation and on productivity mostly in separate analyses and focusing on the usa the few existing contributions on europe study the effect of environmental regulation either on green innovation or on performance indicators such as exports we instead look at overall innovation and productivity impacts first focusing on overall innovative activity allows us to account for potential opportunity costs of induced innovations second productivity impacts are arguably the most relevant indicators for the strong ph as a proxy of environmental policy stringency we use pollution abatement and control expenditures pace one of the few sectoral level indicators available we remedy upon its main drawback namely potential endogeneity by adopting an instrumental variable estimation approach we find evidence of a positive impact of environmental regulation on the output of innovation activity as proxied by patents thus providing support in favor of the weak ph this result is in line with most of the literature on the other front we find no evidence in favor of the strong ph as productivity appears to be unaffected by the degree of pollution control and abatement efforts

enforcing time inconsistent regulation i introduction passage of legislation is merely the beginning of the regulatory task the successful translation of policy from legislative debate into regulation is not guaranteed implementation may be especially problematic for regulations that are time inconsistent regulations have the potential for time inconsistency if the government cannot credibly commit itself to enforcement of the original legislation at every relevant point in time consider a law that sets a regulatory standard to be enforced several years in the future the regulation s implementation may take the following course for any given enforcement period first firms are expected to engage in long term investment to move towards meeting the standard second after that investment has been completed an enforcement agency reviews and has the opportunity to modify the standards shortly before the date at which they are to be enforced finally after the agency s review firms make short term investment to meet the standard this process may be repeated for subsequent enforcement periods this sequence of events presents inherent problems for the enforceability of a regulation during the long term investment stage regulated firms know that the relevant administrative agency may be unable to credibly bind itself to future actions given this firms may believe that the agency s enforcement posture depends on their own actions firms may therefore be able to act strategically to induce the regulatory agency to lower the relevant standard before its enforcement date facing such incentives firms may not undertake the desired long term investments upon review the enforcement agency could find that requiring firms to make short term investments to meet the standard may involve substantial social costs facing such costs the agency may grant regulatory relief and relax the standard in these circumstances society s welfare may be greater if firms engaged in the necessary long term investment to meet the standard prior to the enforcement date in order to force firms to make the necessary long term investment however the enforcement agency may need to threaten to punish firms by enforcing the original standard even if firms long term investments are below optimal levels the need to threaten this punishment places the agency in a difficult position if firms do not undertake the desired long term investments it may be in the agency s and society s interests to relax the initial standard to avoid the potentially higher costs associated with short term investments firms will understand this and thus make no ex ante investment towards meeting the standard the regulation is therefore time inconsistent and unenforceable in the case of automobile fuel economy regulations for example congress in 1975 set standards for model years 1978 and afterwards but provided the executive branch in the form of the national highway traffic safety administration nhtsa with discretion to modify the standard for model years after 1984 automobile manufacturers then undertook long term product investment that may have been initiated in order to meet the standards for model years 1985 1986 and 1989 however firms were able to gain regulatory relief from nhtsa at the start of the relevant model years if relief had not been granted there would have been insufficient time for further product innovation and firms would have had to meet the standard by eliminating less fuel efficient vehicles from their fleets a strategy that would have been costly not only to themselves but to their employees and customers as well see kleit 1990 and greene 1991 on the other hand in the 1970s the congress passed laws to be enforced by the environmental protection agency that required automobile companies to invest millions of dollars in pollution control devices while automobile firms achieved some delay in the implementation of the law the devices ultimately were installed

informal work networks we present a model of time allocation between formal and informal labour supply where workers learn of informal job opportunities from their peers in addition to formal income taxation and enforcement individuals labour supply decisions depend on the number of their peers with informal jobs and the strength of social ties workers allocate more time to informal activities when tax enforcement is lax and job information transmission is good more connected social networks e g wheel complete feature lower average income but higher average utility than poorly connected social networks e g star empty average income may be non monotonic in tax enforcement on presente un modele d allocation du temps entre l offre de travail formel et informel dans le cas ou les travailleurs apprennent l existence de possibilites de travail informel de leurs pairs en plus de dependre de l imposition des revenus formels et de la rigueur de ce processus les decisions des individus dans leur offre de travail dependent du nombre des pairs qui ont du travail informel et de la force des liens sociaux les travailleurs allouent plus de temps aux activites informelles quand l application de la loi fiscale est rel chee et que la transmission de l information a propos du travail informel est bonne des reseaux sociaux mieux connectes e g roue complet se traduisent par un revenu moyen plus bas mais par une utilite moyenne plus elevee que des reseaux sociaux plus pauvrement connectes e g etoile vide le revenu moyen peut avoir un lien non monotone a la nature de l application de la loi fiscale

firm incentives to promote technological change in pollution control reply abstract the process of technological change in pollution control is broken into three basic steps innovation diffusion and optimal agency response firm incentives to promote these steps are then examined under five regulatory regimes direct controls emission subsidies emission taxes free marketable permits and auctioned marketable permits on a relative basis emission taxes and auctioned permits provide the highest firm incentives to promote technological change at times free permits generate lower incentives direct controls which are common regulatory tools usually provide the lowest relative firm incentives to promote technological change

are cadre offspring in the fast lane evidence from the labour market for college graduates in china this paper studies the impact of having a cadre parent on the labour market performance and channels of the intergenerational transference using a recent data set we find that college graduates w

the role of policy instruments in the innovation and diffusion of environmentally friendlier technologies popular claims versus case study experiences abstract moving towards sustainability will require that new environmentally friendlier technologies are developed and widely adopted policy instruments that promote eco efficiency are therefore necessary some claims frequently made in the literature on the relationship between policy instruments and technological development are examined the claims concern regulations environmental taxation and funding of research and development the claims are explored on the basis of empirical evidence from two sectors the pulp and paper industry and the marine engine industry little support was found for some of the claims in some cases even contradictory findings and for some claims the findings differed between the sectors and even within a sector depending on the issue

who gets the job referral evidence from a social networks experiment we use recruitment into a laboratory experiment in kolkata india to analyze how job networks select individuals for employment opportunities we present evidence that individuals face a tradeoff between choosing the most qualified individual for the job and the individual who is ideal from the perspective of their social network the experiment allows randomly selected subjects to refer members of their social networks to subsequent rounds of the experiment and varies the incentive schemes offered to these participants we find that when faced with performance pay individuals are more likely to refer co workers and less likely to refer family members high ability participants who are offered performance pay recruit referrals who perform significantly better on a cognitive ability task and also prove to be more reliable as evidenced by their choices in the trust game and performance on an effort task

the era of incremental change in the technology innovation life cycle an analysis of the automotive emission control industry abstract according to the life cycle model of technological evolution after the emergence of a dominant design technological product industries undergo an era of incremental change this era of incremental change is not well understood in the existing literature although the period is typically characterized in terms of stability and minimal innovation we find that the era of incremental change can be actually quite dynamic through our research into the period of time following the emergence of a dominant design in automotive emission control systems we find that the overall product innovation in the industry did not decline immediately following the dominant design and increased throughout the era of incremental change further we find that firms maintain their attention on the same core components that they innovated upon before the dominant design but that these components make up less of the overall proportion of total innovation throughout the era of incremental change finally we found that the concentration of innovating firms in the industry increases immediately following the dominant design and this concentration decreases over time throughout the era of incremental change findings imply a pattern of contraction and expansion in the era of incremental change that extends previous work on the technological product life cycles and helps to characterize the era of incremental change in a novel way

pride and prejudice using ethnic sounding names and inter ethnic marriages to identify labour market discrimination labour markets discriminate against workers with particular ethnic sounding names we use non random sorting into interethnic marriage and salient differences between sephardic and ashkenazi surnames to evaluate the causal impact of sephardic affiliation on wages using the 1995 israeli census we estimate the effect of a sephardic sounding surname on wages we first compare the wages of israeli jewish males born to sephardic fathers and ashkenazi mothers sa who are more likely to carry a sephardic surname with the wages of israeli jewish males born to ashkenazi fathers and sephardic mothers as we find that israeli labor markets discriminate based on perceived ethnicity sa workers earn significantly less than their as counterparts we then exploit the custom of women to adopt their husbands surnames to disentangle actual ethnicity from the ethnicity perceived by the market consistent with ethnic discrimination based on surnames we find that it is father in law s ethnicity rather than father s ethnicity that shapes female wage rates finally we find that labor markets discriminate based on surname only when those names provide additional information about ethnicity when ethnicity can be discerned from skin tone surnames do not provide additional explanatory power with respect to wages

quality leadership when regulatory standards are forthcoming in many markets governments set minimum quality standards while some sellers compete on the basis of quality by exceeding them such quality leadership strategies often win public acclaim especially when they involve environmental attributes using a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation we show that if the high quality firm can commit to a quality level before regulations are promulgated it induces the regulator to weaken standards and welfare falls our results raise doubts about the social benefits of corporate self regulation and highlight the dangers of lengthy delays between legislative mandates for new regulations and their implementation

the impact of ethnic diversity on microenterprise start ups until recently factors determining the decisions made by microfinance institutions mfis to extend loans to business start ups had not been explored recent evidence shows that mfi performance wi

environmental policy incentives to adopt advanced abatement technology abstract we investigate incentives through environmental policy instruments to adopt advanced abatement technology first we study the case where the regulator makes long term commitments to policy levels and does not anticipate arrival of new technology we show that taxes provide stronger incentives than permits auctioned and free permits offer identical incentives and standards may give stronger incentives than permits second we investigate scenarios where the regulator anticipates new technologies we show that with taxes and permits the regulator can induce first best outcomes if he moves after firms have invested whereas this does not always hold if he moves first

does technological innovation really reduce marginal abatement costs some theory algebraic evidence and policy implications the existing literature models innovation in pollution control as a reduction in marginal abatement costs we show that this assumption is inappropriate for production process innovations such as fuel switching algebraically we examine the effects of different innovation types on marginal abatement cost curves showing that some desirable innovations increase marginal abatement costs empirically we estimate marginal abatement costs for sulfur dioxide by measuring the output distance function for electric power in korea regression results confirm that production process innovations did raise marginal abatement costs in this case one policy implication economic instruments do not always provide stronger innovation incentives than command and control policies

employer recruitment strategies and the labor market outcomes of new hires i introduction employers and job seekers are brought together for potential matches through their recruitment and job search activities employers may post help wanted signs run newspaper advertisements or seek referrals from private employment agencies job seekers may speak with friends and relatives solicit the aid of the state employment agency or simply walk in and apply these recruitment and search activities help both parties acquire information about each other and the more information they obtain prior to entering an employment agreement the higher the likelihood of a good employment match the crucial role of information in the labor market has been recognized since stigler 1962 but despite a voluminous literature on job matching and organizational behavior in labor markets we know far less about employers recruitment strategies than about job seekers search strategies as granovetter 1995 notes while people are finding jobs employers are finding people to fill them and their behaviors strategies and purposes play a central but often neglected role in the process of matching people to jobs this imbalance in research effort is explained more by a dearth of adequate data describing employer recruitment behavior than by lack of scholarly interest indeed labor economists sociologists psychologists and human resource management specialists have spent the last half century exploiting the meager existing data sets in efforts to learn about employer recruitment behavior in this article i address several empirical questions concerning employer recruitment using the multi city study of urban inequality mcsui a large cross sectional survey of employers in four metropolitan areas of the united states that has not been exploited for a detailed analysis of the relationships among recruitment strategies starting wages and vacancy duration despite the richness of the data set for this purpose the mcsui data contain detailed information on firm and job characteristics and most important for the purpose of this article indicators of the recruitment methods these employers used when hiring the most recently hired worker the data allow a number of interesting questions to be addressed concerning the link between employer recruitment choices and starting wages vacancy duration and the skill levels of new hires because there has been relatively little empirical research done by labor economists on employer recruitment this work with a relatively large representative sample of employers should enhance our understanding of a number of basic questions i consider three of these first i present evidence describing which recruitment methods employers use and how these vary by firm characteristics vacancy characteristics and the skill requirements of jobs i estimate a multivariate probit model with a separate equation for each of 10 recruitment choices in addition to providing information about the relationship of each recruitment method with each of the covariates this method has the attractive feature of allowing for an analysis of the relationships among the unobserved determinants of recruitment choice to my knowledge this methodology is new to the recruitment literature second i present regression evidence showing how vacancy duration varies by recruitment choices some recruitment methods can be expected to be faster than others in generating job applicants however an employer must invest time in screening the applicant pool so the recruitment methods that generate applicants quickly do not necessarily fill vacancies quickly therefore the link between recruitment methods and vacancy durations is an empirical question third i present evidence concerning the relationship between starting wages and recruitment methods in particular i augment standard log wage specifications based on the human capital model with recruitment choices and find that the recruitment variables have explanatory power even in the presence of all of the usual controls

the signaling role of promotions further theory and empirical evidence an extensive theoretical literature investigates the role of promotions as a signal of worker ability we extend the theory by focusing on how the signaling role of promotion varies with education and then investigate the resulting predictions using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information concerning the internal labor market history of a medium sized firm in the financial services industry our results support signaling being important for understanding the differences between promotion practices concerning bachelor s and master s degree holders while the evidence concerning the importance of signaling for high school graduates and phds is mixed

instrument choice when regulators and firms bargain abstract we compare outcomes with an emissions tax and an emissions standard when a firm and regulator engage in cooperative bargaining over the stringency of the regulation bargaining is motivated by giving the firm a choice of abatement technologies if the firm s preferred technology differs from the regulator s the first best outcome is not an equilibrium of the traditional noncooperative game in which the regulator is a stackelberg leader the regulator may therefore choose to offer the firm a more lenient regulation if it agrees to switch technologies we find that the resulting bargaining outcomes differ for a tax and a standard even though information is symmetric and we identify conditions under which each instrument yields lower social costs

does privatization improve job satisfaction the case of ghana this paper analyzes the impacts of privatization in ghana on the basis of a survey of 300 workers in privatized and state owned enterprises the findings indicate a significant positive relationship between privatization and job satisfaction whereas monthly wage is an important determinant of job satisfaction in state owned enterprises education and the availability of training opportunities are strong determinants in privatized enterprises the study also shows that there exists a variety of instruments to implement a privatization program smoothly

migration with endogenous moving costs we study a dynamic model of labor migration in which moving costs decrease with the number of migrants already settled in the destination this assumption is supported by sociological studies of migrant networks with endogenous moving costs migration occurs gradually over time once it starts it develops momentum and migratory flows may increase even as wage differentials narrow in addition migration tends to follow geographical channels and low moving cost individuals migrate first these patterns are consistent with historical evidence from the great black migration of 1915 1960 in the united states much of which cannot be reconciled with existing migration models excerpt

innovation in israel 1968 1997 a comparative analysis using patent data abstract the israeli high tech sector is widely regarded as a hotbed of cutting edge technologies and as the growth engine of the israeli economy in the 1990s and beyond in this paper we present a close up portrait of innovation in israel for the past 30 years with the aid of highly detailed patent data we use for that purpose all israeli patents taken in the us over 7000 as well as us patents and patents from other countries for comparative purposes the time path of israeli patenting reveals big jumps in the mid 1980s and then again in the early 1990s reflecting underlying shocks in policy and in the availability of relevant inputs israeli ranks high in terms of patents per capita compared to the g7 the asian tigers and a group of countries with similar gdp per capita finland is strikingly similar taiwan s patenting has grown extremely fast and is now on par with israel south korea is rapidly closing the gap the technological composition of israeli innovations reflects quite well worldwide technological trends except that computers and communications the fastest growing field in the us has grown even faster in israel the weak side resides in the composition of israeli assignees the actual owners of the intellectual property rights just 35 of israeli patents were assigned to israeli corporations a much lower percentage than in most other countries relatively large shares went to foreign assignees to universities and the government and to private inventors on the other hand israeli patents are of good quality in terms of citations received and getting better over time us patents command on average more citations but not in computers and communications or in biotechnology and israeli patents are significantly better than those of the reference group of countries

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

a resource based perspective on corporate environmental performance and profitability drawing on the resource based view of the firm we posited that environmental performance and economic performance are positively linked and that industry growth moderates the relationship with the returns to environmental performance higher in high growth industries we tested these hypotheses with an analysis of 243 finns over two years using independently developed environmental ratings results indicate that it pays to be green and that this relationship strengthens with industry growth we conclude by highlighting the study s academic and managerial implications making special reference to the social issues in management literature

job information networks neighborhood effects and inequality this paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the use by different social groups of informal sources of information provided by friends relatives and acquaintances during job search and its consequences for the job market it also addresses the role of network structure and size the resource endowments of contacts and nature of the links between contacts to explain differences in the effects of job information networks in doing so the paper also turns to the sociology literature on job information networks and provides an economic perspective on such sociological concepts as strong versus weak ties inbreeding distance from structural holes etc the paper distinguishes between models of exogenous job information networks that is where individuals obtain job related information through a given social structure and endogenous job information networks which are social networks that result from individuals uncoordinated actions the paper pays special attention to such issues as physical and social proximity and sharing of information and discusses them in the context of the recent social interactions and neighborhood effects literature finally the paper outlines a model that integrates job information networks where interactions occur in business cycle frequencies with the dynamics of human capital formation which include the joint effects of parental community and neighborhood human capital and are set in life cycle frequencies for the purpose of organizing suggestions for future research and examining earned income inequality

the intergenerational transmission of employers we find that about 40 of a cohort of young canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked and 6 9 have the same employer in adulthood the intergenerational transmission of employers is positively related to paternal earnings particularly at the very top of the earnings distribution and to the presence of self employment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact it has an important influence on nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings

with a little help from my friends quality of social networks job finding and job match quality this paper studies the effect of network quality on job finding and job match quality using longitudinal data and a direct measure of network quality which is based on the employment of friendship ties various identification strategies provide robust evidence that a higher number of employed contacts increases the job finding rate network quality also increases wages for high skilled workers forming networks with non familial contacts instead for low skilled workers more employed familial contacts lead to a negative but not significant effect on wages these findings reconcile previous mixed evidence of network effects on wages indicating heterogeneity by skill level and relationship type

getting closer or drifting apart advances in communication and transportation technologies have the potential to bring people closer together and create a global village however they also allow heterogenous agents to segregate along special interests which gives rise to communities fragmented by type rather than geography we show that lower communication costs should always decrease separation between individual agents even as group based separation increases each measure of separation is pertinent for distinct types of social interaction a group based measure captures the diversity of group preferences that can have an impact on the provision of public goods an individual measure correlates with the speed of information transmission through the social network that afiects for example learning about job opportunities and new technologies we test the model by looking at coauthoring between academic economists before and during the rise of the internet in the 1990s

migration remittances and capital accumulation evidence from rural mexico this paper studies the link between migration remittances and productive assets accumulation for a panel of poor rural households in mexico over the period 19972006 in a context of nancial markets imperfections migration may act as a substitute for imperfect credit and insurance provision through remittances from migrants and thus exert a positive eect on investment however it may well be the case that remittances are channelled towards increasing consumption and leisure goods exploiting within family variation and an instrumental variable strategy we show that migration indeed accelerates productive assets accumulation moreover when we look at the eect of migration on consumption of non productive assets durable goods we nd instead a negative eect our results then suggest that

knowledge sharing and the dynamics of social capital abstract mutual aid often entails the sharing of knowledge we investigate how in turn knowledge sharing affects the long run dynamics of mutual aid in our economy agents with specific knowledge are held up by their principals inside communities agents aid each other by sharing their specific knowledge this process generates a new type of knowledge which exacerbates the specificity of the existing types and induces more agents to engage in mutual aid however since the knowledge generated is shared it progressively renders agents inside communities more flexible and thus less dependent on mutual aid we characterize conditions under which in the long run mutual aid spreads or is abandoned

school decentralization helping the good get better but leaving the poor behind abstract the decentralization of public services is a major feature of institutional innovation the main argument in support of decentralization is that it brings decisions closer to the people thereby alleviating information asymmetries and improving accountability however decentralization can also degrade service provision in poor communities that lack the ability to voice and defend their preferences in this paper we analyze the average and distributional effects of school decentralization on educational quality in argentina we find that decentralization had an overall positive impact on student test scores the decentralization gains however did not reach the poor thus although bringing decisions closer to the people may help the good get better the already disadvantaged may not receive these benefits

principles of network development and evolution an experimental study this paper reports on an experimental investigation of the evolution of networks and the individual decision making processes that guide it inasmuch as there is no history of experimental work on network formation part of the paper is devoted to the formulation of problems that can be examined experimentally the results are that networks composed of decentralized decision makers are capable of overcoming complex coordination and learning problems and converge to stationary when it does not occur significant and persistent inefficiencies can result the models of equilibration based on the principle of nash equilibrium are more reliable than models based on the alternative principles of efficiency seeking or focalness of the network configuration however individual decision making within networks is not in accordance with the simple decision rules of nash best response instead we observed complicated strategies that appear to trade short term profits in order to signal to and teach other agents the strategies required for long term profit maximization

what percentage of innovations are patented empirical estimates for european firms abstract a 1993 survey on the innovative activities of europe s largest industrial firms obtained useable results on patenting activities for 604 respondents the data are used to calculate the sales weighted propensity rates for 19 industries the propensity rates equal the percentage of innovations for which a patent application is made the propensity rates for product innovations average 35 9 varying between 8 1 in textiles and 79 2 in pharmaceuticals the average for process innovations is 24 8 varying from 8 1 in textiles to 46 8 for precision instruments only four sectors have patent propensity rates for both product and process innovations combined that exceed 50 pharmaceuticals chemicals machinery and precision instruments regression results that control for the effect of industry sector show that patent propensity rates increase with firm size and are higher among firms that find patents to be an important method for preventing competitors from copying both product and process innovations the effect of secrecy is not so straightforward firms that find secrecy to be an important protection method for product innovations are less likely to patent as expected but secrecy has little effect on the propensity to patent process innovations the r d intensity of the firm has no effect on patent propensity rates for both product and process innovations the sector of activity has a strong influence on product patent propensities but very little effect on process patent propensities after controlling for the effect of other factors

promoting clean energy technology entrepreneurship the role of external context abstract this study examines how political social and economic factors influence clean energy technology entrepreneurship cete government policies supporting clean energy technology development and the development of markets for clean energy create opportunities for cete however the extent to which such opportunities lead to the emergence of new clean energy businesses depends on a favorable external context promoting cete this study employs a novel dataset combining indicators of the policy and social context of cete with information on clean energy technology startup firms in the usa to provide empirical evidence that technological and market conditions supporting clean energy induce more extensive cete under contexts where local attention to clean energy issues and successful firms commercializing clean energy technologies are more prominent by establishing that cete is contingent upon a supportive local environment as well as technology and market opportunities the study holds relevance for policy makers and clean energy technology firms

local and personal networks in employment and the development of labor markets evidence from the cut flower industry in ethiopia summary we examine the roles of local and personal networks in the employment process and the emergence and development of the labor market in ethiopia s growing cut flower industry using primary survey data of 320 workers randomly sampled from all 64 farms we find that workers who were recruited informally using the social ties were paid less than the formally recruited workers at hiring however these workers quickly increased their productivity and the effect of social ties on wages disappeared over time further we find that the development of labor market for this newly emerged industry took place particularly within the industrial cluster

identifying the causal effect of income on religiosity using the earned income tax credit abstract how do economic conditions income and the generosity of social insurance affect religious behavior this paper provides novel evidence for the united states using variation in earned income tax credit benefits across states over time and by number of children in the raw data income and religiosity have a trivial relationship in contrast the instrumental variables strategy shows that increases in income from the eitc are found to sizably reduce religious attendance among low income individuals among individuals who attend the results indicate that an additional 1000 in annual income is associated with a decrease of roughly 1 service per year as compared to an average of 16 services per year the effect arises mainly along the intensive margin decreasing devout behavior and increasing more marginal attendance but having little impact on whether an individual participates at all or on beliefs there are also minimal effects on the occurrence and amount of contributions to religious organizations the results extend our understanding of the determinants of religiosity the relationship between governmental income support and religious behavior and the social effects of the earned income tax credit

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

endogenous job contact networks we use the uk quarterly labour force survey to document the presence of two phenomena first a positive correlation between unemployment rate and the proportion of job seekers who use social networks to nd jobs network use second a non monotone relation between unemployment rate and the proportion of recently employed workers who found their job through friends or relatives network productivity this second relation is positive for low levels of unemployment rate while it becomes negative for high levels of unemployment rate existing models of social networks and labor market generally assume that social networks are exogenous this assumption implies a negative correlation between unemployment rate and network productivity we develop a model where social networks are used to collect job oers but workers decide strategically how much to invest in their network we show that equilibrium job contact networks are dense and more productive in transmitting information when labor market turnover is moderate while they are less productive and segmented into clusters for either high or low turnover the equilibrium response of job contact networks to changes in labor market conditions is sucient to generate

bayesian learning in social networks we study the perfect bayesian equilibrium of a sequential learning model over a general social network each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world observes the past actions of a stochastically generated neighbourhood of individuals and chooses one of two possible actions the stochastic process generating the neighbourhoods defines the network topology we characterize pure strategy equilibria for arbitrary stochastic and deterministic social networks and characterize the conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning convergence in probability to the right action as the social network becomes large we show that when private beliefs are unbounded meaning that the implied likelihood ratios are unbounded there will be asymptotic learning as long as there is some minimal amount of expansion in observations we also characterize conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning when private beliefs are bounded

toward an integrated approach to industry dynamics and labor mobility industrial dynamics and labour mobility are two fields of economic research that have developed fast in recent years but along what are essentially separate lines this paper shows that the processes those two fields deal with can be highly interdependent and demonstrates the usefulness of and the opportunity for an integrated approach to the dynamics of industries and labour mobility it concludes with a list of questions that inform a research agenda dedicated to such approach

internal and external labor markets and the scope of the firm abstract the scope of integration is characterized in the context of worker learning about job preferences and adverse selection integration mitigates inefficiencies arising from incomplete information on both the demand and supply sides of the labor market worker learning about job preferences comes at a productivity cost which is important in how firms determine the scope of integration

frictional unemployment on labor flow networks abstract we develop an alternative theory to the aggregate matching function in which workers search for jobs through a network of firms the labor flow network the lack of an edge between two companies indicates the impossibility of labor flows between them due to high frictions in equilibrium firms hiring behavior correlates through the network generating highly disaggregated local unemployment hence aggregation depends on the topology of the network in non trivial ways this theory provides new micro foundations for the beveridge curve wage dispersion and the employer size premium we apply our model to employer employee matched records and find that network topologies with pareto distributed connections cause disproportionately large changes on aggregate unemployment under high labor supply elasticity

incentives for advanced pollution abatement technology at the industry level an evaluation of policy alternatives abstract in this research we evaluate the incentive effects of five environmental policy instruments to promote the development and adoption of advanced pollution abatement technology in a heterogenous industry from most to least incentive the policy instruments can be rank ordered as follows i auctioned permits ii emissions taxes and subsidies iii issued marketable permits iv performance standards including performance standards in this list necessitates the assumption that they are differentiated between heterogeneous firms before the technology adoption in a way which replicates the initial emissions control distribution of the efficient incentive based instruments with the starting point normalized in this fashion the instrument rankings are invariant with respect to the size of firms the size of the industry or the industry s abatement cost structure

the intergenerational effects of political influence evidence from china this paper considers the effects of fathers political influence on their offspring s labour market outcomes in china political influence refers to the ability to convert political power into econ

stratification social networks in the labour market and intergenerational mobility young individuals taking the locational choices made by their altruistic parents as given decide whether or not to acquire skills the use of location specific word of mouth communication in the transmission of information about skilled job opportunities implies that the local social environment partly determines an individual s expected returns to education stratified equilibria when they exist are characterised by low intergenerational social mobility and inefficient use of talent in addition the equilibrium responses to factors that generally encourage education may in stratified outcomes be highly asymmetric across socio economic groups non stratified equilibria are likely to be destabilised by measures that encourage education

pollution controlling innovation in oligopolistic industries some comparisons between patent races and research joint ventures abstract much of the literature on pollution control innovation has focused on normative comparisons of exogenous regulatory policies in light of the incentives they induce on firms r d efforts in contrast in the positive analysis below both r d incentives and regulatory policy arise endogenously as functions of market structure and external cost differentials incentives for pollution controlling innovation are found to arise from within the industry in a patent race setting when innovation gives the race winner s a cost advantage over the other industry members this cost advantage is shown to come about when innovating firms successfully use their influence to raise their rivals costs by bringing about a policy change forcing industry members to internalize pollution externalities in contrast an industry wide research joint venture rjv has incentive to collusively prevent development of innovation unless environmental activists are sufficiently strong this latter result is illustrated by the case u s vs automobile manufacturers association where the justice department found evidence that the big three used an rjv to slow the introduction of pollution control innovation

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

does lengthening the school day increase school value added evidence from a mid income country many mid income countries face a significant and challenging problem of low educational achievement this research looks at a full time primary schools programme implemented in mexico to work out

innovation in pollution control comparisons of the various institutional arrangements for controlling pollutant emissions from individual sources effluent fees effluent control subsidies marketable permits and direct command and control regulation have usually focused on their static efficiency properties and institutional feasibility e g dales 1968 zerbe 1970 baumol and oates 1975 kneese and schultze 1975 marin 1978 mills and white 1978 spence and weitzman 1978 russell 1979 a relatively neglected area has been the study of how each arrangement influences innovation in pollution control a few studies e g kneese and schultze 1975 marin 1978 mills and white 1978 russell 1979 have casually claimed that the control methods that rely on economic incentives provide superior incentives for innovation but there have been few systematic studies of the question this paper provides a simple model of pollution control innovation by a profitmaximizing polluter who is subject to the various control methods the consequences of the methods will be explored in three major contexts first we assume that the polluter and the innovation is a small enough part of the overall pollution problem so that none of the important marginal conditions are changed by the innovation second we assume that the polluter and the innovation are important enough so that marginal conditions are changed by the innovations but that the governmental authority determining pollution control incentives or levels fails to make the appropriate adjustments third we again assume that the innovation causes marginal conditions to change but in this case the governmental authority makes the appropriate adjustments we use the term ratcheting to describe this last phenomenon in all cases we assume that the innovating polluter correctly predicts the reactions of the governmental authority and bases his innovation decisions on that prediction a profit maximizing entrepreneur would normally be expected to adopt any innovation that promised gains present discounted value to him in excess of initial

o papel das redes sociais na condicao do desempregado uma analise usando a teoria de matching the paper investigates whether the size of social networks can aect the unemployment rate of the economy therefore based on a theoretical model of matching i propose a technique for simulating the eects of networks on the employability of workers the proposal is applied to a database of portugal noting evidence that there is an optimal size of network that minimizes the unemployment rate

linking induced technological change and environmental regulation evidence from patenting in the u s auto industry a b s t r a c t this article uses a carefully screened patent database in automobile emission control technologies and a detailed regulatory action analysis to examine firms innovation in response to u s technology forcing auto emissions standards enacted between 1970 and 1998 the study finds that under the performance based technology forcing pbtf auto emissions regulations both automakers and compo nent suppliers innovated and introduced more advanced emission control technologies for automobile applications the study also shows that stringent pbtf regulation temporarily induced domestic u s firms to become more innovative than foreign firms that operated in the local u s market during the early phase of the regulatory regime findings of this research strongly imply that government intervention in the form of technology forcing regulation can drive firms to invest in technological innovation

examining the role of policy design and policy interaction in eu automotive emissions performance gaps in the wake of the 2015 dieselgate scandal the us and european governments publicly confronted automakers about their behaviour which raised concerns about the integrity of the current emissions legislation regimes in this article i argue that flexibilities within the eu s emissions legislative framework afforded automakers the opportunity to legally sidestep strict performance standards laid out in the law and resulted in a significant performance gap in real world driving emissions this article provides a timely examination of eu emission legislation policy design and policy interaction within the european union with the aim of explaining why the eu policy framework failed to regulate the regional automotive industry current research is mostly concerned with the typology and effectiveness of individual environmental policy instruments be it regulatory or economic incentives that aim to influence industry behaviour this article approaches the current eu policy regime in a more holistic manner and focuses on the exploitation of weaknesses in the regulatory framework by private firms which has received little academic attention in the innovation and transition literature a major contribution of this article therefore is a body of primary qualitative interview data from industry elites concerning relevant emissions policies

old boy networks as screening mechanisms this paper studies a fulfilled expectations equilibrium in situations in which intermediaries provide personal opinions on the likelihood of success of personnel projects or investments each referee must recommend some candidates from a group of people about whom he has private information the employer uses the recommendations to choose the workers using his expectations about the quality of the recommended and the nonrecommended applicants although the referees use their information strategically the competition among them produces optimal use of the information in the sense that employers make the same choices in equilibrium as they would if they had the same information as the referees

environmental regulation and environmental productivity the case of china abstract constrained by the dual mission of supporting industrial growth and reducing emissions china s traditional emission reduction oriented environmental policies unavoidably face a dilemma this study adopts the gml index to calculate china s industrial productivity by considering environmental factors in addition based on the assumption of industry heterogeneity the author examines the non linear relationship between china s environmental regulation and environmental productivity and calculated the optimal regulation environment for industries according to this study when impact of undesirable outputs pollutant emissions is considered environmental regulation and environmental productivity are positively correlated which to some degree validates the porter hypothesis at present environmental regulation has significant positive effects on clean production industries but shows a lag effect on pollution intensive industries the degree of environmental regulation and environmental productivity show an inverted u shaped relation and display three thresholds it should be noted however that the relationship between regulation and productivity may vary across industries these findings have clear policy implications rather than continually increasing the level of environmental regulation the government should establish standards for individual industries that emphasize flexibility

experimental games on networks underpinnings of behavior and equilibrium selection in this paper we describe a series of laboratory experiments that implement specific examples of a general network structure specifically actions are either strategic substitutes or strategic complements and participants have either complete or incomplete information about the structure of a random network since economic environments typically have a considerable degree of complementarity or substitutability this framework applies to a wide variety of settings we examine behavior and equilibrium selection the degree of equilibrium play is striking in particular with incomplete information behavior closely resembles the theoretical equilibrium whenever this is unique when there are multiple equilibria general features of networks such as connectivity clustering and the degree of the players help to predict informed behavior in the lab people appear to be strongly attracted to maximizing aggregate payoffs social efficiency but there are forces that moderate this attraction 1 people seem content with in the aggregate capturing only the lion s share of the efficient profits in exchange for reduced exposure to loss and 2 uncertainty about the network structure makes it considerably more difficult to coordinate on a demanding but efficient equilibrium that is typically implemented with complete information

determinants of environmental innovation in us manufacturing industries abstract this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of environmental innovation we employ panel data models to study how environmental innovation by us manufacturing industries responded to changes in pollution abatement expenditures and regulatory enforcement during the period 1983 through 1992 we find that 1 environmental innovation as measured by the number of successful environmental patent applications granted to the industry responded to increases in pollution abatement expenditures however 2 increased monitoring and enforcement activities related to existing regulations did not provide any additional incentive to innovate we also find some empirical evidence that environmental innovation is more likely to occur in industries that are internationally competitive

labor market equilibrium with rehiring consistent with the empirical evidence this article analyzes a labor market in which separations are not permanent and reactivated firms prefer to rehire former employees instead of seek new ones workers engage in job search due to the uncertain prospects of rehiring if firms can commit to wages contingent on rehiring they backload wages to provide incentives for workers to reduce their unobservable search effort under risk aversion and incomplete markets if productivity at reactivation is sufficiently high the tension between wage backloading and consumption smoothing leads to excessive search in equilibrium

employment wages and alcohol consumption in russia 1 introductionconcerns regarding the relationship between alcohol consumption and labor market productivity are well grounded if problem drinking or alcoholism is considered a disease then it may have depressant effects on labor market productivity causing reductions in employment earnings and other labor market outcomes mullahy and sindelar 1993 1996 kenkel and ribar 1994 however there is a medical literature that documents a u shaped relationship between alcohol consumption and the risk of cardiovascular disease according to this literature moderate drinkers have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than do either abstainers or heavy drinkers beaglehole and jackson 1992 doll et al 1994 consistent with this evidence several economists have found a positive association between moderate drinking and earnings berger and leigh 1988 french and zarkin 1995 heien 1996 hamilton and hamilton 1997 zarkin et al 1998 macdonald and shields 2001 this article investigates the impact of alcohol consumption on employment and wages in russia the primary contributions of the article are twofold first it enhances the economic literature on the relationship between alcohol consumption and labor market behavior by using data from a longitudinal survey the use of a longitudinal data set enables the estimation of a fixed effects model which helps avoid the potential bias caused by unobserved individual factors not captured in cross sectional models the use of a fixed effects model is an important extension to the literature because the data sets used in previous studies are cross sectional and usually lack adequate variables that could serve as identifying instruments to control for the endogeneity of alcohol consumption 1 furthermore the richness of the data set used in this article allows for the application of three alternative measures of alcohol consumption in the empirical analysis this is important because the relationship between alcohol consumption and labor market outcomes may be sensitive to the alcohol measure that is used the second notable contribution of this article is that it provides the first empirical evidence on the association between alcohol consumption and labor market outcomes in russia excessive alcohol consumption is a widespread problem in russia where per capita alcohol consumption is around 14 liters per year the world health organization who considers 8 liters to be a sign that a country has a critical consumption level for health problems quinn judge 1997 furthermore the dramatic fluctuations in mortality rates experienced in russia over the past 15 years have generated considerable attention to the potential effect of alcohol consumption on the overall health of the russian population it is important to investigate how labor market outcomes would be affected by alcohol consumption in a country which demonstrates such dramatic fluctuations in alcohol consumption and mortality consistent with the previous studies cross sectional results generally support the hypothesis of an inverse u shaped relationship between alcohol consumption and wages and employment results from the fixed effect models are found to be quite different from those of cross sectional models the positive effect of alcohol consumption on employment disappears for both males and females once the individual fixed effects are controlled for the results of the wage model lend support to a small and linear return to alcohol consumption but the effects are significant only at the 10 level the fixed effects estimates are smaller in magnitude and estimated with less precision compared with cross sectional estimates section 2 reviews the previous literature section 3 discusses the conceptual issues and empirical strategy section 4 introduces the data set section 5 provides a discussion of the results and sensitivity analyses section 6 concludes the article

communication and coordination in social networks i model people in a coordination game who use a communication network to tell each other their willingness to participate the minimal sufficient networks for coordination can be interpreted as placing people into a hierarchy of social roles or stages initial adopters then followers and so on down to late adopters a communication network helps coordination in exactly two ways by informing each stage about earlier stages and by creating common knowledge within each stage we then consider two examples first we show that low dimensional networks can be better for coordination even though they have far fewer links than high dimensional networks second we show that wide dispersion of insurgents people predisposed toward participation can be good for coordination but too much dispersion can be bad although collective action depends on both social structure and individual incentives these integral aspects have been formalized separately in the fields of social network theory and game theory by considering them together this paper engages the classic question of which structures are conducive to coordination and shows that structure and strategy are related in a mutually interesting way here we consider a coordination game in which each person wants to participate only if others participate social structure is thought of as a communication network by which people tell each other their willingness to participate each person knows whether her neighbours in the network are willing but does not know about anyone else our model is thus a game of incomplete information in which each person given his local knowledge decides whether to participate the main result is a characterization of the minimal sufficient networks for coordination in terms of a hierarchy of social roles or stages initial adopters then followers and so on down to late adopters for example a communication network helps coordination in exactly two ways by informing each stage about earlier stages and by creating common knowledge within each stage we also consider two simple examples first we show that low dimension or strong link networks can be better for coordination even though they have far fewer links than high dimension or weak link networks second we show that wide dispersion of insurgents people predisposed toward participation can be good for coordination but too much dispersion can be bad this paper is built on the assumption that the most basic and common mechanism for coordination is the i ll go if you go mechanism individuals first communicate with each other about their preferences and then each individual chooses whether to participate or not hence a person s participation depends on what he knows about his neighbours it does not depend solely on their participation itself either through learning adaptation or social influence the physical analogies of contagion or diffusion are not

personal networks and nonagricultural employment the case of a farming village in the philippines abstract this article based on an intensive village survey in the philippines analyzes the effects of personal networks on rural villagers access to nonagricultural occupations and the terms of employment given to them a key finding is that personal networks are selectively used to reduce transaction costs and their impacts on employment conditions vary by size and by location of enterprises we find that when villagers are employed in unskilled work at small enterprises those who use family relative networks receive wage premiums however if we limit our sample to small enterprises located near our study village the family relative network premiums become insignificant presumably because of the overriding influence of the community wide network within a narrow local community contrary to the case of small enterprises unskilled workers wages at large enterprises are not much affected by personal networks but are largely determined by years of schooling and work experience the recent developmen

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination

social networks employee selection and labor market outcomes we provide a direct empirical test of montgomery s 1991 notion that firms hire workers through social ties of productive employees as these workers know others with high unobserved productivity we focus on coworker networks and show that firms recruit workers with better military draft test scores but shorter schooling when hiring previous colleagues of current employees suggesting that firms use these networks to attract workers with better qualities in hard to observe dimensions incumbent workers abilities predict the incidence abilities and wages of linked entrants these results suggest that firms rely on the ability density of the studied networks when setting entry wages

the strategic use of innovation to influence regulatory standards this paper investigates the welfare consequences of strategic behavior by firms to affect the amount of environmental regulation they face environmental regulation often attempts to force an industry to develop cleaner technology but the regulator may have no means to commit to a specific standard this lack of regulatory commitment induces firms to choose innovation strategically it is well known that firms have incentives to suppress innovation to induce the regulator to ratchet down the standard and this strategic behavior lowers welfare this paper explores a countervailing incentive in oligopoly settings firms have heightened incentives to innovate so as to increase regulation and raise rivals costs in equilibrium the incentive to raise rivals cost can mitigate the welfare loss arising from no regulatory commitment also a regulator who is unable to commit ex ante to the stringency of a regulatory standard can induce more clean technology than a regulator with a commitment mechanism

city structure job search and labour discrimination theory and policy implications we consider a search matching model in which black workers are discriminated against and the job arrival rates of all workers depend on social networks as well as distance to jobs location choices are driven by the racial preferences of households both blacks and whites consciously choosing to trade off proximity to neighbors of similar racial backgrounds for proximity to jobs because of coordination failures in the location choices multiple urban equilibria emerge there is a spatial mismatch equilibrium in which blacks reside far away from jobs and experience high unemployment rates and a spatial match equilibrium in which blacks are closer to jobs and experience lower unemployment rates under some reasonable condition we demonstrate that all workers are better off in the spatial match equilibrium we then consider two policies affirmative action and employment subsidies to the firms which hire black workers we show that the optimal policy requires imposing larger quotas or subsidies in cities in which black workers reside far away from jobs than in cities in which they live closer to jobs

environmental protection innovation and price setting behavior in spanish manufacturing firms abstract in this paper we analyze the effects of environmental protection regulation on process and product innovation decisions and their impact on price setting behavior in spanish manufacturing firms throughout 2009 2014 to this end we estimate several discrete choice probit models using firm level data our results show a positive relationship between the existence of environmental regulations environmental expenditures as a proxy and innovation however the magnitude of the effects and their significance depend on the type of innovation and the size of the firms environmental regulation positively impacts process innovation only in large firms 200 workers while it positively impacts product innovation exclusively in small firms up to 200 workers taking into account innovation activities we additionally explore the behavior of product prices we obtain that process innovation increases the probability of reducing prices for both small and large firms while product innovation only raises the likelihood of increasing prices for the former finally we look into the determinants of investment in environmental protection and find a positive impact of environmental regulation

why personal ties cannot be bought personal connections can function as privileged channels of information and trust when the reliability of information is particularly important applying for a job needing capital for a new enterprise moving to a new country their role often becomes crucial hence the ethnic enclaves both residential and professional in new york city the economic weight of the overseas chinese in their countries of residence the success of medieval networks of merchants organized along ethnic or religious lines personal networks are often very successful but they are by their nature discriminatory and thus tend to generate resentment and opposition among those excluded economists and sociologists debate whether networks can be replicated artificially not surprisingly economists tend to be more optimistic believing that appropriate market mechanisms encouraged and supported by policy where necessary can substitute for the missing personal channels sociologists on the other hand see the personal spontaneous link as the essence of the relation and thus as something that by its nature cannot be replicated at will e g marta tienda and rebeca raijman 2001 discussing james e rauch 2001 we address this question in a simple model of labor markets where workers differ in their unobservable productivity we ask how signaling the possibility of engaging

demand pull and technology push public support for eco innovation the case of the biofuels sector the purpose of this paper is to explore the differentiated impact of demand pull and technology push policies in shaping technological patterns in the biofuels sector the empirical analysis is based on a novel and original database biopat containing patents in the field of biofuels selected using appropriate keywords and classified according to the technological content of the invention our results generally show that technological capabilities and environmental regulation spur innovative activities in the biofuels sector both demand pull and technology push factors are found to be important drivers of innovation in the biofuels sector however technology exploitation activities in first generation technologies are found to be mainly driven by quantity and price based demand pull policies on the contrary the pace of technology exploration efforts in advanced generation biofuels is shown to react positively to price based demand pull incentives but also to technology push policy the clear diversity in the impact of different public support instruments provides new insights which fuel discussion on the optimal policy mix debate and offers new elements for the design of future policy strategies

the labor market integration of refugees in the united states do entrepreneurs in the network help we investigate whether entrepreneurs in the network of refugees from the same country of origin help refugees enter the labor market by hiring them we analyze the universe of refugee cases without u s ties who were resettled in the united states between 2005 and 2010 we address threats to identification due to refugees sorting into specific labor markets and to strategic placement by resettlement agencies we find that the probability that refugees are employed 90 days after arrival is positively affected by the number of business owners in their network but negatively affected by the number of those who are employees this suggests that network members who are entrepreneurs hire refugees while network members working as employees compete with them which is consistent with refugees complementing the former and substituting for the latter