estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

renewable natural resource management and use without markets natural resources by their nature are not readily bent to the status of private property efficient resource use is complicated by jurisdictional externalities public goods non use values and beneficiaries spatially separated from the location of resources the task is made more challenging by ecological complexity that obscures cause benefits and effects costs and dramatic time lags between individual actions and subsequent social consequences that together with substantial uncertainty introduce the chance of irreversibilities resource economists have played a major role in the literature on externalities the development of individual transferable quotas non market valuation techniques and common property management

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

the role of property rights in determining the environmental quality income relationship article i nfo this paper examines the role of property rights in shaping the relationship between environmental quality and income it develops an analytical framework that integrates the effects of property rights evolution natural resource attributes agent characteristics and production technology on the environment income relationship the substantive strength of this framework lies in its ability to rationalize a wide range of environment income relationships the model shows that the u shaped environment income relationship which is consistent with the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis can arise only under specific model conditions thus the framework provides an additional explanation for non universality of ekc we provide evidence in support of our framework from case studies of various natural resources

interrupted work careers depreciation and restoration of human capital the quantitative effects and even the existence of a human capital depreciation phenomenon have been a subject of controversy in the recent literature prior work however was largely cross sectional and the longitudinal dimension if any was retrospective using longitudinal panel data on married women in nls we have now established that real wages at reentry are indeed lower than at the point of labor force withdrawal and the decline in wages is greater the longer the interruption another striking finding is a relatively rapid growth in wages after the return to work this rapid growth appears to reflect the restoration or repair of previously eroded human capital the phenomenon of depreciation and restoration is also visible in data for immigrants to the united states however while immigrants eventually catch up with and often surpass natives returnees from the nonmarket do not fully restore their earnings potential

obsolescence of knowledge and career publication profiles some evidence of differences among fields in costs of interrupted careers in recent years women have received about 45 percent of all baccalaureate degrees but only approximately 20 percent of all ph d s does this imply that academic careers as compared with careers of the wider market for college graduates are less conducive to dual career family objectives evidence suggesting the relative tradeoff of these objectives is shown by the fact that over the last thirty years the zero order correlation between average cohort fertility and the proportion of ph d recipients who are women is 0 939 a female recipient of a doctorate is twice as likely as a male recipient to have specialized in the humanities and only one third as likely to have specialized in a physical science field furthermore of those who receive a doctorate in physical science a male is 60 percent more likely than a female to pursue research as a primary work activity in the humanities on the other hand a woman is at least as likely as a man to have research as an initial postdoctoral work activity obviously many factors affect opportunities and resultant decisions to enter particular careers and to select specific occupational specialties this study considers only onethe rate of obsolescence or depreciation of knowledge as reflected in the age profile of cited works this measure of the obsolescence of knowledge refers to the rate of decay in the relative frequency at which citations are made to a particular vintage of research communications as the communications age in other words the usefulness of older published research papers as an input to current research depreciates over time the rate at which this depreciation occurs is interpreted as measuring the durability of a professor s accumulated stock of knowledge evidence presented in section ii indicates that the durability of knowledge varies considerably from discipline to discipline this information raises a number of questions concerning how the durability of knowledge influences career decisions one influence considered here is that of a temporary career interruption for example if a woman experiences a break in her academic career such as for the purpose of raising children she will incur an opportunity cost in the sense that her research knowledge will to some extent become obsolete consequently her accumulated stock of knowledge will decline relative to those professors who have continuous careers the relative cost imposed on a woman who pursues dual family career objectives is higher the less durable the jobrelated knowledge this difference in relative costs is expected to alter career incentives the results presented here suggest that women who pursue academic careers have responded to these incentives before discussing the evidence on female careers i consider a more general model in which a professor is assumed to have a continuous career profile this model which is more appropriately viewed as a male model of investment behavior is used to analyze how the durability of a professor s knowledge affects his research productivity over a career interestingly the evidence suggests that a professor s response to less durable knowledge is not to compact all learning early in his career but rather to smooth learning over the career perhaps the most assistant professor arizona state university i would like to thank an anonymous referee and many friends for helpful comments on earlier drafts i am especially indebted to finis welch for valuable suggestions throughout the development of this paper the views expressed are my own and i am responsible for any possible errors

are corruption and taxation really harmful to growth firm level evidence exploiting a unique data set containing information about the estimated bribe payments of ugandan firms the authors study the relationship between bribe payments taxes and firm growth in uganda for the period 1995 97 using industry location averages to circumvent the potential problem of endogeneity and to deal with issues of measurement error they find that both the rate of taxation and the rate of bribery are negatively correlated with firm growth for the full data set a one percentage point increase in the bribery rate is associated with three percentage point reduction in firm growth an effect about three times that of taxation moreover after excluding outliers the authors find that bribery has a much greater negative impact on growth and taxation a considerably smaller one this provides some validation of firm level theories of corruption which posit that corruption retards development even more than taxation does

corruption a review as is increasingly recognised in academic literature and by international organisations corruption acts as a major deterrent to growth and development the aim of this survey is to organise and summarise existing theoretical and empirical work on corruption with a view to identifying opportunities for further research the paper begins with a brief overview of key definitions of corruption and then turns to a review of the factors that favour or deter the growth of corruption together with a brief look at related models this is followed by an examination of the consequences of corruption for society and the consideration of measures that might help to reduce corruption the paper ends with suggestions for future research and includes summaries of data sources and key variables for use in this research

corruption manufacturing plant growth and the asian paradox indonesian evidence summary using panel data from the indonesian manufacturing industry during the suharto era 1975 95 we assess the impact of plant level corruption on output and productivity growth in support of the grease the wheels hypothesis and the view of an asian paradox we find that corruption measured as bribes and indirect tax payments has a positive and statistically significant effect on individual plant growth this effect persists over the entire period which suggests improvements in the efficacy of the bribe system and a strengthening of the long term contract between firms and the government

determinants of agricultural economics faculty salaries in the spring of 1980 500 randomly selected agricultural economists at land grant universities were asked to complete a pretested mailed questionnaire the questionnaire was designed to secure individual information and preserve respondent anonymity the 311 returned questionnaires represented a response rate of nearly 60 two hundred and forty one of the respondents held ph d degrees these individuals formed the sample for the following analysis 2

firm level corruption in vietnam abstractthis article uses panel data from a survey of small and medium sized enterprises in vietnam to uncover which firms pay bribes and which do not we also study how bribe paying evolved between 2005 and 2007 and test how the determinants of bribes changed between the two years three sets of insights emerge first bribe incidence is highly associated with firm level differences in visibility sunk costs ability to pay and some but not all types of interaction with public officials second the magnitudes of bribes are distinctly higher for firms which get preferential tax benefits and government contracts third the observed decrease in bribe incidence between 2005 and 2007 is largely driven by significant behavioral changes these behavioral changes seem to be associated with policy initiatives to improve law enforcement and increased media focus on punitive actions against corruption

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

an equilibrium queuing model of bribery it is sometimes argued that bribery is inefficient because bureaucrats may cause delays for attracting more bribes this hypothesis is examined in the context of a queue where customers having different values of time are ranked by their bribe payments to the queue s server the nash equilibrium strategies of the customers are derived it is shown that the server is unlikely to slow down the allocation process when bribery is allowed the model does not have stringent informational requirements and the equilibrium outcome minimizes the average value of time costs of the queue it also suggests a useful auctioning procedure

governing a groundwater commons a strategic and laboratory analysis of western water law we examine strategic behavior in groundwater depletion within the setting of state governance of groundwater resources in the american west solving a dynamic common pool resource model for its optimal solution and its subgame perfect equilibrium provides benchmarks for behavior observed in laboratory experiments three forms of legal rules common pool depletion with a rule of capture to establish ownership absolute ownership doctrine entry restrictions prior appropriation doctrine and stock quotas correlative rights doctrinekre examined in terms of their impact on individual strategic behavior in laboratory experiments

negative returns to seniority new evidence in academic markets recent research has suggested that the long observed negative association between seniority and pay among college faculty largely reflects below average research productivity of senior faculty a possibility that most earlier studies did not examine overlooked in both waves of studies however is match quality because the higher quality of the faculty institutional match implied by higher seniority should all else equal result in higher salaries failure to account for match quality inflates the estimated returns to seniority indeed that positive bias the authors find is roughly equal in magnitude to the negative bias caused by failure to account for research quantity and quality when they account for both match quality and faculty research productivity in an analysis of data on economics faculty at five research universities over a 21 year period the authors estimate that holding experience and other factors constant the penalty for twenty years of seniority is 16 of salary

accounting for endogeneity and the dynamics of corporate social corporate financial performance relationship abstract this paper examines the endogeneity problem in studies dealing with corporate social performance and financial performance relationship since randomized controlled experiments in the business research field are often unfeasible researchers rely mostly on observational data to make claims about doing good doing well arguments in response to several strong calls for additional well crafted empirical research that address endogeneity we revisit the csp cfp relationship in the airline industry to understand how endogeneity arises and how to control for it in studies based on observational panel data we exploit various approaches such as ols fixed effects fixed effects iv 2sls dynamic system gmm and gls estimators we show the appropriateness behind the use of the dynamic system gmm estimator and its benefits over the fixed effects estimator in addition we demonstrate that results in models that do not account for endogeneity lead to inflated estimations misleading interpretations and wrong theoretical propositions about the dynamic nature of csp cfp relationship

cadillac desert revisited property rights public policy and water resource depletion to alleviate arizona s dependence on groundwater the federal government subsidized construction of the central arizona project cap to import water from the colorado river in exchange for the subsidy arizona reformed its groundwater law to eliminate common property pumping and to ban groundwater mining after the year 2025 we build a model of water resource development in which imported water is a capacity constrained backstop the model is applied to quantify the welfare effects of alternative cap construction dates and arizona groundwater laws we reach two general conclusions first cap was completed 86 years too early in 1987 at a deadweight loss of 2 612 billion ironically construction in 1987 yielded lower surplus than never constructing cap second the political exchange of reform for subsidy introduced a greater loss 2 612 billion than it corrected 0 810 billion the exchange was worse than doing nothing at all

endogeneity and the dynamics of internal corporate governance abstract we use a well developed dynamic panel generalized method of moments gmm estimator to alleviate endogeneity concerns in two aspects of corporate governance research the effect of board structure on firm performance and the determinants of board structure the estimator incorporates the dynamic nature of internal governance choices to provide valid and powerful instruments that address unobserved heterogeneity and simultaneity we re examine the relation between board structure and performance using the gmm estimator in a panel of 6 000 firms over a period from 1991 to 2003 and find no causal relation between board structure and current firm performance we illustrate why other commonly used estimators that ignore the dynamic relationship between current governance and past firm performance may be biased we discuss where it may be appropriate to consider the dynamic panel gmm estimator in corporate governance research as well as caveats to its use

scholarships citations and salaries economic rewards in economics while substantial attention has been paid to the determinants of academics earnings 5 7 8 14 15 this literature has by implication suggested that the mere fact of having spent more time in the profession and the publication of more scholarly articles and books are the major determinants of salary differences our purpose here is to introduce a new determinant the quality of one s scholarly research measured by the frequency of references to that work as an additional objective measure of productivity we expect that this proxy for the extent of a scholar s influence on the work of other researchers is rewarded by the market in addition to giving a more complete picture of the determination of salaries in academic labor markets our approach should be useful in establishing a better framework for the evaluation of issues of discrimination in such markets than has been presented before 2 9

is corruption an efficient grease this paper tests whether corruption may be an efficient grease in the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework it analyzes the interaction between aggregate efficiency corruption and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 69 countries both developed and developing using two measures of corruption and two other aspects of governance we observe that corruption is less detrimental to efficiency in countries where institutions are less effective it may even be positively associated with efficiency in countries where institutions are extremely ineffective we thus find evidence for the grease the wheels hypothesis in its weak and strong forms

does corruption boost or harm firms performance in developing and emerging economies a firm level study in the last decade a growing number of studies have addressed the ongoing debate about whether corruption sands or greases the wheels of business at the firm level this study revisits this debate and proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework to test whether corruption harms or boosts firm performance as well as the extent to which this relationship is mediated by the countries institutional settings the size and strategic behaviour of the firms and market competition based on a sample of 21 250 firms located in 117 emerging and developing countries and resorting to instrumental variable iv estimations three main results were found a regardless of the proxy used for corruption and firm performance the former clearly harms the latter b corruption greases the wheels of business for african firms but it sands the wheels for firms in latin america the caribbean eastern europe central asia and southern asia and c the negative impact of corruption on performance is mitigated for larger and exporting firms

does raiding explain the negative returns to faculty seniority i introduction economists have studied various aspects of faculty mobility research shows that turnover is greater among nonunion faculty rees 1994 female faculty average slightly more employers than male faculty barbezat and hughes 2001 ginther and kahn 2004 1 the responsiveness of turnover to relative pay diminishes with rank ehrenberg kasper and rees 1991 and research productivity enhances prospects for upward mobility ault rutman and stevenson 1979 1982 coupe smeets and warzynski 2005 still questions remain unanswered where do faculty go when they leave a university how does faculty turnover vary with time at a university what percentage of faculty move upward and what percentage move downward because of tenure denials or the prospect of being turned down for tenure the present article contributes to our understanding of these issues but its primary objective was to use data on faculty mobility to provide insights on another issue returns to academic seniority the negative returns to seniority that many studies find are commonly attributed to one of two factors 2 the first view is that negative returns reflect monopsony power on the part of universities faculty with high mobility costs acquire high seniority and because they are unlikely to move they are paid less than equally productive faculty that employers view as more likely to leave a competing explanation is that highly productive faculty are raided according to this story returns to seniority are biased negatively because faculty with high seniority tend to have low unmeasured productivity the best faculty are bid away moving on to better jobs those who remain are the faculty without outside offers and the negative returns estimated for senior faculty actually reflect a penalty for low unmeasured productivity rather than a true penalty for seniority the raiding story has several implications first estimated returns to seniority should become less negative the more fully the productivity is measured second estimated returns should be less negative once we control for faculty who are bid away finally and of particular importance estimated returns to seniority should not be negative for faculty who are bid away the faculty for whom unmeasured productivity is presumably high with the right data set these hypotheses can be tested rejection of the raiding hypothesis would provide tacit evidence of monoposony in academic markets 3 this article contributes to the literature in several ways it is the first research to directly test the raiding hypothesis it provides a detailed look at faculty mobility in one segment of the academic labor market it extends and improves bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 in the following ways it expands the sample to cover three decades of faculty pay records it includes additional controls for productivity number and types of books recent and prospective articles and so forth resulting in the most complete specification of research productivity to date and it allows for heterogeneity in the seniority penalty via phd pedigree and direction of move finally it tests for the possibility that the academic job market does a better job of matching faculty and universities in recent years as might be expected because of the information revolution the sample consists of five public phd granting universities in the midwest we track all tenure track economics faculty employed in these universities over a 30 yr period we measure their productivity their pay and their mobility as such the study provides a rich and detailed investigation of one subset of economics programs it is possible that mobility may be greater in urban areas where faculty can more readily obtain alternative employment without relocating and prior research indicates that pay structures depend on the university s stature and its relative emphasis on research and teaching

eight questions about corruption this paper will discuss eight frequently asked questions about public corruption 1 what is corruption 2 which countries are the most corrupt 3 what are the common characteristics of countries with high corruption 4 what is the magnitude of corruption 5 do higher wages for bureaucrats reduce corruption 6 can competition reduce corruption 7 why have there been so few recent successful attempts to fight corruption 8 does corruption adversely affect growth

groundwater use under incomplete information abstract this paper introduces a game theoretic model of groundwater extraction in a two cell aquifer under incomplete information a novel assumption is that individual users have incomplete knowledge of the speed of lateral flows in the aquifer although a user is aware that his neighbor s water use has some influence on his future water stock he is uncertain about the degree of this impact we find that the lack of information may either increase or decrease the rate of water use and welfare in a two period framework the relevant characteristic is the ratio of the periodic marginal benefits of water use depending on whether this ratio is convex or concave the average speed with which the aquifer is depleted decreases or increases when users learn more about the local hydrologic properties of groundwater in principle welfare may decrease even in cases when the groundwater allocation is closer to the efficient groundwater allocation

appropriation violent enforcement and transaction costs a critical survey this paper focuses on the extension of transaction costs to appropriative activity and coercive power in the property rights approach it has been argued that including the costs of appropriation and violent enforcement in transaction costs is based on the assumption that coaseian bargaining can be extended to any institutional scenario i e voluntary as well as coercive exchange however voluntary transactions cannot capture the logic of coercive power this means that the assumption of an efficient political market is not valid and that the political coase theorem lacks the logical consistency to provide a cornerstone for political theory

groundwater focusing on the real issue most studies of the welfare economics of groundwater have focused mainly on the dichotomy between optimal control of groundwater use and no control at all this article argues that under circumstances that generally prevail in semiarid zones assigning property rights to groundwater and permitting the market to determine the allocation of water use can lead to a second best solution an argument is made that if potential users would be allowed to coase bargain with incumbent users on the issuance of new groundwater rights the second best solution is elevated to a pareto optimal solution this article is also a tale of two states water law and performance in new mexico and arizona

earnings profiles of department heads comparing cross section and panel models academics who become department heads suffer declining research skills because of time spent performing administrative tasks and this skill depreciation slows future wage growth this study examines kansas state university faculty who served as department heads during the period 1965 92 cross section estimates of the compensation for serving as department head are biased upward because of a correlation between unmeasured productivity characteristics and selection as department head to correct for this bias the authors reestimate earnings equations using a panel model that incorporates personal fixed effects although the average department head in the sample received a wage premium of 12 the premium for past administrative service had completely disappeared for the typical former head another finding is that skill depreciation was most severe and wage growth most adversely affected in the sciences as compensation department heads in the sciences received a larger initial administrative premium th

current issues in the economics of groundwater resource management the issue of groundwater management remains a practical concern in many regions throughout the world while water managers continue to grapple with the question of how to manage this resource in this article we attempt to bring the most advanced and appropriate tools to bear on the issue of resource allocation involving groundwater our objective is to demonstrate the state of the art in the literature on ways to think about this complex resource and to deal with the important economic issues emanating from its complexity we present the conceptual framework within which economists examine the elements interacting in the management of groundwater resources indicate why the role of the market is limited with respect to the price of this very complex resource and point to the mechanisms that can pull competitive groundwater price and quality graded quantity of groundwater in line with their equilibrium levels in particular we critically review economic models of groundwater use examine the potential for groundwater management discuss the difficulties encountered in the estimation of the relevant control variables of such models and identify the advantages and limitations of the instruments devised for the efficient use allocation of this resource finally we argue that devised regulatory schemes usually ignore the information and knowledge needed for their implementation and we suggest a core of conditions necessary for successful groundwater management reforms

incomplete ownership rent dissipation and the return to related investments i introduction when ownership rights to a resource are costless to enforce trades occur and an equilibrium price emerges in such cases it is a price and a transfer of wealth from one agent to another that rations use of the resource absent ownership no price is charged and use is rationed by a transaction cost acquiring a barrel of oil or an acre foot of water from a shared reservoir is a transaction a resource in the common domain is transformed into property by the act of lifting it to the surface where ownership can be enforced the relevant transaction cost in this case is the cost of pumping in a fishery the relevant transaction cost is the cost of locating and capturing a portion of the unowned stock the marginal transaction cost limits each individual s use and accomplishes the necessary task of equating demand to the resource s supply users of the resource are in equilibrium when this marginal transaction cost equals the resource s marginal value the transaction cost also eliminates all or part of the rent the resource would earn if owned however and the size of this loss depends on the relationship between average transaction cost and the resource s marginal value this suggests that the amount of rent an unowned resource will yield in equilibrium after netting out relevant costs depends on the shape of the cost function for acquiring it if marginal cost is much greater than average cost as in cases where marginal cost is steeply rising the equilibrium rent will be relatively large 1 while the shape of the cost function depends on the nature of the resource it is not immutable for example it can be altered by imposing constraints on the inputs or the technology used it follows that users of a resource would benefit collectively if the technology or inputs used were constrained in a way that causes the marginal cost of obtaining it to rise steeply the optimal choice of such constraints is a well formulated second best policy problem this specification of the problem is incomplete however because the intensity of competition for the shared resource can also be changed by actions that affect it only indirectly an innovation or investment that lowers the individual s cost of acquiring it for example by reducing the price of an input used has this effect so does an action that raises the resource s marginal value product possibly by affecting the price or availability of a substitute such actions increase competition for the shared resource and raise the equilibrium cost of actions taken to acquire it in this sense the rent dissipation that is normally thought to characterize competition for shared resources can spread to related actions or investments both of these considerations are pursued in what follows second best policy toward a shared resource is examined by considering regulations that can control some but not all of the inputs needed to acquire it it is shown that the optimal input constraint and the fraction of potential rent such a policy can capture depend on two determinants the elasticity of substitution between and relative price of regulated and unregulated inputs it is also shown that competition for the shared resource can eliminate all or part of the return to related actions i e actions that result in a shift in the relevant private cost or benefit function the size of such losses depends in a simple way on the elasticities of relevant cost and benefit functions these additional losses can occur even in cases where direct competition causes complete rent dissipation as a result the loss that results from free access can exceed the rent the resource would earn in a complete markets equilibrium this phenomenon termed excess dissipation is illustrated with a number of examples investments that reduce the percolation of groundwater back into a common aquifer or expenditures to prevent fish from escaping from a net and returning to the natural population during the process of capture are shown to have this effect

how does corruption affect public debt an empirical analysis summary this paper investigates the relationship between corruption the shadow economy and public debt it additionally examines whether the shadow economy increases the adverse effects of corruption on public debt the model is empirically tested for 126 countries over 1996 2012 using ordinary least squares ols fixed effects system generalized method of moments gmm and instrumental variable estimation and two measures of corruption the transparency international corruption perceptions index and the kaufmann et al corruption index results confirm that increased corruption and a larger shadow economy lead to an increase in public debt results additionally indicate that the shadow economy magnifies the effect of corruption on public debt suggesting that they act as complements results also suggest that a larger shadow economy reduces tax revenues and thus increases public debt similarly higher government expenditure enhances the effects of corruption on government debt hence reducing corruption should be a primary policy goal of governments given the complementarity detected between corruption and the shadow economy reducing corruption would also lead to a fall in the size of the shadow economy and public debt reducing corruption will also minimize the adverse effects of corruption on government debt through government expenditure

the structure of a contract and the theory of a non exclusive resource the process of arriving at a useful concept of analysis is not only slow and painful but also may go astray and attain nothing useful someone begins with one example or observation followed by a theory which is intuitively plausible a theoretical term associated with a vague concept is coined examples of a seemingly different type emerge which call for another theory the process goes on as examples and theories continue to accumulate the different categories under the same heading of analysis serve only to confuse and each associated theory becomes ad hoc such has been the fate of the concept of externality a more useful approach i think is via contractual conditions the example chosen for illustration is marine fisheries where the fishing right is taken

competitive versus efficient extraction of a common property resource the groundwater case abstract in this paper socially optimal and private extraction of a common property aquifer are compared open loop equilibrium and feedback equilibrium in linear strategies have been computed to characterize private extraction the use of these two equilibrium concepts allows us to distinguish between cost and strategic externalities as long as the open loop solution captures only the cost externality and the feedback solution captures both the results show that strategic behaviour increases the overexploitation of the aquifer compared to the open loop solution however if the groundwater storage capacity is large the difference between the socially optimal and private extraction the latter characterized by a feedback equilibrium is negligible

corruption types of corruption and firm financial performance new evidence from a transitional economy using a nationwide survey of provincial institutional quality and a sample of private manufacturing small and medium scale enterprises the smes this paper contributes to the literature by considering for the first time the effects of corruption on the financial performance of vietnamese private smes interestingly contrary to previous findings we find that corruption when measured by a dummy variable does not affect firms financial performance after controlling for heterogeneity simultaneity and dynamic endogeneity however the intensity of bribery and the majority of the forms of corruption were found to have negative impacts on firms financial performance hence a typical approach using only a dummy variable for bribery might not adequately evaluate the impact of bribe intensity or even ignores the negative impacts of some types of bribes on firms financial performance the findings suggest that anti corruption measures are vital for the development of the vietnamese private smes

water conveyance return flows and technology choice abstract this paper develops a spatial conjunctive use model of an irrigation project in which the regulatory agency determines investments in the centralized distribution system and farmers decide the level of on farm technology in the field irrigation return flows are assumed to recharge the groundwater aquifer it is shown that there is specialization in production with upstream farmers using surface water and downstream farmers pumping from the aquifer an empirical model suggests that the proportion of return flows has a significant effect on the level of investments in water distribution as well as in the field for example if return flows are relatively high it may be optimal to allow for significant water losses from the canal and the fields it suggests that the project pricing and technology adoption policies may need to be tempered by consideration of the basinwide impacts of water diversions

a free lunch in the commons we derive conditions under which raising costs through a regulatory constraint or a fully expropriated tax can increase the profits arising from a common pool resource the basic model assumes a fixed number of identical agents with linear costs selling in a single period at an exogenous price a necessary and sufficient condition for a cost increase to be profitable is that aggregate output from the resource be locally convex in aggregate effort we also show that cost increases can be profitable even if price is endogenous agents are heterogeneous entry is costless or agents are playing a markov perfect equilibrium of a dynamic game we also discuss more general welfare implications of the result along with its relation to existing results for a cournot oligopoly

strategic behavior and efficiency in the common property extraction of groundwater groundwater has always been regarded as a common property resource where entry is restricted by land ownership and private exploitation is inefficient in 1980 gisser and sanchez presented a first estimation of this inefficiency cornparing socially optimal exploitation with private competitive exploitation using a model with linear water demand average extraction cost independent of the rate of extraction and linearly decreasing with respect to the water table level they characterized the private exploitation of the aquifer assuming that farmers are myopic and choose their rate of extraction to maximize their current profits whereas optimal exploitation is obtained by maximizing the present value of the stream of aggregate profits their results show that if the storage capacity of the aquifer is relatively large the difference between the two systems is so small that it can be ignored for practical consideration this result has been called the gisser sanchez rule by nieswiadomy 1985 and it has and important policy implication regulation of the resource does not seem justified since the profits it brings are not very high 1

evaluation of price policy in the presence of water theft mathematical programming models of representative farms are commonly used to evaluate policies such as input subsidies and output price supports on canals in india upstream farmers routinely use more irrigation water than allotted in such circumstances the programming model should encompass farmers locational heterogeneity here a representative watercourse with thirty farms is calibrated to the eight crops fifteen irrigation turns yield responses to water and seepage in maharashtra not only does water theft increase the social cost of price policies but the policies increased inducement to theft by upstream farmers leaves those downstream with less water and lower incomes

normalized collective corruption in a transitional economy small treasuries in large chinese enterprises small treasuries xiaojinku are off book accounts found in many large enterprises in china for the purpose of rewarding managers and their subordinates building up guanxi personal networks and even financing the business operations of their danwei work units we analyze cests with reference to their antecedents constructs and consequences our analysis indicates that while cests can in some cases help organizations deal with immediate financial problems they have negative impacts on organizational performance in relation to the moral hazard of managers as well as the allocation of organizational resources in respect of sustainability of strategic advantages and growth and mismanagement of organizations because of the involutionary behavior of managers in chinese enterprises we propose that it will require not only organizational controls but also a fundamental change in these managers ideology for solving the problems of cests

does inequality lead to greater efficiency in the use of local commons the role of strategic investments in capacity abstract this paper examines how inequality in access to credit affects the strategic behavior of users of a common resource in their investment and extraction decisions a dynamic two stage game is developed in which agents choose the level of sunk investment in capacity and the consequent extraction path the results show that agents invest in excess capacity except when inequality is very high the relation between inequality and efficiency in resource extraction is found to be non monotonic with the steady state resource stock being closest to the optimal level when either inequality is very high or very low

on and off the hot seat an analysis of entry into and out of university administration the authors investigate economists decisions to enter and exit department chair positions in research intensive economics departments of elite universities during the postwar era 1948 1989 they use the american economic association survey of members as well as phone surveys to determine which and at what point in their careers faculty assume administrative positions the theoretical model predicts and empirical results confirm that a faster rate of knowledge depreciation in an economist s field of study reduces the entry and exit rates for the chair position moreover among those who have exited the position of chair longer terms of past chair service and faster knowledge depreciation accelerate the timing of movements into upper level administration the findings suggest that administrators are to some extent made and not born and that the growing specialization and technical nature of many professions could affect who chooses administrative careers and at what point in their careers they choose

pareto improving water management over space and time the honolulu case we model welfare gains from efficient allocation of groundwater over space and time relative to the status quo policy of financial cost recovery in order to promote political feasibility an intertemporal compensation plan is devised that renders the reform pareto improving gainers from the reform finance the compensation in proportion to their benefits through a block pricing scheme for the honolulu case only 7 of the 441 million in gains to winners is needed to compensate losers from the reform future winners from the reform also repay the deficit created by the compensation package much as state and local governments finance capital improvements copyright 2009 oxford university press