measuring excess capital capacity in agricultural production we introduce the concept excess capital capacity and employ a stochastic input requirement frontier to measure excess capital capacity in agricultural production we also propose a two step estimation method that allows endogenous regressors in stochastic frontier models the first step uses generalized method of moments to get consistent estimates of the frontier parameters in the presence of endogenous regressors the second step uses maximum likelihood to measure excess capital capacity and evaluate the factors that influence it the empirical application to dutch cash crop farms found varying degrees of excess capital capacity the policy implications of excess capital capacity are discussed

does infrastructure investment stimulate building supply the case of the english regions ball m and nanda a does infrastructure investment stimulate building supply the case of the english regions regional studies policies to improve infrastructure to stimulate regional growth remain common this paper investigates whether increases in infrastructure investment in the english regions lead to subsequent rises in new commercial and residential property using time series modelling both physical roads and harbours and social infrastructure education and health impacts are investigated hardly any infrastructure effects with respect to commercial property investment were found which raises doubts about whether extra infrastructure creates employment though some impact was related to residential building overall these results raise doubts about the supposed direct effects of infrastructure policies on regional jobs and growth

one lump or two unitary versus bifurcated measures of injury at the usitc i introduction firms that face competition frequently have a number of legal avenues to limit such competition when such competition comes from overseas competitors they might avail themselves of laws to limit imports in the major industrialized countries laws to limit competition from imports fall into two broad categories safeguards and laws against unfairly traded imports safeguards also known as escape clause procedures allow a world trade organization wto member state to temporarily restrict imports when a product is imported to its territory in such increased quantities as to cause or threaten serious injury to competing domestic producers these temporary restrictions quotas or tariffs can either allow the domestic industry to become more competitive or allow an orderly transfer of resources from the industry unfairly traded imports are imports that are subsidized and or dumped that is sold at less than fair value fair value can be the price that the imports are sold for in their home market the price that the imports are sold for in a third country or the estimated cost of production including a profit in accordance with international agreements u s law requires that remedial duties antidumping duties or countervailing duties can only be imposed on unfairly traded imports if these imports have caused or threaten to cause material injury to competing domestic producers the u s international trade commission usitc is responsible for investigating and determining whether unfairly traded imports have caused material injury to a domestic industry the usitc is also responsible for investigating and determining whether a domestic industry that petitions for relief in a safeguard proceeding has suffered serious injury because of increased imports usitc commissioners have adopted a variety of approaches to determining whether dumped or subsidized imports have caused material injury to competing domestic producers an important one that has been used by several commissioners is the unitary approach this approach uses production and prices for the unfairly traded imports the domestic industry and fairly traded imports if any estimates of demand and supply elasticities and dumping or subsidy margins to calculate what the performance of the domestic industry would have been had it not had to compete with unfairly traded imports an alternative approach that has been adopted by more commissioners is the bifurcated approach this approach first asks if the domestic industry has suffered material injury and then asks whether unfairly traded imports contributed to this injury by separating the injury determination into two separate questions the presence of injury and the causation of injury the bifurcated approach is similar to the sort of inquiry that the usitc conducts in its safeguards investigations commissioners who used the unitary approach relied on an explicit economic model to compare actual domestic industry performance with what the performance would have been absent competition from unfairly traded imports in contrast commissioners who used the bifurcated approach rejected formal economic analysis in fact many of them were openly hostile to the use of economic analysis because of these different attitudes toward quantitative economics the unitary approach has also been called the economic approach we adapt an economic model developed to measure the causes of injury in usitc safeguard investigations to measure the effect of unfairly traded imports to domestic industry performance that is the second question under the bifurcated approach we apply this methodology to all usitc unfairly traded import investigations for a time period between two major changes in the law during this period there were commissioners who used the unitary approach and commissioners who used the bifurcated approach

incentives to cultivate favored minorities under alternative electoral systems a simple model is used to compare under different electoral systems the incentives for candidates to create inequalities among otherwise homogeneous voters by making campaign promises that favor small groups rather than appealing equally to all voters in this game model each candidate generates offers for voters independently out of a distribution that is chosen by the candidate subject only to the constraints that offers must be nonnegative and have mean 1 symmetric equilibria with sincere voting are analyzed for two candidate elections and for multicandidate elections under rank scoring rules approval voting and single transferable vote voting rules that can guarantee representation for minorities in multiseat elections generate in this model the most severely unequal campaign promises

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

covering dominance and institution free properties of social change this paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules specifically in a multidimensional setting where all voters have strictly quasi concave preferences it is shown that the uncovered set contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings the three institutional settings are two candidate competition in a large electorate cooperative behavior in small committees and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously because of its apparent institution free properties the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist a general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven and for the downsian case bounds for the uncovered set are computed these bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points

purification of bayes nash equilibrium with correlated types and interdependent payoffs abstract we establish purification results for bayes nash equilibrium in a large class of bayesian games with finite sets of pure actions we allow for correlated types and interdependent payoffs and for type dependent feasible action sets the latter feature allows us to prove existence and purification results for pure bayes nash equilibria in undominated strategies we give applications to auctions global games and voting to illustrate the usefulness of our results

the impact of public infrastructure capital on regional manufacturing production cost seitz h and licht g 1995 the impact of public infrastructure capital on regional manufacturing production cost reg studies 29 231 240 the paper presents an analysis of the impact of public infrastructure capital on manufacturing production cost in the 11 west german states we present a simple theoretical model of a cost minimizing firm in which the stock of public capital is included as a proxy for public services provided to firms as a fixed unpaid factor of production duality theory is used to recover the productivity effects of public infrastructures by calculating the cost saving effects that are associated with public services using a translog cost function we present panel estimates for the manufacturing industry in the 11 states of west germany with labour buildings and machinery as private factors of production the results strongly indicate significant cost reducing effects of public infrastructure services and suggest that public capital formation encourages private investment s

on the effectiveness of private and public capital this study assesses the effectiveness of private and public capital investments in the performance of manufactures within the framework of the duality theory the response of costs of production and input utilization to changes in the stocks of private and public capital is measured by the appropriate elasticities obtained from a cost function instead of considering private capital either as a variable or fixed input on a priori grounds its nature is checked that is the study discriminates between a long and a short run situation the empirical exercise is made for the manufacturing industries in the spanish regions

intertemporal output and employment effects of public infrastructure capital evidence from 12 oecd economies this paper utilises an intertemporal optimisation framework to study the effects of public infrastructure capital on output supply and input demands in 12 oecd countries we find that in all 12 countries i public capital has positive long run effects on both output supply and input demands ii its mean short run rates of return are fairly low while the corresponding long run rates are much higher but declining over time these findings underscore important under investment gaps in infrastructure during the 1970s and 1980s these gaps however narrowed down significantly in a few cases completely by the early 1990s

regulation versus taxation abstract we study which policy tool and at what level a majority chooses in order to reduce activities with negative externalities we consider three instruments a rule that sets an upper limit to the activity which produces the negative externality a quota that forces a proportional reduction of the activity and a proportional tax on it for all instruments the majority chooses levels which are too restrictive when the activity is performed mainly by a small fraction of the population and when costs for reducing activities or paying taxes are sufficiently convex also a majority may prefer an instrument different than what a social planner would choose for instance a rule when the social planner would choose a tax

the political economy of administered protection trade restrictions are hardly ever voted directly by congress though the threat of direct congressional action is frequently present pressure for protection is usually applied through the major instruments for the administrative regulation of imports the antidumping and countervailing duty procedures and the escape clause mechanism in this paper we will examine these instruments for the administrative regulation of imports the form of the paper is not novel a theory of how these mechanisms work is developed then operational implications of this theory are deduced and tested over the record of countervailing duty antidumping and escape clause cases decided from 1975 through 1979 this is the period over which the trade act of 1974 was in force because the nature of these mechanisms is relatively unfamiliar a relatively large amount of institutional information is provided

social choice and electoral competition in the general spatial model this paper extends the theory of the core the uncovered set and the related undominated set to a general set of alternatives and an arbitrary measure space of voters we investigate the properties of social preferences generated by simple games we extend results on generic emptiness of the core we prove the general nonemptiness of the uncovered and undominated sets and we prove the upper hemicontinuity of these correspondences when the voters preferences are such that the core is nonempty and externally stable finally we give conditions under which the undominated set is lower hemicontinuous

the relation between price and marginal cost in u s industry an examination of data on output and labor input reveals that some u s industries have marginal cost well below price the conclusion rests on the finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared with variations in output in booms firms produce substantially more output and sell it for a price that exceeds the costs of the added inputs the paper documents the disparity between price and marginal cost where marginal cost is estimated from annual variations in cost it considers a variety of explanations of the findings that are consistent with competition but none is found to be completely plausible

swedish economic performance and swedish economic debate a view from outside the papers by korpi henrekson and agell raise important questions both about the swedish economy and about the way in which evidence on economic growth should be handled in debate on economic policy i want to comment in particular on the fundamental question of whether the international evidence allows us to judge that swedish growth has been below par the papers raise two further questions on the first whether growth is inhibited by high taxation and a large welfare state the hallmarks of the post war swedish economy agell provides as good an assessment of the cross country macroeconomic evidence as we can probably hope to get at the moment unproven on the final vexed question of whether the structure of the economics profession has been inimical to open debate i have only a few comments to make let me start with the criteria and method by which we should attempt to assess relative economic performance this is a methodological minefield there are numerous paths leading to divergent conclusions the least we can do is to be explicit about our choices and subject our provisional conclusions to some checks for robustness what performance measure is relevant we could look at gdp or consumption scaled per head of population or per member of the workforce or per hour worked what deflators do we use we can reduce measures denominated in local currency to a common unit using exchange rates or using fixed international prices or using utility based indexes which derivative of the performance measure do we use we might want to compare levels or rankings or we might choose to assess relative rates of growth or even relative changes in growth rates which time period is relevant in particular comparisons of growth rates are often very sensitive to choice of start and end years when business cycle fluctuations are asynchronous what is the reference pointfor assessing underor overachievement the definition of par might be either the best performance or average performance for some group of countries for some period of time finally what exogenousfactors are to be taken into account we might wish to control for the influence on our preferred performance measure of a wide range of factors which are extraneous to the policy question under examination i will take a brisk jog through this minefield explaining briefly some of the choices which seem most relevant to the problem in hand but without attempting a full exposition of the problems the most usual starting place is to choose real gdp per capita as a measure of aggregate performance this

the analysis of causality in escape clause cases under section 201 of the trade act of 1974 the so called escape clause a domestic industry that is seriously injured can obtain temporary relief if imports are the substantial cause of such injury this paper develops a methodology to determine the change in a domestic industry s production as a result of changes in import supply demand and domestic supply and so determine whether or not an industry is entitled to section 201 relief this methodology is illustrated by application to two recent section 201 investigations wood shakes and shingles and nonrubber footwear copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

is public expenditure productive abstract this paper considers the relationship between aggregate productivity and stock and flow government spending variables the empirical results indicate that i the nonmilitary public capital stock is dramatically more important in determining productivity than is either the flow of nonmilitary or military spending ii military capital bears little relation to productivity and iii a core infrastructure of streets highways airports mass transit sewers water systems etc has most explanatory power for productivity the paper also suggests an important role for the net public capital stock in the productivity slowdown of the last fifteen years

multidimensional electoral competition between differentiated candidates it is known that multidimensional downsian competition fails to admit an equilibrium in pure strategies unless very stringent conditions on the distribution of voters bliss points are imposed plott 1967 this paper revisits this problem considering that the two vote share maximizing candidates are dierentiated that is candidates strategically decide po sitions only in some of the n dimensions while in the rest their positions are assumed to be xed these xed dimensions may be viewed as candidates immutable characteristics race religion culture etc we nd that if candidates are su ciently dierentiated if in the xed dimensions their positions are su ciently dierent then a unique nash equilibrium in pure strategies is guaranteed to exist for any distribution of voters bliss points perhaps more importantly we show that this is true even if there exists a unique xed dimension and candidates instrumentally decide their positions in all other n 1 dimensions

public infrastructure and the productive performance of canadian manufacturing industries this article examines the effects of public infrastructure on the productive performance of 12 two digit canadian manufacturing industries a flexible cost function incorporating public capital infrastructure is estimated for each industry separately using annual time series data for 1961 1995 the effects of public infrastructure on productivity are measured in terms of both cost saving dual and output augmenting primal measures we also investigate how public capital influences the input demand and cost structure in each industry and calculate the rate of return to public capital the empirical results provide strong evidence of the important role public infrastructure plays in the productivity of manufacturing industries the public capital serves as a substitute for both private capital and labor in most industries the rates of return to public capital are significant and vary over the years

the productivity effect of government capital in developing and industrialized countries this paper uses an aggregate production function to examine the effect of government capital formation on growth of labour productivity in an annual panel of 12 developing and 12 oecd economies covering the period 1976 1989 the results from a pooled model of all 24 countries indicate that contribution of government capital to labour productivity is positive and statistically significant this result also holds in separate samples of the industrialized and developing economies where we find that while there are productivity differentials between the two types of economies with respect to private capital there are no differences with regards to public capital

on 64 majority rule introduction d une definition de consensus social base sur deux restrictions une sur les preferences individuelles et l autre sur la distribution des preferences dans ce cas de consensus une regle de majorite a 64 presente de nombreuses proprietes interessantes par opposition aux regles de super majorite possedant des proprietes paradoxales comme les regles electorales americaines

measuring the contribution of public infrastructure capital in sweden the authors purpose is to examine ways of evaluating and measuring the contribution of public infrastructure capital to private sector output and productivity growth in sweden they do this by specifying and implementing empirically a number of alternative econometric models using annual data for sweden from 1960 to 1988 applying a dual cost function approach they find that increases in public infrastructure capital ceteris paribus reduce private sector costs the authors compute that amount of public infrastructure capital that would rationalize the cost savings incurred by the private business and manufacturing sectors and find that the amount that can be rationalized in this manner is less than what was in fact available in 1988 but that the extent of excess public infrastructure capital has been falling in the 1980s copyright 1992 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

public capital and private productivity this paper uses three different approaches to investigate whether the declining provision of public capital is a major cause of declining labor productivity the juxtaposition of approaches removes

unraveling the productivity growth slowdown in the u s canada and japan the effects of subequilibrium scale economies and markup measures of productivity growth typically include in the productivity residual the impacts of fixity of factors subequilibrium costs of adjustment returns to scale and markups this paper proposes a general framework for adjusting the residual to accommodate these impacts by first correcting and then decomposing traditional measures use of the framework is illustrated empirically for the united states japanese and canadian manufacturing sectors using an econometric model that allows explicit incorporation and measurement of these factors the adjusted measures show that a significant amount of cyclical and secular change in measured productivity growth can be attributed to production characteristics other than technical change particularly scale effects copyright 1992 by mit press

international aspects of public infrastructure investment m odelling infrastructure as an international public good in a two country m odel of trade where each country s social planner behaves strategically we show that the equilibrium levels of infrastructure are sub optimal from a global perspective utilising an appropriate econom etric fram ework and data from 16 european countries over the period 1987 95 we find evidence that accords well with the m ain predictions of our theory thus we are able to offer a plausible theoretical explanation why public capital m ay be undersupplied as suggested by previous em pirical literature