total factor productivity intangible assets and spatial dependence in the european regions dettori b marrocu e and paci r total factor productivity intangible assets and spatial dependence in the european regions regional studies the aim of this paper is to analyse the determinants of the efficiency levels across the european regions firstly a regression based measure of regional total factor productivity is derived by estimating a spatial cobb douglas production function secondly the role played by intangible factors human capital social capital and technological capital on total factor productivity levels is investigated by applying the spatial two stage least squares 2sls method and the spatial heteroskedasticy and correlation consistent shac estimator to account for both heteroskedasticity and spatial autocorrelation it turns out that a large part of total factor productivity differences across the european regions is explained by disparities in the endowments of these intangible assets dettori b marrocu e and paci r

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

no matter how it is measured income declines with global warming abstract the contemporaneous relationship between temperature and income is important because it enables economists to estimate the economic impact of global warming without assuming a structural model until recently empirical evidence generally suggests that there is a negative relationship between temperature and income and therefore global warming has an adverse impact on economic activity however nordhaus 2006 argues that the temperature income relationship depends on how income is measured we show in this paper that the results of nordhaus 2006 may be due to an omitted variable problem based on a well motivated temperature income model we find that the relationship between temperature and income is not dependent on income measurement our regression results show that the adverse impact of an increase of 1 c in temperature can be as much as a 3 decrease in total income for the g 7 nations therefore our results suggest an aggressive climate mitigation policy

information transmission in informationally linked markets evidence from us and chinese commodity futures markets abstract this paper investigates information transmission and price discovery in informationally linked markets within the multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and information share frameworks based on both synchronous and non synchronous trading information from chinese futures spot markets the new york mercantile exchange nymex chicago board of trade cbot and cme globex futures markets for copper and soybeans we show that there is a bidirectional relationship in terms of price and volatility spillovers between us and chinese markets with a stronger effect from us to chinese markets than the other way around additionally the nymex and cbot play a more important role than the cme globex in the flow of information from us to chinese markets moreover we find that chinese copper market adjusts more quickly than the nymex copper market to correct the disparity between both markets however the converse is true in the case of soybeans finally our results highlight the remarkable role of chinese futures markets in the price formation process though nymex and cbot futures markets are the main driving force in price discovery

tropics and economic development an empirical investigation abstract following kamarck s 1976 reasoning crosscountry regressions of income life expectancy schooling human development population increase capital accumulation and economic growth are estimated with the country s distance from the equator as an explanatory variable the distance parameter shows high statistical significance and is quantitatively substantial in all cases several versions of the solow models formulated by mankiw et al 1992 are also reestimated after including the distance variable which shows high significance in these cases too some implications of the regression estimates are noted

on the empirics of foreign aid and growth the present paper re examines the effectiveness of foreign aid theoretically and empirically using a standard olg model we show that aid inflows will in general affect long run productivity the size and direction of the impact may depend on policies deep structural characteristics and the size of the inflow the empirical analysis investigates these possibilities overall we find that aid has been effective in spurring growth but the magnitude of the effect depends on climate related circumstances finally we argue that the collier dollar allocation rule should be seriously reconsidered by donor agencies if aid effectiveness is related to climate the usefulness of foreign aid in promoting growth in developing countries has been an area of controversy ever since rosenstein rodan in 1943 advocated for aid to eastern and south eastern europe browsing through successive editions of a leading textbook in development economics provides a telling illustration of how the confidence in aid effectiveness dwindled over the years in the first edition of leading issues in economic development meier 1964 dedicated a full 18 page section to the issue of foreign aid he started out asking how much aid by the time of the sixth edition meier 1995 the treatment of foreign aid had been cut into half and the questions in focus were why official assistance and does aid work in the 2000 edition meier and rauch 2000 foreign aid is not even listed in the index

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

institutions infrastructure and economic growth abstract this paper develops a structural model of infrastructure and output growth that takes account of institutional and economic factors that mediate in the infrastructure gdp interactions cross country estimates of the model indicate that the contribution of infrastructure services to gdp is substantial and in general exceeds the cost of provision of those services the results also shed light on the factors that shape a country s response to its infrastructure needs and offer policy implications for facilitating the removal of infrastructure inadequacies

choosing size of government under ambiguity infrastructure spending and income taxation i examine choice of size of government by a planner who has partial knowledge of population preferences and the productivity of public spending focusing on income tax financed spending for infrastructure i examine scenarios where the planner observes the outcome of a status quo policy and uses various decision criteria to choose policy the analysis shows that the planner can reasonably choose a wide range of spending levels thus a society can rationalise having a small or large government i conclude that to achieve credible conclusions about the desirable size of government we need to improve current knowledge of preferences and the productivity of spending vastly

infrastructures and productivity in the spanish regions mas m maudos j perez f and uriel e 1996 infrastructures and productivity in the spanish regions reg studies 30 641 649 the aim of this paper is to analyse the role of public capital the types of infrastructures in which it is invested and their territorial distribution in the gains in productivity of the private sector in the spanish regions in the period 1964 91 using panel data techniques to control for unobserved state specific characteristics the results obtained show how the infrastructures most directly linked to the productive process present a significant and positive effect on productivity they also show the importance of the network effect of the infrastructures of a productive nature as well as a decrease in the elasticity associated with such infrastructures as development progresses mas m maudos j perez f et uriel e 1996 les infrastructures et la productivite aux regions espagnoles reg studies 30 641 649 cet article cherche a analyser le role du capital public les

linking local business with global growth opportunities the role of infrastructure infrastructure is instrumental when it comes to linking local businesses with their global growth opportunities this paper shows that by making this link the transport network can act as a catalyst for regional economic growth using a novel approach we find that firms in regions with a more developed transport infrastructure are better placed to benefit from positive growth opportunities than those in regions with a less well developed transport network this advantage is most pronounced in times of economic slack making a better transport network a key ingredient for economic recovery it is against this background that the recent slowdown in infrastructure investment in europe is worrisome but it is through this channel among others that the substantial ramp up of activity by the european investment bank is expected to foster growth and enhance competitiveness in europe

increasing returns migrations and convergence abstract the paper investigates the link between convergence and factor mobility it contrasts the predictions of exogenous growth models where factor mobility is found to promote convergence with endogenous growth models where factor mobility invariably leads to a cumulative process of regional divergence the paper develops a simple model of regional growth with mobile factors increasing returns to scale and diminishing returns to the reproducible factor it also tries to provide more solid microfoundations to the specification of the migration choice because of diminishing returns to the reproducible factor the economy will not be able to generate endogenous self sustaining growth nevertheless the results suggest that even in the context of an exogenous growth model convergence is not warranted however convergence may occur for some particular constellations despite the presence of increasing returns to scale more precisely it is shown that convergence is more likely the greater is the scope for scale economies and somewhat paradoxically the lower is the degree of labor mobility

the regional allocation of infrastructure investment the role of equity efficiency and political factors abstract this paper analyses the main determinants of the regional allocation of infrastructure investment the estimated investment equation is derived from a general specification of the government s objective function berhman and craig am econom rev 77 1987 315 which accounts both for the equity efficiency trade off and for deviations from this rule that arise because of political factors the reaction of investment to changes in the regional output provides information about the strength of the equity efficiency trade off the main political factor considered is a measurement of the electoral productivity of funds invested in each region the equation is estimated from panel data on investment and the capital stock of transportation infrastructure i e roads rails ports and airports for the spanish departments nuts3 during the period 1987 1996 we use a dynamic specification of the equation that allows for slow adjustment and which is estimated by gmm methods arellano and bond rev econom stud 58 1991 277 the results suggest that efficiency criteria play only a limited role in the geographical distribution of government infrastructure investment specific regional infrastructure needs and political factors both appear to be factors that do explain the regional allocation of infrastructure investment

complementing emu rethinking cohesion policy under emu the less competitive regions of the eu usually assumed to be peripheral have been widely expected to lose ground yet it is the core of the eu that so far has appeared to have suffered from the advent of the euro this paper looks at the processes behind regional divergence in the eu and presents evidence on recent and prospective trends as emu is consolidated bearing in mind that the imminent enlargement of the eu will radically change the political economy of the eu s efforts to assure cohesion policy issues are then discussed looking forward to the next renegotiation of the structural funds it is argued that difficult decisions have to be taken about the extent and character of eu policy the option of an open method of coordination for cohesion policy is put forward as a means of resolving some of the hard choices

accommodating public expenditure policies the case of fast growing asian economies abstract it is widely believed that the exceptional economic performances of the east asian economies are attributable as much to the visible hand of the state as to the invisible hand of the market this paper analyzes the experiences of japan south korea singapore and taiwan in implementing a key instrument of state intervention namely public expenditure policy the analysis shows that these economies could achieve high standards of physical and social infrastructure even with relatively low spending the key features of complementary spending policy include emphasis on macroeconomic stability cost effective spending involvement of private sector in providing quasi public goods minimum distortions in the labor markets and human resource development to achieve a broad based development

leviathan and competition among jurisdictions the case of benefit taxation abstract this paper shows that interjurisdictional competition for mobile factors of production forces the government to raise the efficiency of the public sector and thus helps to tame leviathan governments however this result is derived under some restrictive assumptions concerning the kind of tax policy used by the government in the case of benefit taxes e g user charges a leviathan may be tamed by interjurisdictional competition whereas this is not necessarily true in the case of lum sum taxes

common factors and common breaks in panels an empirical investigation abstract unobserved common factors and common breaks are two important features in empirical studies using large panels recently baltagi feng and kao 2016 2019 extended pesaran s 2006 common correlated effects cce approach by allowing for common breaks and endogenous regressors in large heterogeneous panels in this note we empirically investigate these estimators and compare them with cce and bai s 2009 interactive fixed effects ife estimators in the context of china s provincial infrastructure investment

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

how misleading is linearization evaluating the dynamics of the neoclassical growth model this paper investigates the reliability of employing linearization to evaluate the dynamic adjustments to changes in productive government spending in a ramsey growth model if government expenditure is introduced as a flow and the dynamic adjustment is fast linearization may yield a reasonably good approximation to the true dynamics even for fairly large policy shocks if government expenditure assumes the form of a stock leading to more sluggish adjustment linearization may yield misleading predictions these errors occur at the beginning of the transition and weigh heavily in welfare calculations the implications for temporary shocks and the speed of convergence are also considered

scale congestion and growth this paper explores the relationship between aggregate and relative congestion returns to scale and economic growth aggregate congestion reduces the effective productivity of capital relative congestion reduces the effective productivity of labour both forms of congestion adversely affect the equilibrium growth rate although their relative effects depend upon aggre gate returns to scale the two forms of congestion have contrasting effects on the transitional dynamics relative congestion retards the rate of adjustment aggregate congestion accelerates it the externalities generated by congestion and non optimal expenditure can be fully cor rected both during the transition and in steady state by a time invariant income tax the role of public expenditure as an instrument of economic growth has been a major policy issue as governments throughout the world design stimulus packages as in japan and face difficult choices to meet the emu criteria in europe empirical research investigating the impact of public investment on the productivity of private capital and output was stimulated by aschauer 1989a b who found the effects to be strongly positive the nature of public investment is however diverse in general public goods vary extensively in terms of the nature of their services spanning the range between the polar cases of pure private and pure public goods but the treatment of public expenditures in formal growth models is limited barro 1990 and futagami et al 1993 treat government expenditure as a pure pub lic good and in so doing they fail to take account of the congestion typically associated with public goods however as barro and sala i martin 1992 have argued almost all public services are characterized by some degree of congestion so that the pure public good should be viewed as only a bench mark these considerations suggest that congestion is an important consider ation in assessing the effect of public expenditures on economic growth attempts to analyse the effects of congestion on economic growth have been limited in various dimensions drawing on the public goods literature edwards 1990 proposes a number of specifications of congestion two notions particularly relevant in a growth context are relative congestion and aggregate absolute congestion the former specifies the level of services derived by an individual from the provision of a public good in terms of the usage of his individual capital stock relative to the aggregate capital stock aggregate congestion sometimes called crowding indicates how aggregate usage of the service alone influences the services received by an individual 2 existing applications of congestion to growth theory introduce it into ak models see barro and sala i martin 1992 1995 glomm and ravikumar 1994 1997 and turnovsky 1996 1997 however the ak model features two limitations that restrict its flexibility to examine the relationship between congestion and growth first as solow 1994 pointed out sustained ongoing

ict and transport infrastructure development an empirical analysis of complementarity abstractthis paper provides an empirical framework to assess the nonlinear complementary linkage effects that arise from the interaction between motorway capital and information and communications

urban growth and transportation we estimate the effects of interstate highways on the growth of u s cities between 1983 and 2003 we find that a 10 increase in a city s initial stock of highways causes about a 1 5 increase in its employment over this 20 year period to estimate a structural model of urban growth and transportation we rely on an instrumental variables estimation that uses a 1947 plan of the interstate highway system an 1898 map of railroads and maps of the early explorations of the u s as instruments for 1983 highways we investigate the role of interstate highways in the growth of u s cities our investigation is in three parts in the first we develop a simple structural model describing the joint evolution of highways and employment in cities in the second we develop an instrumental variables strategy that allows us to identify key parameters of our structural model we are also able to provide out of sample evidence for the validity of our estimates and for the central assumptions of our model in the third we use our estimates to assess counterfactual transportation policies we find that a 10 increase in a city s stock of interstate highways causes about a 1 5 increase in its employment over 20 years and that an additional kilometre of highway allocated to a city at random is associated with a larger increase in employment or population than is a road assigned to a city by the prevailing political process our results also suggest that too many new highways were built between 1983 and 2003 these findings are important for three reasons first transportation generally and infrastruc ture in particular are large segments of the economy the median u s household devotes about 18 of its income to road transportation while all levels of government together spend another 200 billion dollars annually overall the value of capital stock associated with road transporta tion in the u s tops 5 trillion dollars united states bureau of transportation statistics 2007 2010 given the magnitude of transportation expenditures it is important that the impact of these expenditures on economic growth be carefully evaluated and not assessed on the basis of the claims of advocacy groups our analysis provides a basis for assessing whether these resources are well allocated our results also provide useful guidance to policy makers charged with planning cities since changes in a city s transportation infrastructure cause changes to the city s employment new transportation infrastructure causes complementary changes in the demand for public utilities and schools our results provide a basis for estimating the magnitude of such changes finally this research is important to furthering our understanding of how cities operate and grow transportation costs are among the most fundamental quantities in theoretical models

asset market linkages evidence from financial commodity and real estate assets abstract we use a general markov switching model to examine the relationships between returns over three different asset classes financial assets us stocks and treasury bonds commodities oil and gold and real estate assets us case shiller index we confirm the existence of two distinct regimes a tranquil regime with periods of economic expansion and a crisis regime with periods of economic decline the tranquil regime is characterized by lower volatility and significantly positive stock returns during these periods there is also evidence of a flight from quality from gold to stocks by contrast the crisis regime is characterized by higher volatility and sharply negative stock returns along with evidence of contagion between stocks oil and real estate furthermore during these periods there is strong evidence of a flight to quality from stocks to treasury bonds

valuing rail access using transport innovations this paper uses a powerful empirical method to evaluate the benefits of rail access to consumers we study the effects on house prices of a transport innovation that altered the distance to the nearest station for some households but left others unaffected the transport innovation we study is the construction of new stations in london in the late 1990s using this innovation we implement a quasi experimental approach that allows us to avoid the biases inherent in cross sectional valuation work our evidence on distance station effects on local prices identified through distance changes induced by the transport innovation suggests that households value rail access and that these valuations are large compared to the valuations of other local amenities

evaluating the social optimality of durable public good provision using the housing price response to public investment recent empirical work in public finance uses the housing price response to public investment to assess the efficiency of local durable public good provision this paper explores the theoretical justification for this technique it points out that the logic justifying the technique for evaluating non durable public good provision does not translate to the durable case a model in which investment is determined by the interaction between a budget maximizing bureaucrat and a community s residents is used to demonstrate that the technique can falsely predict under provision falsely predict over provision or perform without error

the contribution of local public infrastructure to private productivity and its political economy evidence from a panel of large german cities this paper proposes a simultaneous equation approach to theestimation of the contribution of infrastructure accumulationto private production a political economy model for theallocation of public infrastructure investment grants isformulated our empirical findings using a panel of largegerman cities for the years 1980 1986 and 1988 suggest thatcities ruled by a council sharing the state bundesland government s current political affiliation were particularlysuccessful in attracting infrastructure investment grants with regard to the contribution of infrastructure accumulationto growth we find that public capital is a significant factorin private production moreover at least for the samplestudied we find that simultaneity between output and publiccapital is weak thus feedback effects from output toinfrastructure are negligible

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

is infrastructure capital productive a dynamic heterogeneous approach this paper offers an empirical evaluation of the output contribution of infrastructure drawing from a large data set on infrastructure stocks covering 88 countries and spanning the years 1960 2000 and using a panel time series approach the paper estimates a long run aggregate production function relating gdp to human capital physical capital and a synthetic measure of infrastructure given by the first principal component of infrastructure endowments in transport power and telecommunications tests of the cointegration rank allowing it to vary across countries reveal a common rank with a single cointegrating vector which is taken to represent the long run production function estimation of its parameters is performed using the pooled mean group estimator which allows for unrestricted short run parameter heterogeneity across countries while imposing the testable restriction of long run parameter homogeneity the long run elasticity of output with respect to the synthetic infrastructure index ranges between 0 07 and 0 10 the estimates are highly significant both statistically and economically and robust to alternative dynamic specifications and infrastructure measures there is little evidence of long run parameter heterogeneity across countries whether heterogeneity is unconditional or conditional on their level of development population size or infrastructure endowments

modeling volatility and correlations between emerging market stock prices and the prices of copper oil and wheat abstract increased financial integration between countries and the financialization of commodity markets are providing investors with new ways to diversify their investment portfolios this paper uses varma agarch and dcc agarch models to model volatilities and conditional correlations between emerging market stock prices copper prices oil prices and wheat prices the dynamic conditional correlation model is found to fit the data the best and used to generate dynamic conditional correlations hedge ratios and optimal portfolio weights emerging market stock prices and oil prices display leverage effects where negative residuals tend to increase the variance conditional volatility more than positive ones correlations between these assets increased considerably after 2008 and have yet to return to their pre 2008 values on average oil provides the cheapest hedge for emerging market stock prices while copper is the most expensive but given the variability in the hedge ratios one should probably not put too much emphasis on average hedge ratios

endogenous structural breaks public investment in agriculture and agricultural land productivity in taiwan using time series data for taiwan s agricultural sector and with the government s public investment in the agricultural sector serving as a proxy variable for nonfarm current inputs aside from the original labour and capital input variables usually taken into consideration this article examines the relationship between public investment in agriculture public investment land and agricultural land productivity output land in taiwan our main findings are as follows first the cointegration test reveals that public investment in agriculture and the productivity of agricultural land exhibit a significant positive relationship in the long run where the elasticity of land productivity in relation to public investment in agriculture is 0 55 second when controlling for endogenous structural breaks the long run equilibrium relationship for the productivity of the agricultural land model is still supported third the results of the weak exogeneity test indicate that a causal relationship exists in the lo

inter regional redistribution through infrastructure investment tactical or programmatic in this paper we study the political economy of the inter regional allocation of investment in infrastructure in an effort to disentangle tactical and programmatic motives where tactical politics refers to the discretionary allocation of investment to districts with more political clout and programmatic politics refers to the allocation of investment according to certain objective criteria e g income level we use a panel of data from the spanish electoral districts for the period 1964 2004 to estimate an equation in which investment depends both on economic and political variables the results show that tactical politics do matter since the districts receiving the most funds are those in which i the incumbent s vote margin is low ii few votes are needed to win an additional seat in the legislature iii the central and regional governments are controlled by the same party and iv regional parties play a pivotal role in the legislature however the results also show that programmatic politics matter since inter regional redistribution is shown to increase i with the arrival of democracy and european union funds ii under leftist governments and iii the weaker the correlation is between political clout and regional income

two sector growth models with productive public goods equilibrium in determinacy author affiliation been lon chen institute of economics academia sinica 128 academia road section 2 taipei 11529 taiwan e mail bchen econ sinica edu tw corresponding author shun fa lee department of industrial economics tamkang university 151 ying chuan road tamsui taipei county 25137 taiwan e mail alphalee mail tku edu tw acknowledgment we are grateful to two anonymous referees and an editor for constructive comments and to participants in several workshops for valuable comments and suggestions in earlier versions of the paper 1 introductionmodels of economic growth with multiple equilibrium paths offer an explanation as to why we often observe diverse growth performances among countries with similar economic environments a central question is under what conditions is it possible to establish local indeterminacy in this paper we study a lucas 1988 human capital based growth model and investigate whether there are multiple equilibrium paths and thus local equilibrium indeterminacy in the neighborhood of a balanced growth path equilibrium indeterminacy in existing two sector human capital based growth models emerges based upon two mechanisms one of the mechanisms is differential factor tax rates initiated in the work of bond wang and yip 1996 and followed by that of raurich 2001 the other mechanism is sector specific externalities pioneered in the work of benhabib and farmer 1996 in an exogenous growth model and followed by the work of benhabib meng and nishimura 2000 and mino 2001 in endogenous growth models ben gad 2003 combined the two mechanisms these two mechanisms establish local indeterminacy when the mechanisms cause the factor intensities at the social perspective and those at the private perspective to reverse the purpose of this paper is twofold first we argue that once productive public goods are considered the two existing mechanisms are not robust in creating local indeterminacy then we take into account congestion in public services so a two sector model with the two existing mechanisms can generate local indeterminacy our purpose is motivated by the following in the existing models with sector specific externalities or distorted factor taxes there is either no government spending or if the government spending is taken into account only consumptive public spending and government transfers are considered recently a number of authors have documented the positive impact of public expenditure upon the productivity of private capital 1 when there is productive public spending the production technology is externally enhanced by the public goods productive public goods as an engine of economic growth have received much attention in endogenous growth models in particular a number of studies in this line of modeling strategy have obtained local indeterminacy 2 thus it is important to determine whether or not differential factor tax rates and sector specific externalities create local indeterminacy in models with productive public goods however as we will find the two existing mechanisms no longer create local indeterminacy in a two sector growth model with productive public goods unless the difference in the factor tax rates and the gap in the sector specific externalities are implausibly large intuitively productive public goods introduce the effects of intersectoral externalities they offset the effects of the two existing mechanisms that would have otherwise reversed the factor intensity at the social viewpoint from the factor intensity at the private viewpoint as a consequence the two existing mechanisms are not robust in the establishment of local indeterminacy in models with productive public goods this paper then introduces the congestion effect in the use of public goods an effect offsetting the effect from public spending to salvage the two existing mechanisms

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

is all public capital created equal this paper uses a var approach to investigate the effects of public investment on private sector performance in the united states this approach is consistent with the argument that the analysis of

public capital and total factor productivity new evidence from the italian regions 1970 98 destefanis s and sena v 2005 public capital and total factor productivity new evidence from the italian regions 1970 98 regional studies 39 603 618 this paper analyses the relationship between industrial total factor productivity and public capital across the 20 italian administrative regions it adds upon the existing literature in a number of ways it analyses a longer period 1970 98 it allows for the role of human capital accumulation it tests for the existence of a long run relationship between total factor productivity and public capital through previously suggested panel techniques and for weak exogeneity of public capital and it assesses the significance of public capital within a non parametric set up based on the free disposal hull the results confirm that public capital has a significant impact on the evolution of total factor productivity particularly in the southern regions this impact is mainly ascribed to the core infrastructures road and airports harbours railroads w

the value of school facility investments evidence from a dynamic regression discontinuity design author s cellini stephanie riegg ferreira fernando rothstein jesse abstract despite extensive public infrastructure spending surprisingly little is known about its economic return in this paper we estimate the value of school facility investments using housing markets standard models of local public goods imply that school districts should spend up to the point where marginal increases would have zero effect on local housing prices our research design isolates exogenous variation in investments by comparing school districts where referenda on bond issues targeted to fund capital expenditures passed and failed by narrow margins we extend this traditional regression discontinuity approach to identify the dynamic treatment effects of bond authorization on local housing prices student achievement and district composition our results indicate that california school districts underinvest in school facilities passing a referendum causes immediate sizable increases in home prices implying a willingness to pay on the part of marginal homebuyers of 1 50 or more for each 1 of capital spending these effects do not appear to be driven by changes in the income or racial composition of homeowners and the impact on test scores appears to explain only a small portion of the total housing price effect c 2010 by the president and fellows of harvard college and the massachusetts institute of technology

international transmission of stock market movements this paper investigates the international transmission mechanism of stock market movements by estimating a nine market vector autoregression var system using simulated responses of the estimated var system we i locate all the main channels of interactions among national stock markets and ii trace out the dynamic responses of one market to innovations in another generally speaking a substantial amount of multi lateral interaction is detected among national stock markets innovations in the u s are rapidly transmitted to other markets in a clearly recognizable fashion whereas no single foreign market can significantly explain the u s market movements also the dynamic response pattern is found to be generally consistent with the notion of informationally efficient international stock markets

public infrastructure and regional economic development a simultaneous equations approach an analysis of how central bank exchange market intervention can affect both the level of exchange rates and the risk premium in asset returns showing how the risk premium is related to the conditional variances of intervention and other exogenous processes

crowding out the role of state companies and the dynamics of industrial competitiveness in india this article examines growth patterns of government companies in india whether their presence has crowded out private entrepreneurial activity and whether there has been a decline in the competitiveness of india s industry measured as relative productive efficiency for a 45 year period from 1957 1958 to 2001 2002 there was a significant growth in the number of government companies in india that effectively crowded out the entry and growth of private enterprise this took place from the mid to late 1950s to the late 1980s and early 1990s correspondingly the amount of private equity capital invested in firms declined until the late 1980s and early 1990s when there was an upsurge of private investment activity another feature was that a small number of government companies absorbed most of the corporate sector equity investment in india the growth in the share of government companies in india that crowded out the entry and growth of private enterprises has had a significantly negative effect on india s industrial competitiveness after the introduction of reforms in 1991 there has been a significant crowding in by private enterprises displacing the government companies from their key position as holders of a very large portion of equity capital and also reversing the trend in the decline of competitiveness of indian industry as a whole copyright 2009 oxford university press

agricultural productivity and economic growth role of tax revenues and infrastructures 1 introductiondevelopment economists such as rostow 1960 and ranis and fei 1961 have stressed a positive linkage between agricultural productivity and industrialization the positive link however has been argued to be nonexistent by matsuyama 1992 in a two sector endogenous growth model of small open economies with a low elasticity of agricultural goods and the existence of learning by doing only in the domestic manufacturing sector 1 as a result of comparative advantage higher agricultural productivity solicits labor inputs from the manufacturing sector in his model leading to lower learning by doing and economic growth matsuyama s results however may not be consistent with what has actually happened in japan and other east asian economies in japan a land reform has been implemented and allocation of resources to agricultural research has been increased since the meiji restoration as a result of agricultural technical progress 2 agricultural productivity in japan is much higher than before the meiji restoration in particular evidence has shown that the agricultural technical change after the meiji restoration tends to increase nonagricultural output by pushing resources out of the agricultural sector into the nonagricultural sector for example see yamaguchi and binswanger 1975 table 7 for the quantitative effects of the agricultural technical change in japan on nonagricultural output column 3 and on input reallocation columns 5 and 7 in 1880 1965 similarly the agricultural technical change was higher in korea s and taiwan s early stages of economic development as they have founded agricultural research institutes and farmers associations during the japanese colonial period3 and implemented land reforms after world war ii for evidence see mason et al 1980 chapter 7 for the case of korea and thorbecke 1979 for the case of taiwan a world bank 1982 p 45 study reports that for the 23 developing countries whose agricultural growth rate in the 1970s exceeded 3 a year 17 countries had a gdp growth rate above 5 a year in the same period finally using cross country data for 14 asian developing countries in 1960 1986 mellor 1995 finds a positive and significant relationship between growth rate of per capita agricultural and nonagricultural gdps in which both agricultural and nonagricultural sectors grow more rapidly than 31 sub saharan and 20 latin american countries these above observations lead to interesting questions as to what mechanism lies in the positive impact of accelerated agricultural growth on nonagricultural growth what policies might increase the efficiency with which a productive agricultural sector moves a nonagricultural sector forward the purpose of this study is to revisit the linkages between agricultural productivity and economic growth with a government policy our model is based on matsuyama s 1992 framework with a small twist so that we can clearly identify the mechanism leading to a positive relationship the departure in this article lies in introducing a government which collects taxes and then conducts expenditures on infrastructures an important role played by higher agricultural productivity in an early stage of economic development is the one by which it renders the government larger tax revenues so that larger expenditure on infrastructures is facilitated 4 in a study investigating taiwan s rice for fertilizer bartering system in the 1950s and 1960s koo 1996 table 2 finds that the resulting hidden taxes on rice alone account for 10 20 of total tax revenue in the period extending from 1950 to 1969 along with other taxes the agricultural sector is thus an important source of government revenue in a developing economy 5 following barro 1991 public expenditure on infrastructures is assumed to be productive in that the learning by doing effect of the manufacturing sector becomes enhanced with public expenditure on infrastructures

student t distribution based var mgarch an application of the dcc model on international portfolio risk management significant second moment transmission effects and obvious time varying patterns of correlation coefficients among major equity and currency markets in the us japan and the uk are found to exist such observations inspire the time varying setting of dynamic conditional correlation coefficients in mgarch models on the other hand the multivariate student t distribution is suitable for analysing the visible leptokurtosis that is common in financial markets both are important for international portfolio risk management thus a comparison on the hedging efficiency of hypothetical portfolios consisting of stock and currency future positions is conducted in order to justify the multivariate student t distribution based on the dcc mgarch model

public investment and regional inequality in rural china this paper develops a method for decomposing the contributions of various types of public investment to regional inequality and applies the method to rural china public investments are found to have contributed to production growth in both the agricultural and rural non agricultural sectors but their contributions to regional inequality have differed by type of investment and the region in which they are made all types of investment in the least developed western region reduce regional inequality whereas additional investments in the coastal and central regions worsen regional inequality investments in rural education and agricultural r d in the western region have the largest and most favorable impacts on reducing regional inequality

public sector capital and the productivity puzzle a number of studies have suggested a quantitatively important relationship between public sector capital accumulation and private sector productivity with the most compelling evidence derived from analyses of state level data estimates herein of production functions that use standard techniques to control for unobserved state specific characteristics however reveal essentially no role for public sector capital in affecting private sector productivity only estimates of state production functions that do not include such controls find substantial productivity impacts this result reconciles existing econometric estimates with the findings of hulten and schwab based on growth accounting techniques as such techniques effectively control for state specific effects region level estimates are essentially identical to those from state data suggesting no quantitatively important spillover effects across states copyright 1994 by mit press

corrigendum to congestible public goods and local indeterminacy a two sector endogenous growth model journal of economic dynamics control 31 7 2007 2486 2518

infrastructure provision and macroeconomic performance this paper studies the differences between private and government provision of infrastructure capital utilization decisions and their differential role in determining market prices for capital goods under the two regimes of infrastructure provision serve as a critical transmission mechanism for fiscal policy a subsidy to private providers of infrastructure is preferable to direct government provision irrespective of how the subsidy or expenditure is financed the case for private provision is much stronger in economies characterized by high levels of congestion the choice between private and government provision also has a crucial effect on the design of optimal fiscal policy 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved

a new approach to test the effects of decentralization on public infrastructure investment this paper proposes a simple theoretical framework to obtain a tractable equation that considers the traditional criteria for allocating public infrastructure investment and variables to capture de

correlations and volatility spillovers between oil prices and the stock prices of clean energy and technology companies abstract in this paper multivariate garch models are used to model conditional correlations and to analyze the volatility spillovers between oil prices and the stock prices of clean energy companies and technology companies four different multivariate garch models bekk diagonal constant conditional correlation and dynamic conditional correlation are compared and contrasted the dynamic conditional correlation model is found to fit the data the best and generates results showing that the stock prices of clean energy companies correlate more highly with technology stock prices than with oil prices on average a 1 long position in clean energy companies can be hedged for 20 cents with a short position in the crude oil futures market

capital utilization economic growth and convergence abstract optimal decisions by economic agents regarding the utilization of capital lead to empirically plausible speeds of convergence in one sector models of economic growth the relationship between depreciation and capital utilization plays a crucial role in slowing down convergence to the steady state cross country differences in the extent to which the capital utilization decision is internalized along the transition path may lead to differences in convergence rates even for countries with similar initial and terminal conditions finally by assuming a constant depreciation rate and full capital utilization standard growth models may be overstating the magnitude of the steady state equilibrium

the intertemporal elasticity of substitution an analysis based on japanese data this paper investigates whether the intertemporal elasticity of substitution ies for japan possesses similar properties to that found for the united states in the literature as the existing empirical findings are mixed there is no clear consensus this paper uses a model with both production and non separability between nondurables and durables in order to control for possible factors that cause a bias in the ies we present the empirical results demonstrating that the ies is quite similar between the two countries

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

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

between development and social policies the impact of european structural funds in objective 1 regions rodriguez pose a and fratesi u 2004 between development and social policies the impact of european structural funds in objective 1 regions reg studies 38 97 113 european regional support has grown in parallel with european integration the funds targeted at achieving greater economic and social cohesion and reducing disparities within the european union eu have more than doubled in relative terms since the end of the 1980s making development policies the second most important policy area in the eu the majority of the development funds have been earmarked for objective 1 regions i e regions where gdp per capita is below the 75 threshold of the eu average however the european development policies have come under increasing criticism based on two facts the lack of upward mobility of assisted regions and the absence of regional convergence this paper assesses using cross sectional and panel data analyses the failure so far of european development policies to fulfil their objective of de

infrastructure and education as instruments of regional policy evidence from spain regional policy and spain infrastructure and education as instruments of regional policy evidence from spain governments have often tried to influence the regional distribution of economic activity through supply side measures such as investment in training and infrastructure using evidence from spain we examine whether such policies can have an impact and whether they have done so in the past our results indicate that disparities in the stocks of human and public capital account for a third of observed regional inequality about evenly split between the two factors hence public investment can in principle be used to reduce regional disparity its actual impact however will depend both on its overall volume and on the extent to which its regional allocation does indeed vary with regional need in spain investment in infrastructure has made only a small contribution to regional convergence primarily because it has not in practice been allocated to redistribute across regions to any great extent in contrast efrd transfers have clearly been allocated among regions with redistribution in mind the impact of the fund has been significant but it has been limited by the relatively small size of the programme angel de la fuente and xavier vives

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

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

reprint to infrastructure provision and macroeconomic performance abstract this paper studies the differences between private and government provision of infrastructure capital utilization decisions and their differential role in determining market prices for capital goods under the two regimes of infrastructure provision serve as a critical transmission mechanism for fiscal policy a subsidy to private providers of infrastructure is preferable to direct government provision irrespective of how the subsidy or expenditure is financed the case for private provision is much stronger in economies characterized by high levels of congestion the choice between private and government provision also has a crucial effect on the design of optimal fiscal policy

the income temperature relationship in a cross section of countries and its implications for predicting the effects of global warming hotter countries are poorer on average this paper attempts to separate the historical and contemporaneous components of this income temperature relationship following ideas by acemoglu et al am econ rev 91 5 1369 1401 2001 we use colonial mortality data to account for the historical role of temperature since colonial mortality was highly correlated with countries average temperatures the remaining income temperature gradient after colonial mortality is accounted for is most likely contemporaneous this contemporaneous effect can be used to estimate the consequences of global warming we predict that a 1 c temperature increase across all countries will cause a decrease of 3 8 in world gdp this prediction is robust across functional forms and an alternative method for separating historical effects

efficiency adjusted public capital and growth summary this paper constructs an efficiency adjusted public capital stock series and re examines the public capital and growth relationship the paper also examines the effects of four specific stages of the public investment process appraisal selection implementation and evaluation on capital accumulation and growth the results show that public capital is a significant contributor to economic growth the quality of public investment as measured by variables capturing the adequacy of project selection and implementation is statistically significant in explaining variations in economic growth a result mainly driven by low income countries

services sector and economic growth in india this study examines the long run equilibrium and short run dynamic relationship between services sector and gross domestic product gdp and between services and nonservices sectors in india the model is estimated using the optimal single equation and the maximum likelihood system estimators all the estimators consistently suggest the cointegrating relationship between services sector and gdp as well as between services and nonservices sectors the estimates of long run elasticity parameters are statistically significant and dimensionally consistent across the estimators the conventional cumulative sum cusum and the new cusum and moving sum mosum tests suggest the stability of the equilibrium residuals and reinforce the cointegrating relationship between the model series the error correction model provides some support for unidirectional granger causality from services sector to gdp the impulse response and variance decomposition analyses instead suggest the bidirectional causality between servic

spillover effects in the global copper futures markets asymmetric multivariate garch approaches this study investigates changes in return and volatility spillovers between the lme comex and the shfe copper futures markets before and after the global financial crisis and after the introduction

spillover effects of public capital formation evidence from the spanish regions maybe because of the inconclusive nature of the results on the impact of public capital on output at the regional level the issue of the po ssible existence of the regional spillovers from public capital formation has received little attention the objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the possible existence of such spillovers we consider the case of spain and its seventeen regions our methodological approach consists in estimating an aggregate var model for spain as well as seventeen region specific var models in which both capital installed in the region and capital installed outside the region are allowed to play a role in en hancing regional output the estimation results can be summarized as follows the aggregate effects of public capital formation in spain are important they cannot however be captured in their entirety by the direct effects in each region from public capital installed in the region itself when for each region both the capital installed in the region and the capital installed outside the region are considered the total disaggregated effect from the seventeen regional models are very much in line with the aggregate results furthermore the aggregate effect seems to be due in almost equal parts to the direct and spillover effects of public capital formation ultimately this paper establishes the relevance of both capital installed in each region and s pillover effects in the understanding of the regional decomposition of the aggregate effects of public capital formation in doing so it opens the door to some tantalizing and potentially highly charged research issues in terms of the determination of the optimal location of public investment projects

the politics of infrastructure investment the role of product market competition abstract in spatial competition public infrastructure plays a crucial role in determining product market outcomes in our model consideration of infrastructure s impact on the product market drives the preferences of consumers in their dual role as voter taxpayers the spatial heterogeneity of consumers produces conflicting political interests and in many cases inefficient outcomes however across both exogenous and endogenous market environments product market competition consistently leads to higher levels of publicly funded infrastructure than monopoly collusion furthermore competition s boost to the popular support for infrastructure investment is often excessive while monopoly leads to underinvestment

transforming european regional policy a results driven agenda and smart specialization the paper examines the nature rationale and logic of the reforms to eu cohesion policy a particular focus of the paper is on the concept of smart specialization and the use of this concept to help facilitate a results oriented policy agenda on the one hand the arguments underpinning the reforms in part relate to modern thinking regarding the role of industrial policy on the other hand they also partly relate to advances in our understanding of the relationships between economic geography technology and institutions at the same time the specific features of the eu context also heavily influence the nature and logic of the changes whereby legal and institutional matters linking cohesion policy to other eu policies all play an important role

public investment and economic growth this article uses an extension of mankiw romer and weil s augmented solow swan growth model to examine whether public investment has a distinct role as a determinant of economic growth it considers both the predictions of the model in steady state and in transition to steady state for the steady state model there is no significant effect from public investment on the level of output per worker using standard ordinary least squares ols methods for the transition model it observes a significant contribution to economic growth from public investment when instrumental variables methods are used however the associated standard errors are much larger and the contribution of public investment is statistically insignificant

what have we learned from three decades of research on the productivity of public capital the last three decades have witnessed a great deal of research effort devoted to measuring the private output elasticity of public capital the wide range of available estimates have precluded any consensus so far however this paper reconciles the empirical findings of the literature by quantitatively analyzing a sample of 578 estimates collected from 68 studies for the 1983 2008 period using meta regression analysis we show how study design characteristics and publication bias can explain a large fraction of the variation across estimates we find a short run output elasticity of public capital supplied at the central government level of 0 083 which increases to 0 122 in the long run if in addition only core infrastructure at a regional local level of government is considered these estimates are almost doubled the average output elasticity of public capital amounts to 0 106 our results suggest that public capital is undersupplied in oecd economies

differences in gdp per head in gb counties some suggested explanations this paper examines the evidence concerning the convergence of gross domestic product gdp per head across gb counties during 1977 1995 in general the evidence rejects the hypothesis of convergence although there is some evidence of a north south divide with convergence in the north in the 1990s cross section results suggest that variation in gdp per head may be related to different economic activity rates and some aspects of industrial structure