the demand for lotto the role of conscious selection this article presents estimates of the elasticity of demand for lottery tickets using time series data in which there is variation in the expected value of a lottery ticket induced by rollovers an important feature of our data is that there are far more rollovers than expected given the lottery design we find strong evidence that individuals do not choose their lottery numbers uniformly from a uniform distribution that is conscious selection we use our estimates to derive the inverse supply function for the industry and this enables us to identify the demand elasticity we find the price elasticity to be close to unity which implies that the operator is revenue maximizing which is the regulator s objective

expected utility skewness and the baseball betting market a subjective expected utility model is developed to explain the gambling behaviour of bettors on major league baseball games in the united states betting activity was examined over 15 seasons for the period 1978 1992 the observed overbetting of favourite teams by baseball bettors can be reconciled without abandoning the traditional assumption of risk aversion additionally there is some evidence to suggest that positive skewness has a discernible influence in the decision making process for higher odds contests

some issues in the measurement of comparative advantage this paper examines measurement of revealed comparative advantage in the light of recent evidence that such measures appear to yield poor results and of recent theoretical developments evidence is presented that the poor performance of these measures is not likely to be attributable to problems predominantly associated with measurement itself recent theoretical developments make clearer what can be expected of observed trade flows a measure based on theory s ex antepredictions measures the behaviour of the measure is evaluated for a sample of uk industries in 1979

state lotteries and consumer behavior abstract this paper investigates two central issues regarding state lotteries first analyses of multiple sources of micro level data demonstrate that household lottery spending is financed primarily by a reduction in non gambling expenditures not by a reduction in expenditures on other forms of gambling the introduction of a state lottery is associated with an average decline of 46 per month or 2 4 percent in household non gambling expenditures low income households reduce non gambling household expenditures by 2 5 percent on average 3 1 percent when the state lottery includes instant games these households experience statistically significant declines in expenditures on food and on rent mortgage and other bills second consumer demand for lottery products responds positively to the expected value of the gamble controlling for other statistical moments and product characteristics including the nominal top prize amount this finding is consistent with informed choice among consumers of lottery products although other forms of irrational or misinformed choice cannot be ruled out

the who and why of lottery empirical highlights from the seminal economic literature lotteries operate today in many countries around the world this type of gambling is usually run by governments and is sometimes described as regressive lottery is an unfair bet so explaining the purchase of lottery tickets by risk averse consumers has been a challenge for economic theory lotteries can be analysed from either of two economic perspectives as a source of public revenue or as a consumer commodity in this paper the state of economic research on lotteries is reviewed focusing on its main empirical findings

an analysis of bilateral intra industry trade in the food processing sector this paper analyses determinants of intra industry trade in food processing for a 30 country sample over the period 1964 85 previous studies have tested the hypothesis that imperfect competition is a major determinant of intra industry trade iit in the durable goods manufacturing sectors this study is distinguised from the earlier studies of iit by the examination of the processed food sector sic 20 the use of a panel data set for 22 years and 30 countries available at the four digit sic level the use of purchasing power parity measures of gdp and the use of a weighted tobit model with fixed effects to account for the censored cross section time series nature of the date the results indicate that iti in food processing is a positive function of a country s gdp per capita and equality if gdp per capita between countries in addition it is also found that such trade is strongly influenced by distance between trading partners membership in customs unions and free trade blocs and also exchange r

the learning curve and the yield factor the case of korea s semiconductor industry this article attempts to find out how the korean economy has grown so rapidly in a short time span of less than 30 years for that purpose it focuses on the development of the korean semiconductor industry more specifically the memory chip segment of the industry as a case in point to test the hypothesis that the learning curve effects have been significant in the memory chip industry yield factor the ratio of sellable chips to total chips in a wafer in semiconductor production is used as a measure of the learning progression that is by tracing how the yield factor for each generation of memory chips has increased one is able to see how well the korean chip makers have exploited the learning effects this article improves the learning by doing modelling by introducing a richer set of yield data and the unit of analysis employed throughout the article is at the firm level which is not common in the literature dealing with east asian development as well as the economics of technology thus enha

factors influencing the adoption of state lotteries this paper explores the factors influencing the adoption of state lotteries in the united states the conceptual framework utilizes a common utility framework in which a representative legislator maximizes utility derived from the current and expected fiscal position of a state subject to a political constraint the empirical results support the theoretical hypotheses including the finding that changes in the fiscal health of the state the predicted profit potential of a lottery and the political climate of the state all affect the likelihood that a lottery is adopted by introducing a sound conceptual framework using better data than used in previous studies utilizing an appropriate estimation technique and obtaining strong results this study advances our knowledge of why states adopt lotteries

determinants of the structure of u s foreign trade 1958 1976 abstract the heckscher ohlin model with three direct factor inputs is borne out for u s net exports of manufactures in annual cross section regressions for 1958 1976 the coefficient on unskilled labor became significantly more negative over the period and there is evidence that the negative sign on physical capital may reflect the inclusion of natural resource industries further analysis based upon 1960 and 1970 census years suggests the importance as well of skill and technological variables calculations of the total factor requirements of u s trade uphold the leontief paradox for 1958 but not for 1972

the competitiveness of the uk aerospace industry porter s five competitive forces model provides an analytical framework for assessing the uk aerospace industry s competitiveness in this article various statistical indicators are used to measure competitiveness based on published data at the industry and firm level supplemented with information from company interviews the indicators include productivity output firm size development time scales labour hoarding exports and profitability the empirical results of this article suggest that over the period 1980 to 2000 the uk aerospace industry improved its competitiveness compared with the usa and the eu

substitution between games in the uk national lottery virtually all lottery agencies offer a variety of games to suit the tastes of players in an attempt to maximize revenue to the government using the uk national lottery which offers a variety of on line and scratchcard games the extent to which there is substitution or complementarity between games is evaluated employing weekly data from the three uknl lottery games offered over the sample period it is found that own game characteristics have by far the largest influence on sales some evidence is found suggesting that the lotto and scratchcard games are partial substitutes for one another thunderball sales appear independent of the other two games some evidence is also found that the wednesday and saturday drawings of the lotto game are substitutes the overall conclusion is that camelot has successfully designed and marketed three games that each appeal to bettors in different ways thus sales from one game do not seem to seriously cannibalize the sales of the other games with the exceptions no

buying a dream alternative models of demand for lotto existing lotto demand models utilize effective price computed as the face value of a ticket minus the expected value of prize money per ticket as their primary explanatory variable by contrast this article proposes a key role for consumption benefit or fun in the demand for gambling in general and lotto demand in particular it develops an alternative model of lotto demand that focuses on the maximum possible prize when this is tested against the traditional model using data from the u k national lottery we find that jackpot considerations exert an influence over and above that of variations in effective price

intra industry trade in agrofood sectors the case of the eec meat market examination of intra industry trade iit and of its determinants has so far been confined to industrial commodity markets taking the case of red meat the possibility of trade overlap in a typical agroffod commodity is observed further based on previous theoretical analyses and empirical indications it tests formally a general and a restricted set of country and industry or demand and supply hypotheses which being particular to the eec meat market may account for cross country variations in iit in 1988 results suggest that taste overlap as approached by countries cultural and economic convergence as well as the imperfectly competitive structure of the market as supported by product differentiation significantly explain iit despite some methodological shortcomings there seems to be ample scope for the application of similar models in other agrofood sectors in what remains a relatively under researched area

testing for efficiency in lotto markets state sponsored lotto games because they are pari mutuel and because jackpots with no winner are rolled over into the next drawing present an excellent opportunity to test for market efficiency using data from massachusetts kentucky and ohio we investigate bettors responses and test for weak form efficiency lotto bets do not have positive net expected returns thus weak form efficiency exists to evaluate strong form efficiency we utilize the concept of a rational expectations equilibrium we find that in general lotto bettors decisions to play generate a level of sales that conform to their original forecasts of expected value

the size distribution of innovating firms in the uk 1945 1983 a survey of 4 378 significant innovations shows that firms with fewer than 1 000 employees commercialized a much larger share than is indicated by their share of r and d expenditures innovations per employee have been consistently above average in firms with more than 10 000 employees and have become so in firms with fewer than 1 000 intersectoral variation in the size distribution of innovating firms can be explained as a function of r and d based technological opportunities and of technological ease of entry by user firms with principal activities outside the sector copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

horizontal and vertical intra industry trade in australian manufacturing does trade liberalization have any impact this paper contributes to the literature on intra industry trade iit by disentangling such trade into horizontally and vertically differentiated products and investigating their determinants in the context of trade liberalization in australia iit in australian manufacturing has increased following trade liberalization in 1980s and is increasingly dominated by vertically differentiated products industry level evidence confirms that the failure to segregate iit into horizontally and vertically differentiated products produces misleading results as their determinants differ also structural changes brought about by the policy liberalization appear to have an impact on total as well vertical iit

exchange rate uncertainty and agricultural trade using a sample of bilateral trade flows across ten developed countries between 1974 and 1995 this article explores the effect of exchange rate uncertainty on the growth of agricultural trade as compared to other sectors based on a gravity model that controls for other factors likely to determine bilateral trade the results show that real exchange rate uncertainty has had a significant negative effect on agricultural trade over this period moreover the negative impact of uncertainty on agricultural trade has been more significant compared to other sectors

the use of unit values to discriminate between price and quality competition this paper proposes using the unit value of exports to discriminate between markets in which the quantity traded depends more on price competition and those markets in which the quantity traded depends more on non price competition the unit value of the exports is a measure available at practically all levels of disaggregation this measure thus enables us to judge competitiveness for broad industries as well as to trace its sources and structures in narrowly defined product markets the author proposes an easy way to discriminate between industries in which low unit values signal low costs and those industries in which high unit values signal high quality or highly processed goods and he applies this concept of revealed price elasticity revelast to the german economy copyright 1997 by oxford university press

on the optimal design of lotteries is globally concave since thearguments against the plausibility of a convex utility function advanced in the previous sectionin relation to eu theory apply with equal force to the rdeu model by contrast as is shownbelow these arguments do not apply to risk seeking behavior associated with the possibility that

the peculiar scale economies of lotto the best selling lottery game in the united states is lotto a parimutuel game of long odds and large jackpots unlike in the other popular lottery games numbers and instant there is a strong tendency for per capita lotto sales to increase with the size of the population base the fact that the jackpot also tends to increase with population size is not a complete explanation since the probability of winning tends to be inversely proportional to state population our explanation for why the games are more successful in large states is that players tend to judge the likelihood of winning based on the frequency with which someone wins then a larger state can offer a game at longer odds but the same perceived probability of winning as a smaller state this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

protectionist pressures and aggregate economic conditions comment on takacs this paper explores the influence of u s macroeconomic conditions and the international trade position on protectionist pressures as measured by escape clause cases brought before the international trade commission several possible difficulties with takacs pioneering empirical study of this topic are considered it is argued that while further support is found for her principal conclusion that the state of the domestic economy is a significant determinant of such protectionist pressures the quantitative strength of such aggregate factors is less than was suggested by takacs original study

probability of purchase amount of purchase and the demographic incidence of the lottery tax abstract when consumers indifference curves are discontinuous at zero perhaps due to stigma or fixed costs of purchase then factors influencing the amount purchased will have a different effect on the probability of purchase estimation of the demand for a commodity like lottery tickets requires a procedure that accounts for this tobit estimation commonly used in this literature does not allow for this generalization we investigate individual lottery ticket purchases using data from a survey of households our results are quite disparate from earlier studies regarding the effects of many demographic variables on probability of play level of play and expected lottery ticket purchases and imply a different demographic incidence of the lottery tax than previous studies suggest

sectoral patterns of technical change towards a taxonomy and a theory abstract the purpose of the paper is to describe and explain sectoral patterns of technical change as revealed by data on about 2000 significant innovations in britain since 1945 most technological knowledge turns out not to be information that is generally applicable and easily reproducible but specific to firms and applications cumulative in development and varied amongst sectors in source and direction innovating firms principally in electronics and chemicals are relatively big and they develop innovations over a wide range of specific product groups within their principal sector but relatively few outside firms principally in mechanical and instrument engineering are relatively small and specialised and they exist in symbiosis with large firms in scale intensive sectors like metal manufacture and vehicles who make a significant contribution to their own process technology in textile firms on the other hand most process innovations come from suppliers these characteristics and variations can be classified in a three part taxonomy based on firms 1 supplier dominated 2 production intensive 3 science based they can be explained by sources of technology requirements of users and possibilities for appropriation this explanation has implications for our understanding of the sources and directions of technical change firms diversification behaviour the dynamic relationship between technology and industrial structure and the formation of technological skills and advantages at the level of the firm the region and the country

the representative bettor bet size and prospect theory abstract models of representative bettors have ignored the decision on the size of bet that a gambler takes by modelling bet size the favourite longshot bias observed in many pari mutuel betting markets is shown to be consistent with both i a representative bettor taking decisions according to prospect theory based on standard shaped value and weighting functions and ii the bettor simply being risk loving for gains and risk averse for losses

complementarities of trade advantage and trade competitiveness measures the complementarities of trade advantage and trade competitiveness measures for agro food trade of five central european ce 5 countries with the european union are analysed the stability and duration of the trade measures over time is investigated by the survival analysis using the nonparametric kaplan meier product limit estimator and the consistency test between the trade measures is conducted by the stratified cox proportional hazard model the ce 5 countries experienced a greater number of products with relative trade disadvantages and greater significance of one way imports unlike the czech republic poland slovakia and slovenia hungary experienced relative trade advantages rtas for bulk raw commodities processed intermediates and horticulture with the greatest significance of successful quality competition and one way exports and the lowest significance of unsuccessful price and unsuccessful quality competition the duration of rtas is longer than the duration for the successful trade co

measuring international competitiveness experience from east asia this paper uses a new measure of real exchange rates as an indicator of international competitiveness this new measure involves defining all prices and exchange rates on an appropriately weighted basket of currencies rather than a single currency the measure is applied to the data for japan korea thailand malaysia and singapore for comparison purposes we calculate real exchange rates based on purchasing power parity ppp for these countries to check for the relative performance of the two measures cointegration tests are employed the results indicate that the new measure tends to be closely related with the export growth for the sample countries while the ppp based measure is not moreover the ppp based real exchange rates tend to understate the measures of competitiveness for these countries this result has important implications in terms of the levels of these countries exchange rates as well as the well known balassa hypothesis

the british gambler s fallacy people facing choices under uncertainty and gamblers in particular are often subject to statistical fallacies this paper explores the hypothesis that if lotto players were subject to the gambler s fallacy predictable fluctuations in the number of jackpots would occur evidence based on a poisson regression model in which the number of winning bets is conditional on the history of draws indicates that number selection in the uk is only marginally affected by the history of draws

state lotteries as a source of revenue a re examination most of the academic literature that has examined state lotteries has had a negative assessment of them studies of lotteries as a source of revenue have reported that even under the best circumstances they generate only a tiny proportion of a state s revenues and the lottery revenues are so volatile that states cannot and should not be dependent on them in addition the general consensus is that lotteries have high administrative costs and that they may reduce other sources of state revenue 1 in contrast to this negative view prevalent in the academic literature lotteries have been exceedingly popular with policymakers in state capitals and among the general public most of the literature which casts a negative light on lotteries as a revenue source looked at data through the mid 1980s since then the number of states operating lotteries has grown from 17 in 1985 to 33 in 1992 in only one state north dakota during the past 30 years has a lottery referendum failed to achieve a majority of votes 2 why are lotteries so popular is it because voters are ill informed and unsophisticated do proponents mistakenly believe that they will help cure government revenue shortfalls or is it possible that lotteries really do have a significantly favorable fiscal impact that lottery revenues are not as small and destabilizing as the academic literature maintains

a portfolio of nobel laureates markowitz miller and sharpe three pioneers of quantitative finance have now been justly honored harry markowitz merton miller and william sharpe received the nobel prize in economic science in 1990 from today s perspective it is hard to understand what finance was like before portfolio theory here i attempt to provide a very brief history of the quantitative revolution in finance drawing upon p bernstein s capital ideas 1992 and accounts of the three nobel laureates

lottery pricing and price elasticity dispersion in the uk and canada abstractwe estimate effective price elasticities for different quantiles of the demand distribution of the uk national lottery and the canadian lotto 649 we show that price elasticities vary significantly from draw to draw and have a tendency to increase with lottery participation and jackpot size our findings indicate that setting lottery rules on the basis of mean effective price elasticities should be faced with caution because expected profits are negatively related to the evident variation of elasticities among lottery draws we also simulate alternative active rollover distributions and show that limiting the rollover accumulation by withholding portions and ploughing them back in future nonrollover draws is potentially profitable

an economist s guide to lottery design this paper outlines the issues relevant to the design of pari mutuel lottery games and makes inferences about game design effects from estimates of how rollovers affect sales lottery tickets sales depend positively on the proportion of revenue returned as prizes positively on the skewness of the prize distribution which depends largely on how much of the prize money goes to the jackpot and negatively on the variance in the prize distribution which depends largely on how much goes on smaller prizes we simulate the effects of envisaged game design changes on sales revenue and find potentially large effects

a theory of rational addiction we develop a theory of rational addiction in which rationality means a consistent plan to maximize utility over time strong addiction to a good requires a big effect of past consumption of the good on current consumption such powerful complementarities cause some steady states to be unstable they are an important part of our analysis because even small deviations from the consumption at an unstable steady state can lead to large cumulative rises over time in addictive consumption or to rapid falls in consumption to abstention our theory also implies that cold turkey is used to end strong addictions that addicts often go on binges that addicts respond more to permanent than to temporary changes in prices of addictive goods and that anxiety and tensions can precipitate an addiction

vertical and horizontal intra industry trade a cross industry analysis for the united kingdom a large theoretical literature has emerged directed at explaining the presence of intra industry trade iit one of the distinctions which comes out of these models is that between horizontal iit where goods are differentiated by attributes and vertical iit where goods are differentiated by quality in this paper horizontal and vertical iit in u k trade are disentangled using a unit value dispersion criterion and a range of industry characteristics the paper not only points up the relative importance of vertical and horizontal iit in the united kingdom it also demonstrates how a failure to separate them out can impact on the interpretation of empirical results copyright 1995 by royal economic society

does federally financed business r d matter for us productivity growth this paper investigates the impact of federally financed business r d on productivity of the us nonfarm business sector results of a cointegration analysis suggest that a long run relation between productivity and total privately and federally financed r d capital stock exists moreover the estimation results do not confirm the finding of previous empirical studies that the productivity effects of federally financed business r d are lower compared with those of privately financed business r d

collaboration and firm size some evidence from the uk defence industry this paper presents evidence on the relationship between collaboration and firm size derived from an empirical study of the uk defence industry the results indicate that size has a positive impact on collaboration and in particular with the propensity to collaborate with overseas firms however size has no impact on the propensity to collaborate with uk partners this lends support to theories which emphasize the resource constraints facing small firms in developing international collaboration there is a need for a policy debate concerning mechanisms to promote collaboration to assist small firms to realise the benefits of international collaboration

the welfare effects of lotto evidence from the uk abstract this paper estimates the demand for lottery tickets using pooled cross section data that contain individual incomes and extensive information about characteristics one of the cross sections corresponded to a draw which was a double rollover the jackpot was enhanced by adding the two previous draws jackpots which had not been won together these datasets provide sufficient observations facing different prices to allow us to estimate the price elasticity as well as the income elasticity of demand we estimate tobit and other specifications and use the estimates to evaluate the welfare effects arising from the introduction of the lottery

empirical relevance of the hillman condition for revealed comparative advantage 10 stylized facts the theoretically necessary and sufficient condition for the correspondence between revealed comparative advantage and pre trade relative prices derived by hillman 1980 is analysed empirically for virtually all countries of the world over an extended period of time this yields 10 stylized facts including that i violations of the hillman condition are small as a share of the number of observations but substantial as a share of the value of world exports ii violations occur relatively frequently in the period 1970 1984 and more rarely in the period 1985 1997 and iii violations occur foremost in primary product and natural resource intensive sectors and for countries in africa the middle east latin america and central and eastern europe an additional bonus of verifying the hillman condition in empirical research is its ability to identify erroneously classified trade flows

introduction to monetary and financial arrangements abstract recent years have seen major innovations in the nature of monetary banking and payment arrangements these innovations which are certain to continue into the foreseeable future will have huge implications for the conduct of monetary policy for the regulation of banking and for the design of payment systems indeed central banks now need to think about the conduct of monetary policy in environments where the evolution of banking and payments systems already has implied and will continue to imply a declining demand for their liabilities central banks also need to think about the conduct of monetary policy in increasingly global markets and in a context where the number of currencies is shrinking as different nations abandon their own monies in favor of the dollar or the euro and at least in the united states all legal impediments to the issue of currency substitutes by private agents have been repealed this has occurred at the same time that developments in communications and record keeping technologies have made it feasible for agents to issue various forms of electronic currency substitutes what would the widespread issue of private possibly electronic currency substitutes imply for price level and interest rate determination or for the conduct of monetary policy in general in addition the increasing frequency and severity of financial crises around the globe and the increasing exposure of economies like the u s to external events raise issues about the appropriate roles for national central banks and the appropriate roles for international agencies like the imf and recent changes in u s banking legislation will force a rethinking of how the supervision and regulation of the banking system should be conducted and of how far the safety net created by deposit insurance provision and lender of last resort services should be extended these issues will become particularly vexing as the scope of activities conducted by banks increases and as the notion of a bank becomes more amorphous the papers in this issue are intended to provide frameworks for advancing research on these and other topics journal of economic literature classification numbers e0 e5 g0

technological competition and trade performance this paper estimates a demand system for oecd exports differentiated by country of origin for two isic industries non electrical machinery electrical machinery and for total manufacturing exports it develops a generalized form of the aids demand system in which research and development r d effort enters in a number of ways to affect a particular supplier s competitiveness r d activity relative to competitors affects on the one hand relative cost competitiveness and on the other hand the producer s position in the quality spectrum of products offered on international markets one of the interesting insights gained from the study is that effectiveness of r d effort can differ much across different economies it is conjectured that a country s position in an international catching up process may be partly responsible for such differences as well as labour market dynamics which link increased labour costs to cost and quality improvements

lotto fever do lottery players act rationally around large jackpots abstract lotto fever occurs when an increase in ticket sales reduces the expected value of a lottery ticket despite a higher jackpot an examination of 17 538 lotto drawings in the united states finds that examples of lotto fever are exceedingly rare

on the economics of state lotteries s tate lotteries can be evaluated from either of two perspectives familiar to economists as a consumer commodity or as a source of public revenue l as a commodity the lottery is notable for its broad market penetration and rapid growth sixty percent of the adults in lottery states play at least once in a year the annual growth in real per capita sales in lottery states has averaged 12 percent rising in 1989 dollars from 22 in 1975 to 108 in 1989 as a source of public revenue lotteries account for a rather modest fraction of revenue in states that run them 3 3 percent in 1986 but they are nonetheless one of the most visible state government activities lottery sales exceed those of all other products sold directly by state governments to the public and are larger than all but three major activities of state government education public welfare and highways clotfelter and cook 1989 table 2 5 moreover lotteries are a qualitatively new activity for state governments in that they are a business operated in effect for profit state liquor stores are perhaps the closest analog but they were created to encourage temperate drinking practices and do not engage in the sales promotion and marketing activities that are characteristic of the lotteries lotteries enjoy an honored place in american history as a device for raising funds for public purposes funding for such institutions as the jamestown settlement harvard college and the continental army as well as hundreds of bridges fire houses and schools came from lotteries but after the

productivity growth in british manufacturing spatial variation in the role of scale economies technological growth and industrial structure this paper investigates the role of scale economies technological growth and industrial structure in creating spatial variation in manufacturing labour and total factor tfp productivity in britain separate estimates of a translog specification are presented for british manufacturing firms located in defined areas of the country over the period 1994 1998 the results show that tfp change due to scale economies and technological growth has been of much less important in influencing the output growth of manufacturing firms than input growth or industrial structure regarding the components of tfp technological growth has been the dominant force at play the analysis of average labour productivity identifies shifts to other factors of production and industrial structure as being the main determinants of change scale economies appear to have had a marginal role the results identify spatial patterns indicating that more favourable locational effects arise for firms in areas adjacent to large urban centre

lotto nothing the budgetary impact of state lotteries lottery revenues are often touted as an independent revenue source for states using 32 years of state financial data the fallacy of such thinking is demonstrated being the first to control for the self selection of being a lottery state it is found that overall tax revenues decline with increased lottery sales moreover it is discovered that this decline is driven by a decrease in revenues from general sales and excise taxes which is only partially offset by increases in income tax receipts such findings are attributed to a combination of behavioural and political responses following the lottery s implementation

revealed comparative advantage and competitiveness in hungarian agri food sectors we examine the competitiveness of hungarian agriculture and food processing in relation to that of the eu based on four indices of revealed comparative advantage using highly disaggregate data for the period 1992 to 1998 consistency tests suggest that the indices are less satisfactory as cardinal measures but are useful in identifying the demarcation between comparative advantage and comparative disadvantage hungary is shown to have a comparative advantage in a range of agri food products including animals and meat this complements the findings of those studies that have used price and cost based approaches in identifying competitiveness in cereals and crops results indicate that the rca indices when interpreted as a binary measure have remained surprisingly stable during the period of transition although there is evidence of a weakening in the level of comparative advantage as revealed in the balassa index

does the quality of political institutions affect intra industry trade within trade blocs the asean perspective there has been a renewed resolve for deeper integration and cooperation within asean intra industry trade iit is often viewed as a way of achieving economic as well as political integration thi

the role of innovation in bilateral oecd trade performance this paper tests an empirical model of the determinants of bilateral oecd trade with particular emphasis on the role of innovation variation in the relationship across countries and sectors is analysed two innovation proxies and actual data on innovations are used a positive relationship is found between relative innovation and bilateral trade performance at an aggregate level and for a number of manufacturing sectors sectors are also categorized as either net users or producers of innovations differences in innovation appear to have more of an impact on trade performance for the net producers of innovations than the net users of innovations

willingness to pay and the demand for lotto why do many bettors participate in an unfair gamble in particular a lotto game while at the same time purchase insurance the willingness to pay for lotto is analysed to find a rational explanation for a local risk averter s participation in an unfair bet a reasonable case is found where bettors preference can be approximately characterized as a locally risk averse and sufficiently prudent cubic function such bettors dislike risk but prefer standard third moment of the payoff the result suggests that the traditional effective price for lotto demand may omit important explanatory variables we thus propose an alternative method to examine the demand for lotto by incorporating the second and the third moments of lotto s payoff evidence from taiwan lotto data supports that lotto bettors could be both locally risk averse and rational

sectoral patterns of production and use of innovations in the uk 1945 1983 abstract based on information on more than 4000 innovations commercialised in the uk between 1945 and 1983 we analyse sectoral patterns and trends in the production and use of innovations a few core sectors chemical mechanical instruments and electronic are of major importance in the production of technology that gets used over a much wider range of sectors including those outside manufacturing similar sectoral patterns of production and use exist in the uk and usa the trend over time in the uk has been toward greater sectoral interdependence in technology and a higher share of uses outside manufacturing reflecting the growth and spread of the electronic based technological cluster any understanding of the nature determinants and dynamics of intersectoral differences in patterns of production and use of technology will require an integration into empirical and theoretical analysis of the characteristics of innovating firms

effects of global trade liberalization on softwood lumber markets this study develops a world spatial equilibrium softwood lumber model comprised of the major importing and exporting countries regions to analyse the impacts of global trade reform on the world softwood lumber market the results show that free trade leads to an increase in lumber trade and canadian producers and us consumers are the biggest beneficiaries trade liberalization improves the overall world welfare as world producer and consumer surpluses increase the result highlights the importance of moving towards free trade in the global softwood lumber market

consistency tests of alternative measures of comparative advantage the commodity pattern of comparative advantage across countries is a central concept in international trade theory since the concept is based upon autarkic prices which are not observable in post trade equilibria its use in empirical research is most difficult the literature reports numerous alternative indices that purport to measure comparative advantage this paper examines the extent to which various measures are consistent using a large sample of trade flows the results have important implication for judging empirical studies based upon particular choices of a measure for comparative advantage

science and technology in united states foreign trade economists generally believe that modern science technology such as the presence of scientists and engineers or research and development is a central factor in the comparative advantage of advanced industrial nations however most discussion of this topic rests on cross industry regressions which leamer and bowen i981 do not provide a valid indication of factor abundance so the overall role of science still remains to be established in addition much remains to be known about the role of different facets of science and innovation in the process of generating comparative advantage there are two fundamentally different ways of understanding technological differences between countries one point of view adopted in the standard neoclassical theory of international trade assumes all countries are on the same production function under these circumstances relative factor abundance determines the factor services which a country exports or imports within this perspective one can make progress towards an understanding of the role of science and technology in international trade by dividing science into many highly specific narrowly defined input factors calculations can then determine the relative abundance of those inputs associated with science technology versus other input factors in a given country or the relative abundance of different elements within the broad area of overall science technology quite another procedure assumes there are substantial differences in the production possibilities faced by different countries for example krugman i979 recently argued that advantages in innovation and lags in the diffusion of knowledge are the basic influences which permit incomes to be higher in the industrialised world than in developing nations this view illustrates the potential economic significance of innovation in advanced countries since the generation of new technologies in industrialised countries and their diffusion to the rest of the world then essentially determines world income distribution and world economic development however empirical implementation of the diffusion viewpoint requires data for many countries which greatly limits the number of facets of technology which can be considered since the present paper is centrally concerned with the effect which a wide variety of technological elements has on international trade we choose to select a framework within which the ample data available on different aspects of technology in the united states can be utilised the first view of technological

locational advantage and us foreign direct investment in uk manufacturing the relationship between foreign direct investment fdi and international trade is examined with specific reference to us fdi in the uk four complementary hypotheses are tested on a cross section of uk industries there is evidence of us fdi being located in uk industries which have a revealed comparative advantage and that large market size effects are important on the other hand little evidence was found for the protection jumping and industrial concentration hypotheses

testing for rational expectations in the uk national lottery the concept of rational expectations has typically been assumed without testing in the analysis of consumer demand and market efficiency in betting markets including betting on lottery games lottery games offer an excellent opportunity to test how participants process the information that is available to them using the uk national lottery as our particular case we find that participants in general efficiently process available information specifically they act as if they can on average forecast the level of sales for a given drawing

the economic analysis of lotteries lotteries determinants of ticket sales and the optimal payout rate this paper considers policy issues arising in the design regulation and taxation of lotteries focusing on the market for an on line lottery game demand determines who buys lottery tickets and in what quantities the design of lotteries affects the terms on which tickets are supplied uk data suggest that its lottery may be priced too high to maximize lottery revenue more revenue might be raised if the proportion of sales allocated to tax and other levies were smaller having established the positive economics of lotteries the paper then assesses their welfare implications pari mutuel lotteries enjoy scale economies and as natural monopolies are invariably run either by government agencies or a regulated licensee i estimate consumer surplus and identify the excess burden that arises from existing over taxation of lotteries the large price elasticity of demand implies that revenue raised from the lottery is raised very inefficiently moreover the demand for lottery tickets is inferior and there is some evidence that such games are contagious and addictive so using lotteries as a vehicle for raising revenue is extremely regressive finally i consider other policy implications induced effects on charitable giving and on other forms of gambling the impact on the government budget perceptions of risk and distributional considerations ian walker

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

investigating efficiency in betting markets evidence from the greek 6 49 lotto abstract in this paper we investigate the existence of profit opportunities in the greek market for the 6 49 lotto under the assumption of random number selection we find evidence suggesting that the market is efficient because number selection is found to deviate from randomness we further investigate the existence of profit opportunities due to number unpopularity the evidence suggests that although unpopular numbers exist they are not sufficiently unpopular so as to generate positive expected payoffs

an institutional approach to cross national distance cross national distance is a key concept in the field of management previous research has conceptualized and measured cross national differences mostly in terms of dyadic cultural distance and has used the euclidean approach to measuring it in contrast our goal is to disaggregate the construct of distance by proposing a set of multidimensional measures including economic financial political administrative cultural demographic knowledge and global connectedness as well as geographic distance we ground our analysis and choice of empirical dimensions on institutional theories of national business governance and innovation systems in order to overcome the methodological limitations of the euclidean approach we calculate dyadic distances using the mahalanobis method which is scale invariant and takes into consideration the variance covariance matrix we empirically analyze four different foreign expansion choices of us companies to illustrate the importance of disaggregating the distance construct and the usefulness of our distance calculations which we make freely available to managers and scholars

a discrete time hazard model of lottery adoption this paper uses conventional logit probablitities to estimate a discrete time hazard model of lottery adoption the data set consists of a time series of cross sections on states in the us our findings suggests that politicians are more likely to support the decision a lottery is more likely to be adopted of ther is a favourable climate for gambling in the state and if a bordering state has adopted a lottery

an empirical analysis of productivity growth and industrial concentration in us manufacturing this manuscript focuses on the productivity industrial concentration relationship in the us manufacturing industries while accounting for external and internal sources of knowledge it is found that there is a critical level of industrial concentration beyond which its relationship with productivity growth becomes negative results suggest that static welfare losses of increasing concentration in manufacturing industries can be offset by welfare gains from productivity growth

does the linder effect hold for differentiated agri food and beverage product trade using a generalized gravity equation this study tests for the linder effect in differentiated agri food product trade i e as the demand structures of two countries become more similar their trade intensity increases two proxies of demand structure the balassa index and the absolute value of the difference in per capita gross domestic products gdps of trading partners are used to capture the linder effect in addition two measures of bilateral trade the grubel and lloyd gl index and the value of bilateral trade are used as the dependent variable this study investigates the role of the linder effect in explaining the trade of 37 differentiated agri food and beverage products categorized into eight product groups cereals fresh fish frozen fish vegetables fresh fruit processed fruit tea and coffee and alcoholic beverages the data covers trade across 52 developed and developing countries from 1990 to 2000 the type of proxy used for the linder effect and the way in which bilateral trade

panel thoughts on the future of payments and central banking maintaining a uniform electronic currency the role a central bank should play in operating or regulating a payments system is not a new issue back in 1913 for example congress decided that the federal reserve would play a major role providing the country with a national check clearing system and a single uniform currency and while that role has not changed much over the years in 1980 congress revised its view of the payments system with the passage of the depository institution deregulation and monetary control act among other things the act requires the federal reserve to price its check clearing services and earn a competitive return or exit the business today the role of the federal reserve in providing a national currency is being reexamined this reexamination is driven by recent technological advances banks now have the ability to offer a new kind of currency electronic cash also known as ecash that could readily compete with federal reserve notes so the question naturally arises should congress allow banks to issue their own private currency a privilege banks used to have before the civil war to answer that question we need to address several concerns including one that is often overlooked the loss of a uniform currency allowing banks to issue currency e cash usually raises concerns about the loss of seigniorage the effectiveness of monetary policy and the overall stability of our monetary system allowing banks to issue their own currency will no doubt reduce seigniorage because e cash will be a close substitute for federal reserve notes the success of e cash will be at the expense of the united states treasury related to the concern over the loss of seigniorage is the concern that as the demand for federal reserve notes declines so will the impact of monetary policy furthermore the introduction of e cash may not only weaken monetary policy but it may also make markets less stable based on the history of private money systems some economists worry that banks would be tempted to overissue their currency while these are legitimate concerns a concern that is often overlooked when the e

the relationship between betting and lottery play we apply a novel daily time series data set of daily turnover from one of britain s leading bookmakers to analyze potential substitution between lottery play and bookmaker betting we find some evidence that bettors do substitute away from horse race soccer and numbers betting when the effective price of lottery tickets is unusually low that is when there is a rollover or other special draw this substitution has a highly specific pattern of timing that varies by sector our results further suggest that bettors rationally engage in forward looking substitution within their betting portfolios

intra industry specialization in a multi country and multi industry framework the paper tests alternative hypotheses as to the factors determining the extent of intra industry trade defined as the share of this trade in total trade in a multi country and multi industry framework the empirical results show that the extent of intra industry trade in a particular industry between any two countries depends on the characteristics of the industry and the countries concerned the explanatory power of the regressions for the entire group of countries exporting manufactured goods as well as for trade among the developed countries is relatively high and practically all the hypotheses concerning the impact of industry trade are supported by the empirical results lower coefficients of determination have been obtained for trade between developed and developing countries and for trade among developing countries but the estimates generally support the hypotheses put forward in the paper in these cases also

lottery expenditures in canada a regional analysis of determinants and incidence this article examines two issues first it evaluates the statistical significance of a number of socio economic and demographic variables on the level of household lottery expenditures in the six regions of canada while some household characteristics vary in the extent to which they significantly affect the level of lottery expenditures across regions wealth age occupation mother tongue and urban location for example others are significant in every region regional consistency exists in the statistical significance of after tax household income sex and education of the head of household lottery expenditures increase as incomes increase lottery expenditures are significantly lower for female heads of households than for their male counterparts lottery expenditures decline as the education level of the head of household increases second lottery expenditures are found to be regressive although the degree of regressivity is less than for lotteries in the united states

the impact of technological innovation on international trade patterns the evidence reconsidered abstract this paper presents some new evidence in relation to the role of technical change in particular industrial innovation on the international competitiveness of the various oecd countries its originality consists primarily of a using a technology output indicator to measure technological performance b presenting and comparing various measures of trade and technological performance for each individual oecd country with the exception of iceland c analysing at a relatively high level of product industry disaggregation the relationship between export performance and technological performance at the same time the very limited scope of the paper has to be emphasized a the analysis is purely static all the evidence presented relates to one year 1977 b most of the results obtained are preliminary and should be further substantiated by more detailed empirical and theoretical research c as a consequence little attention has been paid to policy implications which it was felt could only be discussed properly in a later stage the paper consists of four sections a brief review of the state of the art section 1 a discussion on definitions of technology intensity section 2 the development of the best technology output indicator section 3 and the empirical analysis itself section 4 the following most important results emerge from these various sections a there are serious shortcomings in using average technology intensity as bench mark for classifying products or industries in technology intensive or nontechnology intensive categories b there is a substantial difference between technology intensity as measured on the basis of a technology input proxy rd c yet as between countries the most traditional output and input indicators the number of patents granted and the amount spent on rd d foreign patenting in particular foreign patenting in the united states figs 1 and 2 section 3 is a more reliable technology output proxy than domestic patenting e in terms of technological comparative advantage as opposed to technology intensity it is the small oecd countries as opposed to the large ones which seem to base their trade comparative advantage on technological comparative performance table 7 section 4 1 f at the individual industry level it is found that i for most technology intensive industries defined however in a less restrictive way than us r d intensities a close relation exists between technological performance and export performance and ii that as compared to other country specific resource variables technological performance is the most important trade explanatory variable its elasticity increasing with the technology intensity of industries tables 11 and 12 section 4 2 space constraints prevented us from presenting the data in relation to the inter industry and inter country analysis these can however be obtained from the author

jackpot promotion model for taiwan lotto lotto was inaugurated in january 2002 and immediately became a popular activity in taiwan as the big craze following its initial introduction has subsided the growth of lotto game sales has slowed to maintain lottery sales momentum operators have conducted numerous jackpot promotions this study examines the effectiveness of various jackpot promotional strategies the analytical results can provide a valuable reference for operators and governmental authorities regarding ways of increasing lottery earnings the empirical findings of this investigation include the following 1 the effective price elasticity of lotto is 0 382 taipei fubon bank can increase the revenue gained from lotto by increasing the effective price 2 operators can significantly increase lottery sales by declaring the jackpot as an unconditional added fixed or variable bonus

foreign patenting in the u s as a technology indicator the case of norway abstract foreign patenting in the u s has been considered to be a useful technology indicator in comparisons between countries in order to shed light on this topic this paper will try to explain foreign patenting in the u s by way of data for one country norway a crucial question is what role is played by exports in explaining the foreign patent activity is the u s patenting just an indicator of the export performance or is it the other way around that technology measured by foreign patent activity is an important trade explanatory variable the first part of this paper deals with the relationship between norwegian u s patenting and export to the u s by way of time series analysis on data from 1883 to 1980 then some more detailed analysis are done on industry level data from 1920 and from 1960 1980 an hypothesis is further tested for the possible relationship between foreign u s patenting and the international business cycles finally a detailed but tentative analysis is done on firm level data for the years 1969 1980 the results lend partial support to the assumption that foreign u s patent activity reflects innovative activity in the country where the patents originated a major advantage in using foreign patenting in the u s as a technology indicator is that this type of data in general seems to be of a higher quality than domestic patent data

the disappearance of the border barrier in some european union countries bilateral trade this paper estimates the tariff equivalent of the border barrier in each bilateral trade among european union countries the results show that there are large differences in the border barrier across european union countries bilateral trade in some bilateral trade flows the border barrier has almost disappeared whereas in other cases it is still equivalent to a 75 per cent tariff the results also show that some countries have low border barriers in most of their bilateral trade flows with other eu members whereas other countries persistently present large border barriers

unkind roll of the dice drivers of lottery crimes in the united states using data on u s states this paper studies the factors driving lottery related crimes focusing on spillovers from other gambling and corruption although state sponsored lotteries have become q