note on the open loop von stackelberg equilibrium in the cartel versus fringe model one of the ways to model the supply side of the world oil market is by means of the cartel versus fringe model and to employ the open loop von stackelberg equilibrium concept this note shows that the equilibrium as presented in the literature does not satisfy the optimality conditions for the open loop equilibrium the authors show furthermore that in contrast with the prevailing view the equilibrium can display discontinuous price trajectories copyright 1992 by royal economic society

do labor market policies have displacement effects evidence from a clustered randomized experiment this article reports the results from a randomized experiment designed to evaluate the direct and indirect displacement impacts of job placement assistance on the labor market outcomes of young educated job seekers in france we use a two step design in the first step the proportions of job seekers to be assigned to treatment 0 25 50 75 or 100 were randomly drawn for each of the 235 labor markets e g cities participating in the experiment then in each labor market eligible job seekers were randomly assigned to the treatment following this proportion after eight months eligible unemployed youths who were assigned to the program were significantly more likely to have found a stable job than those who were not but these gains are transitory and they appear to have come partly at the expense of eligible workers who did not benefit from the program particularly in labor markets where they compete mainly with other educated workers and in weak labor markets overall the program seems to have had very little net benefits

the role of firm size in bilateral bargaining a study of the cable television industry we examine the effect of buyer merger on bilateral negotiations between a supplier and n buyers merger may have bargaining effects in addition to the usual efficiency effects the effect of merger on the buyers bargaining position depends on the curvature of the supplier s gross surplus function merger enhances worsens the buyers bargaining position if the function is concave convex based on a panel of advertising revenue in the cable television industry our estimates indicate that the gross surplus function for suppliers of program services is convex this result suggests that cable operators integrate horizontally to realize efficiency gains rather than to enhance their bargaining position vis a vis program suppliers

balancing the carbon budget for oil the distributive effects of alternative policies keeping temperature change below 2 c will require leaving large reserves of fossil fuels unextracted we assess alternative policies to achieve this goal in a world divided into two regions one regulated with emissions pricing and one unregulated supplied by multiple resource pools with different extraction costs and a carbon free backstop whose costs decline over time global emissions can be reduced by combinations of three policies 1 increasing the size of the regulated coalition 2 raising the tax or tightening the cap within the regulated coalition and 3 accelerating cost reductions of the clean technology we ask how combinations achieving the same cumulative co2 emissions the carbon budget affect the discounted surplus of regulated and unregulated consumers and the wealth of the extractors we first evaluate these policy alternatives in a two pool theoretical model with high and low cost extractors and once tradeoffs are illuminated in a calibrated oil market model a global co2 tax is both cost effective and the best policy for regulated consumers extractors and unregulated consumers however prefer a technology only policy when the regulating coalition is subglobal support for the clean substitute is desired and often required but the preferred policy portfolio of the coalition involves a tighter cap and less technology policy than is globally optimal leaving room for bargaining over who pays for clean innovation

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

market structure and resource depletion a contribution to the theory of intertemporal monopolistic competition a the theory of resource extraction in the model we present there exists a produced substitute to the natural resource the primary question with which we are concerned is the interaction of the resource and its substitute the model we present can thus be thought as providing a link between rent and production based price theories one of the general results in the earlier literature on resource extraction is that deposits with lower extraction costs will be exploited first the analysis

limit pricing and the in effectiveness of the carbon tax we present a theory of limit pricing monopoly in non renewable resource production facing a very inelastic demand an oil monopoly seeks to induce the highest price that does not destroy its demand unlike the conventional hotellian analysis the monopoly tolerates some ordinary substitutes to its oil but deters high potential ones with limit pricing policy induced extraction changes do not obey the usual logic for example oil taxes have no effect on current oil production extraction increases when high potential substitutes are promoted but can be effectively reduced by supporting ordinary substitutes the carbon tax not only applies to oil it also penalizes its ordinary carbon substitutes whose market shares are taken over by the monopoly thus the carbon tax ambiguously affects current and long term oil production and carbon emissions

an oligopoly fringe non renewable resource game in the presence of a renewable substitute abstract in accordance with recent empirical evidence we model the oil market as an oligopoly facing a fringe as well as competition from renewable resources within this framework we fully characterize i e for all vectors of initial resource stocks the equilibrium extraction paths of the fringe and the oligopolists we show that i the sequence of extraction in equilibrium crucially depends on the oligopolists market power ii there always exists a phase of simultaneous supply of the oligopolists and the fringe iii the oligopolists pursue a limit pricing strategy near the end of the extraction horizon and iv an increase in the reserves of the fringe may lead to a decrease in their initial supply

computational economics and economic theory substitutes or complements abstract this essay examines the idea and potential of a computational approach to theory discusses methodological issues raised by such computational methods and outlines the problems associated with the dissemination of computational methods and the exposition of computational results we argue that the study of a theory need not be confined to proving theorems that current and future computer technologies create new possibilities for theoretical analysis and that by resolving these issues we will create an intellectual atmosphere in which computational methods can make substantial contributions to economic analysis

monopoly extraction of a nonrenewable resource facing capacity constrained renewable competition abstract this paper studies monopoly extraction of a nonrenewable resource with the presence of a competitively supplied capacity constrained renewable substitute the monopolist staves off the renewable supply when the latter becomes competitive and then lets the resource price jump up

income redistribution in a common labor market when households are mobile among jurisdictions income redistribution by individual jurisdictions creates fiscal externalities a model of interjurisdictional migration is used to study the nature of this redistributive externality analysis of optimal redistribution and optimal corrective subsidies from higher level governments shows that benefit levels for the recipients of income transfers and tax rates on mobile taxpayers should be equalized across jurisdictions a system of jurisdictions with a common labor market can achieve welfare improvements through coordination of domestic redistributive policy or through the intervention of a higher level government copyright 1991 by american economic association

inefficiencies from metropolitan political and fiscal decentralization failures of tiebout competition we examine the welfare effects of provision of local public goods in an empirically relevant setting using a multi community model with mobile and heterogeneous households and with flexible housing supplies we characterize the first best allocation and show efficiency can be implemented with decentralization using head taxes we calibrate the model and compare welfare in property tax equilibria both decentralized and centralized to the efficient allocation inefficiencies with decentralization and property taxation are large dissipating most if not all the potential welfare gains that efficient decentralization could achieve in property tax equilibrium centralization is frequently more efficient an externality in community choice underlies the failure to achieve efficiency with decentralization and property taxes poorer households crowd richer communities and free ride by consuming relatively little housing thereby avoiding taxes copyright oxford university press

do oil producers act as oil igopolists in this paper the author analyzes an oligopoly model of exhaustible resource extraction and develop predictions about relative extraction patterns of different producers using the open quote oil close quote igopoly model of loury one can show that producers with large stocks produce a larger amount but a smaller percentage of their stocks than producers with small stocks the authors extend loury s model to cases where extraction costs differ among producers and where costs are a function of cumulative extraction an increase in extraction costs for a producer causes it to produce less relative to its rivals when extraction costs rise with cumulative extraction producers with large reserves tend to have lower extraction costs and a smaller ratio of cumulative production to initial reserves than producers with small reserves the authors test the predictions of the model using oil industry data and find that the empirical results are consistent with the predictions of open quotes oil close quotes igopoly theory producers with larger reserves extract a smaller share of their reserves and have lower production costs than producers with smaller reserves this pattern holds for 73 countries with oil reserves during the time period 1970 1989 and for approximately 400 us oil companies in 1983 and 1984 more the observed pattern of production for both opec and non opec producers is consistent with open quote oil close quote igopoly theory opec producers do not appear to restrain production given their level of reserves relative to non opec producers thus viewing the oil market as containing one dominant firm opec with a competitive fringe may be misleading further the pattern of extraction observed in oil markets is inconsistent with the pattern predicted by competitive theory 29 refs 5 figs 6 tabs less

dynamic cournot duopoly with intertemporal capacity constraints this paper studies a dynamic cournot duopoly in which suppliers have a limited amount of products available for two consecutive periods we derive optimal sales strategies and analyze welfare effects with and without commitment under commitment strategies do not depend on the rival s realized sales in this case there is a unique nash equilibrium for any allocation of initial supplies and prices increase over time absent commitment sellers can adjust their supply decision after the first period in this case a subgame perfect nash equilibrium does not always exist and prices may decline over time a more asymmetric allocation of stocks generally leads to higher first period prices whereas the impact on second period prices is ambiguous the larger firm typically prefers not to commit whereas the smaller firm is better off under commitment commitment generates a higher total surplus and almost always a higher consumer surplus our findings thus suggest that market transparency or flexible supply contracts can adversely affect welfare in situations where production precedes sales and firms face an intertemporal capacity constraint

oligopoly equilibria in nonrenewable resource markets abstract most nash cournot oligopoly models of nonrenewable resources apply open loop equilibrium concepts and are based on physical resource depletion this paper studies feedback equilibria and economic depletion assuming affine quadratic functional forms the existence uniqueness and explicit solutions for the equilibria are derived for duopoly and n player oligopoly with multiple resource stocks for the cases of nonquadratic criteria we develop a numeric solution scheme for the nash feedback equilibrium this scheme is an application of a discrete time discrete state controlled markov chain approximation method originally developed for solving deterministic and stochastic dynamic optimization problems in our nash cournot equilibrium the degree of concentration in supply declines over time whereas the previous models with physical depletion and open loop equilibrium concepts predict that a nash cournot resource market will develop in the direction of monopoly supply

backward induction algorithm for a class of closed loop stackelberg games abstract in the paper a new deterministic continuum strategy two player discrete time dynamic stackelberg game is proposed with fixed finite time duration and closed loop information structure the considered payoff functions can be widely used in different applications mainly in conflicts of consuming a limited resource where one player called leader is a superior authority choosing strategy first and another player called follower chooses after in case of convex payoff functions and certain parameter values we give a new particular backward induction algorithm which can be easily realized to find a leader follower equilibrium of the game in a certain sequential equilibrium realization from the last step towards the first one with respect to the current strategy choices of the players considerations on uniqueness and game regulation i e setting parameters of the game to achieve a predefined equilibrium are also provided the finite version of the game with finite strategy sets is also given along with its simplification and solution method several practical examples are shown to illustrate the comprehensive application possibilities of the results

the impact of internal displacement on destination communities evidence from the colombian conflict abstract more than ten percent of the population of colombia has been forced to migrate due to civil war this study employs an enclave iv strategy which exploits social distance between origin and destination locations as well as conflict induced migration to estimate the impact that the arrival of displaced individuals has on the wages of local residents i compare the effects on four different subgroups of the population partitioned by skill low skilled versus high skilled and by gender the analysis suggests that a conflict induced increase in population leads to a short run negative impact on wages but that subsequent out migration from receiving municipalities helps to mitigate these effects though the impact tends to dissipate over time it persists for low skilled women suggesting that this group is particularly vulnerable to the arrival of forced migrants

strong time consistency in the cartel versus fringe model due to developments on the oil market in the 1970s the theory of exhaustible resources was extended with the cartel versus fringe model to characterize markets with one big coherent cartel and a large number of small suppliers called the fringe because cartel and fringe are leader and follower the von stackelberg solution concept is appropriate for the supply side of this market the solution for the cartel versus fringe model presented in the previous literature proved to be time inconsistent for a large plausible range of values for extraction costs and initial reserves this paper provides a strongly time consistent solution for the cartel versus fringe model

inequality the urban rural gap and migration using population and product consumption data from the demographic and health surveys i construct comparable measures of inequality and migration for 65 countries including some of the poorest countries in the world i find that the urban rural gap accounts for 40 of mean country inequality and much of its cross country variation one out of every four or five individuals raised in rural areas moves to urban areas as a young adult where they earn much higher incomes than nonmigrant rural permanent residents equally one out of every four or five individuals raised in urban areas moves to rural areas as a young adult where they earn much lower incomes than their nonmigrant urban cousins these flows and relative incomes are suggestive of a world where the population sorts itself geographically on the basis of its human capital and skill i show that a simple model of this sort explains the urban rural gap in living standards

natural resource economics under the rule of hotelling abstract natural resource stocks held in situ are physical assets equilibrium in the assets market requires that their rates of return be such that their owners are just willing to hold on to them rather than invest elsewhere i discuss a number of factors relating to the evolution of extraction costs to the durability of the resource to market structure and to uncertainty that are important in correctly characterizing the rate of return on holding exhaustible natural resource stocks the emphasis is put on how those factors can potentially help bridge the gap between the basic hotelling s rule of natural resource exploitation and the historical behaviour of the flow price of a number of resources i also highlight some theoretical and empirical issues that need further attention

migration congestion externalities and the evaluation of spatial investments abstract the direct benefits of infrastructure in developing countries can be large but if new infrastructure induces in migration congestion of other local publicly provided goods may offset the direct benefits using the example of rural household electrification in south africa we demonstrate the importance of accounting for migration when evaluating welfare gains of spatial programs we also provide a practical approach to computing welfare gains that does not rely on land prices we develop a location choice model that incorporates missing land markets and allows for congestion in local land using this model we construct welfare bounds as a function of the income and population effects of the new electricity infrastructure a novel prediction from the model is that migration elasticities and congestion effects are especially large when land markets are missing we empirically estimate these welfare bounds for rural electrification in south africa and show that congestion externalities from program induced migration reduced local welfare gains by about 40

exhaustible resources non convexity and competitive equilibrium theoretical underpinnings of competitive equilibrium in an exhaustible resource market with non convex u shaped costs are proposed the analysis extends to intertemporal production novshek and sonnenschein s approximation of static competitive equilibrium by limits of cournot equilibria a problem with using novshek and sonnenschein s method is that oligopolistic equilibrium even an open loop equilibrium to which limits might be applied does not exist when there is a non convex technology using epsilon equilibrium as the equilibrium concept finesses this problem there are two types of limiting competitive equilibrium a third type of competitive equilibrium that has been prominent in the literature is found to be inconsistent with limiting approximations

on price taking behavior in a nonrenewable resource cartel fringe game abstract we consider a nonrenewable resource game with one cartel and a set of fringe members we show that i the outcomes of the closed loop and the open loop nonrenewable resource game with the fringe members as price takers the cartel fringe game a la salant 1976 coincide and ii when the number of fringe firms becomes arbitrarily large the equilibrium outcome of the closed loop nash game does not coincide with the equilibrium outcome of the closed loop cartel fringe game thus the outcome of the cartel fringe open loop equilibrium can be supported as an outcome of a subgame perfect equilibrium however the interpretation of the cartel fringe model where from the outset the fringe is assumed to be price taker as a limit case of an asymmetric oligopoly with the agents playing nash cournot does not extend to the case where firms can use closed loop strategies

the economic lives of the poor in what turned out to be a rhetorical master move the 1990 world development report from the world bank defined the extremely poor people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than 1 per day per person measured at the 1985 purchasing power parity ppp exchange rate in 1993 the poverty line was updated to 1 08 per person per day at the 1993 ppp exchange rate which is the line we use in this paper poverty lines have always existed indeed 1 per day was chosen in part because of its proximity to the poverty lines used by many poor countries 1 however the 1 a day poverty line has come to dominate the conversations about poverty to a remarkable extent

testing static oligopoly models conduct and cost in the sugar industry 1890 1914 we explore the widespread methodology of using demand information to infer market conduct and unobserved cost components under the hypothesis of static oligopoly behavior direct measures of marginal cost and conduct indicating small market power serve as benchmarks the more competitive models yield better cost estimates the best cost estimates occur when conduct is estimated as a free parameter which in turn only slightly underestimates our direct measure it also tracks the decline in market power accompanying the industry s structural changes the methodology is largely validated although partial cost information can improve its predictive power conclusions are robust to demand function

spring cleaning rural water impacts valuation and property rights institutions the brief summarizes the spring cleaning rural water impacts valuation and property rights institutions the first two rounds of spring protection occurred in january april 2005 and august november 2005 the author measure health impacts of spring protection an investment that improves source water quality the author also estimate households valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights in water which limits incentives for private investment spring infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66 percent but household water quality improves less due to recontamination child diarrhea falls by one quarter travel cost based revealed preference estimates of households valuations are much smaller than both stated preference valuations and health planners valuations and are consistent with models in which the demand for health is highly income elastic the author estimate that private property norms would generate little additional investment while imposing large static costs due to above marginal cost pricing private property will function better at higher income levels or underwater scarcity and alternative institutions could yield pareto improvements

who bears the cost of a change in the exchange rate pass through accounting for the case of beer abstract nominal exchange rates are remarkably volatile they ordinarily appear disconnected from the fundamentals of the economies whose currencies they price these facts make up a classic puzzle about the international economy if prices do not respond fully to changes in the nominal exchange rate who bears the cost of such large and unpredictable changes foreign firms domestic firms or domestic consumers this study presents a new analysis of the sources of incomplete pass through and then uses this analysis to re examine its implications for social welfare i develop and estimate a structural model that analyzes the sources of local currency price stability for a particular industry the model enables counterfactual simulations that quantify the relative importance of firms local cost components and markup adjustments in the incomplete transmission of exchange rate shocks to prices and the effect of the exchange rate shock on domestic and foreign firms profits and on consumer surplus the model is applied to a panel dataset of one industry with retail and wholesale prices for upc level products i find that markup adjustments by manufacturers and the retailer explain roughly half of the incomplete transmission and local cost components account for the other half foreign manufacturers generally bear a greater cost or reap a greater benefit following an exchange rate induced marginal cost shock than do domestic consumers domestic manufacturers or the domestic retailer

ordering the extraction of polluting nonrenewable resources energy markets are often characterized by the use of multiple nonrenewable resources such as coal and natural gas with different pollution characteristics the same resource may have different qualities as when high and low sulfur coal is used to generate electricity multiple resources are used in providing transportation services such as cars running on gasoline or plug in hybrids that may be fueled by electricity produced from coal when these nonrenewable resources contribute differentially to pollution what is the opti mal sequence of extraction over time harold hotelling 1931 developed the classical theory of extraction of a nonrenewable resource orris c herfindahl 1967 extended the hotelling model by considering many resources with different unit costs of extraction and proposed the least cost first principle extraction must be ordered by cost with the cheapest resource used first others have examined whether herfindahl s model remains valid in a variety of situations in a general equilibrium setting see murray kemp and ngo v long 1980 tracy r lewis 1982 in the presence of setup costs g rard gaudet moreaux and stephen w salant 2001 under het erogeneous demands chakravorty and darrell l krulce 1994 and when the extraction rate is constrained jean pierre amigues et al 1998 stephen p holland 2003 in these studies following hotelling and herfindahl resources were differentiated by cost alone in this paper we abstract from cost considerations and focus on how the sequence of extraction may be affected when resources are differentiated only by their pollution character istics we consider two resources one more polluting than the other without loss of generality consider coal to be the dirty resource and natural gas the clean one both may be used to generate electricity environmental regulation is imposed through a cap on the stock of pollution this may be a stylized approximation of an international agreement such as the kyoto protocol which aims to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere 1 with heterogeneity in pollution the results are nonintuitive and do not depend on the emis sion rates of the resources when the economy is already at its allowable stock of pollution the clean natural gas is used first and use of the dirty coal is postponed to the future this is what one would expect armed with insights from the herfindahl model however when the economy starts from below the ceiling and accumulates pollution coal may be used first and use of the clean natural gas is postponed the optimal strategy is to benefit from natural dilution by build ing the stock of pollution as quickly as possible this is done by burning coal rather than natural

double limit pricing abstract we study oil extraction by a monopolist who faces demand from a climate aware and a climate ignorant region a renewable perfect substitute for oil is available at constant unit cost the climate aware region uses a carbon tax and a renewables subsidy as policy instruments due to heterogeneity in climate policies between regions the oil price path possibly contains two limit pricing phases we specify conditions under which a tightening of climate policies results in lower initial carbon emissions a renewables subsidy and a carbon tax effectively force the monopolist to sell more oil to the climate ignorant region during the stage when demand from the climate aware region has already vanished we calibrate the model and numerically investigate climate damage and welfare effects of the policies of the climate aware region we find that both the carbon tax and a renewables subsidy lower climate damage even though cumulative emissions are fixed

stackelberg versus cournot a differential game approach abstract we propose an infinite horizon differential oligopoly game where at each point in time m stackelberg leaders and n m stackelberg followers exploit a common pool renewable resource and sell their harvest in the marketplace at a price that depends on total harvest we derive a feedback generalized stackelberg nash cournot equilibrium a generalization of the feedback stackelberg equilibrium nesting feedback stackelberg and feedback cournot as special cases we proceed with a comparison between the feedback stackelberg and the feedback cournot equilibria and find a number of interesting results in contrast with static oligopoly theory as to the relative efficiency of the two equilibria we show that the cournot equilibrium can be more efficient than the stackelberg equilibrium this holds true in the short run at the steady state and in terms of discounted welfare

collusion discounting and dynamic games abstract this paper investigates the following claims in a dynamic game i pareto optimal outcomes are sustainable only by patient players and ii the set of equilibrium outcomes expands in the discount factor the intuition for these results although immediate for purely repeated games is shown to be incomplete for dynamic games consequently there is no direct link between patience and the sustainability of pareto optimal outcomes in fact there are dynamic games arbitrarily close to a repeated game in which such collusion is facilitated by impatience however for a class of dynamic games any equilibrium outcome that is sustainable by less patient players is also an equilibrium outcome when players are more patient journal of economic literature classification numbers c73 d90

price discrimination and bargaining empirical evidence from medical devices many important issues in business to business markets involve price discrimination and negotiated prices situations where theoretical predictions are ambiguous this paper uses new panel data on buyer supplier transfers and a structural model to empirically analyze bargaining and price discrimination in a medical device market while many phenomena that restrict price discrimination are suggested as ways to decrease hospital costs e g mergers group purchasing organizations and transparency i find that 1 non discriminatory pricing actually works against hospitals because competition is more intense under price discrimination and 2 results depend ultimately on a previously unexplored bargaining effect

monopoly unilateral climate policies and limit pricing abstract we examine the behavior of a fossil fuel monopolist who faces demand from two regions a climate club and the rest of the world row each region is able to produce a perfect substitute for fossil energy at constant marginal costs the climate club uses a carbon tax and a renewables subsidy as policy instruments the row is policy inactive we fully characterize the market equilibrium and show that due to differences in climate policies between the climate club and the row the monopolistic fossil fuel supplier may choose for two limit pricing phases to postpone entry of renewables producers first in the climate club and later in the row as soon as energy demand from the climate club shifts from fossil fuels to renewables the monopolist abruptly increases the fossil price for the row

a theory of oil igopoly cournot equilibrium in exhaustible resource markets with fixed supplies the emergence of an effective and powerful cartel in the international petroleum market has stimulated considerable effort among economists to develop models of pricing and supply behavior for this industry 2 this modeling task poses two basic difficulties first as in the standard oligopoly problem one must characterize the behavior of several sellers in a market aware of each other and of their effect on market price second there is here the added difficulty of treating the explicitly intertemporal nature of suppliers decision wherein a limited stock must be optimally allocated over time this paper studies the implications of the simplest non trivial postulates about these two aspects of the problem it is assumed that suppliers are non cooperative cournot nash players each of whom is imagined to select an optimal supply strategy taking as given the strategies of the others moreover it is hypothesized that the feasible strategies are limited to open loop paths chosen at the initial date to maximize the present value of profits in light of the paths of supply which the others have chosen 3 these basic postulates together with a few technical assumptions concerning the structure of resource demand permit one to demonstrate the existence of at least one non cooperative equilibrium concerning thisequilibrium we show that 1 the average and marginal return on resource stocks is inversely related to the size of a player s initial endowment 2 aggregate production decreases over time until all stocks are exhausted while firms with smaller stocks exhaust their supplies no later than firms with larger stocks do 3 the present value of price net of extraction cost declines over time 4 industry production maximizes a weighted average of intertemporal consumer s surplus and producers profits

optimal investment in clean production capacity for the mitigation of long term pollution threats one must consider that both the process of environmental degradation and the switchover to new and cleaner technologies are dynamic we develop a model of a uniform good that can be produced by either a polluting technology or a clean one the latter is more expensive and requires investment in capacity we derive the socially optimal pollution stock accumulation and creation of nonpolluting production capacity weighing the tradeoffs among consumption investment and djustment costs and environmental damages we consider the effects of changes in the pollution decay rate the capacity depreciation rate and the initial state of the environment on both the steady state and the transition period the optimal transition path looks quite different with a clean or dirty initial environment with the former investment is slow and the price of pollution may overshoot the long run optimum before converging with the latter capacity may overshoot

learning and price volatility in duopoly models of resource depletion the aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical model that can account for price fluctuations in depletable resource markets we do so by introducing learning into a hotelling style duopoly model of optimal resource depletion before the depletable resource becomes scarce the self confirming equilibrium of the model mirrors noncooperative rational expectations equilibrium in that supply is high and price is low although learning does induce occasional upward price spikes that are followed by a long period of falling price once the depletable resource becomes scarce the dynamics of the market change significantly with the self confirming equilibrium mirroring the cooperative rather than noncooperative rational expectations equilibrium supply is low and price is high price spikes still occur but against a background of increasing prices when scarcity is sufficient then the market is permanently in a self confirming equilibrium that is equivalent to cooperative rational expectations equilibrium

prices profits and pass through of costs along a supermarket supply chain bargaining and competition in this paper we present an empirical study of a supermarket supply chain to understand the determinants of prices and profits enjoyed by farmers processors and supermarkets we study the liquid milk market which has seen much controversy about both the distribution of rents and the mechanisms firms have used to influence the distribution we discuss insights from a series of interviews we conducted with executives and farmer representatives our interviews suggest a model in which the farmer s price is determined mainly by the sterling value of international commodity prices the retail price is determined by marginal costs and the intensity of supermarket competition and the wholesale price is determined in private bilateral negotiations between retailers and processors which are characterized by well informed agents and a high level of efficiency we present a simple theoretical model that captures these features and bring it to data on supply chain prices for the period 1994 2014 we find that over this period there has been great variation in the intensity of retail price competition and in the sterling value of international commodity markets which together result in large changes both to the overall surplus in the supply chain and to its distribution between farmers and the other firms after farmers have been paid the sterling value of international commodity prices the profit that remains to be split between processors and retailers mostly goes to supermarkets because of competition between processors

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

leviathan governments and carbon taxes costs and potential benefits abstract this paper addresses positive aspects of the global warming debate that so far has been concerned by and large with normative issues the paper considers a consumers government that appreciates tax revenues as such leviathan in addition to conventional measures of welfare i e carbon taxes serve the dual purpose of correcting for externalities here global warming or more generally a stock externality from energy use and of raising revenues this government faces either a competitive or a perfectly cartelized supply the major findings are 1 i consumers may benefit from a leviathan government that appropriates some of the monopoly rent by deterring preemption to some extent 2 ii the leviathan motive raises initial taxes and thereby lowers initial emissions but increases the long run stock externality in a play with linear strategies 3 iii there exists a continuum of equilibria in nonlinear markov strategies which are however pareto inefficient compared with the linear strategies 4 iv but in case of a binding resource constraint nonlinear strategies are the only feasible ones

would hotelling kill the electric car in this paper we show that the potential for endogenous technological change in alternative energy sources may alter the behaviour of resource owning firms when technological progress in an alternative energy source can occur through learning by doing resource owners face competing incentives to extract rents from the resource and to prevent expansion of the new technology we show that in such a context it is not necessarily the case that scarcity driven higher traditional energy prices over time will induce alternative energy supply as resources are exhausted rather we show that as we increase the learning potential in the substitute technology lower equilibrium energy prices prevail and there may be increased resource extraction and greenhouse gas emissions we show that the effectiveness and the incidence of emissions reduction policies may be altered by increased potential for technological change our results suggest that treating finite resource rents as endogenous consequences of both technological progress and policy changes will be important for the accurate assessment of climate change policy

bilateral monopolies and incentives for merger the paper presents a model of duopoly in which firms acquire inputs through bilateral monopoly relations with suppliers it combines a bargaining model with a duopoly model to examine how input pri

inefficiency of credible strategies in oligopolistic resource markets with uncertainty abstract the implications of different information patterns for firms in oligopolistic resource markets are considered the traditional open loop nash equilibrium with static information sets is one of many possible nash equilibria and is not suitable for stochastic environments when shocks to resource growth are serially uncorrelated there are no gains from conditioning the harvest on past stock levels and the feedback or credible nash equilibrium is the appropriate nash equilibrium concept this credible equilibrium assumes that firms have knowledge of current stocks of reserves which typically leads to more rapid extraction of the resource and possibly extinction since the open loop nash equilibrium is efficient when demand is iso elastic and extraction costs are zero it is clear that an increase in information can be detrimental to firms in the industry

targeted characteristics and use of socially marketed preventive health goods evidence from condoms in sub saharan africa social marketing is a popular method for allocating targeted publicly funded preventive health goods in poor countries however low demand among targeted groups may inhibit take up relative to non

the transition to nondepletable energy social planning and market models of capacity expansion as depletable energy becomes increasingly scarce and expensive energy markets will turn to a multitude of nondepletable sources of energy the rate at which this transition occurs will depend on the quantities of fuels available production costs government policies and the choices of major producers in this paper we analyze the transition to nondepletable fuels first in the context of a social planning model then using a stackelberg model to represent the dynamic game between owners of depletable and nondepletable fuels we show that the pace of capacity expansion in the nondepletable sector has a strong influence on socially optimal energy prices and production rates with the stackelberg model we characterize the strategy a market dominating producer of depletable energy will use against the nondepletable sector numerical implementations of this model allow us to compare the socially optimal and market determined outcomes our results show how a dominant depletable energy producer can manipulate the nondepletable sector by pricing at the marginal cost of backstop output during an early phase of resource depletion

opec unconventional oil and climate change on the importance of the order of extraction we show that opec s market power contributes to climate change by enabling producers of relatively expensive and dirty oil to start producing before opec reserves are depleted we examine the importance of this extraction sequence effect by calibrating and simulating a cartel fringe model of the global oil market while welfare net of climate damage under the cartel fringe equilibrium can be significantly lower than under a first best outcome almost the entire welfare loss is due to the sequence effect of opec s market power in our benchmark calibration the cost of the sequence effect amounts to 15 trillion us which corresponds to 97 percent of the welfare loss moreover we find that an increase in non opec oil reserves decreases global welfare in a counterfactual world without non opec oil global welfare would be 13 trillion us higher 10 trillion us of which is due to lower climate damages

a well based cost function and the economics of exhaustible resources the case of natural gas abstract a cost function for natural gas production is estimated using a pool of data from 29 wells statistically exact tests are performed for parameter stability across locations formations wells and producing firms costs are determined to be inversely related to remaining recoverable reserves and marginal costs of production are decreasing in all cases theoretical implications of these cost characteristics on optimal exhaustible resource extraction are analyzed although marginal cost is decreasing production effects on the resource stock imply that an interior production path may be optimal conditions under which production optimally occurs at the capacity bound are delineated and optimal interior production paths are characterized

how does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings evidence from project star in project star 11 571 students in tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade this article evaluates the long term impacts of star by linking the experimental data to administrative records we first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27 college attendance home ownership and retirement savings we then document four sets of experimental impacts first students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27 but this effect is imprecisely estimated second students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings third an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades k 3 as measured by classmates end of class test scores have higher earnings college attendance rates and other outcomes finally the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades but gains in noncognitive measures persist

the effect of power plants on local housing values and rents abstract this paper uses restricted census microdata to examine housing values and rents for neighborhoods in the united states where power plants were opened during the 1990s compared to neighborhoods with similar housing and demographic characteristics neighborhoods within 2 miles of plants experienced 3 7 decreases in housing values and rents with some evidence of larger decreases within 1 mile and for large capacity plants in addition there is evidence of taste based sorting with neighborhoods near plants associated with modest but statistically significant decreases in mean household income educational attainment and the proportion owner occupied

depreciation erodes the coase conjecture if a durable good monopolist produces at constant marginal costs and the good depreciates there exists a family of strong markov perfect equilibrium smpe one member of this family entails instantaneous production of the level of stock produced in a competitive equilibrium this is consistent with the coase conjecture other smpe in the family entail steady state production at a stock level lower than in the competitive equilibrium there may be a jump to these steady states or they may be approached asymptotically monopoly profits are positive in these equilibria and the coase conjecture fails

testing for the cartel in opec non cooperative collusion or just non cooperative this paper extends the framework of green and porter 1984 and porter 1983a to encompass the case of a cartel opec faced by a competitive fringe non opec oil producers estimation of a simultaneous equation switching regression model allows us to examine which market structure better characterizes the world oil market during the 1974 2004 period and to test whether switches between collusive and non cooperative behaviour occurred the null hypothesis that no switch occurred is rejected in favour of the alternative that both cooperative and non cooperative behaviour was observed we find that although there were periods in which oil prices were measurably higher owing to collusion among opec members overall opec has not been effective in systematically raising prices above cournot competition levels our results suggest that on average over the period of study opec s behaviour is best described as cournot competition in the face of a competitive fringe constituted by non opec producers

the effects of rural electrification on employment new evidence from south africa this paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing south africa s mass roll out of electricity to rural households using several new data sources and two different identification strategies an instrumental variables strategy and a fixed effects approach i find that electrification significantly raises female employment within five years this new infrastructure appears to increase hours of work for men and women while reducing female wages and increasing male earnings several pieces of evidence suggest that household electrification raises employment by releasing women from home production and enabling microenterprises migration behavior may also be affected jel h54 l94

substitution between biofuels and fossil fuels is there a green paradox we show that i subsidies for renewable energy policies with the intention of encouraging substitution away from fossil fuels may accentuate climate change damages by hastening fossil fuel extraction and that ii the opposite result holds under some specified conditions we focus on the case of subsidies for renewable resources produced under increasing marginal costs and assume that both the renewable resources and the fossil fuels are currently in use such subsidies have a direct effect and an indirect effect working in opposite directions the direct effect is the reduction in demand for fossil fuels at any given price the indirect effect is the reduction in the current equilibrium price for fossil fuels which tends to increase the amount of fossil fuels demanded whether the sum of the two effects will actually result in an earlier or later date of exhaustion of the stock of fossil fuels depends on the curvature of the demand curve for energy and of the supply curve for the renewable substitute

vertical relationships between manufacturers and retailers inference with limited data in this paper different models of vertical relationships between manufacturers and retailers in the supermarket industry are compared demand estimates are used to compute price cost margins for retailers and manufacturers under different supply models when wholesale prices are not observed the purpose is to identify the set of margins compatible with the margins obtained from estimates of cost and to select the model most consistent with the data among non nested competing models the models considered are 1 a simple linear pricing model 2 a vertically integrated model and 3 a variety of alternative strategic supply scenarios that allow for collusion non linear pricing and strategic behaviour with respect to private label products using data on yogurt sold in several stores in a large urban area of the u s the results imply that wholesale prices are close to marginal cost and that retailers have pricing power in the vertical chain this is consistent with non linear pricing by the manufacturers or high bargaining power of the retailers

capacity investment preemption and commitment in an infinite horizon model the commitment value of capacity is analyzed in an infinite horizon duopoly model the paper focuses on the role of alternative behavioral assumptions about the ability of firms to commit to investment paths each firm s investment strategy in a feedback nash equilibrium is shown to be a decreasing function of its rival s current capacity this creates an incentive for a firm to expand its capacity to preempt subsequent rival investment in a precommitment equilibrium there are no incentives to invest preemptively as a consequence steady state capacity levels are greater in a feedback nash equilibrium than in a precommitment equilibrium copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

assessing the incidence and efficiency of a prominent place based policy abstract this paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of round i of the federal urban empowerment zone ez program using confidential microdata from the decennial census and the longitudinal business database using rejected and future applicants to the ez program as controls we find that ez designation substantially increased employment in zone neighborhoods and generated wage increases for local workers without corresponding increases in population or the local cost of living the results suggest the efficiency costs of first round ezs were relatively modest jel h26 h77 j31 r23 r58

consumer surplus enhancing cooperation in a natural resource oligopoly abstract in this study we use a differential game to illustrate that cooperation among oligopolists selling a common pool renewable resource may lead not only to higher industrial output consumer surplus and resource stock in the stationary equilibrium but also a greater discounted sum of consumer surplus a priori this finding is not straightforward an increase in the coefficient of cooperation causes industry output to first decrease and then increase over time thus making consumers worse off in the short run and better off in the long run this study establishes the conditions under which the long run effects outweigh the short run effects of cooperation leading to an increase in the discounted sum of consumer surplus our analysis suggests that in some cases conservation cartels should be promoted on the basis of not only resource conservation but also efficiency

accounting for incomplete pass through recent theoretical work has suggested a number of potentially important factors in causing incomplete pass through of exchange rates to prices including markup adjustment local costs and barriers to price adjustment we empirically analyze the determinants of incomplete passthrough in the coee industry the observed pass through in this industry replicates key features of pass through documented in aggregate data prices respond sluggishly and incompletely to changes in costs we use microdata on sales and prices to uncover the role of markup adjustment local costs and barriers to price adjustment in determining incomplete pass through using a structural oligopoly model that nests all three potential factors the implied pricing model explains the main dynamic features of short and long run pass through local costs reduce long run pass through by a factor of 59 relative to a ces benchmark markup adjustment reduces pass through by an additional factor of 33 where the extent of markup adjustment depends on the estimated super elasticity of demand the estimated menu costs are small 0 23 of revenue and have a negligible eect on long run pass through but are quantitatively successful in explaining the delayed response of prices to costs we nd that delayed passthrough in the coee industry occurs almost entirely at the wholesale rather than the retail level

when additional resource stocks reduce welfare in the dominant firm model we show that an increase of the fringe s reserves of a nonrenewable resource may lead to a decrease in aggregate discounted social welfare this happens when the difference between the fringe s extraction cost and the dominant firm s is positive and large enough we also show that welfare might decrease if the fringe s marginal extraction cost decreases

analysis of nash equilibria in a class of capital accumulation games in a simple capital accumulation game we study existence and dynamic properties of the cooperative solution two kinds of markov perfect equilibria mpe and a trigger strategy equilibrium in the cooperative solution the stock always converges towards a steady state this property is shared by our first mpe whereas the second type of mpe may result in complicated dynamics a pareto comparison of both mpe depends on the parameter specifications but can turn out either way finally we show how the players can achieve the efficient payoffs of the cooperative solution as an equilibrium outcome by using trigger strategies

dynamic oligopoly with capacity adjustment costs abstract the literature on strategic investment emphasized the case of completely irreversible investment this paper considers an oligopoly model in which investment is reversible and capacity is subject to adjustment costs an n player linear quadratic differential game is analyzed existence and characterization results for perfect equilibrium feedback strategies are provided feedback strategies provide incentives for each player to invest strategically so as to preempt subsequent expansion by rivals a larger set of perfect equilibria is constructed by using memory dependent trigger strategies equilibria of this type are shown to support joint value maximization for some initial states and asymmetric steady states

exhaustible resources and alternative equilibrium concepts we compare the open loop and feedback nash equilibria that obtain in oligopolistic resource markets when the resource is exhaustible and privately owned when the resource is common property the two equilibrium concepts are known to yield significantly different results under the regime of private property the choice of equilibrium concept does not appear to be as important restricting our attention to the cases of iso elastic demand and zero extraction costs and linear demand and quadratic extraction costs we identify instances where the open loop and feedback nash equilibria coincide and demonstrate that in other cases the two equilibria do not differ significantly

private storage of common property abstract many resources extracted under the rule of capture are not utilized immediately but are stored instead for later use oil is stockpiled fish are frozen groundwater is bottled rivers are dammed land deforested as the way to establish title remains uncultivated we examine the positive and normative effects of such storage privatization of common property through storage may eliminate inefficiencies altogether but the accelerated extraction it induces may also exacerbate them even if rapid extraction does not reduce ultimate recovery once storage commences extraction accelerates until the open access reserves are drained in limiting cases these speculative acquisitions are instantaneous the naturally occurring analogue of policy induced speculative attacks studied in the international finance literature when some reserves are privately owned while others are open access the order of extraction no longer follows the progression from lowest to highest per unit cost first noted by o c herfindahl in extractive resources and taxation m gaffney ed univ of wisconsin press madism 1997 instead the common property may be extracted in its entirety before any private reserves are extracted even if it has the higher per unit extraction cost

trade with polluting nonrenewable resources abstract the paper considers nonrenewable resource extraction in a situation where the resource buyers have formed a government which applies emission taxation for slowing pollution accumulation and the sellers are competitive or a resource cartel the noncompetitive situation is studied as a stackelberg differential game which the cartel leads it is first assumed that extraction costs do not depend on the resource stock level and that the pollution stock does not decay in the time consistent and markov perfect equilibrium the sellers monopoly power vanishes asymptotically the sellers market power reduces the buyers emission tax at each point in time in the stackelberg equilibrium the emission tax is below the marginal present value of pollution damage if pollution decays and extraction costs depend on the resource stock level buyers have monopsony power and the ability of sellers to receive emission tax revenues is weakened when the rate of pollution decay is high the producer price falls below the pareto optimal level

on nonrenewable resource oligopolies the asymmetric case we give a full characterization of the open loop nash equilibrium of a nonrenewable resource game between two types of firms differing in extraction costs we show that i there almost always exists a phase where both types of firms supply simultaneously ii when the high cost mines are exploited by a number of firms that goes to infinity the equilibrium approaches the cartel versus fringe equilibrium with the fringe firms acting as price takers and iii the cheaper resource may not be exhausted first a violation of the herfindahl rule that may be detrimental to social welfare

cyclical and noncyclical redistributive taxation consider the optimal time path of a tax on capital income the proceeds of which are transferred to labor in a lump sum it is known from earlier open loop formulations that if the optimal rate of tax converges to a point it converges to zero implying that in the long run a tax on capital income can do nothing for social welfare it is now shown that the optimal rate of tax need not converge to zero and in the case of feedback formulations that it may converge to a positive or negative number or to a limit cycle copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

oligopoly extraction of a common property natural resource the importance of the period of commitment in dynamic games the theory of noncooperative dynamic games has provided an extremely powerful framework for studying many of the classic questions in industrial organization for example questions about resource extraction advertising research and development investment in new capacity and barriers to entry where interactions over time among few firms are involved however an important methodological issue arises when economic competition over time is modeled as a dynamic game the issue is the appropriate formulation of the players strategy spaces

aggressive oil extraction and precautionary saving coping with volatility the effects of stochastic oil demand on optimal oil extraction paths and tax spending and government debt policies are analyzed when the oil demand schedule is linear and preferences quadratic without prudence optimal oil extraction is governed by the hotelling rule and optimal budgetary policies by the tax and consumption smoothing principle volatile oil demand brings forward oil extraction and induces a bigger government surplus with prudence the government depletes oil reserves even more aggressively and engages in additional precautionary saving financed by postponing spending and bringing taxes forward especially if it has substantial monopoly power on the oil market gives high priority to the public spending target is very prudent and future oil demand has high variance uncertain economic prospects induce even higher precautionary saving and if non oil revenue shocks and oil revenue shocks are positively correlated even more aggressive oil extraction in contrast prudent governments deliberately underestimate oil reserves which induce less aggressive oil depletion and less government saving but less so if uncertainty about reserves and oil demand are positively correlated

evaluating the effects of optimally distributed public programs child health and family planning interventions this paper develops and tests an optimizing model determining the distribution of family planning and health subsidies across heterogeneous households and assesses the biases in cross area estimates of the health effects of such subsidies due to public resource optimization the model incorporates both health externalities and the endogenous response of the size of the recipient population to program subsidies longitudinal data describing child health and publicly provided family planning and health programs in 20 barrios in laguna province in the philippines are used to estimate the effects of such programs on child health and the relationships between the distribution of the programs and preprogram health levels the impact of a program on a particular childs health status is viewed as dependent upon the childs length of exposure to the program a basic feature of the model is the presence of health externalities which is shown to be sufficient along with plausible features of household behavior to make selective subsidization of fertility control either alone or in combination with health investment subsidies pareto efficient the model suggests that subsidization of fertility control is likely to be pareto efficient in the presence of health or human capital externalities when human capital and family size are gross substitutes and or when any per child human capital subsidies may substitute for direct subsidies to health investment and an equalizing distribution of the subsidies the highest family planning subsidies to the lowest health recipient households is efficient when both health and family planning subsidies are used fertility control subsidies minimize the subsidy burden for donors and are highest when total subsidy expenditures per child are greatest