self enforcing collusion in large dynamic markets abstract the folk theorem in game theory implies that any outcome that is better for all players than some single period nash outcome can be achieved through noncooperative equilibrium in repeated games with discounting whether the folk theorem holds for a repeated cournot oligopoly as the number of firms n increases without bound is investigated it is shown that the folk theorem holds in the limit iff demand increases at the same rate as the number of firms and the cournot price sequence is bounded strictly above by the supremum of marginal cost for large n

organizational design decision rights and incentive contracts where should decision rights be lodged in organizations michael c jensen and william h meckling 1992 argue that moving a decision away from the inherently best informed party involves costs in communication and garbling but may lodge it with someone who has better incentives to make good decisions generally however we expect that incentives are part of the organizational design why not just provide incentives to those with the best information so that they make the right decisions one reason is that the available incentive instruments must serve multiple purposes and designing them to induce better decisions worsens performance against other organizational objectives our experience suggests that this is a common situation in actual organizations the means available to affect one sort of behavior or decision inevitably affect the incentives governing other choices then the design of incentive schemes and the allocation of decision rights become interlinked this paper looks at this idea in the specific context of a principal s problem of inducing agents to provide unobservable effort while also motivating the efficient selection of investments each of these problems has been extensively studied in isolation on inducing effort see e g bengt holmstrom 1979 and holmstrom and paul milgrom 1991 on decisions see e g eugene f fama and jensen 1983 milgrom and roberts 1990a b philippe aghion and jean tirole 1997 matthias dewatripont and tirole 1999 we thus know that motivating effort is done best by rewarding agents on precise measures of their effort not necessarily on the total value created in the firm at the same time it is clear that getting the right investment choices may require that the decision makers rewards be tied to total value created the difficulty is that the available measures do not allow doing both the only available performance measures are aggregates whose component pieces cannot be disentangled while contracts must be written in advance of learning about investment possibilities including many contingencies in the contracts ex ante is impossible and ongoing renegotiation in every ex post eventuality is prohibitively costly more formally we assume that it is not possible to contract on investment projects nor can the principal bargain with the agents over the adoption of these projects once they are identified instead returns to projects are reflected in the performance measures available for use in the effort incentive contracting then the incentives for effort and for decisions are inextricably tied together in this framework we explore the interactions among the design of jobs and assignment of individuals to tasks the shape and intensity of effort incentives and the allocation of authority over project selection we argue that it may indeed be optimal to assign decisions rights to someone other than the best informed party an authority based hierarchy then emerges endogenously with some agents being given the right to make organizational decisions over projects that others discovered moreover as in herbert simon 1951 those in authority will make the decisions in a self interested way simon emphasized that this discussants michael riordan columbia university bengt holmstrom massachusetts institute of technology w bentley macleod university of southern california

transaction costs and the robustness of the coase theorem this paper explores the extent to which the presence of ex ante transaction costs may lead to failures of the coase theorem in particular we identify and investigate the basic hold up problem which arises whenever the parties to a coasian negotiation have to pay some ex ante costs for the negotiation to take place we then show that a coasian solution to this hold up problem is not available this is because a coasian solution to the hold up problem typically entails a negotiation about the payment of the costs associated with the future negotiation which in turn is associated with a fresh set of ex ante costs and hence with a new hold up problem

experimental tests of core theory and the coase theorem inefficiency and cycling abstract we examine experimentally the bargaining process and the final allocation of payoffs in games that differ in terms of whether the core exists and in the initial allocation of property rights among the players this paper highlights the interaction among property rights transaction costs and the empty core our experimental results indicate that the existence of the core is an important determinant of bargaining generally and the coase theorem in particular they confirm our conjecture that when the core is empty and property rights are ill defined coasean efficiency breaks down among other results our experiments show that the number of inefficient non pareto optimal agreements and bargaining rounds with cycling are significantly greater when the core is empty than when the core exists especially when property rights are ill defined our results suggest an economic role for specific property right arrangements to resolve the empty core

dynamic group formation in the repeated prisonerʼs dilemma abstract we consider dynamic group formation in repeated n person prisoner s dilemma agreements in coalitional bargaining are self binding in that they are supported as subgame perfect equilibria of repeated games individuals are allowed to renegotiate the cooperating group agreement through a process of voluntary participation we prove that a cooperating group forms as an absorbing state of a markov perfect equilibrium after a finite number of renegotiations if and only if the group is pareto efficient provided that individuals are patient the cooperating group can only expand

overt interfunctional conflict and its reduction through business strategy we study why production and sales departments tend to disagree with the former wanting long production runs and the latter wanting a broad product line we then analyze why these disagreements lead to overt conflict in which functional areas fight with each other by presenting arguments that damage each other s position we show how the firm benefits from the information generated by this conflict in spite of these benefits the equilibrium conflict can exceed its profit maximizing level finally we show that concentrating innovative talent in only one department can help reduce interfunctional conflict

why democracies produce efficient results by applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis i argue that democratic markets work as well as economic markets in particular i show that previous work has greatly exaggerated the existence of principal agent and informational problems in electoral markets and has drawn incorrect conclusions

competitive cheap talk we study a competitive cheap talk model with two senders each sender is responsible for a single project and observes its return exactly one project will be implemented both senders share some common interests with the principal but have own project biases under simultaneous communication all equilibria are shown to be partition equilibria but all the equilibria can no longer be ranked ex ante in terms of pareto efficiency the payoff of the principal depends on both the total conflict between the agents and the asymmetry in the own project biases in the equilibrium preferred by the principal the agent with a smaller bias always has veto power to determine which alternative is implemented and weakly more messages in any given equilibrium decreasing the own project bias of one agent improves the precision of communication by both agents finally sequential communication and simple delegation are shown to be essentially outcome equivalent to simultaneous communication

the informal sector and the political economy of development this paper takes an initial step in integrating insights from two sets of literature which have focused on central aspects of development with unfortunate independence it highlights politically valuable resources which are identified in the political economy literature and shows that the informal sector literature provides ample evidence that these resources in general are i scarcely available to informal entities ii poorly valued in their possession and iii more often collectively unexploited by them overall there seems to be an important though neglected bias in how the political system in less developed countries formulates crafts and implements policy

how important is selection experimental vs non experimental measures of the income gains from migration measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non random selection of migrants from the general population making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non migrants this paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration new zealand allows a quota of tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of applicants a unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate but whose names were not drawn in the lottery after allowing for the effect of non compliance among some of those whose names were drawn the authors also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery comparing this non applicant group with the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration they find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills as a result non experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration by 9 to 82 percent a good instrumental variable works best while difference in differences and bias adjusted propensity score matching also perform comparatively well

meetings with costly participation we study a collective decision making process in which people interested in an issue may participate at a cost in a meeting and the resulting decision is a compromise among the participants preferences we show that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are extreme and when the compromise is the median the outcome is likely to be random the model and its equilibria are consistent with evidence on the procedures and outcomes of us regulatory hearings jel d7 h0 l5

the effect of group size on public good provision in a repeated game setting abstract the ability to cooperate in the provision of a pubic good is analyzed in a repeated game holding the level of provision fixed with quasi linear utility we find that the critical value of the discount parameter converges to 0 in the limit thus cooperation is feasible in a large market next we allow the level cooperation to be adjusted optimally as the group size increases both for a specific form of quasi linear utility and for cobb douglas utility in each case we find that there are admissible values of the discount parameter such that cooperation may be maintained in the limit

olson s logic of collective action at fifty in the 50 years since its publication mancur olson s logic of collective action has had an enormous impact on the academic literature in both economics and political science in this review essay i discuss olson s work in light of the ensuing research particularly developments in the theoretical literature much of the discussion focuses on the group size paradox as applied to politics i e the extent to which the group size paradox can explain why the interests of some groups are better represented in the political process than others i also discuss selective incentives with an emphasis on the byproduct mechanism under which a firm sells a private good and uses the resulting profits to provide a public good

the economic effect of immigration policies analyzing and simulating the u s case abstract in this paper we analyze the economic effects of different immigration policies using a model that incorporates economic and policy features crucial to understanding the migrant flows into the us we differentiate among the most relevant channels of immigration to the us family based employment based and undocumented moreover we explicitly account for earning incentives to migrate and for the role of immigrant networks in generating immigration opportunities hence we can analyze the effect of policy changes through those channels in our simulations comparing long run steady states highly skilled employment and unskilled immigrants generate larger surplus to us firms than natives do hence policies restricting their entry either directly or indirectly have a depressing effect on job creation and in turn on native labor markets our analysis gives new insights into the effect of policies as it accounts for the endogenous immigration response which is overlooked by most existing models

the uncommon insight of elinor ostrom author s bergstrom ted abstract this article was written in celebration of eleanor ostrom s nobel prize standard economic approaches to the problem of overuse of common property resources have emphasized two competing remedies the pigovian approach of corrective taxation and the property rights approach of internalizing externalities by means of assigning marketable property rights to individual owners with exclusive claim on the entire commons elinor ostrom pursues a third approach which is based on case studies of existing communities that have established successful and durable systems of managing common property resources this paper discusses her work and suggests that economists with an interest in public policy have much to gain from becoming familiar with the work of ostrom and her co authors

markets for ownership the prevailing economic theory of the firm based on a property rights perspective has demonstrated that ownership by dispensable outside parties is an inefficient outcome relative to ownership by productive agents in order to better understand observed patterns of ownership this paper considers the outcome of ma rkets for ownership that operate prior to production taking place the main result is that outside parties will often become the equilibrium asset owners this is precisely because but for ownership such parties would not earn rents in contrast productive agents earn rents even when they do not own assets given that their contribution is complementary with other productive agents their willingness to pay for ownership is less than that of an outside party this result is robust to the introduction of moderate levels of inefficiency arising from outside ownership and to a consideration of opportunities for re sale before production begins the main conclusion drawn is that the nature of the operation of markets for ownership stands alongside incentive effects as important predictors of firm boundaries journal of economic literature classification numbers d23 l22

does schooling cause growth a number of economists find that growth and schooling are highly correlated across countries a model is examined in which the ability to build on the human capital of one s elders plays an important role in linking growth to schooling the model is calibrated to quantify the strength of the effect of schooling on growth by using evidence from the labor literature on mincerian returns to education the upshot is that the impact of schooling on growth explains less than one third of the empirical cross country relationship the ability of reverse causality to explain this empirical relationship is also investigated

negotiating a uniform emissions tax in international environmental agreements abstract a consensus appears to be emerging that a global carbon tax is the best policy for managing greenhouse gas emissions emissions tax systems are relatively straightforward cost effective and can generate revenues used to offset other distortionary taxes moreover recent theoretical research weitzman 2014 has demonstrated that under some conditions the globally efficient tax rate can be implemented through a majority voting rule we extend this area of research by examining a uniform emissions tax system in the framework of an international environmental agreement in which only countries that voluntarily participate are subject to the tax we show that in the simplest situation in which countries have identical marginal benefit and cost functions the largest stable agreement consists of two countries and the tax system has little impact on abatement levels our analysis highlights that by ignoring the participation decision and assuming commitment by all parties the efficiency gains from a uniform emissions tax system are overstated

do meetings in smoke filled rooms facilitate collusion the sherman act prohibits firms from discussing prices in meetings traditional thought suggests that this prohibition makes it harder for firms to collude and economists have concluded that the sherman act operates in the public interest i provide an alternative explanation for the act that also accounts for the small sanctions chosen by the legislature when firms interact in a dynamic environment in which the law helps them to prevent renegotiation the firms may benefit from the law that makes it costly but not very costly to meet to discuss prices the sherman act may help firms to collude

payments for ecosystem services rife with problems and potential for transformation towards sustainability abstract payments for ecosystem services pes programs are one prominent strategy to address economic externalities of resource extraction and commodity production improving both social and ecological outcomes but do pes and related incentive programs achieve that lofty goal along with considerable enthusiasm pes has faced a wide range of substantial critiques in this paper we characterize seven major classes of concerns associated with common pes designs and use these as inspiration to consider potential avenues for improvements in pes outcomes and uptake the problems include 1 new externalities 2 misplacement of rights and responsibilities 3 crowding out existing motivations 4 efficiency equity tradeoffs 5 monitoring costs 6 limited applicability and 7 top down prescription alienating agency as currently practiced many pes programs are thus of limited benefit and even potentially detrimental to sustainability from this dire conclusion we highlight several innovations that might be combined and extended in a novel approach to pes that may address all seven problems recognizing that pes necessarily articulate and even normalize values our proposed approach entails designing these institutions intentionally to articulate rights and responsibilities conducive to sustainability those we might collectively seek to entrench problems remain and new ones may arise but the proposed approach may offer a way to reimagine pes as a major social and economic tool for enabling sustainable relationships with nature conserving and restoring ecosystems and their benefits for people now and in the future

international environmental agreements with mixed strategies and investment abstract we modify a canonical participation game used to study international environmental agreements iea considering both mixed and pure strategies at the participation stage and including a prior cost reducing investment stage the use of mixed strategies at the participation stage reverses a familiar result and also reverses the policy implication of that result with mixed strategies equilibrium participation and welfare are higher in equilibria that involve higher investment

which sectors make poor countries so unproductive which sectors are most responsible for the low total factor productivities of developing countries to answer this question we develop a new framework for sectoral development accounting applying this framework to the penn world table we find that in equipment construction and food the sectoral tfp differences between developing countries and the united states are much larger than in the aggregate however in manufactured consumption the sectoral tfp differences are about equal to the aggregate tfp differences and in services they are much smaller we show that our level of disaggregation allows us to reconcile the results of existing studies of sectoral productivity differences which have focused on noncomparable two sector decompositions of the aggregate data we also show that our results help shed light on existing theories of aggregate tfp differences

decentralization duplication and delay we argue that although decentralization has advantages in finding low cost solutions these advantages are accompanied by coordination problems which lead to delay or duplication of effort or both consequently decentralization is desirable when there is little urgency or a great deal of private information but it is strictly undesirable in urgent problems when private information is less important we also examine the effect of large numbers and find that coordination problems disappear in the limit if distributions are common knowledge

non excludable public good experiments we conduct a two stage game experiment with a non excludable public good in the first stage two subjects choose simultaneously whether or not they commit to contributing nothing to provide a pure public good in the second stage knowing the other subject s commitment decision subjects who did not commit in the first stage choose contributions to the public good we found no support for the evolutionary stable strategy equilibrium and the ratio of subjects who did not commit to contributing nothing increased as periods advanced that is the free riding rate declined over time furthermore this behavior did not arise due to altruism or kindness among subjects but from spiteful behavior of subjects

a voluntary participation game with a non excludable public good faculty of economics tokyo metropolitan university hachioji tokyo 192 0397 japanyamato takehiko c metro u ac jpreceived november 14 1997 revised august 21 1998in the previous mechanism design on public goods it was implicitly assumed thatevery agent must participate in the mechanism that the designer provides thisapproach neglects non excludability of public goods we explicitly incorporatenon excludability and examine a two stage game with voluntary participation inthe first stage each agent simultaneously decides whether she participates in themechanism or not and in the second stage knowing the other agents participationdecisions the agents who selected participation in the first stage choose theirstrategies participation of all agents is not an equilibrium in many situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d71 d78 h41

public good provision in a repeated game the role of small fixed costs of participation pecorino 1998 models tariff lobbying in a repeated game and finds that cooperation can be maintained in a large group even though tariff lobbying provides a rival public good to interest group members we add small fixed costs of participation to this model and find that cooperation must break down in large groups by contrast if a fully rival public good directly enters the utility function then cooperation is possible in large groups even with small participation costs thus we find only partial support for olson s 1965 proposition that collective action must break down in large groups

the new economic case for migration restrictions an assessment abstract migration barriers tend to reduce global production by impeding efficient spatial reallocation of labor recent research argues for a countervailing effect of barriers tending to raise global production by preventing the spread of impoverishing institutions from poor to rich countries while evidence of this mechanism is scarce it is theoretically plausible at high migration rates we propose and calibrate a simple model of dynamically efficient migration when migrants spread economic institutions between countries the net effect of migration depends on three parameters transmission the degree to which origin country total factor productivity is embodied in migrants assimilation the degree to which migrants productivity determinants become like natives over time in the host country and congestion the degree to which transmission and assimilation change at higher migrant stocks on current evidence about the magnitudes of these parameters dynamically efficient policy would not imply open borders but would imply relaxation of current restrictions

productivity differences and the dynamic effects of labor movements barriers to labor mobility across countries coexist with substantial differences in living standards largely attributable to productivity differences a growth model with endogenous labor movements is used to assess the effects on output capital accumulation and welfare of removing barriers to labor mobility the model is parameterized so that it is consistent with evidence on historical labor movements and is applied to two cases the enlargement of the european union and the hypothetical creation of a common labor market in the north america the main finding is that there are large resulting gains in terms of output and welfare

group size paradox and public goods in an economy with voluntarily provided public goods and private product varieties and a general class of ces preferences it is shown that aggregate public good contribution follows an inverted u pattern with respect to group size when private and public goods are substitutable in preferences with complementarity however aggregate provision grows monotonically with group size

buy coal a case for supply side environmental policy free riding is at the core of environmental problems if a climate coalition reduces its emissions world prices change and nonparticipants typically emit more they may also extract the dirtiest type of fossil fuel and invest too little in green technology the coalition s second best policy distorts trade and is not time consistent however suppose that the countries can trade the rights to exploit fossil fuel deposits as soon as the market clears the above mentioned problems vanish and the first best is implemented in short the coalition s best policy is to simply buy foreign deposits and conserve them

collective rent dissipation the theory of rent seeking was initiated by tullock 1967 1980 followed by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 and more recently extended in various directions by allard 1988 appelbaum and katz 1986a b c gradstein and nitzan 1989 hillman and katz 1984 1987 hillman and samet 1987 hillman and riley 1989 katz et al 1990 long and vousden 1987 ursprung 1990 and varian 1989 the purpose of this paper is to extend this theory by introducing the possibility of collective group rent seeking with voluntary individual decisions regarding their extent of participation in the collective rent seeking efforts

the human capital stock a generalized approach this paper presents a new framework for human capital measurement the generalized framework can i substantially amplify the role of human capital in accounting for cross country income dierences and ii reconcile the existing con ict between regression and accounting evidence in assessing the wealth and poverty of nations one natural interpretation emphasizes dierences across economies in the acquisition of advanced knowledge by skilled workers

dynamic behaviour in large markets for differentiated products an important question is how well competitive models approximate models of large finite economies for a class of differentiated products models static nash equilibria if they exist always converge to competition as the number of firms increases dynamic nash equilibria need not so converge easily checked conditions for convergence to competition do however exist

private information coasian bargaining and the second welfare theorem abstract most of the debate about coasian bargaining in the presence of externalities relates to the first welfare theorem is the outcome under bargaining efficient this debate has involved the definition and importance of transaction costs the significance of private information and the effect of entry there has been little analysis of how coasian bargaining relates to the second welfare theorem even if the bargaining outcome is efficient does the process limit the set of pareto optimal allocations which can be achieved we consider a model in which individuals utilize a common resource and may affect each other s output the individuals differ in their productivities or tastes and this information is private to each of them the government can manage the common resource and use nonlinear taxes to correct for the externality or it can turn the common resource over to a private owner who can charge individuals to utilize it with a nonlinear fee schedule the government and the owner have the same information about tastes and productivities of the individuals except for the private information there are no bargaining or administrative costs for collecting the taxes or fees whether there is public or private ownership the government desires to redistribute but it faces self selection constraints we show that the outcome of coasian bargaining is constrained pareto efficient that is given the information constraints no pareto improvement is possible however private ownership may limit what pareto optimal allocations the government can achieve the private owner in seeking to maximize profits always proposes contracts which counteract the government s attempts to redistribute across individuals with different characteristics under public management any pareto optimum can be sustained in this context private ownership while not inefficient does limit the government s ability to redistribute

how important is human capital a quantitative theory assessment of world income inequality we develop a quantitative theory of human capital investment in order to evaluate the magnitude of cross country dierences in total factor productivity tfp that explains the variation in per capita incomes across countries we build a heterogeneousagent economy with cross sectional variation in ability schooling and expenditures on schooling quality in our theory the parameters governing human capital production and random ability process have important implications for a set of cross sectional statistics mincer return variance of earnings variance of schooling and intergenerational correlation of earnings these restrictions of the theory and u s household data are used to pin down the key parameters driving the quantitative implications of the theory our main finding is that human capital accumulation strongly amplifies tfp dierences across countries in particular we find an elasticity of output per worker with respect to tfp of 2 8 a 3 fold dierence in tfp explains a 20 fold dierence in output per worker we argue that the cross country dierences in human capital implied by the theory are consistent with a wide array of evidence including earnings of immigrants in the united states average mincer returns across countries and the relationship between average years of schooling and per capita income across countries the theory implies that using mincer returns to measure human capital understates dierences across countries by a factor of 2

rational inattention and organizational focus this paper studies optimal communication flows in organizations a production process can be coordinated ex ante by letting agents stick to a prespecified plan of action alternatively agents may adapt to task specific shocks in which case tasks must be coordinated ex post using communication when attention is scarce an optimal organization coordinates only a few tasks ex post those tasks are higher performing more adaptive to the environment and influential hence scarce attention requires setting priorities not just local optimization our results provide microfoundations for a central idea in the management literature that firms should focus on a limited set of core competencies

the economic consequences of brain drain of the best and brightest microeconomic evidence from five countries this article presents results of innovative surveys that tracked academic high achievers from five countries to wherever they moved in the world to directly measure at the micro level the channels through which high skilled emigration affects sending countries there are high levels of emigration and of return and the income gains to the best and brightest from migrating are an order of magnitude greater than any other effect most high skilled migrants from poorer countries remit but involvement in trade and foreign direct investment is rare fiscal costs vary widely but are much less than the benefits to the migrants themselves two narratives drive discussions of the development impact of high skilled migration the first is the idea of a brain drain whereby the departure of doctors teachers engineers scientists and other highly skilled workers decimates the human capital and fiscal revenues of sending countries bhagwati and hamada 1974 such fears lead to calls for policies to restrict the flow of highly skilled workers such as demands that developed countries stop recruiting doctors from developing nations and efforts by developing nations to restrict the ease of their highly skilled individuals migrating 1 contrasting with this is the view of a highly educated diaspora as a potent force for developing the local economy through remittances trade foreign direct investment fdi and knowledge transfers with the experience of india and china in setting up technology firms as a result of diaspora working in silicon valley a prominent example saxenian 2002 economists have also emphasised that the possibility of migrating may spur human capital accumulation potentially leading to a net increase in the education levels of those in the home country 2

government control of the media abstract we present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in media freedom across countries and over time media bias is greater and state ownership of the media more likely when the government has a particular interest in mobilizing citizens to take actions that further some political objective but are not necessarily in citizens individual best interest however the distinction between state and private media is smaller large advertising markets reduce media bias in both state and private media but increase the incentive for the government to nationalize private media media bias in state and private media markets diverge as governments become more democratic whereas media bias in democracies and autocracies converge as positive externalities from mobilization increase

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

reevaluating agricultural productivity gaps with longitudinal microdata recent research has pointed to large gaps in labor productivity between the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors in low income countries as well as between workers in rural and urban areas most estimates are based on national accounts or repeated cross sections of micro survey data and as a result typically struggle to account for individual selection between sectors this paper contributes to this literature using long run individual level panel data from two low income countries indonesiaand kenya accounting for individual fixed effects leads to much smaller estimated productivity gains from moving into the non agricultural sector or urban areas reducing estimated gaps by over80 percent per capita consumption gaps between non agricultural and agricultural sectors as well as between urban and rural areas are also close to zero once individual fixed effects are included estimated productivity gaps do not emerge up to five years after a move between sectors nor are they larger in big cities we evaluate whether these findings imply a re assessment of the currentconventional wisdom regarding sectoral gaps discuss how to reconcile them with existing crosssectional estimates and consider implications for the desirability of sectoral reallocation of labor

collective action and the group size paradox according to the olson paradox larger groups may be less successful than smaller groups in furthering their interests we address the issue in a model with three distinctive features explicit intergroup interaction collective prizes with a varying mix of public and private characteristics and nonlinear lobbying costs the interplay of these features leads to new results when the cost of lobbying has the elasticity of a quadratic function or higher larger groups are more effective no matter how private the prize with smaller elasticities a threshold degree of publicness is enough to overturn the olson argument and this threshold tends to zero as the elasticity approaches the value for a quadratic function we also demonstrate that these results are true irrespective of whether we examine group sizes over the cross section in some given equilibrium or changes in the size of a given group over different equilibria

conflicts and common interests in committees committees improve decisions by pooling members independent information but promote manipulation obfuscation and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences committee decision procedures transform continuous data into ordered ranks through voting this coarsens the transmission of information but controls strategic manipulations and allows some degree of information sharing each member becomes more cautious in casting the crucial vote than when he alone makes the decision based on own information increased quality of one member s information results in his casting the crucial vote more often committees make better decisions for members than does delegation

public good provision in legislatures the dynamics of enlargements abstract this paper analyzes the effects of legislature enlargements on public good provision in a repeated game we find that enlargements induce two countervailing effects on the legislature s ability to yield efficient outcomes cooperation though necessarily breaks down in large legislatures

interpreting suboptimal business outcomes in light of the coase theorem lessons from sidmouth international festival abstract the management team of the world famous sidmouth festival resigned in 2004 after failing to secure bad weather underwriting worth 200 000 and amidst widespread fears that the festival was doomed while claims of a local economic impact of 5 million are seriously flawed it is highly likely that the local economy did benefit by at least several times the amount of the required insurance failure to capture these net positive benefits is linked to ill defined property rights rising transaction costs incomplete information from unreliable sources and actual or feared free riding these conditions prevented the type of efficient bargaining solution in the face of externalities envisioned by the coase theorem practically all of the problems preventing the ideal coasean solution could have been addressed by granting key stakeholders individual ownership rights hence while the coase solution was not applicable the theorem s predictions or its corollary s predictions were confirmed

impacts of alternative allowance allocation methods under a cap and trade program in power sector emission trading is considered to be a cost effective environmental economic instrument for pollution control however the policy design of an emission trading program has a decisive impact on its performance allowance allocation is one of the most important policy design issues in emission trading not only for equity but also for policy performance in this research an artificial market for sulfur dioxide so2 emission trading was constructed by applying an agent based model the performance of the jiangsu so2 emission trading market was examined under different allowance allocation methods and transaction costs the results showed that the market efficiency of emission trading would be affected by the allocation methods when the transaction costs are positive the auction allowance allocation method was more efficient and had the lowest total emission control costs than the other three allocation methods examined however the use of this method will require that power plants pay for all of their allowance and doing so will increase the production costs of power plants on the other hand output based allowance allocation is the second best method

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

costly bargaining and renegotiation we identify the inefficiencies that arise when negotiation between two parties takes place in the presence of transaction costs first for some values of these costs it is efficient to reach an agreement but the unique equilibrium outcome is one in which agreement is never reached secondly even when there are equilibria in which an agreement is reached we find that the model always has an equilibrium in which agreement is never reached as well as equilibria in which agreement is delayed for an arbitrary length of time finally the only way in which the parties can reach an agreement in equilibrium is by using inefficient punishments for some of the opponent s deviations we argue that this implies that when the parties are given the opportunity to renegotiate out of these inefficiencies the only equilibrium outcome which survives is the one in which agreement is never reached regardless of the value of the transaction costs

confining the coase theorem contracting ownership and free riding if individuals own the right to take any action that they please and are free to contract about behaviour will outcomes be efficient in all situations that is does the coase theorem hold we study this classic question through the lens of a non cooperative model of contract negotiations considering both compulsory and voluntary participation in negotiations in either case we find that all consistent equilibria of the contracting game are efficient in the case of two players but if participation is voluntary and there are more than two players there are situations in which all consistent equilibria are inefficient specifically the provision of public goods tends to be inefficiently low due to strategic abstention from contracting free riding on others agreements can be avoided if individuals do not own all their actions when actions involve the use of assets efficient action ownership may correspond to collective rather than individual asset ownership

law or economics w hen aaron director and edward levi launched the journal of law and economics in 1958 director suggested the title law or economics this alternative title certainly described the world more accurately at that time the traditional attitude of each discipline toward the other had been one of indifference only gradually has that attitude been replaced by a mixture of cooperation and hostility the first systematic application in america of economics to law was the use of price theory to explain economic phenomena involved in the antitrust cases director made creative use of price theory to explain phenomena such as tie in sales and patent licensing and assisted younger colleagues such as john mcgee and lester telser in their respective studies of predatory competition and resale price maintenance in such applications professional economic analysis was replacing the amateur economics of the lawyer lawyers did not welcome this development the national committee for the study of the antitrust laws was the scene of a deep schism between the fifty three lawyers and the eight economists 2 these numbers probably represented the belief that 13 percent of antitrust policy is economics the remainder law at one point the lawyers attempted to exclude the economists completely from the formulation of the report the division was not simply one between angels and legally trained devils consider the question of price discrimination economists insisted that price discrimination could persist only under noncompetitive conditions under full competition rivals would undermine any attempt to sell part of the supply at a higher price the lawyers argued to the contrary

the place premium bounding the price equivalent of migration barriers large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility we use migrant selection theory and evide

information manipulation and climate agreements it appears that news media and some pro environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change this article provides a rationale for this tendency by using a modified international environmental agreement iea model with asymmetric information we find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an iea which will eventually enhance global welfare from the ex ante perspective however the impact that manipulating information has on the level of participation in an iea and on welfare is ambiguous

how important is human capital for development evidence from immigrant earnings this paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross country income differences it exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their human capital endowments these estimates suggest that human and physical capital account for only a fraction of cross country income differences for countries below 40 of the us output per worker less than half of the output gap relative to the us is attributed to human and physical capital

political bargaining in a federation buchanan meets coase abstract in recent decades the issues of federalism and political integration have gained prominence in public debate as well as in the academic realm a frequently made point is that allowing free secession may protect the minority s interests thus providing it with an incentive to enter the federation this paper explicitly considers the political process in the federation arguing that the option to secede may distort the political choices made by the individual regions to improve their bargaining positions as a result the allocation of resources in the federation could well end up being inefficient and unattractive for the minority region in contrast limiting the secession possibilities by requiring the consent of a majority of voters through a regional referendum rather than leaving it to the discretion of the legislature restores efficiency

the participation decision versus the level of participation in an environmental treaty a spatial probit analysis abstract this paper represents treaty participation as a two stage game for which nations first decide whether or not to participate and then they choose their level of participation the resulting subgame perfect equilibrium is used to derive a reduced form equation for estimating and separating the influences of the variables at the two decision stages this spatial probit equation forms the basis for a full information maximum likelihood estimator that accounts for the simultaneity bias associated with public good spillins at both stages when the procedure is applied to the helsinki protocol we find that the strategic influence of a variable may drastically differ depending upon which stage is scrutinized

asymmetric information bargaining problems with many agents a yes or no decision must be made about some issue all agents must agree the coase theorem asserts that the efficient outcome will always result suppose the value positive or negative that an individual attaches to an affirmative decision is privately known to that individual it is proved under very mild conditions that with independent types as the number of agents increases the probability of an affirmative efficient decision goes to zero an example in which it is common knowledge that an affirmative decision is efficient and yet the probability of such a decision goes to zero is given

participation games and international environmental agreements a non parametric model abstract we examine the size of stable coalitions in a participation game that has been used to model international environmental agreements cartel formation rd based on these examples a consensus has emerged that in this kind of game the equilibrium coalition size is small except possibly when the potential benefits of cooperation are also small in this paper we develop a non parametric approach to the problem and demonstrate that the conventional wisdom is not robust in a general setting we identify conditions under which the equilibrium coalition size can be large even when potential gains are large contrary to previously examined leading special cases we show that reductions in marginal abatement costs in an international environmental game can increase equilibrium membership and we provide a measure of the smallest reduction in costs needed to support a coalition of arbitrary size

is there a free rider problem in lobbying endogenous tariffs trigger strategies and the number of firms there are two reasons we expect moreconcentrated industries to have advantages over less concentrated industries in playing the lobbying game one is that in a noncooperative setting as the number firms rises we expect the free rider problem to become worse this is the finding of rodrik 1986 the second is that we expect that the ability to maintain a cooperative outcome deteriorates as the number of firms in the industry rises the classic reference is mancur olson 1965 also see russell hardin 1982 and todd sandler 1992 among others in contrast with the second intuition this paper shows that there is no general presumption that maintaining cooperation becomes more difficult as the number of firms in the industry rises the ability of an industry to overcome the free rider problem is analyzed in a re peated tariff lobbying game where cooperation may be maintained through the use of a simple trigger strategy 2 the difficulty of maintaining cooperation is measured by the critical value of the discount parameter all values above this critical value are consistent with cooperation and all values below the critical value imply that cheating will prevent maintenance of the cooperative outcome there is no presumption that this critical value rises with the number of firms a separate but related question involves asymptotic results standard intuition suggests that as industry structure approaches perfect competition it becomes impossible to maintain cooperation in the context of this paper this intuition corresponds to the critical value of the discount factor converging to i as the number of firms increases to infinity in the general case it is shown that the critical value of the discount parameter converges to a value less than 1 in the limit as the number of firms becomes arbitrarily large if the actual discount parameter lies above this value then cooperation may be maintained even with an infinite number of firms though the framework here is quite simple it provides results which contrast sharply to our standard intuition about how industry structure affects the ability to maintain cooperation there are two ways to interpret the results of this paper one is to assert that standard intuition is wrong and that there is in fact no presumption that maintaining cooperation becomes more difficult as the number

the economic determinants of technology shocks in a real business cycle model abstract creative destruction due to new technologies causes both long run growth and short run business fluctuations new technologies push the economy on a higher productivity level but also imply partial obsolescence of old production units obsolescence induces an adjustment period during which growth rates gradually fall at some endogenously determined point research for the next technology starts once the new technology is discovered a technology shock occurs and the next cycle starts this is shown in a continuous time rbc model with risk averse agents where savings can be used for financing deterministic capital accumulation and stochastic r d for new technologies

the private provision of excludable public goods an inefficiency result abstract does voluntary contracting suffice for the efficient provision of excludable public goods even in a complete information environment we find that the answer is negative the reason is that some agents may profit from not participating at the provision stage but instead negotiate access ex post

education quality and development accounting this paper measures the role of quality adjusted years of schooling in accounting for cross country output per worker differences while data on years of schooling are readily available data on education quality are not i use the returns to schooling of foreign educated immigrants in the u s to measure the education quality of their birth country immigrants from developed countries earn higher returns than do immigrants from developing countries i show how to incorporate this measure of education quality into an otherwise standard development accounting exercise the main result is that cross country differences in education quality are roughly as important as cross country differences in years of schooling in accounting for output per worker differences raising the total contribution of education from 10 to 20 of output per worker differences copyright 2012 oxford university press

ecological sufficiency individual liberties and distributive justice implications for policy making we investigate the prospects of voluntary ecological sufficiency for environmental and climate policy under the constraints implied by political liberalism we find that freedom of choice restricts sufficiency to rather wealthy societies and that a sufficiency threshold cannot be derived by referring to the poor sufficiency can be in conflict with the demands of social justice i e if the sufficiency threshold is below the social minimum implied by social justice benefits from sufficiency are highly related to individual perceptions such benefits cannot be expressed in a standard preference framework consequently alternative measures of welfare and inequality are required if sufficiency is a significant phenomenon in society standard environmental policies can have a pronounced interaction with voluntary sufficiency i e if quantity regulation is present overall the voluntary notion of sufficiency causes a dilemma as sufficiency is largely a matter of civil society however voluntary sufficiency is expected to make important contributions to the preservation of ecological resources if properly balanced with social and environmental policies and framed by public discursive control

restricted coasean bargaining we investigate the efficiency of coasean bargaining when restrictions are placed on the set of feasible bargaining outcomes when property rights are costly to defend appropriate we find bargaining restrictions may be pareto superior to unconstrainedvoluntary exchange under cost uncertainty over the harmful activity we show an efficient configuration of restrictions must balance the potential reduction in appropriation costs with the possibility of allocatively inefficient bargaining restrictions for an all pay auction we find conditions where precluding bargaining is always ex ante preferable to unrestricted bargaining for cases where the restrictions are contested we show conditions for the continuing existence of welfare improvements

human capital and development accounting new evidence from wage gains at migration we use new data on the pre and postmigration wages of immigrants to the united states to measure wage gains at migration the average immigrant from a middle income or poor country increases their wage by a factor of two to three upon migration this wage gain is small relative to the underlying gap in gdp per worker in a development accounting framework this finding implies that switching countries accounts for 40 of cross country income differences while human capital accounts for 60 wage gains decline with education consistent with imperfect substitution between skill types we augment our analysis to allow for this possibility and bound the human capital share in development accounting to between one half and two thirds we also provide results on the importance of premigration sector of employment assimilation and skill transfer

participation and duration of environmental agreements we analyze participation in international environmental agreements in a dynamic game in which countries pollute and invest in green technologies if complete contracts are feasible participants eliminate the holdup problem associated with their investments however most countries prefer to free ride rather than participate if investments are noncontractible countries face a holdup problem every time they negotiate but the free rider problem can be mitigated and significant participation is feasible participation becomes attractive because only large coalitions commit to long term agreements that circumvent the holdup problem under well specified conditions even the first best outcome is possible when the contract is incomplete

on a world climate assembly and the social cost of carbon this paper argues that a uniform global tax like price on carbon emissions whose revenues each country retains can provide a focal point for a reciprocal common climate commitment whereas quantity targets which do not nearly so readily present such a single focal point tend to rely ultimately on individual quantity commitments the paper postulates the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic world climate assembly wca that votes for a single worldwide price on carbon emissions via the basic democratic principle of one person one vote majority rule a wca like uniform price tax counters self interest by incentivizing countries or agents to internalize the externality because each wca agent s higher abatement cost from a higher emissions price is counterbalanced by that agent s extra benefit from inducing all other wca agents to simultaneously lower their emissions in response to the higher price the paper derives fresh insights and new simple formulae that relate each emitter s most preferred world price of carbon to the world social cost of carbon scc and further relates the wca voted world price of carbon to the world scc some implications are discussed the overall methodology of the paper is a mixture of mostly classical with some behavioural economics

accounting for the effect of health on economic growth i use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on gdp per capita i employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health which i combine with cross country and historical data on height adult survival rates and age at menarche using my preferred estimate eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log gdp per worker by 9 9 percent and reduce the ratio of gdp per worker at the 90th percentile to gdp per worker at the loth percentile from 20 5 to 17 9 while this effect is economically significant it is also substantially smaller than estimates of the effect of health on economic growth that are derived from cross country regressions

long run substitutability between more and less educated workers evidence from u s states 1950 1990 we estimate the aggregate long run elasticity of substitution between more educated workers and less educated workers the slope of the inverse demand curve for more relative to less educated workers at the u s state level our data come from the five 1950 1990 decennial censuses our empirical approach allows for state and time fixed effects and relies on time and state dependent child labor and compulsory school attendance laws as instruments for endogenous changes in the relative supply of more educated workers we find the aggregate long run elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers to be around 1 5

public goods group size and the degree of rivalry it is well established that the provision of a pure public good is increasing in group size if the good is normal what i show is that if the good exhibits even a small degree of rivalry then the individual level of consumption of the public good falls to zero in a large group thus a strong version of olson s large group hypothesis applies to anything other than a pure public good while individual consumption of the public good goes to zero in a large group there is not a monotonicity result if it is initially small an increase in the group size may lead to an increase in the individual consumption of the public good

do countries free ride on mfn abstract the most favored nation mfn clause has long been suspected of creating a free rider problem in multilateral trade negotiations to address this issue we model multilateral negotiations as a mechanism design problem with voluntary participation we show that an optimal mechanism induces only the largest exporters to participate in negotiations over any product thus providing a rationalization for the principal supplier rule we also show that through this channel equilibrium tariffs vary according to the herfindahl hirschman index of export shares higher concentration in a sector reduces free riding and thus causes a lower tariff estimation of our model using sector level tariff data for the u s provides strong support for this relationship

does voluntary participation undermine the coase theorem abstract the coase theorem states that costless enforcement of voluntary agreements yields efficient outcomes we argue that previous treatments fail to recognize the full meaning of voluntary it requires a two stage game a non cooperative participation decision followed by coaseian bargaining only among those who choose to participate we illustrate this in a simple public goods model and find outcomes ranging from extremely inefficient to fully efficient however the efficient equilibrium is not robust to even very small transaction costs thus we cast doubt on coaseian claims of universal efficiency finally we outline a kind of coercion that restores efficiency

tariffs subsidies and welfare with endogenous policy abstract it is a well established proposition of trade theory that in the absence of directly trade related distortions or policy goals subsidies are superior to tariffs for achieving any economic or non economic objective this paper shows that once the endogeneity of the distortion or non economic objective is allowed for the welfare ranking of various policies can be reversed the particular model analyzed is one where the level of non economic objectives that have to be fulfilled itself depends on the policy tools considered to fulfill them with this arises from the public good nature of tariffs compared to subsidies

free riders holdouts and public use a tale of two externalities free riders and holdouts are distinct market failures that potentially impede the completion of otherwise beneficial transactions the key difference is that the free rider problem is a demand side externality that requires taxation to compel payment for a public good while the holdout problem is a supply side externality that requires eminent domain to force the sale of land for large scale projects this paper highlights the distinction between these two problems and uses the resulting insights to clarify the meaning of the public use requirement of the fifth amendment takings clause

digging for golden carrots an analysis of research tournaments contracting for research is often infeasible because research inputs are unobservable and research outcomes cannot be verified by a court sponsoring a research tournament can resolve these problems a model is presented in which contestants compete to find the innovation of highest value to the tournament sponsor the winner receives a prespecified prize the tournament game has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium free entry is not optimal because equilibrium effort by each researcher decreases in the number of contestants an optimally designed research tournament balances the probability of overshooting the first best quality level against the probability of falling short copyright 1995 by american economic association