determinants of violent and property crimes in england and wales a panel data analysis we examine various determinants of property and violent crimes by using police force area level pfa data on england and wales over the period of 1992 2008 our list of potential determinants includes two law enforcement variables namely crime specific detection rate and prison population and various socio economic variables such as unemployment rate real earnings proportion of young people and the gini coefficient by adopting a fixed effect dynamic gmm estimation methodology we attempt to address the potential bias that arises from the presence of time invariant unobserved characteristics of a pfa and the endogeneity of several regressors there is a significant positive effect of own lagged crime rate the own lagged effect is stronger for property crime on an average than violent crime we find that on an average higher detection rate and prison population leads to lower property and violent crimes this is robust to various specifications however socio economic variables with the exception

the energy efficiency paradox revisited through a partial observability approach the present paper examines the energy efficiency paradox demonstrated in greek manufacturing firms through a partial observability approach the data set used has resulted from a survey carried out among 161 energy saving technology firm adopters maximum likelihood estimates that arise from an incidental truncation model reveal that the adoption of the energy saving technologies is indeed strongly correlated to the returns of assets that are required in order to undertake the corresponding investments the source of the energy efficiency paradox lies within a wide range of factors policy schemes that aim to increase the adoption rate of energy saving technologies within the field of manufacturing are significantly affected by differences in the size of firms finally mixed policies seem to be more effective than policies that are only capital subsidy or regulation oriented

male unemployment and crime in england and wales this paper employs county level data to investigate the relationship between crime and male adult and youth unemployment in britain our results indicate that there is a systematic positive relationship between most crime and male unemployment regardless of age

personal indebtedness community characteristics and theft crimes becker 1968 and stigler 1970 provide the germinal works for an economic analysis of crime and their approach has been utilised to consider the response of crime rates to a range of economic criminal and socioeconomic factors until recently however this did not extend to a consideration of the role of personal indebtedness in explaining the observed pattern of crime this paper uses the becker 1968 and stigler 1970 framework and extends to a fuller consideration of the relationship between economic hardship and theft crimes in an urban setting the increase in personal debt in the past decade has been significant which combined with the recent global recession has led to a spike in personal insolvencies in the context of the recent recession it is important to understand how increases in personal indebtedness may spillover into increases in social problems like crime this paper uses data available at the neighbourhood level for london uk on county court judgments ccj s granted against residents in that neighbourhood this is our measure of personal indebtedness and examines the relationship between a range of community characteristics economic socio economic etc including the number of ccj s granted against residents and the observed pattern of theft crimes for three successive years using spatial econometric methods our results confirm that theft crimes in london follow a spatial process that personal indebtedness is positively associated with theft crimes in london and that the covariates we have chosen are important in explaining the spatial variation in theft crimes we identify a number of interesting results for instance that there is variation in the impact of covariates across crime types and that the covariates which are important in explaining the pattern of each crime type are largely stable across the three periods considered in this analysis

competition privatisation and productive efficiency evidence from the airline industry we use data from the airline industry to examine the extent to which the costs of airline operations are affected by rents accruing to workers and the extent to which these rents depend inter alia upon the degree of competition in the industry our empirical results based on a panel of twelve european and seven major united states airlines confirm that state ownership substantially increases rents to labour while the effects of competition are more subtle and ambiguous airline profits tend to be associated with higher rents to employees the gains from further privatisation and liberalisation may be quite large does competition have significant effects on productive as well as allocative efficiency convincing empirical answers to this question have been hard to find for two reasons first data of the quality required for robust estimation of productive efficiency are only rarely available secondly there is frequently no convincing standard against which the efficiency of an industry or a firm may be compared since when the degree of competition varies many other things such as technology network structures and firm sizes typically vary as well these problems do not automatically make comparison impossible but they compound the need for high quality data one industry which is likely to be well suited to investigating questions of this kind is the international airline industry the industry contains a large number of firms thus ensuring at least enough potential competition to make questions about the effects of competition interesting but the scope for these firms to compete with one another has been influenced to varying degrees over the years by different national and international regulatory regimes in particular deregulation of the united states industry in 1978 provided a kind of natural experiment that has led not only to comparisons of the before and after variety but also to comparisons between the united states industry and that of other global regions notably europe such comparisons are far from straightforward but they are facilitated by the fact that the technology of civil aviation is more or less internationally standardised and by the relatively high quality of available data in the industry

youth unemployment and crime in the english regions and wales this paper investigates the relationship between unemployment and crime in england and wales taking account of both age and gender in the unemployment measures the study is for 1985 95 and is disaggregated to the regional level we allow for different types of crime and the deterrence effects of detection and punishment we also consider the relationship between ethnicity and crime in the light of the contentious public debate on this issue our results indicate that there is a systematic positive relationship between burglary rates and male unemployment regardless of age however we find that while youth unemployment is consistently and positively related to criminal damage and robbery rates there is no systematic evidence of a relationship between adult male unemployment and these specific crimes instead our evidence supports a positive link between adult unemployment and theft we find no compelling evidence of a link between ethnicity and crime

unemployment and crime rates in the post world war ii united states a theoretical and empirical analysis using annual time series data for the united states 1946 1982 two hypotheses are tested 1 the level of the unemployment rate in any given year will have a negative partial contemporaneous effect on detrendedfluctuations increases or decreases in seven index crime rates homicide rape aggravated assault robbery burglary larceny theft and motor vehicle theft in that year 2 unemployment rate fluctuationsfrom one year to the next will have a positive partial effect on detrended crime rate fluctuations in the next year these hypotheses are developed from a theoretical model that identifies the former with a criminal opportunity effect and the latter with a criminal motivation effect of aggregate unemployment on crime for burglary robbery and larceny theft empirical support is found for the expected pattern of partial effects however the relative sizes of the effects are such that the total impacts of unemployment through both partial effects are negative in addition only the negative levels effect is exhibited for homicide and motor vehicle theft while rape and aggravated assault show no consistent association with either levels orfluctuations in the unemployment rate interpretations for these findings are discussed

the efficiency paradox bureaucratic and organizational barriers to profitable energy saving investments abstract the paradox of why profitable energy saving investments are not undertaken continues to provoke debate the underlying phenomenon might be called the efficiency paradox because it represents a case in which business firms which are often presumed or taken axiomatically to be economically efficient make decisions that do not maximize profits new data from one of the us environmental protection agency s voluntary pollution prevention programs enables this paradox to be explored statistically the data show that both the level and variation in returns to lighting upgrade investments cannot be explained by standard economic models substantial gains in energy efficiency can be achieved without sacrificing profitability both economic and organizational factors account for some of the variation in observed returns to these investments but the results suggest a need for improved and more comprehensive theories of the investment behavior of firms and other organizations

adult labour market implications of antisocial behaviour in childhood and adolescence findings from a uk longitudinal study while antisocial behaviour in younger age groups is largely viewed as a public externality issue there are also reasons for expecting less favourable life course outcomes for those individuals who follow antisocial developmental pathways data from a uk longitudinal study of delinquent development in a cohort of working class boys are used to model the adult labour market implications of different antisocial developmental pathways to age 32 a series of probit estimations suggests that children identified as troublesome by peers and teachers at an early age and who subsequently engaged in delinquent behaviour throughout their adolescence had a significantly higher probability of experiencing long periods of time out of the workforce prior to age 32 and lengthy periods of unemployment and or low paid work at both age 18 and at age 32 a heckman selectivity model estimated on weekly earnings at age 32 does not provide evidence that antisocial development in children and adolescents is associated with a l

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

the profitability concentration relation market power or efficiency industrial economists have been studying the relationship between profitability and concentration using cross industry samples for many years now however as sometimes happens once it appeared that some consensus had been achieved with few exceptions market concentration and industry profitability are positively correlated peltzman i977 p 229 people began to question the interpretation of those results in particular demsetz e g i973 i974 and others suggested that rather than concentration market power leading to higher prices and profits the causal direction in fact ran from greater efficiency to both higher profits and incidentally to higher concentration our purpose here is to subject these conflicting hypotheses to cross industry empirical test using u k data in order to do this we first develop a model which is sufficiently general to allow for both alternative explanations of a positive concentration profitability correlation in the light of this model we then examine the implications for the within industry relation between market share and firm level profitability more specifically we explore demsetz s claim that the empirical form of this relationship should signal which of the alternative hypotheses is consistent with the between industry profitability concentration correlation our model suggests that in certain special circumstances this claim is partly justified in that it should be possible to assess the relative strengths of the market power and efficiency effects from the within industry relation more generally however factors such as product differentiation and scale economies may seriously impair the information content of the relation with at least a strong suspicion that the estimates will tend to exaggerate the evidence in favour of the efficiency hypothesis in the event our results tend to confirm that for most industries the within industry data offer little conclusive support for either hypothesis but for a not insignificant minority of industries the evidence suggests some support for the view that both efficiency and market power are at work simultaneously our model is detailed in section ii and estimated on u k data in section iii after which we offer a few comments in section iv first however we drovide a backcloth to the later analysis

plant level productivity efficiency and environmental performance of the container glass industry this paper presents a methodology and empirical results based on themalmquist productivity index we measure productivity while treatingpollution as an undesirable output our estimates show that technicalchange has contributed to productivity and environmental performancegrowth in the container glass industry an energy and pollution intensivesector changes in inter plant efficiency over time have made thisproductivity growth more rapid than otherwise would have occurred withthe underlying technical change the efficiency estimates show that thereare both opportunities to improve productivity and reduce pollution in thisindustry as well as productivity losses associated with the emissionscontrol the shadow prices for nox the undesirable output we analyze is quite high compared to other regulated sectors

rank stock order and epidemic effects in the diffusion of new process technologies an empirical model in this article we construct a general duration model of technology adoption that incorporates the main factors discussed in different theories of diffusion of new process technologies the model is applied to data on diffusion of cnc in the uk engineering industry although we find strong evidence in support of rank and endogenous learning effects there seems to be little evidence in support of the stock and order effects the main factors affecting the diffusion of cnc are found to be endogenous learning firm size industry growth rates the cost of the technology and expected changes in the cost of the technology

epa s voluntary 33 50 program impact on toxic releases and economic performance of firms abstract this paper examines the motivations for participation in the voluntary 33 50 program and the program s impact on the toxic releases and economic performance of firms in the u s chemical industry it demonstrates that the benefits due to public recognition and the potentially avoided costs of liabilities and compliance under mandatory environmental regulations provide strong incentives for participation after controlling for sample selection bias and the impact of other firm specific characteristics this paper shows that program participation led to a statistically significant decline in toxic releases over the period 1991 93 the program also had a statistically significant negative impact on the current return on investment of firms but its impact on the expected long run profitability of firms was positive and statistically significant

examining the link between crime and unemployment a time series analysis for canada we use national and regional canadian data to analyse the relationship between economic activity as reflected by the unemployment rate and crime rates given potential aggregation bias we disaggregate the crime data and look at the relationship between six different types of crimes rates and unemployment rate we also disaggregate the data by region we employ an error correction model in our analysis to test for short run and long run dynamics we find no evidence of long run relationship between crime and unemployment when we look at both disaggregation by type of crime and disaggregation by region lack of evidence of a long run relationship indicates we have no evidence of the motivation hypothesis for selected types of property crimes we find some evidence of a significant negative short run relationship between crime and unemployment lending support to the opportunity hypothesis inclusion of control variables in the panel analysis does not alter the findings qualitatively or quantitatively

why do firms do basic research with their own money abstractthe question to be addressed is why do private firms perform basic research with their own money interest in this question derives from both analytical and utilitarian considerations there is empirical evidence in the united states which provides the main context for this paper supporting the view that basic research makes a significant contribution to the productivity growth of the economy 4 7 it is widely held that social returns from basic research are significant and higher than private returns and it is for this reason that most such activities continue to be financed by the taxpayer this also implies that measures aimed at increasing basic research by the private sector will be welfare improving in the united states the federal government in the years since the second world war has provided the vast majority of all funds devoted to basic research although the federal share has been declining in recent years and although that share is at its lowest level in about 20 years it still constitutes about two thirds of the total 10 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

domestic burglaries and the real price of audio visual goods some time series evidence for britain this paper explores the relationship between the real price of audio visual goods and domestic burglaries using british data our findings suggest that the falling real price of these consumer goods has contributed to a reduction in domestic burglary activity

knowledge capital and performance heterogeneity a firm level innovation study this paper is an empirical analysis of knowledge capital and performance heterogeneity at the firm level we apply new econometric methods to extensive data on innovation and innovative activities

is energy intensity important for the productivity growth of eet adopters abstract energy efficient technologies eet have attracted strong interest because of their role in reducing environmental damage their adoption however remains rather low while their impact on productivity is substantial and differentiating with respect to technological characteristics energy intensity being such an obvious characteristic could be employed to classify eet adopters thus giving rise to two heterogeneous technologies i e those corresponding to firms of low and high energy consumption hence this paper examines the impact of energy intensity on the productivity growth of firms adopting eet in varying time intervals through a metafrontier based framework while also decomposing that impact in terms of technical efficiency and scale efficiency changes the analysis is complemented by examining the role of firm specific characteristics on the productivity growth through linear regression

input substitution economies of scale and productivity growth in the us upholstered furniture industry cost factor demand and productivity growth are considered in the upholstered furniture industry over 1958 87 factors are divided into labour capital and materials it is found that all inputs are substitutes in production although substitution elasticities are small factor demand is price inelastic for all inputs the industry operates around minimum average cost productivity growth is small but significant the results indicate that labour will continue to be important in the industry however regional comparative advantage is not related to labour alone the results suggest that policies to attract or retain the industry must consider the low degree of factor substitution

does renewable and or non renewable energy consumption matter for total factor productivity tfp growth evidence from the brics abstract studies proved that output growth is mainly associated with the total factor productivity tfp growth and variables that affect the tfp have an important explanatory power on output in this regards the aim of this study is to examine the causal relationship between different types of energy consumption and tfp growth in the brics from 1992 to 2012 a panel bootstrap granger causality test by konya 2006 68 was employed to investigate the direction of possible connection between energy consumption and tfp growth results show that no remarkable causal link exists between renewable energy consumption and tfp growth in the brics however in the case of non renewables energy consumption creates a positive externality that contributes economic development in brazil and south africa by the growth of tfp as well as energy use itself in this respect policies that promote coal and non renewable electricity consumption in south africa and natural gas consumption in brazil may be beneficial for their economic development

high growth firms in changing competitive environments the us pharmaceutical industry 1963 to 2002 firms across sectors and regions are highly skewed in their ability to engage with innovation and even more skewed in their ability to translate investments in innovation into higher growth recent attention has been placed on the importance of high growth firms hgf for innovation policy our paper explores under what conditions hgf matter for translating r d investments into economic growth and how this depends on firm specific and industry specific factors we use quantile regression techniques to study the r d growth relationship in hgf compared to low growth firms unlike previous studies we pay particular attention to whether this relationship depends on the particular period in the industry s life cycle we focus on the us pharmaceutical industry from 1963 to 2002 and find that the r d growth relationship is sensitive to the changing competitive environment over the industry s history which suggests that innovation policy must focus not only on firm attributes but also competitive structures

estimating the linkage between energy efficiency and productivity abstract many analyses have referred to industrial productivity benefits associated with energy efficiency that are at least as great or larger than the energy benefits if plants with higher energy intensity also tend to have lower productivity then energy policy needs to consider this this study examines this issue for two segments of the glass industry using plant level data from the census bureau productivity is defined by the difference in best practice production efficiency as measured by data envelopment analysis dea this study uses regression analysis to estimate how differences in plant level electricity and fossil fuel intensity i e energy use per unit of production are attributable to differences in plant level productivity and other economic variables like energy prices and cumulative production in every case productivity differences between plants are statistically significant in explaining differences in plant energy intensity the coefficient that links productivity to energy efficiency yields a less than proportional impact for only one industry and fuel type for others the relationship is implies that a 1 increase in productivity increase energy efficiency by more than 1 this effect is statistically significant for flat glass but not container glass the estimates of the price and learning by doing coefficients seem reasonable but without imposing the assumption that all plants in the industry are equally productive this lends further credence to a significant relationship between productivity and energy efficiency

personal indebtedness spatial effects and crime there is a long and detailed history of attempts to understand what causes crime one of the most prominent strands of this literature has sought to better understand the relationship between economic conditions and crime an economic argument is that in an attempt to maintain consumption in the face of unemployment people may resort to sources of illicit income in a similar manner we might expect ex ante that increases in the level of personal indebtedness would be likely to provide similar incentives to engage in criminality in this paper we seek to understand the spatial pattern of property and theft crimes using a range of socioeconomic variables including data on the level of personal indebtedness

crime during the business cycle urban rural differences abstractdespite the abundant literature on how crime evolves over the business cycle no consensus has arisen whether crime increases or decreases during recessions the literature provides both po

the link between crime risk and property prices in england and wales evidence from street level data this paper uses street level data on property sales and crime rates for england and wales to investigate compensating differentials for crime risk my identification strategy relies on the use of non parametric regional time trends on various levels of spatial aggregation as well as various fixed effects for streets and wider areas to control for unobserved amenities and regional economic conditions the data comes from transaction data collected by the land registry and recently published crime maps for the whole of the uk my estimates which are robust to a range of sensible specification changes suggest that each case of anti social behaviour per ten population in the same street leads to an approximately 0 6 0 8 drop in property prices while a corresponding increase in violent crime decreases prices by roughly 0 6 1 6 and a corresponding increase in non violent crime by about 0 2 0 4 the majority of estimates are at the upper end of these intervals estimates for robbery burglary and vehicle c

models of technology diffusion abstract the literature on new technology diffusion is vast and it spills over many conventional disciplinary boundaries this paper surveys the literature by focusing on alternative explanations of the dominant stylized fact that the usage of new technologies over time typically follows an s curve the most commonly found model which is used to account for this model is the so called epidemic model which builds on the premise that what limits the speed of usage is the lack of information available about the new technology how to use it and what it does the leading alternate model is often called the probit model which follows from the premise that different firms with different goals and abilities are likely to want to adopt the new technology at different times in this model diffusion occurs as firms of different types gradually adopt it there are actually many ways to generate an s curve and the third class of models which we examine are models of density dependence popularized by population ecologists in these models the twin forces of legitimation and competition help to establish new technologies and then ultimately limit their take up finally we look at models in which the initial choice between different variants of the new technology affect the subsequent diffusion speed of the chosen technology such models often rely on information cascades which drive herd like adoption behaviour when a particular variant is finally selected

new evidence from the misery index in the crime function abstract we propose a parsimony model which is clear from multicollinearity and specification problems in the standard crime function this study examines the relationship between the misery index and the crime rate in the unites states from 1960 to 2005

the urban rural divide regional disaggregation and the convergence of crime potential regional variation in crime rates has been recognized as an issue of clear importance given its implications for the development and evaluation of theories of criminal activity determining the appropriate level of disaggregation at which to undertake empirical analyses of crime and whether crime fighting policies should be constructed at a national or local level consequently a literature has evolved examining the similarities in us regional crime rates and whether a national trend exists or is emerging the present article extends the recent research into the emergence of a national trend by considering convergence in alternative classifications of crime using a data set subject to a higher degree of disaggregation than considered hitherto the results obtained overturn previous findings obtained using more highly aggregated data indicating the detection of convergence to be dependent upon the level of disaggregation considered in addition the extent of convergence detected is shown to va

firm organization industrial structure and technological innovation abstract the formal and informal structures of firms and their external linkages have an important bearing on the rate and direction of innovation this paper explores the properties of different types of firms with respect to the generation of new technology various archetypes are recognized and an effort is made to match organization structure to the type of innovation the framework is relevant to technology and competition policy as it broadens the framework economists use to identify environments that assist innovation

the dynamic implications of increasing returns technological change and path dependent inefficiency this paper addresses the issue of path dependent selection and inefficiency counterfactual methods and the empirical evidence employed in this research trajectory the general message is basically that the theoretical argument to prove path dependent inefficiency is relatively straightforward while empirical demonstrations as well as the analysis of welfare implications are much more difficult in the first section we briefly state the basic argument explaining how localized learning leads to an incomplete exploration of the variety distribution of a technology we then synthesize the most interesting historical studies which get potential regret results and ask whether these results suggest a large welfare loss to try to answer this question we start from the critical arguments of liebowitz and margolis to discuss the theoretical and empirical difficulties of establishing path dependent inefficiency