a theoretical and empirical analysis of family migration and household production reply of her household production as factors in the family s migration decisions 38 in this paper the research on family migration will be extended in three ways a formal model of household production and family migration will be developed and used to generate testable hypotheses about family migration variables which otherwise would not have a clear economic interpretation are incorporated into the model the model will then be estimated and some policy implications will be discussed one policy implication concerns the efficiency of the labor market labor market efficiency needs to be judged not only in terms of the efficiency of the job search of single individuals but also in terms of the efficiency of the joint job search of double income families this paper is organized into five sections first a comparative static household production model of locational choice is developed 2 next this model of locational choice is used to develop a theoretical model of family migration third the data and empirical model are discussed fourth the empirical results are reported and interpreted in terms of three different types of migration estimates of the impact of selected variables on the distance of the move are also considered the final section summarizes the general findings and offers some policy implications

asymmetric shocks and monetary policy in a currency union we analyze the conduct of monetary policy in a currency union in the face of asymmetric shocks in particular we compare the stabilization properties of a currency union versus alternative exchange rate arrangements the relative performance of a currency union is shown to depend on the extent of economic integration in patterns of consumption and production and on the relative weights placed on price stability versus employment stability in the monetary authority s objective function jel classification f33 f40

stabilization policy in a currency union abstract we show that the monetary authority of a currency union chooses to do nothing in the face of an asymmetric shock generating inefficiently high inflation and employment fluctuations in the member countries moreover adjustment is equivalent to that under a mckinnon rule

place to place migration in colombia the determinants of lifetime and recent place to place migration in colombia are investigated using unpublished data from the 1973 census the data cover 12 zones rural and urban segments of 6 regions and are analyzed for the population as a whole and for eight specific demographic groups including four educational categories and the two sexes the basic proposition is that areas economic opportunities play a central role in determining the spatial allocation of the population the results give strong support to the economic model of migration overall and in explaining differences in migration behavior among demographic groups excerpt

is the european community an optimal currency area optimal taxation versus the cost of multiple currencies the authors propose a view of optimal currency areas that is based on the principles of public finance inflation taxes are distortionary and an optimal spreading of tax distortions may require high inflation in one region and low inflation in another each region would need its own currency to do this on the other hand multiple currencies imply valuation and currency conversion costs which impede trade between regions this tradeoff is explored in the context of the european community s debate over a common currency using a two country variant of robert lucas and nancy stokey s cash in advance model copyright 1990 by american economic association

re analyzing the economic impact of a global bunker emissions charge abstract regulating bunker emissions continues to be a challenging task largely due to the lack of a globally coordinated scheme providing economic and political incentives to potential participating countries this paper analyses the economic costs and benefits of imposing a global carbon tax on international bunker emissions by employing a computable general equilibrium model approach under the assumption of an emissions reduction of 5 below 2000 levels by 2020 we demonstrate that a global bunker emissions charge on one hand reduces trade volume and change trade patterns between countries and regions while on the other hand accelerates the adoption of energy saving technologies and reallocates the supply of international transportation services throughout the world the net economic impact though negative on average is modest compared to the benefits obtained from the emissions reduction if revenues from a bunker emissions charge are properly distributed among countries and regions the losses to disadvantaged countries are likely to be offset by the benefits to advantaged countries this finding provides useful insights for policy makers a global bunker emissions charge could in future be an economically feasible strategy to reduce the increasing bunker emissions through the implementation requires more political effort and wisdom

meta analysis in model implementation choice sets and the valuation of air quality improvements this research illustrates how the methods developed for meta analysis can serve to document and summarize voluminous information derived from repeated sensitivity analyses our application is to the sensitivity of welfare estimates derived from discrete choice models to assumptions about the choice set these assumptions affect welfare estimates through both the estimated parameters of the model and conditional on the parameters the substitution among alternatives in our specific application the evaluation is in terms of estimated benefits of air quality improvements in los angeles based on discrete choices of neighborhood and housing copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

fiscal versus traditional market variables in canadian migration this paper evaluates the hypothesis that the influence of traditional market variables on migration in canada has diminished over time this is attributed to a crowding out process whereby growth of social security type programs has cushioned the effects of say unemployment and thus motivation to migrate for jobs and fiscal policies have exerted unintended effects implications are that market forces that would work naturally to induce migration from low to high income regions and thus equalize earned incomes have been short circuited and that traditional tools of manpower policy for influencing migration such as job creation skill enhancement or wages are less effective currently than they might have been in the past

mobility behavior of the elderly mobility patterns of the elderly provide a particularly interesting theoretical subcase of a more general migration model which interacts individual specific traits e g health and retirement status and location specific traits e g amenities rents and wages the spatially invariant incomes pensions dividends etc of the retired are shown to lead to migration toward areas where the wage and rent compensation for amenities necessary for spatial equilibrium occurs primarily in the labor market rather than in the land market empirical evidence appears to be consistent with theoretical expectations more investigation however is clearly desirable

estimation using contingent valuation data from a dichotomous choice with follow up questionnaire reply abstract our original article proposed that the two yes no willingness to pay wtp responses produced by this survey format should be viewed as a pair of jointly distributed correlated discrete random variables the comparison model the conventional approach to estimation using these types of data contained a programming error correction alters the results from the comparison model but our original claim that estimation by conventional methods can produce misleading inferences if ours is the appropriate specification still stands this is especially true if negative wtp is precluded when e wtp is calculated

statistical efficiency of double bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation the statistical efficiency of conventional dichotomous choice contingent valuation surveys can be improved by asking each respondent a second dichotomous choice question which depends on the response to the first question if the first response is yes the second bid is some amount greater than the first bid while if the first response is no the second bid is some amount smaller this double bounded approach is shown to be asymptotically more efficient than the conventional singlebounded approach using data from a survey of californians regarding their willingness to pay for wetlands in the san joaquin valley we show that in a finite sample the gain in efficiency can be very substantial

social cost of environmental quality regulations a general equilibrium analysis the use of cost benefit analysis by federal regulatory agencies has expanded greatly in scope and sophistication unfortunately agencies continue to employ private cost rather than social cost to evaluate environmental quality regulations furthermore general equilibrium impacts and intertemporal effects of regulations are typically not included in the evaluation in this paper we estimate the social cost of environmental quality regulations mandated by the clean air and clean water acts we construct an econometric general equilibrium model of the united states to demonstrate that social cost estimates diverge sharply from private cost estimates we also demonstrate that general equilibrium impacts are significant and pervasive and that intertemporal effects of the regulations heretofore ignored are significant

internal migration and urban employment in the third world for more than a decade michael todaros model has provided a widely accepted theoretical framework for explaining the massive flows of rural urban migration that are observed in many third world countries this paper however presents data amassed from a wide range of countries to highlight a crucial shortcoming of that model it will be shown that far from being general in nature the todaro approach is limited to explaining the movement of persons possessed of sufficient human capital to qualify them for modern sector employment the present work utilizes the perspective of the urban subsistence sector to develop a model that serves as a useful complement to that of todaro excerpt

determinants of internal migration in israel expected returns and risks a multinomial logit model of place to place migration focusing on economic geographic and demographic factors is applied to empirical data on inter regional migration in israel in 1980 it explains 75 of the cross sectional variance in the data the results presented in this paper depart from previous empirical work due to its industrialized context and its focus on risk aversion as a determinant of the migration decision the results support the harris todaro 1970 hypothesis and indicate that regional similarities in the structure of industrial employment promote migration

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

valuation of natural resource improvements in the adirondacks for 20 years acid rain in the adirondack park has been a central issue in the debate about clean air regulation based on a contingent valuation survey of new york residents our study quantifies the total economic value of expected ecological improvements in the park from forthcoming policies our preferred estimates of the mean household willingness to pay range from 48 to 107 annually which imply total statewide benefits ranging from 336 million to 749 million annually alternative assumptions about ecological changes yield benefits up to 1 1 billion the instrument passes external scope sensitivity to bid and sample selection tests

renewable resource use and nonseparable amenity benefits we incorporate amenity benefits into an overlapping generations model with a renewable resource as a factor of production source of amenity benefits and store of value unlike the conventional renewable resource problems studied under the assumption of additive consumption and amenity benefits we let amenity benefits affect the utility of consumers in a nonseparable fashion we examine the role that weights given to consumption and amenities have for harvesting and the resource stock we characterize dynamics and stability of steady state equilibria with a logistic resource growth function we demonstrate in parametric and numerical models that the weights given to consumption and amenities in the utility function matter substantially for the steady state equilibrium stock and its stability and dynamics both conventional saddle point equilibria and indeterminacy with infinite number of equilibria and saddle node bifurcation is possible depending on the weights given to consumption and amenities in addition we show that for each inefficient equilibrium stock there is a unique subsidy rate that can move the economy from an inefficient equilibrium to an efficient one the presence of indeterminacy provides a challenge to resource policies because the system becomes unpredictable therefore expectations and market psychology may play an important role in resource utilization and provision of amenities

a fundamental asymmetry of asymmetric shocks a simple n country specific factor type model with imperfectly mobile labour is developed it is shown that the effects of country specific productivity shocks hitting a small country have fundamentally asymmetric effects a positive shock will be accommodated by a moderate wage increase and sizeable in migration whereas a negative shock will be accommodated by a significant decrease in wages and moderate out migration it is argued that the results of the model are consistent with the recent irish experience the welfare effects of small economic fluctuations are also discussed c 2002 elsevier b v all rights reserved

entrepreneurship social mobility and income redistribution in south india development economists have been preoccupied with the problem of increasing the size of the gnp pie to the relative neglect of its distribution despite the recent disenchantment with the viewpoint that all classes share in the benefits of industrial growth empirical data on the distribution of income business opportunity and economic power are in short supply many of the studies on entrepreneurship and economic development when they are not apologetics for ruthless capitalist exploitation as paul baran suggests extol the achievements of the capitalist entrepreneur without examining class origins and monopoly advantage joseph schumpeter sees entrepreneurs irrespective of class origin as heroic figures with the dream and will to found a private kingdom to conquer adversity to achieve success for its own sake and to experience the joy of creation for gustav papanek 1967 the private entrepreneur who is frugal diligent far sighted remarkably able and willing to take political risks is in large part responsible for the success of pakistan in achieving rapid industrialization

do council housing policies reduce migration between regions data from the 1973 general household survey of great britain are used to examine whether the council house system which currently provides a dwelling for one british family in every three tends to discourage long distance migration controls are introduced for various socioeconomic variables and the importance of occupation sector of employment age and education in explaining migration is discussed comparisons are also made between local movements and long distance migration the findings indicate that over longer distances council tenants have much lower migration rates than owner occupiers

non price equilibria for non marketed goods abstract as part of the resources for the future frontiers of environmental economics collection of papers we consider the problem of general equilibrium feedback effects in non price space as they relate to non market valuation our overall objective is to examine the extent to which non price equilibria arising from both simple and complex sorting behavior can be empirically modeled and the resulting differences in partial and general equilibrium welfare measures quantified after motivating the problem in general we consider the specific context of congestion in recreation demand applications which we classify as the outcome of a simple sorting equilibrium using both econometric and computable general equilibrium cge models we examine the conceptual and computational challenges associated with this class of problems and present findings on promising solution avenues we demonstrate the relevance of accounting for congestion effects in recreation demand with an application to lake visits in iowa our econometric and cge results confirm that for some plausible counterfactual scenarios substantial differences exist between partial and general equilibrium welfare estimates we conclude the paper by describing tasks that are needed to move forward research in this area

offshore production and the base of import taxation the scheme is designed to encourage the maximum use of australian made fabrics which are cut or knitted to shape in australia textiles clothing and footwear development authority 1993 p 4 when an australian firm sets up production in south east asia it often attracts criticism because it means losing jobs to low cost labour in the region however our study shows that such criticism is not wholly justified for many firms offshore production is critical to establishing a long term position as an insider in the market and therefore is critical to exports from an australian base different methods have been used to determine origin but none has proved totally unsatisfactory and none is likely to do so

the economics of dams dams provide a host of benefits to societies helping to balance variability in water availability with demand for multiple uses allowing power generation providing and enhancing recreation opportunities and offering protection against damaging floods yet dams are often controversial due to their high investment requirements unequal distributional effects and concerns over the irreparable harm they may cause to free flowing rivers and ecosystems this paper considers the economic case for such projects organized around a review of what we know about their value and impacts though heterogeneity across contexts is a common feature of interventions in many sectors we argue that it is particularly acute in the case of dams and that this creates difficulties for drawing general conclusions about their social value still evidence suggests that investment in additional surface water storage may not always be the best solution for addressing water scarcity furthermore a number of biases and blind spots exist in economic frameworks used to evaluate dams and these often challenge analysts ability to correctly identify which projects will be most attractive perhaps due to some of these perceived deficiencies policy makers do not appear to make much use of economic analyses for decision making about dams if progress is to be made in avoiding costly mistakes related to construction and removal of such infrastructures in the future economists need to improve the realism and methods underlying their analyses of the value of dams and offer more useful interpretations of the results that these approaches produce

taxes tariffs and the global corporation in this paper we develop some simple models of optimal tax and tariff policy in the presence of global corporations that operate in an imperfectly competitive environment the models emphasize two important differences in the practical application of tax and tariff policy tax but not tariff policy can apply to offshore output and tariff but not tax policy can be industryspecific recognizing that multinationals production decisions are endogenous to the tax and tariff policies they face we investigate how a government should tax or subsidize domestically owned firms and how government should set trade policy

the substantial bias from ignoring general equilibrium effects in estimating excess burden and a practical solution we show that under typical conditions the simple excess burden triangle formula substantially underestimates the excess burden of commodity taxes in some cases by a factor of 10 or more this formula performs poorly because it ignores general equilibrium interactions most important interactions between the taxed commodity and the labor market many prior studies have shown that general equilibrium interactions affect excess burden but have not appreciated the bias associated with ignoring these interactions or the quantitative importance of this bias we derive an implementable alternative to the simple formula this alternative formula captures interactions that the simple formula omits as a result it is both unbiased and usually more accurate

valuing nature in a general equilibrium abstract we explore the consequences of modeling the demand for environmental quality improvements as a fully integrated part of a general equilibrium demand system in an applied general equilibrium or cge analysis demand for non market goods depends on a full range of relative prices as well as environmental outcomes we simulate the effects of reducing two air pollutants to improve human health and three ecosystem services provided to households the ecosystem services make non separable contributions to household utility we find that willingness to pay measures of use based ecosystem services are impacted by changes in demand for complementary market goods demand for these goods shifts due to pollution reductions that enhance ecosystem services partial equilibrium estimates of these use values can be measured with substantial error if they fail to account for the general equilibrium adjustments caused by pollution over 300 calibrations of the model identify the model features important to these errors we find that effects on ecosystem services associated with non use values have important implications for the feedback effects on use related measures of economic tradeoffs this is due to how our model integrates market and non market effects reflecting the non market services importance to general equilibrium market outcomes

capital investment for optimal exploitation of renewable resource stocks in the age of global change abstract the world is rapidly changing and biotic resources and their users are adapting determining how ecological and economic interactions determine the outcomes of this adaptation is critical to understanding the future of natural resources we model a two species fisheries as a stylized system to investigate the adaptation strategies of a harvester faced with shifting species composition in an ecological community we explore how interspecies interactions and pricing effects jointly determine the optimal adaptation strategy we consider two interacting species that are harvested jointly but where the harvester may exert effort towards each species differentially provided she invests in reproducible capital that allows targeting the possible adaptation strategies comprise changes in how people interact with natural capital for example changing harvest levels and investment in reproducible or human capital which may be a substitute or complement for natural capital stocks we find that the market price of the harvested species exerts a particularly strong impact on the adaptation strategy all else equal unequal prices tends to drive extreme targeting or avoidance of a new species economic and ecological factors can necessitate investment at equilibrium and early transient management decisions for beneficial species may like with nuisance species produce large benefits

trade and protection with multistage production this paper analyses trade in manuf acutured goods that are produced via a vertical production structure with many stages where some value is added at each to an intermediate product to yield a good in process ready for the next stage we consider the stage at which a good is traded to be an economically endogenous variable with comparative advantage determining the pattern of production specialization by stages across countries we study how endowment changes and policy shifts move the margin of comparative advantage which thus provides a channel for resource allocation adjustment that is additional to the usual ones of factor substitution and changes in the quantity of output

family migration and nonmarket activities in costa rica this study of family migration and nonmarket activities in a 10 sample of 4513 families drawn from the 1973 census of costa rica shows that differences in family characteristics can affect a familys mobility by changing a familys costs of producing household commodities or its ability to earn income at various locations many aspects of the familys nonmarket production are costly to transfer to a new location the relative complexity of family versus individual migration involves more than the simple observation that family ties increase the costs of a move not only does location have an impact on market income but it also plays a role in household production many aspects of household production may be highly region specific such as caring for children or aged adults providing for the childrens education and enjoying the company and support of friends and relatives higher husbands income may not be sufficient to compensate for the costs of transferring these activities to a new location differences in household technology represented by the education variables of the mothers play an important role in family migration as families resist moving from an area that has low input costs in the production of those commodities for which they have a comparative advantage families with a comparative advantage in producing educational commodities may be more likely to move to urban areas with better school systems and less likely to move in general the number of children and the investment in their education are negatively associated with migration the household production model allows the roles of women to be incorporated into migration analysis the characteristics of women appear to be important in determining household migration even though less than 6 of the women in the sample earn wage income they should not be ignored in migration studies the significant negative impact of the wifes education on migration attests to the dangers of ignoring the wifes role

valuing biodiversity for use in pharmaceutical research biodiversity prospecting has been touted as a mechanism for both discovering new pharmaceutical products and saving endangered ecosystems it is unclear what values may arise from such activities however evidence from transactions is incomplete and existing theoretical models are flawed we calculate an upper bound on the value of the marginal species even under favorable assumptions this bound is modest slightly modified assumptions lead to drastically lower estimates we extend our findings to the value of the marginal hectare of habitat and find that the incentives for habitat conservation generated by private pharmaceutical research are also at best very modest

enhanced geospatial validity for meta analysis and environmental benefit transfer an application to water quality improvements meta regression models are commonly used within benefit transfer to estimate willingness to pay wtp for environmental quality improvements theory suggests that these estimates should be sensitive to geospatial factors including resource scale market extent and the availability of substitutes and complements valuation meta regression models addressing the quantity of non market commodities sometimes incorporate spatial variables that proxy for a subset of these effects however meta analyses of wtp for environmental quality generally omit geospatial factors such as these leading to benefit transfers that are invariant to these factors this paper reports on a meta regression model for water quality benefit transfer that incorporates spatially explicit factors predicted by theory to influence wtp the metadata are drawn from stated preference studies that estimate per household wtp for water quality changes in united states water bodies and combine primary study information with extensive geospatial data from external sources results find that geospatial variables are associated with significant wtp variations as predicted by theory and that inclusion of these variables reduces transfer errors

the emergence of migration theory and a suggested new direction abstract the literature on internal labour migration is surveyed using a fourfold taxonomic scheme the potential migrant as presented in the existing literature can be viewed as a supplier of labour an investor in human capital and a consumer of regional amenities such as public goods the paper develops a fourth approach which treats the household rather than the individual as the migrating unit and which views the potential migrant as a producer of home produced commodities the continuities as well as the contrasts between the four approaches are discussed in the paper

unemployment and the efficiency wage hypothesis there has been much recent discussion of the reasons why prices in certain markets and in particular in labour markets may not adjust to eliminate excess supply the absence of speedy adjustment of prices is an essential feature of the recent models of disequilibrium macroeconomics but for the most part no explanation for this absence is provided from within those models one explanation that has been around in the literature for some time and has been receiving increasing attention recently is the efficiency wage hypothesis initially applied to developing economies see leibenstein i957 it has more recently been adapted to developed economies by weiss i 980 and used in the context of a keynesian macroeconomic model by hart i 980 similar concepts have been applied to the credit market by stiglitz and weiss i98i the purpose of the present paper is to explore further the conditions under which the notion of an efficiency wage is applicable and can provide an explanation of involuntary unemployment the essential feature of the efficiency wage hypothesis is that the productivity of a firm s employees increases as their wage is increased at least over an economically relevant part of its range if the wage paid by the firm is denoted by w the number of employees by l and the productivity of each employee by p w where p w o then the effective labour force of the firm e can be represented by

bargaining a monetary union abstract two governments bargain over the benefits of a monetary union in a cash in advance world a novel feature of the model is that because households trade every period market behavior affects and is affected by the government negotiations as a result in addition to objective costs of delay market expectations about the bargaining outcome emerge as crucial determinants of a monetary union there is a continuum of bargaining outcomes indexed by market expectations some outcomes imply that the monetary union is delayed for an arbitrary number of periods journal of economic literature classification numbers f4 c7

an investigation of part whole biases in contingent valuation studies abstract part whole bias is a possible explanation for nonuse contingent valuation estimates that are insensitive to marginal changes in environmental commodities our empirical analyses reveal no statistically significant differences in willingness to pay of independent samples of nonusers to prevent 2000 20 000 or 200 000 migratory waterfowl deaths in the central flyway all numbers less than 2 of the waterfowl population five alternative propositions for explaining this empirical findings do not provide a completely satisfactory explanation more research is necessary to investigate appropriate commodity metrics sample sizes for small changes in environmental commodities and consider how respondents evaluate small changes in environmental commodities

migration intentions in the u k which households want to migrate and which succeed the authors extend their earlier study of the impact of the council housing system on migration in the united kingdom in particular they examine the hypothesis that individuals differ in various unobserved ways and that personal characteristics that result in individuals becoming tenants may also discourage migration data are from the general household survey for 1973 and 1974 and pertain to both migration intentions and past migration the extent to which house tenure and other household characteristics affect the probability that a household embarking on a housing search will be successful in realizing its migration intentions is explored in addition the importance of both individual and aggregate local unemployment in determining migration intentions is discussed

is migration important for regional convergence comparative evidence for norwegian and swedish counties 1980 2000 ostbye s and westerlund o 2007 is migration important for regional convergence comparative evidence for norwegian and swedish counties 1980 2000 regional studies 41 901 915 regional convergence studies have relied on net migration data when assessing the impact of migration with heterogeneous labour the implied symmetrical treatment of immigration and emigration cannot be justified a priori because of heterogeneity among migrants gross migration flows may lead to considerable interregional redistribution of human capital even when net migration is zero moreover the effects of regional economic conditions on gross in and out migration flows may not be symmetric in this comparative study of regional growth and migration the net and the gross migration approaches are compared the results confirm ex post that the net approach cannot be justified and despite sweden and norway being similar in many ways migration has very different effects on convergence in these two countries ostbye s et

social insurance majority voting and labor mobility abstract this paper presents a political economy approach to payroll tax competition between two countries choosing their respective systems of social insurance in a context of labor mobility it considers a class of social insurance systems which includes two interesting polar cases one where benefits are linked to contributions bismarck and one where benefits are flat beveridge the type of social insurance is chosen behind the veil of ignorance at a first constitutional stage in the second stage the generosity of social insurance as measured by the payroll tax rate is chosen by the majority given that some have the possibility to move the main results are as follows first the type of mobility namely poor vs rich has a significant impact on the second stage tax competition migration equilibrium second more bismarckian systems are not necessarily more tax competition proof third the process will result in social insurance systems with a stronger than optimal link between earnings and benefits put differently at the constitutional stage the countries will tend to adopt systems which are too bismarckian

evaluating policy interventions with general equilibrium externalities abstract we report on the results of analytical and numerical models that describe the effects of non separable externalities or public goods on public policies with important general equilibrium consequences in the numerical exercise we calibrate a general equilibrium model with non separable air quality benefits in order to measure the excess burden and total net benefits of transportation and energy taxes in the 1995 u s economy the change in the physical level and the economic value in air quality associated with a given policy is a function of the substitution patterns between air quality and market goods that we assume the size of the deadweight loss due to pre existing distortions such as a tax on labor income is substantially affected by these substitution patterns

participation in a currency union in any voluntary cooperative agreement the potential gain from deviation should determine the minimum influence required over common decision making this paper begins by observing that a highly asymmetric distribution of power between two partners is not sustainable if the choice variables are strategic substitutes it then studies a simple general equilibrium model of a monetary union and shows that a small economy will not take part in the agreement unless it can secure influence that is more than proportional to its size and a transfer of seigniorage revenues in its favor copyright 1992 by american economic association

monetary and fiscal policies interaction in monetary unions in this paper the literature on the interaction between monetary and fiscal policies in a monetary union is surveyed by adopting the concept of symbiosis as a starting point the paper highlights the importance of uncertainty policy makers preferences and targets then the role of commitment to policy rules and coordination is addressed the analysis also focuses on the importance of the data considered for the generation of the policy mix as a final step the paper discusses the main results in the literature on public debt management in a monetary union all the reported theoretical results are then adopted to retrieve policy and institutional implications for the european monetary union

migration and wage growth a human capital approach the purpose of this paper is to analyze migration as an investment in human capital using panel data the authors focus on two issues the first is the economic motivation for migration and the reasons some movers receive high returns relative to other migrants the second issue and the major focus of the paper is a test of the human capital model explaining wage profiles of nonmovers first time and repeat migrants the data are from the national longitudinal survey of young males 1966 1971 cross section and concern the united states excerpt

optimal environmental border adjustments under the general agreement on tariffs and trade a country choosing to adopt border carbon adjustments based on embodied emissions is motivated by both environmental and strategic incentives we argue that the strategic component is inconsistent with commitments under the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt we extend the theory of border adjustments to neutralize the strategic incentive and consider the remaining environmental incentive in a simplified structure the theory supports border adjustments on carbon content that are below the domestic carbon price because price signals sent through border adjustments inadvertently encourage consumption of emissions intensive goods in unregulated regions the theoretic intuition is supported in our applied numeric simulations countries imposing border adjustments at the domestic carbon price will be extracting rents from unregulated regions at the expense of efficient environmental policy and consistency with international trade law

values in the wind a hedonic analysis of wind power facilities the siting of wind facilities is extremely controversial this paper uses data on 11 331 property transactions over nine years in northern new york state to explore the effects of new wind facilities on property values we use a fixed effects framework to control for omitted variables and endogeneity biases we find that nearby wind facilities significantly reduce property values in two of the three counties studied these results indicate that existing compensation to local homeowners communities may not be sufficient to prevent a loss of property values jel q51 q53

latent tastes incomplete stratification and the plausibility of vertical sorting models this paper uses the 2011 phoenix area social survey to evaluate the plausibility of the assumptions made with pure characteristics sorting models to rationalize incomplete stratification of households across local communities by income the analysis with the new ecological paradigm a well recognized index of environmental attitudes confirms the correlations in equilibrium outcomes implied by these models as a result it provides the first empirical support for the role of differences in the tastes for public goods as one explanation that provides the rationale for the commonly observed sorting outcomes

the welfare effects of repealing the u s offshore assembly provision abstract this paper develops new estimates of the welfare and domestic production effects of repealing the us offshore assembly provision oap although the controversy surrounding the oap has recently intensified the only such estimates of repealing the oap weredeveloped by finger 1976 the estimates are developed by applying a partial equilibrium trade model of a two stage production process to nineteen productct categories in which oap trade was important in 1986 the paper find that repael of the oap reduces domestic welfare however the effects are small and almost negligible in percentage terms the important effects of repeal are distributional

a revealed preference approach to the measurement of congestion in travel cost models abstract travel cost models are regularly used to determine the value of recreational sites or particular site characteristics yet congestion a key site attribute is often excluded from such analyses one reason for this omission is that congestion is determined in equilibrium by the process of individuals sorting across sites and thus presents significant endogeneity problems this paper illustrates this source of endogeneity describes how previous research has dealt with it using stated preference techniques and describes an instrumental variables approach to address it in a revealed preference context we demonstrate that failing to address the endogeneity of congestion leads one to dramatically understate its costs we apply our technique to the valuation of a large recreational fishing site in wisconsin lake winnebago which if eliminated would induce significant re sorting of anglers amongst remaining sites ignoring congestion leads to an understatement of the lake s value by more than 50

free riding convergence and two speed monetary unification in europe this paper shows that two speed monetary unification carries a danger low inflation countries in europe have an interest in delaying entry of the high inflation country because it would raise the average inflation rate however this country might refuse to join when the first group find it qualified to that is when convergence has taken place this is because the high inflation country can employ its monetary policy to stabilize against shocks given that the currency union members have optimally chosen a lower inflation rate hence a tradeoff exists between the necessity for convergence and the free rider problem

referendum models and economic values theoretical intuitive and practical bounds on willingness to pay innovations in the estimation of referendum type contingent valuation models have led to willingness to pay wtp measures inconsistent with consumer preferences and unbounded from above or below we propose a set of criteria which guarantee a bounded measure of wtp the criteria reject the traditional random utility model with unrestricted error terms in favor of the random wtp model with bounds on wtp once wtp is bounded by zero and income the form of the distribution is less consequential a new model for wtp is developed based on the beta distribution and is compared to previously estimated models

a note on optimal taxation in the presence of externalities abstract i consider the problem of optimal taxation with externalities in a general setup encompassing most of optimal taxation models found in the literature it is demonstrated that when direct taxation of externalities is possible optimal taxes can be expressed as the sum of the optimal pigouvian taxes and the optimal taxes in a related problem without externalities regardless of what other tax instruments are available this result generalizes the so called principle of targeting

the consequences of interregional labor migration for the regional labor market theory methodology and dutch experience an important problem of interregional migration is whether migrants fulfill vacancies which could also have been filled by native unemployed it is argued that this problem could adequately be analyzed by means of ex post comparison of both categories with regard to age education family status and work experience in a dutch case study this comparison has been made by means of logistic regression and the results have been cross validated the migrants are found to have superior labor market characteristics the implications of this finding for some migra tion theories and regional policy are discussed

measuring welfare loss caused by air pollution in europe a cge analysis abstract to evaluate the socio economic impacts of air pollution we develop an integrated approach based on computable general equilibrium cge applying our approach to 18 western european countries shows that even there where air quality is relatively high compared with other parts of the world health related damages caused by air pollution may be substantial we estimate that as of 2005 europe experienced an annual loss in consumption of about 220 billion euro in year 2000 prices about 3 of total consumption with a range based on 95 high and low epidemiological response functions of 107 335 billion euro and a total welfare loss of about 370 billion euro range of 209 550 including both consumption and broader welfare losses around 2 of welfare level due to the accumulated effects of three decades of air pollution in europe in addition we estimate that a set of air quality improvement policy scenarios as proposed in the 2005 cafe program would bring 18 european countries as a whole a welfare gain of 37 49 billion euro year 2000 prices in year 2020 alone

life on the frontier migrant information earnings and past mobility this paper examines the extent to which information obtained from past geographic mobility affects both post move job search and earnings in subsequent migration in the united states the study considers this linkage between past and present mobility by estimating earnings frontiers for various categories of interstate migrants partitioned by prior mobility history the results demonstrate that migrant groups exhibiting high relative levels of human capital stock do not necessarily possess superior pre move labor market information it is also demonstrated that the incentive to acquire this pre move information is tied to psychic cost and variation in this cost among migrant types excerpt

establishing a central bank issues in europe and lessons from the us list of figures list of tables preface list of conference participants 1 introduction part i the design of a central bank 2 designing a central bank for europe a cautionary tale from the early years of the federal reserve system 3 the european central bank reshaping monetary politics in europe 4 the ecb a bank or a monetary policy rule part ii transition from national central banks to a european central bank 5 hard erm hard ecu and european monetary union 6 voting