democracy volatility and economic development growth stability is an important objective because development requires sustained increases in income because volatility is costly for the poor and because volatility deters growth we study the determinants of average growth and its volatility as a two equation system and find that higher levels of democracy and diversification lower volatility whereas volatility itself reduces growth muslim countries instrument for democracy and measures of diversification identify volatility in contrast to the lack of consensus on the democracy growth relationship the democracy stability link is robust rather than focus on growth this paper forges an alternative link between democracy and development through the volatility channel

quantitative restrictions and the welfare effects of capital inflows abstract this paper explores the welfare effects of capital inflows when some imports are subject to quantitative restrictions it is shown that in a heckscher ohlin model where all imports are restricted by quotas and some fraction of the initial domestic capital stock is foreign owned a capital inflow is welfare improving regardless of the ranking of sectoral factor intensities with sector specific capital stocks and both tariff ridden and quota restricted imports the consequences of direct foreign investment in any sector are uncertain and depend upon whether the two imports are compensated substitutes or complements as well as the characteristics of production

domestic versus international capital mobility some empirical evidence this paper develops an empirical test to determine whether on average capital moves more easily between industries within a country or between coun tries within an industry the test is applied using cross section dat a on accounting rates of return to capital of u s multinational corp orations in 1966 and 1977 it is found that international capital mob ility was greater in the earlier period but domestic capital mobilit y tended to dominate in the later period these findings are of parti cular importance to the field of international economics since compe ting trade models use opposite assumptions as regards which type of c apital mobility is greater

openness external risk and volatility implications for the compensation hypothesis a central assumption in the globalization literature is that economic openness generates economic insecurity and volatility based on this assumption schol ars of international political economy have proposed the compensation hypothesis which claims that globalization bolsters rather than undermines the welfare state by increasing public demand for social protection against externally generated eco nomic instability the openness volatility link is dubious however on both theoret ical and empirical grounds in this study i revisit the volatility assumption focusing on a crucial difference between openness and external risk in their effect on volatil ity my statistical analysis of a panel data set from 175 countries 1950 2002 finds a consistent effect of external risk on volatility of the major economic aggregates but a largely insignificant effect of openness these findings suggest that economic volatility may be a mistaken link in explaining the openness spending nexus calling for further research on the causal mechanisms linking the two the general growth of government in the post world war ii era is one of the most important empirical regularities in political science measured by general govern ment consumption or sectoral expenditures government size grew dramatically during most of the postwar period intrigued by this phenomenal government growth political scientists offered numerous accounts some viewing this growth as a corollary of economic phenomena such as modernization industrialization income distribution or fiscal illusion and others attributing government growth to political causes such as bureaucratization interest group politics and electoral competition 1

measuring macroeconomic instability a critical survey illustrated with exports series for at least 40 years the analysis of the causes and consequences of macroeconomic instability has greatly deepened our understanding of the handicaps faced by developing countries this concern on economic instability is evidenced by a broad spectrum of indicators based on the deviation of observed values of a given economic aggregate from its reference or trend value in general the choice of this or that indicator is not discussed advocating that the resulting instability indicators are closely correlated focusing on measurements of instability in export revenue data for 134 countries from 1970 to 2005 this paper finds that this assertion may be true for variancebased indicators measuring the average magnitude of deviations from the trend however great discrepancies may arise between different measures of the asymmetry or of the occurrence of extreme deviations around the trend when different trend computation methods are used our purpose is therefore to invite further discussions regarding the use of these indicators and to highlight the different dimensions of instability which have been so far unheeded by the economic literature

decentralization and political career concerns abstract politicians career paths often start at some subnational governments and end at the national one allocation of authorities among national and subnational governments affects i how tempting the prospects of taking national offices are and hence how strong bureaucrats political career concerns are and ii whether the incentives generated by these political career concerns can be put into productive use at subnational governments we illustrate this tradeoff in determining the optimal degree of decentralization using china as a case study we also compare the equilibrium degree of decentralization in autocracy and in democracy

a theory of political transitions we develop a theory of political transitions inspired by the experiences of western europe and latin america nondemocratic societies are controlled by a rich elite the initially disenfranchised poor can contest power by threatening revolution especially when the opportunity cost is low for example during recessions the threat of revolution may force the elite to democratize democracy may not consolidate because it is redistributive and so gives the elite an incentive to mount a coup highly unequal societies are less likely to consolidate democracy and may end up oscillating between regimes and suffer substantial fiscal volatility

democracy and national economic performance the preference for stability appear to arise because democracies ameliorate the effects of social cleavages another mechanism that might explain democratic stability when growth and volatility are jointly examined democracies reveal highly favorable economic results oes democracy affect national economic performance and if so how no question is more central to the study of political economics almost all previous work on democracy and economic performance has focused exclusively on growth rates with contradictory and confusing results in this article we argue that to reveal the impact of democratic institutions on economic performance scholars must consider two dimensions of economic performance growth rate and volatility we begin with a novel hypothesis economic policy in democracy is risk avoiding relative to policy in nondemocracies 1 because voters are riskaverse they penalize incumbent governments for economic volatility and democratic governments respond accordingly in nondemocracies we posit that elites are more likely to seek risk that voters would reject consequently autocracies produce systematically more economic volatility than

welfare gains from capital inflows under import quotas abstract the presence of tariffs was assumed in the literature which examined the effect of additional foreign investment on the welfare of the host country in the small country setting however this paper analyzes the case of import quotas and shows that additional inflows of foreign capital improve the host country s welfare when import quotas are kept constant

courting economic development we show that court enforcement uncertainty hinders economic development using sharp variation in judiciaries across native american reservations in the united states congressional legislation passed in 1953 assigned state courts the authority to resolve civil disputes on a subset of reservations while tribal courts retained authority on unaffected reservations although affected and unaffected reservations had similar economic conditions when the law passed reservations under state courts experienced significantly greater long run growth when we examine the distribution of incomes across reservations the average difference in development is due to the lower incomes of the most impoverished reservations with tribal courts we show that the relative under development of reservations with tribal courts is driven by reservations with the most uncertainty in court enforcement

optimal tariffs and income taxes under imperfect and uncertain foreign investment international investment as well as international trade is now a wide phenomenon and optimal policies to be selected in the presence of both international trade and investment have been a great concern jones 7 and kemp 9 have done pioneering works in this area of study previous studies however have mostly postulated that international capital movements are perfect while perfect capital mobility is expected in the long run bhagwati and brecher 2 and brecher and bhagwati 3 emphasized short run sluggishness of foreign investment that is even in the presence of international differentials in rates of return to capital the amount of foreign capital existing in the host country is fixed in the short run a realistic case however will be between complete fixity and perfect mobility of foreign capital this is especially true in the medium run in such a case the amount of foreign capital existing in a country at a particular future point in time may be reasonably conceived as uncertain to that country uncertainty may arise for various reasons the case includes uncertainty about the level of the rate of return to capital in the world market and also uncertainty about production technology employed by foreign investors these cause amounts of foreign capital to be received by the host country uncertain to it even under perfect international capital mobility uncertainties in such a case are relevant when the host country government has a long run perspective and is concerned with the long run consequences of its policies this paper addresses the open question of levels of optimal policies to be chosen when foreign capital movements are uncertain as well as imperfect and examines whether they modify or make intact the optimal policies established traditionally policies considered here are import tariff and income tax by the host country since these are prevalent and have attracted much attention in the literature of international trade and investment

large is beautiful the welfare effect of technology transfer reconsidered abstract this paper demonstrates that a technology transfer via foreign owned firms always reduces the host country s national income if the new technology is localized in the atkinson stiglitz sense at a capital labor ratio higher than prevails locally although developing countries can mitigate this negative impact of technology transfer by restricting the activities of foreign firms we argue that complete capital market liberalization yields even higher national income

energy tariffs in a small open economy abstract tariffs on imported energy alter production and redistribute income the present paper examines a small open economy producing two traded goods with capital labor and imported energy a tariff reduces import and domestic factor income but payment to one domestic factor rises energy intensive output falls but the other output may rise in the general equilibrium political opinions on the tariff would differ revenue is concave in the tariff suggesting that the government might set the tariff to maximize revenue a simulation illustrates these general equilibrium properties across a range of tariffs

entitlement to assort democracy compromise culture and economic stability abstract we propose a simple model to support rodrik s 2000 conjecture that democracy lowers economic instability through breeding compromise culture in the model a population of compromisers and opportunists collectively bargain over the assortativity level of matching through a democratic political institution we show that compromisers are able to achieve a positive level of assortativity which helps them to avoid matching with opportunists this in turn raises compromisers payoffs above opportunists and eventually compromisers dominate the population through cultural evolution

international capital mobility shadow prices and the cost of protection this paper studies the welfare losses from tariff protection in a small open economy when some factors are internationally mobile our principal result is that international fictor mobility must raise the cost of protection more specifically the welfare loss resulting from a uniform increase in tariffs in a competitive small open economy is greater when tariff induced international factor movements take place than when factors are internationally immobile by contrast an exogen1ous inflow of factors in the presence of tariffs may increase or reduce the welfare loss associated with protection depending on whether or not the protected commodities use the foreign owned factors intensively relative to domestically owned factors these results are proven for a very general specification of the economy s technology in particular no restrictions are placed on the degree of vertical integration in production on the sectors into which factors are internationally mobile or on the number of goods and factors our main result holds whether or not an increase in tariff rates leads the economy to specialise in addition we show how our results relate to earlier work on immiserising capital inflows and on negative shadow prices for factors of production thus synthesizing a number of recent results within a common framework the paper is organised as follows in section 2 we explain our framework and derive expressions for the welfare effects of tariffs when all factors are domestically owned and when some factors are foreign owned but not internationally

democracy diversification and growth reversals there exists convincing evidence that democratic countries are less volatile this conclusion is usually reached with respect to volatility as measured by the standard deviation of annual growth rates of per capita gdp which includes both low and high frequency fluctuations however recently several studies have documented that significant changes in trend growth such as growth accelerations that last a decade or similar periods of negative growth are quite common in this paper we ask whether democracy also has a stabilizing effect on trend volatility i e whether more democratic countries experience fewer and milder swings of trend growth we find a common phenomenon medium term reversals of growth that is periods of exceptionally high growth are on average followed by periods of exceptionally low growth and vice versa the propensity to experience large swings of trend growth is not uniform across countries less democratic countries are more susceptible to it when compared with factors commonly associated with volatility such as measures of quality of institutions macroeconomic policies and financial development we find that democracy is the most robust predictor of a country s propensity for growth reversals we construct a model in which non democracies have high barriers of entry for new firms this leads to less sectoral diversification fewer sectors are operated but more resources are channeled to each in an uncertain environment this leads to infrequent but large growth accelerations when one of the few sectors operated is successful however these accelerations are followed by large declines when fortunes change in favor of the missing sectors we present empirical evidence that confirms the positive relationship between democracy and industrial diversification

foreign owned land while foreign investment augments the capital stock it also affects land prices if it causes land values to rise then the resulting capital gain benefits current landowners but the perma nent effect can be to reduce welfare other things equal more crowde d countries have higher land prices and lower steady state welfare b ut their net foreign indebtedness depends on technology savings beha vior and the interest rate even when it does not affect the domesti c capital stock a land tax raises steady state welfare copyright 1988 by american economic association

deciding when to quit reference dependence over slot machine outcomes abstract we conduct tests for reference dependent loss aversion using slot machine gamblers decisions on when to quit playing for a visit to a casino evidence for a lagged status quo reference po

participatory politics social cooperation and economic stability few would doubt the proposition that political institutions matter for economic development yet robust generalizations and systematic evidence on how exactly they do so are lacking in this paper attention is drawn to regularity in the cross national data that has received little attention to date participatory political regimes are associated with significantly lower levels of aggregate economic instability after presenting some of the evidence it is speculated that the reason has to do with the propensity of democracy to moderate social conflict and induce compromise three distinct arguments as to why this may be the case are presented

the demand for casino gaming in this study an econometric model is developed to examine the determinants of the demand for casino gaming specifically the demand for slot machine wagering at riverboats and racinos in addition to examining the effects of traditional demand variables the effect on wagering of variables such as location of a wagering facility and of government restrictions is examined a unique measure of accessibility of market area customers to a facility and to competing facilities was developed the demand for wagering at a facility was found to increase as access by customers in its market area increases and to decrease as access by its customers to competing riverboats racinos or indian casinos increases government restrictions were found to have an adverse effect on wagering at a riverboat on the other hand wagering at a riverboat was found to increase when such restrictions were imposed on competing riverboats the presence of total loss limits and restrictions on boarding times at a riverboat were found

international factor movements commodity trade and commercial policy in a specific factor model two events in the decade of the 1970s had a major impact on world trade and factor movements the collapse of the bretton woods fixed exchange rate system and opec s success in raising petroleum prices the enormous current account surplus accruing to some of the opec members was successfully recycled by the international capital markets to among others the oil importing developing countries in addition the vastly increased tempo of investment in the capital rich labour poor opec members in west asia attracted migration of labour skilled as well as unskilled to these countries from some of the oil importing developing countries the remittances from these workers in turn eased the problem of the labourexporting countries in adjusting to the increased cost of oil imports thus both borrowing from private capital markets and export of labour became very important elements in cushioning the oil shock for a number of countries the post opec movements of labour and financial capital while dramatic are only the more recent instances of a phenomenon of much greater antiquity the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw vast migration of people out of europe though these movements were the result of conquests and colonization rather than movements from one sovereign state into another but the nineteenth century particularly the latter half saw migration of the latter kind from europe to countries of north and south america as well as capital investment by residents of europe in these

international migration remittances and welfare in a dependent economy abstract this note extends the work of rivera batiz 1982 in an attempt to examine the role of remittances in determining the effects of migration on the welfare of the remaining residents in a small open economy producing both traded and non traded goods it is shown that if the flow of remittances exceeds a certain critical amount the remaining residents benefit from migration even if they do not receive any of the remittances themselves this is in sharp contrast with the results of the rivera batiz model in which the possibility of a gain for the non migrants is ruled out

the dilemma of cheap food and self sufficiency the case of wheat in iran self sufficiency in wheat has been one of the major goals of iranian agricultural policies since the revolution of 1979 even so the country failed to achieve this goal by the early 2000s despite a satisfactory growth in wheat production this paper addresses this failure and the political difficulties in introducing reforms that would reduce the need for import first the production and consumption of wheat are examined the conclusion is that the cheap bread policy has mainly been responsible for the imbalances between domestic supply and demand and the continued reliance on wheat imports moreover the paper argues that the subsidy program is an expensive safety net for the needy and shows that the iranian government has intended to reform the program since the early 1990s however subsidy reforms are politically sensitive especially in developing countries where subsidies are considered very important both for supporting the poor and for political stability an analysis of the iranian attempts at subsidy reform suggests that they have not yet succeeded mainly due to such political considerations

historical origins of firm ownership structure the persistent effects of the african slave trade this paper uses evidence from the historical african slave trade to extend prior theory linking modern firm ownership structure to institutions and social capital we argue that institutions and so

confiscation by the ruler the rise and fall of jewish lending in the middle ages he power to confiscate is a mixed blessing a ruler who is truly absolute can confiscate from his subjects at will in practice however no ruler is as absolute as the term implies for example a ruler may have to forgo investment projects that would otherwise increase his wealth because his subjects fearing confiscation are reluctant to deal with him and because he is not absolute enough to costlessly force subjects to do so this problem is especially acute when the ruler stands to gain by borrowing from his subjects as bulow and rogoff show a debtor who cannot be penalized for repudiating his debt will repudiate 1 obviously the same applies to an absolute ruler as veitch points out however he will not necessarily repudiate at his first opportunity 2 as long as he expects his future borrowing to exceed his interest payments he gains by waiting what veitch fails to realize is that no lender can operate indefinitely on such a basis and consequently that the ruler will repudiate when the present value of his debt is maximized since repudiation is inevitable it might seem that an absolute ruler would be unable to find willing lenders loans are often repudiated for the more prosaic reason that borrowers lack adequate resources at repayment time lenders may try to avert this outcome by lending only to borrowers who demonstrate that they will be

international factor mobility and national advantage abstract in this paper we prove rigorously v k ramaswami s proposition that in bilateral trade between two countries sharing the same technology represented by a strictly concave production function with positive marginal productivities of capital and labor the policy active country can gain more by importing monopsonistically the relatively scarce factor than by placing monopolistic restrictions on the export of the relatively abundant one we show that what matters is not the location but the constraints within which maximization takes place hence the monopsonistic results can be replicated by appropriate export arrangements the analysis is extended to consider the welfare implications to the policy passive country

tiebout or not tiebout the market metaphor and america s devolution debate the market metaphor of intergovernmental choice as a spur to efficiency formalized by charles m tiebout is often invoked to support the shift away from washington and toward the states but the model translates badly to governments governmental entry and exit is costly public sector co11usion often serves citizens interests heterogeneous mobility distorts the signals sent by interstate migration and while tiebout and followers condition efficiency predictions on optimal distribution the u s devolution movement coincides with rising inequality and has gone furthest where distribution matters most the metaphor is misapplied devolution will likely do more to enfeeble government than to improve it

the economics of casino taxation in this article a model of the costs of a casino is developed that focuses on the implications for economic welfare of different taxation schemes for casinos the situation being considered is in a country where casinos cater exclusively to foreign tourists the goal of the country is to determine the maximum amount of taxes that can be extracted from the activities of this sector under different systems of taxation when the price of gambling is set by regulation above its competitive level the economic losses created by excessive investment in the sector can be reduced by taxation a turnover tax on the amount gambled can maximize both tax revenue and the economic welfare of the country due to administrative constraints a number of countries rely on the taxation of the casinos fixed assets or a combination of a turnover tax and a tax on fixed costs the model is applied to the situation in north cyprus the annual economic efficiency loss from its poorly designed tax policies on casino gambling is

when saving is gambling abstract prize linked savings pls accounts which allocate interest using lottery payments rather than fixed interest encourage savings by appealing to households gambling preferences i introduce new data on casino cash withdrawals to measure gambling and examine how individual gambling expenditures respond to the introduction of pls in nebraska using a difference in differences design after pls is introduced individuals who live in counties that offer pls reduce gambling by at least 3 more than unaffected individuals the substitution effect is stronger in low frills gambling environments which most resemble pls indicating that these accounts fulfill the desire to gamble

the political economy of food subsidy reform the case of egypt abstract this paper examines the political economy of food subsidy reform efforts in egypt egypt provides a case of a country with a large food subsidy program that has been relatively effective as a social safety net but a program that is also expensive and poorly targeted to the needy policy discussions about strategies to improve the system s performance run into the extreme political sensitivity of the issue of food subsidies in egypt food subsidies are perceived to be important in promoting political stability and providing some legitimacy to a political system where civil liberties are limited egypt therefore illustrates the dilemmas facing policymakers and others contemplating food subsidy reform in developing countries where there are concerns that reform may spark political unrest this paper argues that even in cases where food subsidy reform is a highly politicized issue there are still a number of pragmatic policy steps that can be taken that meet the twin goals of reforming the system in ways that better target the poor while functioning more efficiently

sovereignty credible commitments and economic prosperity on american indian reservations abstract american indian reservations are islands of poverty in a sea of wealth because this poverty cannot be explained solely by natural resource physical and human capital constraints institutions are likely to be part of the explanation one of the institutional variables is the sovereign power of tribes which allows tribal governments to act opportunistically the potential for such opportunistic behavior can thwart economic development if tribes are unable to make credible commitments to stable contract enforcement one avenue for credible commitments is public law 280 which required some tribes to turn judicial jurisdiction over civil disputes to the states in which they reside using data for 1969 99 we find that per capita income for american indians on reservations subject to state jurisdiction grew significantly more than it did for indians who were not

the economics of casino gambling america s casino industry expanded rapidly in the 1990s spreading from nevada and atlantic city to mining towns riverboats race tracks and tribal lands and moving from isolated resort settings to urban and suburban venues this article examines economic characteristics of the casino industry including the evolution of major casino markets pricing of gaming products market structures regulatory constraints and social and economic impacts attributable to casinos when competitive casinos show strong economies of scale and scope but many new jurisdictions limit the number or size of operations thus creating substantial economic rents allocation of these rents are fundamentally politically determined

casino regulations and economic welfare this paper studies the entry and tax regulation of oligopolistically competitive privately run casinos and government run casinos in a jurisdiction we highlight three important external effects from casino style gambling non casino income creation social disorder costs and cross border gambling the laissez faire equilibrium need not be overcrowding compared with regulated or government run regimes entry regulation may lead to higher jurisdiction welfare than tax regulation government run casinos always operate on a larger scale and achieve higher welfare than other regimes given the same number of casinos with an endogenous fraction of external gamblers a dispersed casino configuration yields higher welfare than a centralized one jel classification h2 d62 d21

international factor movements and the ramaswami argument in a succinct but classic article appearing in economica in 1968 ramaswami put forth an argument supporting the superiority of a policy that attracts foreign factors over a policy that allows a relatively abundant factor to emigrate in each case the active home country is assumed to levy taxes on factor flows so as to capture for itself the discrepancy in return to the same factor at home and abroad the asymmetry reflected by this policy ranking rests on a basic propeity of production functions the convexity of technology plus the ability of the active home country to hire or rent out factors at wages or rentals prevailing in the foreign country briefly put the ramaswami argument proceeds as follows suppose the active home country is capital abundant and has levied on optimal tax on earnings of its own capital operating abroad now consider repatriating this capital and allowing for the first time some inflow of foreign labour in particular suppose the home country allows a level of immigration identical to the labour force previously employed with the home capital that is being repatriated such a transfer of home capital and foreign labour out of the foreign country leaves factor proportions abroad undisturbed and thus does not alter the wage that must be paid to attract the requisite bundle of foreign workers although the home country thus avoids any increase in factor costs in foreign markets it can increase output since the capital labour ratiooriginally employed at home at high home wage rates is greater than the ratio in the freshly acquired bundle from abroad by adopting a uniform capital labour ratio over all factors now employed at home output and thus real income rises there may be even further gains to be had by allowing yet a different optimal level of immigration in the home country which has now banned capital exports 2 essential to the ramaswami argument is the ability of the home country to extract a bundle of factors previously employed abroad without disturbing factor prices in that country indeed jones coelho and easton 1983 have suggested that in the context of the ramaswami discussion the original argument could be pursued to suggest that the home country gains not only from repatriating its own capital but from actually encouraging foreign capital to be employed at home such a capital flow is admittedly uphill the home country would have to pay out more in rentals than such capital can earn at home despite this fact such an import of capital and labour in the same proportions found abroad does not alter foreign factor prices but does via the same ramaswami type argument on the convexity of the technology result in gains at home although ramaswami s own discussion starts with a repatriation of home capital previously invested abroad his argument can be applied directly to the foreign autarky factor endowment bundle if technology exhibits constant returns to scale and if all both factors are indeed internationally

the good the bad and the civil society abstract there are three signature features of autocracies first there is a wide variety across autocracies in terms of economic performance some do much better and some much worse than democracies second economic performance of a given autocracy is more sensitive to leader quality and exhibits higher volatility third all autocracies good or bad tend to have weaker civil societies than democracies do we attribute these features to the core of the autocratic political institution the incumbent leader selects the future leader as opposed to citizens at large selecting the future leader under democracy we deliver our analysis in an overlapping generations model where two kinds of dynamic free riding problems arise the first arises among different generations of citizens in implementing far sighted policies political leaders come in two types good ones aim to correct this first kind of dynamic free riding problem while bad ones do not care and only aim to steal public assets both types need a weak civil society to achieve their goals but a second dynamic free riding problem arises among different leaders when it comes to weakening the civil society the autocratic leader selection mechanism helps resolve this second dynamic free riding problem results in a continuously weakened civil society and generates large variations of economic performances both within a given autocracy and across different autocracies a rich set of comparative statics is derived

tariffs foreign capital and national welfare with sector specific factors abstract this paper examines the effect on national welfare of an endogenously determined inflow of foreign capital in the context of a well known model with sector specific inputs both for the case of unrestricted international trade and investment and in the presence of a tariff the second best problem of the optimal tax on foreign investment for a given tariff level is also investigated by application of the concept of shadow prices for primary factors in distorted open economies the results obtained are then related to analogous propositions derived previously for the standard heckscher ohlin model

state contract law and debt contracts abstractthis paper examines the relationship between debt contracts and state contract law we first develop an index to evaluate whether each state s law is favorable or unfavorable to lenders we then analyze how the contract terms the frequency of covenant violations and the repercussions of covenant violations vary across states we find that cash collateral is most likely to be used when the contract is governed by law that is favorable to debtors and that out of state borrowers who use favorable law pay higher yield spreads in addition when the law is favorable to lenders there are significantly fewer covenant violations and the repercussions of covenant violations measured as changes in the borrower s investment policy are more severe we also compare the characteristics of relevant parties across states and the results provide support for the theory that there is a market for contracts similar to the market for incorporations

the theory of international factor flows the basic model abstract the basic model used to discuss the simultaneous international flow of labor and capital is a one commodity model in which a common technology is shared between countries the ramaswami result wherein an optimal restriction of labor inflows is superior to an optimal restriction on capital outflows for a capital abundant country is extended to reveal that optimality requires inflows of both factors box diagrams and iso welfare contours are used to show how optimal policy rankings are reversed if foreign labor must be paid higher home wages

a dynamic specific factors model of international trade in a dynamic economy land and capital serve not only as factors of production but as assets which individuals use to transfer income from working periods to retirement changes in the terms of trade and in the endowments of fixed factors do not necessarily have the same effects on factor prices and on the composition of output as they do in a static framework changes in these variables affect both total savings and the amount of savings that is diverted toward investment in capital results derived from the traditional specific factors model are more likely to emerge when the sector using land as a factor of production has a higher labor share than the sector using capital in this case the land using sector dominates factor markets more than asset markets once the roles for land and capital as assets are recognized the possibility of natural resource booms that reduce steady state welfare arises at the same time an increase in population can raise steady state welfare

measuring displacement effects across gaming products a study of australian gambling markets this article seeks to establish the extent of displacement effects across gaming products this is a particularly difficult question to address with precision to date many studies have looked at policy changes such as the introduction of a new product into the market to assess the severity of displacement effects however simple before and after comparisons are invalid one needs to know what the appropriate counterfactual would have been in the absence of the policy change which by its very nature is unobservable the alternative is to look at identical populations exposed to different regimes australia represents such a natural experiment in australia betting and gaming legislation is determined at the state level giving rise to some interesting differentials across states within a single country this article estimates a state level fixed effects panel data model exploiting the intra state differences in the portfolio of gaming products available to estimate the extent of displacement eff

optimal policy toward international factor movements with a country specific factor abstract this paper examines the optimal taxation of factor movements in a three factor model where two factors are potentially mobile results emphasize the role of substitutability or complementarity between factors in determining the optimal pattern of factor flows in particular a result analogous to the ramaswami result on the desirability of factor importing over factor exporting will hold if factors are complements but may not hold if they are substitutes also a capitalexporting country that cannot tax imported labor should allow labor imports when capital and labor are substitutes but may not allow labor imports if they are complements

international capital mobility and commercial policy in an economic region abstract if two small countries are linked by capital movements then at low tariff levels any increase in capital flows induced by the commercial policy of either country will harm that country and benefit the other country while at low levels of international investment a tariff increase always harms the country levying the tariff nevertheless an increase in one country s tariff could benefit both countries by alleviating regional distortions in factor allocation if the countries liberalize factor movements within a customs union then conflicts must arise in choosing the level of the common external tariff

casinos crime and community costs we examine the relationship between casinos and crime using county level data for the united states between 1977 and 1996 casinos were nonexistent outside nevada before 1978 and expanded to many other states during our sample period most factors that reduce crime occur before or shortly after a casino opens whereas those that increase crime including problem and pathological gambling occur over time the results suggest that the effect on crime is low shortly after a casino opens and grows over time roughly 8 of crime in casino counties in 1996 was attributable to casinos costing the average adult 75 per year

immigration and native welfare we unify two approaches towards identifying native welfare effects of immigration one emphasizing the immigration surplus borjas 1995 1999 the other identifying a welfare loss due to terms of trade effects davis weinstein 2002 we decompose the native welfare effect of immigration into the standard complementarity effect augmented by a stolper samuelson effect and a terms of trade effect using a structural model with three skill classes we derive propositions on the wage and native welfare effects of various immigration scenarios a calibration based simulation reveals that the size of the inflow and immigrant income repatriation are key determinants of the welfare ranking of different immigration scenarios

the institutional foundations of inequality and growth abstract after a decade of research the effect of inequality on long run economic growth remains unresolved in part because researchers have treated omitted variable bias as an estimation problem rather than a deeper question of causality in this article we argue that the key omitted variable is the quality of economic institutions using both cross country and panel data specifications we find no direct effect of inequality on growth in the long run rather the protection of property rights simultaneously raises growth rates and reduces income inequality we interpret these findings as evidence that insecure property rights disproportionately disadvantage the poor

institutions and casinos on american indian reservations an empirical analysis of the location of indian casinos abstractthis paper empirically investigates the institutional determinants of whether a tribal government invests in a casino i find that the presence of indian casinos is strongly related to plausibly exogenous variation in reservations legal and political institutions tribal governments that can negotiate gaming compacts with multiple state governments because tribal lands span state borders had more than twice the estimated probability 77 versus 32 of operating an indian casino in 1999 tribal governments of reservations where contracts are adjudicated in state courts rather than tribal courts have more than twice the estimated probability 76 versus 34 of investing in an indian casino ceteris paribus these findings suggest that states political pressures and predictable judiciaries affect incentives to invest in casinos this study contributes more generally to the empirical literature on the effects of institutions by providing new evidence that low cost contracting is important fo

on the choice between capital and labour mobility trade theorists since the pioneering work of kemp 1966 have considered the question of national advantage from international factor mobility by considering only one factor to be so mobile kemp analyzed elegantly the question of optimal policies in 2 x 2 x 2 model and showed that since monopoly power could exist in both the goods and factor markets in consequence of international capital mobility the optimal policy intervention would generally involve two policy instruments tariffs cum subsidies on goods and duties cum subsidies on international capital flows jones 1967 subsequently extended kemp s argument to the secondbest context by examining the optimal level of one of these instruments when the other was arbitrarily set at zero elsewhere in this issue brecher 1983 shows in an elegant and original contribution that the jones policy problem is in fact a third best rather than a second best problem as generally believed and that if only one of the tariff and capital mobility taxes cumsubsidies can be used it is generally possible to improve welfare further by admitting an altogether different domestic policy instrument namely a production or consumption tax cum subsidy as the case may be the research of bhagwati was supported by the german marshall fund grant no l 34015 the problem analyzed in the paper was posed in bhagwati 1979 and an early ingenious and neglected analysis in ramaswami 1968 was noted by bhagwati we have profited greatly from these contributions also from reading webb 1970 ramaswami 1970 and a recent paper of calvo and wellisz 1983 on this problem this result is in consonance with the results of bhagwati ramaswami and srinivasan 1969 for the case without international capital mobility but the consonance is intuitive only after the result was established for the case with international capital mobility