guarding the guardians good government requires some restraints on the powerful but how can those be impose if there is no one above them this paper studies the equilibrium allocation of power and resources established by self interested incumbents under the threat of rebellions from inside and outside the group in power commitment to uphold individuals rights can only be achieved if power is not as concentrated as incumbents would like it to be ex post power sharing endogenously enables incumbents to commit to otherwise time inconsistent laws by ensuring more people receive rents under the status quo and thus want to defend it

a model of the origins of basic property rights this paper studies the origins of one of the most basic of property rights namely the right of an individual or an organization to the fruits of its labour my objective is to address the questions of why when and how this property right can emerge and be made secure i develop a model of the strategic interaction between two players in the state of nature which is an environment characterized by the absence of any laws and institutions including property rights and the state my analysis explores in particular the roles of the players fightin g and productive skills on the emergence and security or otherwise of this property right

war peace and the size of countries this paper studies the relationship between international con ict and the size distribution of countries in a model in which both peaceful bargaining and non peaceful confrontations are possible we show how the size distribution of countries depends on the likelihood bene ts and costs of con ict and war we also study the role of international law and show how better de ned international property rights may lead to country breakup and more numerous local con icts

equilibrium structure in an economic model of conflict four different types of equilibrium are possible within a two player model of society where only armed self enforcement of property rights is possible the main underlying parameters are the total resource endowment and the initial distribution of this endowment between the players the parameter space is partitioned into regions in which the respective types of equilibrium occur the equilibrium types involve positive arms expenditure by respectively neither player the richer player and both players the latter case involves a sub type in which the poorer player s entire endowment is expended on arms jel d30 d72 d74

the rule of law and economic growth where are we summary it is widely assumed that the rule of law is essential for economic growth however the rule of law is clearly a multidimensional concept encompassing a variety of discrete components from security of person and property rights to checks on government and control of corruption we review the theory underlying these different causal mechanisms linking the rule of law to economic growth and provide an introduction to some outstanding measurement issues we find that the correlation among different components of the rule of law concept are not tight among developing countries and that some inferences about the effects of property rights protection may not be warranted

the biodiversity supergame this paper considers the ability of developed countries to sustain a cooperative agreement to compensate developing countries for the incremental costs of biodiversity conservation it is shown that depending on certain parameter values and the model specification such an agreement could only codify the non cooperative outcome or achieve the full cooperative outcome where global net benefits are maximized however where the agreement can sustain the full cooperative outcome net benefits will be only slightly larger than in the noncooperative outcome

the arms trade the arms trade winners and losers the arms trade is highly controversial and raises difficult policy issues the controversies tend to concentrate on the moral military and political dimensions of arms exports decisions quite a lot of light can be shed on this murky market by asking basic economic questions and using standard economic models we begin with a structured economic description of the evolution of the international arms market in terms of the factors that influence demand and supply and thus prices and quantities then we review the policy issues faced by eu members in particular whether a common control regime is needed to harmonize their regulation of arms exports to address these policy issues we present some models of the market that we have developed and examine their implications for the interesting interactions that characterize the trade paul levine and ron smith

a model of military spending and economic growth this paper investigates a model of militaryconflict between two regimes in which eachmay initiate combat in order to confiscateresources from the other conflict or thepotential for same results in wastefulmilitary spending which lowers growth foreach regime equilibrium military spendingis determined in a one shot game analysisof the one shot game is followed by a studyof the prospects for an equilibrium inwhich regimes lower military spending anddo not engage in combat in repeated play in this latter case military spending willbe decreased to a level just sufficient todeter deviations from the no combatequilibrium this minimum level increases and growth decreases with the internalpolitical instability of each regime moreover an exogenous increase in thedefensive capability of each regime mayeither increase or decrease growth depending upon the initial level ofmilitary spending and growth

endogenous insecurity and economic development abstract we explore the implications of endogenous credit market imperfections for the endogenous relationship between investment insecurity and the process of economic development in the initial stages of development the fraction of agents engaged in nonproductive diversionary activities e g rent seeking grows as the opportunities to gain from diversionary activities expand in later stages however diversion falls as capital market imperfections are overcome and productive activities become more secure and more profitable we detail the forces that determine whether the insecurity generated by an economy s early development will choke off the growth process we also compare the cost effectiveness of alternative policies designed to prevent diversion

redefining recs part 2 untangling certificates and emission markets abstract renewable energy and greenhouse gas emissions markets are currently in a state of confusion regarding the treatment of renewable energy certificate recs how should emission trading schemes treat recs how can emission mitigation policies provide real incentives for renewable generation the objective of rec markets should be to promote additional renewable energy investments the author asserts that defining recs in terms of attributes especially off site attributes does not further this goal ambiguous language such as environmental attribute or environmental benefit creates confusion in the marketplace while failing to address the relevant coordination issues with renewable portfolio standard compliance markets voluntary emission offset markets or emission cap and trade markets specifically defining recs in terms of off site attributes creates a number of problems including that once an emissions cap and trade scheme is in place such definitions of a rec can become indefensible the author proposes to redefine recs in terms of on site attributes which resolves the aforementioned problems and allows compliance and voluntary renewable energy and emission markets to function without conflicts ideally environmental commodities should be homogeneous first best measures of the relevant environmental good as well as easily measured and verified the author proposes tradable environmental commodities that achieve these characteristics

a contractarian theory of property rights and crime as was noted long ago war like distributional squabbles which divert resources from socially productive uses will persist in a world without government in this paper we show that all agents can gain ex ante from the institution of a social contract which establishes property rights and levies a tax in order to finance a criminal justice system where punishment is threatened for violations of property rights these ex ante gains hold even for individuals who may be harshly punished ex post the optimal social contract i e the optimal level of enforcement of property rights is also characterized

transaction costs of tradable white certificate schemes the energy efficiency commitment as case study this paper analyses the nature and scale of transaction costs tcs borne by obliged parties under a tradable white certificate twc scheme taking the first phase of the energy efficiency commitment eecl in great britain as a case study several sources of tcs were considered such as search for information persuasion of customers negotiation with business partners and measurement and verification activities information was obtained through interviews and a questionnaire distributed to obliged parties results show that the most significant sources of tcs were related to search for information persuading customers and negotiating with managing agents contractors to implement energy efficiency measures perceived high tcs related to contract negotiation and liability risks slightly reduced the low trading level the scale of tcs was estimated to be around 10 and 30 of total investments costs for the lighting and insulation segments respectively the results indicate that despite the presence and scale of tcs the eecl scheme generated energy savings that yielded net societal benefits estimated financial benefits range from 0 6 to 6 p kwh for insulation and lighting savings respectively when avoided external costs due to electricity savings are included estimated economic benefits range from 3 to 8 p kwh several lessons from the eecl can be drawn for twc schemes among others it is found that informative policy instruments to raise awareness among end users are critical if a twc scheme is to deliver cost effective energy savings in all the nature and scale of tcs under twc schemes will differ because of a number of endogenous and exogenous determinants c 2007 elsevier ltd all rights reserved less

mixed markets and crime abstract this paper specifies and solves a two stage game theoretic model of a mixed market for crime control in the first stage of the model private targets and the government choose levels of policing in the second stage criminals choose targets and the severity of the crimes that they commit the paper s key results are as follows first private policing can both divert crime to targets that lack private protection and also increase the severity of the crime that these less protected targets suffer second an increase in private policing reduces the aggregate expenditure on traditional policing this is an instance of a political incentive externality where private policing affects the objective function of the government specifically it reduces the level of traditional policing that is consistent with the samuelson condition for efficient provision of a public good third the substitution of private for public policing carries with it a change in the technology of policing in effect private policing leads to a shift from enforcement and punishment towards monitoring and target hardening this in turn may lead to an increase in the severity of crime fourth the mixed policing equilibrium is inefficient and in some situations mixing may reduce the utility of all targets

vulnerable trade the dark side of an edgeworth box abstract we examine incentives to seize and defend goods offered for trade in an edgeworth box economy appropriation possibilities generate equilibrium of coerced redistribution and voluntary trade in a reduced box potential mutual gains remain untaken because the prospect of piracy creates a price wedge wherein the effective relative price is lowered for the exporter and raised for the importer as the vulnerability of one or both goods increases the price wedge widens causing trade to diminish if vulnerability becomes sufficiently high then equilibrium with trade ceases to exist in the edgeworth box economy

a dynamic model of conflict and appropriation abstract this paper presents an extension of a static model of economic conflict analyzed by hirshleifer 1991 1995 and skaperdas 1992 to an infinite horizon differential game our aim is to highlight the strategic role of appropriation among a smaller group of agents in an intertemporal context the model yields the conclusion that there exists a unique linear nonlinear markov perfect equilibrium strategy even when strategies are defined over the entire state space we demonstrate that partial cooperation can be seen as a long run response to conflict moreover a decrease in the effectiveness of appropriation the depreciation rate of a common pool stock the rate of time preferences or an increase in the degree of noise improves the degree of partial cooperation and thus welfare in an anarchic society

nietzschean development failures government policies and substantial external resources and technical assistanceprovided over the course of decades have neither eliminated broad poverty nor resulted inequitable income distributions in the poorer countries of the world this paper explains thedevelopment failures with reference to nietzschean behavior where the strong act withoutethical restraint and the rule of law does not protect the weak while nietzschean behaviorviolates principles of social justice there are also inefficiencies the nietzschean strong whorule have no incentive to adopt efficiency enhancing policies efficiency in a nietzscheansociety is also greater the higher the leisure preference of the weak and the less the weakare capable of producing labor productivity is low because the weak do not consistentlywork these are the outcomes when the strong behave as roving bandits when the strongbehave as stationary bandits efficiency is enhanced but income distribution can be expectedto remain unequal the nietzschean perspective on development failure is compared withalternative explanations for the sustained plight of the poor in poor countries and the unequaldistributions of income and wealth

the arms trade and the stability of regional arms races abstract arms sales to countries involved in regional conflicts raise a range of pressing policy issues this paper models the interaction between two potentially hostile countries who spend their national income on arms imports and consumption goods their welfare depends on consumption and military security military security is a function of relative arms stocks and depends on the relative advantages of aggressive and defensive strategies we examine the dynamic game for noncooperative and regional arms control regimes an innovation of the paper is the inclusion of the price of arms which proves to have a major effect on the stability of arms races

arming as a strategic investment in a cooperative equilibrium to develop a positive economic theory of military spending this analysis focuses on a game theoretic general equilibrium model of international conflict in which consumption peaceful investment and military spending are endogenously determined the analysis illustrates that when there is repeated interaction between nations a game of threats and punishments generally will not support a disarmament outcome and that fluctuations in military spending can be an endogenous result of fluctuations in aggregate economic activity furthermore the analysis shows how the relation between aggregate economic activity and military spending qualitatively depends on whether governments are acting opportunistically or cooperatively copyright 1990 by american economic association

endogenous destruction in conflict theory and extensions this article develops a general equilibrium model of conflict to characterize the implications of endogenous destruction for bargaining and fighting specifically we consider the scenario where two contending parties engage in bargaining to avoid fighting when there are direct costs e g arms buildups and indirect costs e g destruction to consumable resources of conflict without imposing specific functional form restrictions on conflict production and destruction technologies we show their interactions in determining an optimal decision between fighting and bargaining we find that under the shadow of conflict bargaining is costly as the contending parties always allocate more resources to arming for guarding settlement through bargaining than in the event of fighting in contrast to conventional thinking that bargaining is pareto superior over fighting we show conditions under which fighting dominates bargaining as the nash equilibrium choice the positive analysis may help explain the general causes of fighting without resorting to the assumption of incomplete information or misperceptions jel d74 h56 c7

deterrence in contests this paper explores the role of deterrence in contests as a general rule we show that for a deterrence strategy to be played by rational agents it is necessary that the contest be destructive we show for a very general class of functions that pure strategy deterrence equilibria where contestants deter one another do not exist a corollary of this finding is that under fairly general conditions agents should always be expected to engage in contests applied to international relations our results imply that war is always a potential outcome despite deterrence attempts

input and output substitution in higher education abstract this study estimates a multi input multi output model of production in higher education based on data from academic departments from a large public university the results show that there are economies of scale in all dimensions undergraduate and graduate instruction and research of the university s output over the observed range all three types of labor tenured faculty non tenured faculty and graduate assistants are substitutes with the demand for the most skilled category tenured faculty being least elastic

population technology and fragmentation the european miracle revisited abstract the effects of political fragmentation on long run development seem to have changed over the course of human history technological leaders used to be empires but the industrial revolution started in the fragmented europe this paper sets up a model to help us think about this puzzle there are two sets of mechanisms at play a standard scale effect which benefits unified regions since technology is a non rivalrous good and several competition effects both negative like wasteful armies and positive incentives to invest in new technologies we apply the model to analyze the preindustrial divergence between china and europe

how much market do market based instruments create an analysis for the case of white certificates in the context of economic instruments for more energy efficiency and climate protection tradable certificates have been investigated for renewable energy and for a number of emissions in contrast tradable energy efficiency or white certificates have only lately been considered as a market based tool to foster energy efficiency as compared to standards and labelling for example theoretically there is little doubt about the advantages in practice however some fundamental problems arise critical issues are the design of an efficient artificial market for white certificates its compatibility with the european emissions trading system the identification of a suitable target group for an energy efficiency obligation and the measurement of energy savings as compared to a reference use of energy we use the theoretical framework of transaction cost economics to elaborate these issues we conclude that transaction costs and investment specificity will restrict markets for white certificates in practise long term contracts rather than spot trade will be the prevailing form of governance for energy efficiency investments

a model of institutional formation within a rent seeking environment abstract this paper presents a game theoretic model in which some fraction of output is appropriated from entrepreneurs entrepreneurs are able to form a league to prevent this appropriation but this might not be individually rational because of either the free rider problem or coordination failure the model also shows that poorer countries are less able to form this league and so might not be able to develop institutions establishing property rights

national environmental targets and international emission reduction instruments according to the agreed burden sharing within the european union the overall eu emission reduction target as agreed by in the kyoto protocol is converted into national greenhouse gas reduction targets for each of the member states in parallel with national emission reduction initiatives common eu policies for emission reductions are considered currently discussed is the introduction of a market for tradable permits for co2 emissions to achieve emission reductions within the power industry and other energy intensive industries in parallel with this markets for green certificates to deploy renewable energy technologies seem to be appearing in a number of countries among these denmark italy sweden belgium flanders england and australia although these national initiatives for a green certificate market are fairly different they could be a starting point for establishing a common eu certificate market but interactions between national targets for greenhouse gas emissions and these international instruments for emission reduction are not a trivial matter especially not seen in relation to the possible contributions of these instruments in achieving national ghg reduction targets the paper is split into three parts all taking a liberalised power market as starting point the first part discusses the consequences of a general deployment of renewable energy technologies using planning initiatives or national promotion schemes feed in tariffs in the second part an international green certificate market is introduced into the liberalised power market context substituting other national promotion schemes finally in the third part a combination of an international green certificate market tgc and an international emission trading scheme for co2 is analysed within the liberalised international power market set up the main conclusion is that neither the use of national renewable support schemes nor the introduction of a tgc market into a liberalised power market can be recommended if these initiatives efficiently are expected to contribute in achieving the national co2 reduction targets countries most ambitious in implementing renewable energy technologies will only partly be gaining the co2 reduction benefits themselves the ambitious countries will support the less ambitious ones in achieving their ghg reduction targets finally in a tgc market context the most ambitious countries to fulfil their tgc quotas will have to buy certificates from the less ambitious ones although this only contributes to fulfilling a national target for renewable development not in reaching their national co2 reduction targets however a combination of an international tradable permits market and a green certificate market is seen to be efficient in contributing in achieving the national co2 reduction targets if a close co ordination of the two instruments is undertaken at least at the national level when the green power production is increased the tradable permits quota should be decreased correspondingly otherwise the expected co2 reductions will not contribute by the full value in achieving the national targets for greenhouse gas reductions thus if it is a prerequisite that renewable power contributes to achieving national ghg reduction targets then the combination of these two markets might be the right solution

an econometric analysis of changes in the cost and production structure of the trucking industry 1953 1982 a cost function is estimated using a time series cross section database for the trucking industry covering the time period from 1953 through 1982 i e after the implementation of the motor carrier act of 1980 which essentially deregulated the industry two conclusions emerge first similarities between early periods of regulation and deregulation are greater than between early and late periods of regulation second a comparison of the regulated and deregulated cost functions indicates that the heaviest burden of regulation was borne by those firms which faced the highest costs copyright 1988 by mit press

historical legacies a model linking africa s past to its current underdevelopment abstract recent studies have found evidence linking africa s current under development to colonial rule and the slave trade given that these events ended long ago why do they continue to matter today i develop a model exhibiting path dependence which provides one explanation for why these past events may have lasting impacts the model has multiple equilibria one equilibrium with secure property rights and a high level of production and others with insecure property rights and low levels of production i show that external extraction when severe enough causes a society initially in the high production equilibrium to move to a low production equilibrium because of the stability of low production equilibria the society remains trapped in this suboptimal equilibrium even after the period of external extraction ends the model provides one explanation why africa s past events continue to matter today

guns and oil an analysis of conventional weapons trade in the post cold war era i introduction the end of the cold war saw a dramatic reduction in the international trade in conventional weapons from an all time peak of 86 7 billion 19995 in 1987 world arms imports fell to 51 6 billion 19995 in 1999 bureau of verification and compliance 2002 but some important trends emerged during the decade of the 1990s that warrant analysis first a vast majority of conventional weapons went to the persian gulf countries with saudi arabia emerging as the world s single largest weapons importer though by the end of the 1990s taiwan was a significant importer as well on the export side the singular dominance of the united states was notable in 1999 its share in world arms exports was 64 an all time record bureau of verification and compliance 2002 second the motivations underlying the trade in weapons seem to have changed fundamentally during the cold war much of the arms trade was driven by geopolitical factors associated with the arms race and the action reaction type behavior of the two superpowers however matelly 2003 shows that while the arms race between the united states and the former soviet union can explain u s military expenditures between 1952 and 1989 it fails to predict these expenditures in the post cold war period anderton 1995 532 argues that there has been a shift from political to economic motives for arms transfers our goal in this article was to determine both analytically and empirically the main drivers of international arms transfers in the immediate post cold war period 1989 1999 we postulate that the key reasons for the huge transfer of weapons to the persian gulf region are the enormous value of the oil wealth there and the dependence of western economies especially the united states and its allies on access to the reasonably priced and steady supply of crude oil from this region 1 for most of the years between 1989 and 1999 world oil prices remained remarkably stable and between about 15 20 per barrel the notable exceptions being the iraq kuwait war year of 1990 and 1998 chapman and khanna 2006 this was the result of an explicit organization of petroleum exporting countries opec price policy under which production was expanded or contracted to maintain prices within the target range military security in the persian gulf region including the export of weapons from the united states and its allies to the persian gulf countries was an integral part of the institutional framework that supported the oil price arrangement chapman and khanna 2001 2006 we employ a traditional demand and supply framework which includes economic factors such as production costs on the supply side and income and prices on the demand side but also incorporate the political economic factors represented by the trade in crude oil we find that the association between arms trade and crude oil trade is robust regardless of the empirical specification or data sources there is a strong and positive association between arms exports and crude oil import on the one hand and between arms imports and crude oil exports on the other the link between arms trade and crude oil trade is not new after the decline of military aid programs such as the u s military assistance program weapons transactions became more commercial historically unprecedented opec oil revenues in the 1970s and 1980s provided an alternative source of finance and much of these petrodollars were spent on importing weapons conversely weapons exporting countries found a means to offset the balance of payments discrepancy that resulted from the higher oil prices levine sen and smith 1994 3 smith humm and fontanel 1985 240 241 but the period considered in this study 1989 1999 was an era of relatively low and stable oil prices and this argument is not very satisfactory 2 the outline of the article is as follows in section ii we describe the analytical framework for trade in conventional weapons

supporting renewable energy on liberalised markets green electricity between additionality and consumer sovereignty abstract the german feed in regulation has been perhaps the most effective promotional policy for green electricity however with the growing momentum of the liberalisation process the current regulation is challenged by structural problems about how to address the demand side price regulation lefts only little room for private green electricity market activities moreover the success of the feed in regulation depends on a strict differentiation of the political segment and the emerging green electricity markets the question therefore is about the role green electricity markets can or should perform in general in order to evaluate green electricity markets the additionality criteria is frequently used implying that markets are only desirable if they lead to additional environmental effects the additionality criteria has two implications first transformed into individual behaviour additionality implies that consumers are assumed to act as pure altruists however there is evidence from empirical studies that green electricity consumers behave more as impure altruists they are not so much interested in the objective environmental impact of their behaviour but more objected to receive a private satisfaction from buying an environmental friendly product whereas theoretical models in the case of pure altruism suggest that private activities crowd out totally when policy becomes active in supporting the public good this crowding out disappears in the case of impure altruism second using end state criteria such as the additionality principle as pre condition and neglecting process criteria such as consumer sovereignty means to prevent establishing competitive market process right at the outset in principle

is a moral disposition rewarded this paper explores the conditions under which a moral disposition is rewarded in the sense of moral people being more prosperous than amoral people the analytical framework is a general equilibrium model in which production is more lucrative for moral people than for amoral people but in which amoral people can choose to be predators rather than producers we find that regardless of the advantage that moral people have in production a moral disposition is rewarded if and only if the ratio of amoral people to moral people is large relative to a parameter that embodies the technology of predation

war and peace cyclical phenomena this paper demonstrates how the analysis can differ dramatically between two common static modeling approaches to conflict the first approach uses a one period setup and associates positive arms investments with conflict the second approach has two periods where arming decisions are taken in the first period and the decision on whether to go to war is taken separately in the second building on the latter approach i introduce a repeated game protocol with myopic players under these circumstances countries may end up in cycles of war and peace this result offers a novel explanation for a common pattern in history

is piracy sustainable we develop a model of international trade between three countries one of which hosts pirates when the number of pirate ships increases the probability for one of the pirate ships for one commercial ship encountering a commercial pirate ship decreases increases then the commercial ships have an incentive to spend more on defense and pirate ships to invest less on attack if pirates operate under free entry they do not internalize the entry externality then their number rises until it reaches a level such that their attack power has become negligible and the defense of the commercial ships has reached a high level the economy settles in a full deterrence equilibrium however if the number of pirate ships is controlled by an authority which maximizes their total profit the economy settles in an equilibrium where piracy is active and commercial ships spend less on defense piracy is a substitute for trade piracy depends on the terms of trade of the pirate country and on the relative efficiency of the attack versus the defense

the public accounting industry production function abstract a translog function is specified to represent the relation between revenue and human resource inputs in public accounting firms estimation of the model using a balanced panel of annual data for 64 large cpa firms for the period 1995 1999 indicates that increasing returns to scale prevail in the public accounting industry justifying recent merger and acquisition activities among accounting firms average marginal revenue product of partners increased monotonically from 1995 to 1998 decreased slightly in 1999 and was about nine times that of other professionals during 1995 1999 the public accounting industry exhibited continuing improvement in productivity over the 5 years

probabilistic decision model of wind power investment and influence of green power market this paper presents results from a model of a representative wind power investor s decision making process using a monte carlo simulation of a project financial analysis data in the form of probability distribution functions pdfs for key input variables were collected from interviews with investors and other professionals active in the u s wind power industry using a formal expert elicitation protocol this study presents the first quantitative estimates of the effect of the u s voluntary renewable energy certificate rec market on renewable energy generation the results indicate that the investment decisions of wind power project developers in the united states are unlikely to have been altered by the voluntary rec market the problem with the current voluntary rec market is that it does not offer developers a reliable risk adjusted revenue stream consequently the claims by u s green power retailers and promoters that voluntary market recs result in additional wind power projects lack credibility even dramatic increases in voluntary market rec prices in the absence of long term contracts were found to have only a small effect on investor behavior

guns butter and anarchy a state in the international system implicit in realism must allocate its limited resources between satisfying its intrinsically valued ends and the means of military power i formalize this guns versus butter problem in a simple infinite horizon model in which two states must continually decide how to allocate their resources and whether to attack the other state the analysis establishes sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of an equilibrium in which neither state attacks shows that there is a strictly pareto dominant pair of peaceful equilibrium payoffs characterizes the unique peaceful markov perfect equilibrium that yields them and describes the comparative statics of the equilibrium allocations more broadly the analysis also suggests that the notion of anarchy has little if any substantive significance distinctively related to international politics and that the problem of absolute and relative gains is superfluous

the own wage elasticity of labor demand a meta regression analysis firms labor demand responses to wage changes are of key interest in empirical research and policy analysis however despite extensive research estimates of labor demand elasticities remain subject to considerable heterogeneity in this paper we conduct a comprehensive meta regression analysis to re assess the empirical literature on labor demand elasticities building on 942 elasticity estimates from 105 different studies we identify sources of variation in the absolute value of this elasticity heterogeneity due to the theoretical and empirical specification of the labor demand model different datasets used or sectors and countries considered explains more than 80 of the variation in the estimates we further find substantial evidence for the presence of publication selection bias as estimates of the own wage elasticity of labor demand are upwardly inflated

the arms trade and arms control this paper constructs a dynamic model of the arms trade in which there are a small number of suppliers who care about the profits from the trade and the security consequences of the sale and a large number of interacting buyers who are concerned about their security relative to regional rivals we derive the equilibrium under a number of assumptions about market structure this model is then used to evaluate the benefits and sustainability of a proposed arms control regime which involves establishing a cartel of suppliers taxing arms exports and distributing the proceeds to recipients

labour inputs substitution during corporate restructuring a translog model approach for us freight railroads after deregulation in 1980 competitive pressures forced the large us freight railroads to reduce costs and restructure resulting in an economic renaissance of the us railroad companies after years of poor financial conditions the most striking restructuring measure receiving much attention was dramatic labour downsizing until 2004 employment was reduced by 60 but other overlooked measures are the significant restructuring of workforce composition and important changes in railroads workplace organization practices and corporate culture to better understand this successful occupational restructuring i investigate labour inputs substitutional relationships by using a translog variable cost model labour is decomposed into six employee categories rather than traditional production nonproduction breakdown to estimate inputs elasticities of substitution the data investigated is a unique firm level dataset on the us freight class i railroads covering a 22 year period which allows this fine grained a

rent seeking incentives in share contests abstract this article investigates share contests in our framework we allow contestants to have more general preferences than have been used in the literature previous approaches have the unfortunate characteristic that contestants marginal rates of substitution between the rent share allocated by the contest and their effort is constant regardless of the size of the rent share this results in a conventional wisdom larger rents command more effort by providing a more general framework we show the reverse may also be true and we derive the conditions under which this is the case our approach then allows us to rationalize within a standard contest framework observations that rents might be more hotly contested when they become scarcer as has evidently been the case with the recent global contraction of public funds available for public policy

an ex ante evaluation of a white certificates scheme in the netherlands a case study for the household sector increased efficiency of energy demand is generally recognized as a very cost effective strategy to reduce energy requirements and the related environmental impacts e g the greenhouse effect in order to improve energy efficiency the use of innovative market mechanisms such as the white certificates whc has been proposed the basic idea underlying this policy instrument is that specific energy saving targets are set for energy suppliers or energy distributors these requirements must be fulfilled in a predefined time frame the focus of this paper is on the effect on energy efficiency improvement on the behavior of the end consumers and the market of energy efficiency measures furthermore we study the possible effects of whc in the netherlands by means of a theoretical analysis and an empirical bottom up model we compare concrete energy efficient technologies in terms of cost effectiveness and energy efficiency improvement in combination with existing dutch policies for energy efficiency improvement in the built environment the contribution of this innovative scheme could enhance the accomplishment of energy efficiency targets in this paper two packages of energy saving measures of a whc scheme are studied for dutch households the costs of these technologies are estimated through the use of different discount rates which imply overcoming of the market barriers through the use of the whc a scheme that includes all available technologies as flexible options appears as a realistic solution and can generate cost effectively up to 180 pj primary energy savings and 4550 m cumulative net savings in the year 2020 at a discount rate of 5 under the precondition that the policy and administrative costs can be kept low

the social efficiency of private decisions to enforce property rights costs must be incurred if an owner is to enforce private property rights effectively we show that in a perfectly competitive economy private decisions to enforce rights may result in either more or less enforcement than is socially efficient cases of multiple stable equilibria occur and an equilibrium may be locally but not globally efficient resources may not be employed in their socially most valuable uses and enforcement may be accompanied by inefficient investment in resource productivity

distributive justice corruption and entrepreneurial behavior this article introduces equity theory to the economic growth literature to examine whether a relationship exists between perceptions of distributive justice and the productivity of entrepreneurial behavior using survey responses from 317 entrepreneurs in india we find that productive entrepreneurship is positively related to distributive justice perceptions but negatively related to perceptions that corruption is pervasive in contrast nonproductive forms of entrepreneurship are negatively related to distributive justice but positively related to corruption unexpectedly the findings also show that corruption mediates the relationship between distributive justice and legal entrepreneurial behavior while distributive justice mediates the relationship between corruption and illegal entrepreneurial behavior we conclude with a discussion of the study s findings and their implications for entrepreneurship and economic growth

redefining recs part 1 untangling attributes and offsets abstract renewable energy and greenhouse gas emissions markets are currently in a state of confusion regarding the treatment of renewable energy certificates recs should consumers buy recs or emission offsets after examining this question the author concludes that recs are not equivalent to emission offset credits and as currently defined the retiring of a rec may have no impact on emissions from electric power generation consumers who purchase recs in voluntary green power markets are providing financial assistance to renewable generators in the form of a production subsidy generators that sell recs are not transferring emission reductions since they are unlikely to have ownership or the ability to quantify reductions using a commonly accepted standard more importantly recs currently sold in voluntary markets do not pass credible additionality tests and can at best be expected to have a market demand effect which will be less than the supply of recs on the market rec definitions that use the term environmental attributes or environmental benefits are almost universally ambiguous providing the mistaken impression that consumers are purchasing a good instead of subsidizing a public good

regulation and industrial organization this paper examines the effects on firm behavior and industry structure of industry wide price regulation by the state such regulation wherein regulators set prices with regard to an industry wide aggregate performance measure has been and still is widely used and is shown to induce inefficiencies in firm operation in general such regulation can result in setting prices high enough to maintain inefficient firms and it encourages to inefficient firm operation due to incentives to inflate costs and averch johnson effects

social capital conflict and welfare abstract this paper analyzes the role of external conflict as a force that can create social capital hostile inter group interactions can help to resolve intra group social dilemmas but these potential gains must be weighed against the insecurity of hostile relations with an out group our central result is that the presence of an outside threat can induce higher levels of social capital either because a protective aspect of social capital comes into play and or as a reallocation of investments from private to social capital given that social capital is potentially subject to free riding the threat by promoting a greater level of social capital can be welfare improving when the threat is severe social capital and welfare are more likely to fall this effect of an external threat on social capital is stronger in poor economies these results can shed light on the sometimes contradicting empirical evidence on the relationship between conflict and social capital

when renewable portfolio standards meet cap and trade regulations in the electricity sector market interactions profits implications and policy redundancy emission trading programs c t and renewable portfolio standards rps are two common tools used by policymakers to control ghg emissions in the energy and other energy intensive sectors little is known however as to the policy implications resulting from these concurrent regulations especially given that their underlying policy goals and regulatory schemes are distinct this paper applies both an analytical model and a computational model to examine the short run implications of market interactions and policy redundancy the analytical model is used to generate contestable hypotheses while the numerical model is applied to consider more realistic market conditions we have two central findings first lowering the co2 c t cap might penalize renewable units and increasing the rps level could sometimes benefit coal and oil and make natural gas units worse off second making one policy more stringent would weaken the market incentive which the other policy relies upon to attain its intended policy target

do support systems for res e reduce eu ets driven electricity prices abstract support systems for electricity from renewable energy sources res e can reduce electricity prices which have also been influenced by a co2 emission trading scheme ets additional res e substitutes electricity from fossil fuels and thus co2 emissions are reduced the demand for emission reductions is lowered as a result the co2 price is also reduced consequently the wholesale price for electricity decreases however most res e support systems are financed via the electricity market which increases the retail electricity price an assessment for germany shows that retail electricity prices in the first trading period of the eu ets 2005 2007 are lowered by 2 6 euro mwh due to additional res e considering the complete eu the effect is substantially higher this paper describes the effect and the influence of different policy designs it develops an approach for assessing the effect and applies it for the case of germany and roughly estimates the effect for the eu

market power in renewable portfolio standards abstract renewable portfolio standard rps which requires a certain percentage of electricity production from renewables has received considerable attention one emerging issue is the possibility of strategic behavior in the renewable energy certificate credit rec market and its spillover effects on the electricity market this paper develops dominant firm competitive fringe models that account for market power we show that market power could have significant impacts on the rec and power prices in particular when a nonrenewable generator is a dominant firm and a renewable generator is a competitive fringe the nonrenewable firm has a strong incentive to lower the rec price even to zero for avoiding rec costs the zero rec price would negate price impacts in the power market thereby mitigating market power of the dominant firm however this could lead to an underinvestment in renewables in the long run as subsidies received by renewables in form of recs vanish therefore regulatory agencies need to carefully oversee the market performance to ensure a healthy development of renewable industries under the rps policies

the effect of financial constraints technological progress and long term contracts on tradable green certificates tradable green certificates tgcs have recently become a diffuse instrument to support renewable electricity in oecd countries although it is perhaps too early to draw a conclusive judgement on the effectiveness of this instrument in increasing renewable capacity and decreasing the price of certificates one view in the literature maintains that long term contracts are of particular importance for tgcs to be effective this paper contributes to this debate by analysing how financial constraints and technological progress can induce investors to hold pessimistic expectations of their ability to sell green certificates and still make a profit clearly these expectations will prevent investors from building new capacity to fulfil the quota comprised in tgcs and will keep the price of certificates traded in the market high as this kind of expectation is not influenced by most design features of tgcs one can conclude that long term contracts are particularly important in determining the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of these instruments some attention should therefore be paid to the features of the tgcs which induce obliged parties to offer long term contracts to renewable generators

sanctions and civil conflict using a formal general equilibrium framework this paper analyses how sanctions imposed on the contestants in civil conflict affect the welfare of these contestants and the allocation of resources to conflict it is shown that weak sanctions can hurt the contestant they are supposed to help while strong sanctions augment the expected welfare of their intended beneficiaries moreover sanctions are more likely to be successful if the contestant who is subject to sanctions can expect to derive a positive income in case of compliance the likelihood of success rises as this income increases

conflict war and redistribution this article analyzes the circumstances under which conflict leads to the outbreak of war using a formal model which incorporates both the redistribution of resources as an alternative to war and imperfect information countries act as rational agents concerned with both consumption and the public bad of a war in the first period both countries can either consume or build arms whereas in the second period there can be either the threat or the use of force to reallocate resources if both countries are fully informed then there will be no war but rather a voluntary redistribution of resources in a situation of asymmetric information however in which one country is fully informed and the other is not a war can occur if the uninformed country uses a separating equilibrium strategy precommitting itself to a positive probability of war in order to prevent bluffing by the informed country

a european defence union a european defence union jacques fontanel and ron smith the end of the cold war the unification of germany and the removal of us troops has rekindled interest in european defence cooperation the ec has common security policies on its agenda the military role of the weu is being enhanced and the new nato strategy emphasizes multilateral european forces a european defence union offers large potential efficiency gains power like any natural monopoly is generated more effectively and more cheaply by joint forces than by the sum of fragmented individual forces there are also large economies of scale in weapons production trends in budgets costs and threats are making national provision problematic and national arms industries non viable an edu may appear more attractive than either spending vast sums to attain minimum efficient scale or relying on forces that are so small and ill equipped as to require either dependence on the us or acceptance of effective neutrality however an edu reduces national sovereignty poses problems of command control and organization risks free riding and adverse reactions by the us and ussr and is vulnerable to exploitation and rent seeking by military industrial interests this paper examines the economics of these issues and suggests a route towards effective cooperation

swords or plowshares a theory of the security of claims to property this paper develops a general equilibrium model of the allocation of resources among appropriative and productive activities the model emphasizes the distinction between offensive weapons which are the instruments of predation and fortifications which provide defense against predation the analysis of this model shows how the equilibrium security of claims to property is determined the analysis focuses on the possibility of a nonaggressive equilibrium in which no resources are allocated to offensive weapons and claims to property are fully secure we also analyze the complex relation between economic welfare and the security of claims to property we find for example that a relatively poor agent could be better off in an equilibrium with less secure claims to property

the incidence of regulatory rents in the motor carrier industry this article focuses on two questions in the debate over motor carrier regulation first did regulation create eliminate or have no effect on monopoly rents in the trucking industry second ifthere were rents what was their incidence were they received by owners oftrucking firms dissipated through higher costs or captured by the teamsters union data on share price responses to deregulation announcements reveal declines in expected profits of 8 19 of totalfirm value this suggests that regulation created monopoly profits and indicates that at least some of these rents accrued to owners of trucking firms firms responses to regulatory change are modelled as functions of company s operating characteristics and measures of unionization operating efficiency and service characteristics are shown to affect the impact of deregulation on share values

why are rich countries more politically cohesive we document empirically that rich countries are more politically cohesive than poorer countries in order to explain this regularity we provide a model where political cohesion is linked to the emergence of a fully functioning market economy without market exchange the welfare of inherently selfish individuals will be mutually independent whoever has greater bargaining power will be willing to make decisions that enhance the productivity of their supporters at the expense of other groups in society if the gains from specialization are sufficiently large however a market economy will emerge from being essentially non cohesive under self sufficiency the political decision making process becomes cohesive in the market economy because the welfare of individuals will be mutually interdependent as a result of the exchange of goods

the elementary economics of social dilemmas a social dilemma is in essence a prisoners dilemma in a continuous strategy space i discuss a number of social dilemmas that have caught my attention offer an elementary diagrammatic synthesis of them and discuss some of the economic insights that the diagrams capture including incentives for pre commitment finally i model pre commitment via delegation and link results to the literature on the evolution of preferences l economie elementaire des dilemmes sociaux un dilemme social est essentiellement un dilemme du prisonnier dans un espace continu de strategie l auteur discute d un certain nombre de dilemmes sociaux qui ont retenu son attention il en propose une synthese graphique elementaire et discute certaines des suggestions economiques qui decoulent de ces diagrammes comme par exemple les incitations a se pre engager finalement l auteur construit un modele de pre engagement par delegation et relie ses resultats a la litterature sur l evolution des references

endogenous timing in general rent seeking and conflict models we examine simultaneous versus sequential choice of effort in a two player contest the timing of moves determined in a preplay stage prior to the contest subgame as well as the value of the prize is allowed to be endogenous contrary to endogenous timing models with an exogenously fixed prize the present paper finds the following 1 players may decide to choose their effort simultaneously in the subgame perfect equilibrium spe of the extended game 2 the spe does not need to be unique in particular there is no unique spe with sequential moves if the direct costs of effort are zero 3 symmetry among players does not rule out incentives for precommitment to effort locally away from the cournot nash level 4 finally there may be no correlation between win probability and strategic incentives in our framework a finding most central in the analysis of fixed prize contests

costly predation and the distribution of competence an evolutionary game model shows how an equilibrium distribution of competence may evolve when members of a population prey on one another but when predatory competence is costly to acquire under one interpretation the competence distribution is an endogenously determined distribution of bounded rationality an example shows how tricksters and suckers might coexist in the long run the analysis leads to a curious result about a mixed equilibrium for a symmetric zero sum game an increase in the costs of one or more competence levels has exactly zero effect on the fraction of the population at those levels