partisan bias in economic news evidence on the agenda setting behavior of u s newspapers abstract we study the agenda setting political behavior of a large sample of u s newspapers during the 1996 2005 period our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president focusing on unemployment inflation the federal budget and the trade deficit we investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers and the differential coverage of bad good economic news as a function of the president s political affiliation we find evidence that newspapers with pro democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a republican than when the president is democratic compared to newspapers with pro republican endorsement pattern this result is robust to controlling for the partisanship of readers we find similar but less robust results for the trade deficit we also find some evidence that newspapers cater to the partisan tastes of readers in the coverage of the budget deficit we find no evidence of a partisan bias or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement or reader partisanship for stories on inflation

natural resources curse or blessing are natural resources a curse or a blessing the empirical evidence suggests that either outcome is possible this paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources these include that a resource bonanza induces appreciation of the real exchange rate deindustrialization and bad growth prospects and that these adverse effects are more severe in volatile countries with bad institutions and lack of rule of law corruption presidential democracies and underdeveloped financial systems another hypothesis is that a resource boom reinforces rent grabbing and civil conflict especially if institutions are bad induces corruption especially in nondemocratic countries and keeps in place bad policies finally resource rich developing economies seem unable to successfully convert their depleting exhaustible resources into other productive assets the survey also offers some welfare based fiscal rules for harnessing resource windfalls in developed and developing economies

frontiers and sustainable economic development exploiting new resource frontiers such as agricultural land and mineral reserves is a fundamental feature of economic development in poor economies yet frontier based development is symptomatic of a pattern of economy wide resource exploitation in developing economies that a generates little additional economic rents and b what rents are generated are not being reinvested in other sectors such development is inherently unsustainable the following paper explains this phenomenon and provides evidence that long run expansion of agricultural land and oil and natural gas proved reserves across poor economies is associated with lower levels of real income per capita the paper proposes a frontier expansion hypothesis to explain why the structural economic dependence of these economies on frontier land expansion and resource exploitation is not conducive to sustained long run growth the key to sustainable economic development in poor economies will be improving the economic integration between frontier and other sectors of the economy targeting policies to improved resource management in frontier areas and overcoming problems of corruption and rent seeking in resource sectors

the long term consequences of resource based specialisation using geological variation in oil abundance in the southern us i examine the long term effects of resource based specialisation through economic channels in 1890 oil abundant counties were similar to other nearby counties but after oil was discovered they began to specialise in its production from 1940 90 oil abundance increased local employment per square kilometre especially in mining but also in manufacturing oil abundant counties had higher population growth higher per capita income and better infrastructure 2010 the author s the economic journal 2010 royal economic society

a review of o rourke and williamson s globalization and history the evolution of a nineteenth century atlantic economy much of the comparative economic history of the nineteenth century focuses on the spread of the industrial revolution from britain incomes converged in this view as the transfer of superior technology raised incomes in the periphery in globalization and history kevin o rourke and jeffrey williamson challenge this technological approach arguing that neoclassical effects of trade and factor supply changes provide more insight increased trade stimulated by falling transportation costs and factor movements caused prices of locally scarce factors to fall and promoted factor price convergence

the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

media competition and electoral politics we build a framework linking competition in the media market to political participation media outlets report on the ability of candidates running for office and compete for audience through their choice of slant citizens consume news only if the expected utility of being informed about candidates ability is sufficiently large for their group collectively our results can reconcile seemingly contradictory empirical evidence showing that entry in the media market can either increase or decrease turnout while information pushes up independent turnout partisans adjust their turnout to the ability of their preferred candidate and on average they vote less when informed

towards a more historical approach to technological change an economic historian does not get far in trying to interpret the comparative performance of national economies without confronting issues surrounding the conceptualisation and measurement of technology thus i have found myself in recent years wrestling with the historical phenomenon known as american technological leadership and this research experience has generated some views on more general matters vernon ruttan s assessment of the current state of the field is relatively unfavourable in his view promising theoretical beginnings such as induced innovation and path dependence have not been successfully integrated with each other nor with a programme of empirical research approaches to endogenous growth have not yet confronted the research and development process in all its richness and micro level detail this critique has much validity with respect to the more abstract literature cited but i would point in contrast to a number of promising recent efforts to transmute theoretical concepts into operational research agendas and empirical projects as laid out most clearly by arrow i 962 investment in research for the purpose of generating new technology differs in two fundamental ways from conventional investment appropriability and uncertainty broadly speaking those economic sectors that exhibit high rates of technological progress over extended periods are those that have solved these two problems in one way or another in the united states just five industries have accounted for more than 7500 of all industrial r d spending in the postwar period aircraft electrical machinery non electrical machinery chemicals and allied products and motor vehicles rosenberg i992 pp 66 9 but the specific institutional structures that have mitigated problems of appropriability and risk have varied widely private market power government procurement programmes legal protection for intellectual property cooperative and non profit research arrangements and diversified risk portfolios have all been important in one or another instance but one would not expect to find many stable empirical regularities with respect to any subset of these variables one of the implications of this perspective is that it is difficult both in practice and in principle to maintain a clear distinction between innovations in pure technology on the one hand and adoptions or diffusion of alreadyexisting technologies on the other romer i996 argues that the most basic distinction among productive inputs is between ideas and things the first being non rival though sometimes imperfectly excludable in use the latter

voracious transformation of a common natural resource into productive capital i analyze a power struggle where competing factions have private financial assets and deplete a common stock of natural resources with no private property rights i obtain a feedback nash equilibrium to the dynamic common pool problem and obtain political variants of the hotelling depletion rule and the hartwick saving rule resource prices and depletion occur too fast so substitution away from resources to capital occurs too fast and the saving rate is too high the power struggle boosts output but depresses sustainable consumption genuine saving is nevertheless zero in a fractionalized society world bank estimates may be too optimistic

mental accounting and changes in price the frame dependence of reference dependence mental accounting principles for multiple events were replicated and then extended to pricing situations that were designed to moderate these principles if reference dependence is proportional i e if consumers evaluate events in terms of proportional deviations from reference states rather than raw deviations prices were stated with or without popular percentage based pricing frames such as 33 off mental accounting principles generally prevailed in the absence of percentage based frames however percentage based frames altered two principles and increased tendencies toward the others the findings demonstrate that mental accounting principles price perception and reference dependence are sensitive to the ways in which deviations from reference states are framed

price premium variations as a consequence of buyers lack of information it appears that buyers sometimes knowingly pay a price that is higher than that justified by the relative quality of the product such a price premium is argued to be an economically rational attempt by quality conscious buyers to ensure that the seller does not provide a lower than promised level of quality for experience products conversely for search products price premiums are argued to be the consequence of lack of search by buyers who are less quality conscious results from a survey conducted in an organizational buying setting indicate that buyers tendency to pay a price premium for experience products increases with an increase in their quality consciousness while for search products this tendency decreases with an increase in their quality consciousness the implications of this finding are discussed further analysis leads to additional speculation regarding some other mechanisms that buyers may use to assure product quality

natural resources and economic development new panel evidence the question as to whether natural resources are a curse on economic growth and development is subject to considerable debates and remains controversial using heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques this paper provides a fresh re examination of the resource curse while allowing for cross section heterogeneity and commonalities in the nexus between natural resource abundance and economic development it finds in a sample of developing countries that economies endowed with abundant natural resources tend to develop more slowly than countries with scarce resources natural resources are on average a curse however there is considerable heterogeneity in the effects of resource abundance on economic development across countries perhaps because of differences in the extent of government intervention access to sound money legal structures and the security of property rights the degree of globalization and or corruption

competitive price and quality under asymmetric information we present an analysis of equilibrium in markets with asymmetrically informed consumers some consumers know both price and quality of all sellers whereas others know neither but may search among sellers the equilibrium correlation between price and quality generally increases with the level of information in the market and can be negative when this level is sufficiently small a meta analysis of the available empirical studies strongly supports the model s predictions

high and declining prices signal product quality high and declining prices signal a high quality product high prices are the efficient means of signaling because the consequent loss of sales volume is most damaging for lower cost lower quality products as time passes and the number of informed consumers increases the signaling distortion lessens resulting in a declining price profile the prediction of high and declining prices is robust across a variety of dynamic models and is consistent with recent empirical findings copyright 1991 by american economic association

convergence in the pre 1914 atlantic economy what really happened to wages in ireland between 1881 and 1911 after the famine irish wages caught up to those of great britain catch up is ascribed to globalised labour markets and the effects of emigration however current estimates of the level of irish wages and their rate of growth are based on a small sample of the male workforce this article presents estimates of the average wage for all wage earners and the irish wage bill this enables an estimate of an implied british average wage and wage bill the new estimates show that although there was significant wage catch up in a few occupations in general catch up was less rapid than recent studies have suggested the origins of this catch up are also examined consistent with earlier studies which emphasise modernisation of the post famine economy the evidence of this article is consistent with the effects of traditional convergence forces such as tfp growth capital accumulation and structural change operating alongside the effects of emigration

opportunities incentives and the collective patterns of technological change in a few pages in the introductory article for this debate vernon ruttan succeeds in the unlikely task of flagging many issues at the core of the economic interpretation of technological change and by doing so he implicitly addresses also a few sensitive spots for the economic discipline at large here i will not attempt to provide any thorough view of what i consider the achievements and limitations of the current state of the art see however freeman i 994 for a critical survey which i largely share rather i shall put forward a series of remarks which hopefully could be seen as part of a much wider and still largely unexplored research programme as a premise just note that some form of attention to technology related phenomena has spread over the last 20 30 years from small enclaves of heterodox economists and economic historians to become an important concern even for quite mainstream theories of e g the firm industrial organisation macroeconomics trade growth etc from patent races all the way to new trade and new growth theories and even real business cycle macro models technical change has drawn a consideration which is less by default than it was say in robert solow s original growth models orjoe bain s barriers to entry views on industrial structures and in parallel empirical studies at the levels of specific technologies firms sectors and countries have boomed for overviews cf dosi i988 nelson i993 freeman i982 i 994 cohen i 995 and granstrand i 994 among others so at least in this sense those decreasing returns to the economics of technical change suggested by ruttan do not seem to have set in however ruttan s paper raises also substantive questions about the relative success of three interpretative perspectives which he calls induced evolutionary and path dependent in the following i shall argue that an evolutionary perspective broadly defined can easily accommodate both inducement effects and path dependent patterns of technical change let me start from what i consider the major building blocks of an

why do some resource abundant countries succeed while others do not on average resource abundant countries have experienced lower growth over the last four decades than their resource poor counterparts but the most interesting aspect of the paradox of plenty is not the average effect of natural resources but its variation for every nigeria or venezuela there is a norway or a botswana why do natural resources induce prosperity in some countries but stagnation in others this paper gives an overview of the dimensions along which resource abundant winners and losers differ in light of this it then discusses different theory models of the resource curse with a particular emphasis on recent developments

causes and consequences of price premiums existing literature that argues for the prevalence of price premiums is examined an evaluation of an extant model identifies several possible boundary conditions that limit the applicability of the model a set of propositions is developed based on these boundary conditions linking buyer seller and market factors to the magnitude of price premiums that should be available alternative means for empirical testing of the propositions are offered and some implications and applications of this line of thinking for pricing and brand management are described copyright 1996 by university of chicago press

bias in economic news the reporting of nominal exchange rate behavior in colombia proquest denotes formulae omitted the behavior of the nominal exchange rate ner is regularly reported and commented on in colombian newspapers editorials and op eds however the number and flavor of the news and commentary seem to increase disproportionately during revaluation in contrast to periods of devaluation 1 during the course of a revaluation it is common to read claims not facts in the press of firms and entire industries in distress owing to revaluation and arguments about the benefits of outdated policies such as fixed and multiple exchange rates implemented after 1967 with the enactment of law 444 congreso de colombia 1967 if not a dollarization of the economy 2on one hand many news articles and op ed pieces often maintain that revaluation is devastating for the macroeconomic performance of the country owing to the reduced income for exporters and holders of foreign debt and the subsequent effects on the employment and wages of workers in related industries on the other hand when devaluation occurs little attention is paid in news editorials or op eds there are no complaints addressing the plausible effects of a devaluation such as inflation from higher prices of foreign capital machinery and equipment or imported raw materials this asymmetry in media reporting is hard to understand why would revaluation be more important to report and discuss than devaluation why are there claims of the benefits of a fixed exchange rate when the country has already gone through the crippling effects of an exchange rate black market premium easterly 2002 p 222 describes a high black market premium as a punitive tax on exporters not a good incentive for growth finally why after almost twenty years of experience with a market determined nominal exchange rate is revaluation still reported as harmful for the economy even though there have been more devaluation episodes than revaluation ones 3 one answer to these questions lies in media bias in reporting the behavior of the ner the existence of an interest group supplying media outlets with news to increase the awareness of readers and government officials of the catastrophic consequences of revaluation is considered when this is the case the media benefit from a larger audience and subsequent higher income from advertising revenues the interest group s goal is further satisfied when the fiscal authority offers subsidies or the monetary authority intervenes in the exchange rate market when a government related institution steps in to tame the expressions of discomfort it fulfills the goal of increasing political affection and public acceptance there is a growing literature on the economics of media bias and media slant gentzkow and shapiro 2008 and larcinese puglisi and snyder 2011 offer a review of the theoretical and empirical approaches to this topic the literature describes both supply and demand side models on the supply side the distortions of the news its relationship with the private sector and the government capture of media are the core subjects on the demand side the distortion comes from the public and its preference for news with a certain bias or slant and the media competition for their attention the empirical evidence of media bias shown in this paper fits into the supply side models and the idea of media capture not by the government but by an interest group specifically the work of corneo 2006 is an appropriate analytic framework for the alleged sources of media bias and slant in this paper corneo 2006 builds a voting model of media capture at the hands of special interests to begin with the interest group looking for a policy that will favor its current status seeks to form a coalition with the media the media can accept or refuse the formation of a coalition when they do refuse media demonstrate their independence and commitment to honest reporting

natural resource abundance and human capital accumulation summary this paper studies the link between resource abundance and human capital accumulation it reviews the commonly used indicators of resource abundance and human capital accumulation the case for a form of resource curse in human capital accumulation is not robust to reasonable changes in these indicators in fact subsoil wealth and resource rents per capita are shown to be significantly correlated with improved indicators of human capital accumulation if mineral wealth is what authors have in mind when they refer to natural resource abundance then they should choose indicators that measure this concept as accurately as possible

media markets special interests and voters abstract this paper examines the role of mass media in countering special interest group influence i use the concentration of campaign contributions from political action committees to proxy for special interests capture of us senate candidates from 1980 to 2002 and compare the reaction of voters to increases in concentration in two different types of media markets in state media markets and out of state media markets unlike in state media markets out of state markets focus on neighboring states politics and elections thus if citizens punish political capture increases in concentration of special interest contributions to a particular candidate should reduce his vote share in in state counties relative to the out of state counties where the candidate receives less coverage i find that a one standard deviation increase in concentration of special interest contributions to incumbents reduces their vote share by about 0 5 to 1 5 percentage points in in state counties relative to the out of state counties robustness checks suggest that these results are not driven by omitted senator characteristics or by differences between in state and out of state counties along dimensions other than the media environment

optimal top marginal tax rates under income splitting for couples abstract this paper provides formulas for optimal top marginal tax rates when couples are taxed according to income splitting between spouses consumption is taxed and the skill distribution is unbounded optimal top marginal income tax rates are computed for germany using a dataset that includes the tax returns of all german top taxpayers we find that the optimal top marginal tax rate converges to about 2 3 and convergence obtains at income levels that are substantially higher than those currently subject to the actual top tax rate

do natural resources fuel authoritarianism a reappraisal of the resource curse a large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy extant cross country regressions however assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships numerous sources of bias may be driving the results the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country specific and time invariant heterogeneity to address these problems we develop unique historical datasets employ time series centric techniques and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals we test to see if there is a long run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time both on a country by country basis and across several different panels we find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism in fact in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing

growth theory and industrial revolutions in britain and america abstract long run economic growth has again become a major focus of economic theory a perception of technological change as an economic process with externalities has motivated the development of aggregate models that generate different steady state growth paths economic history has also long been interested in long run economic growth here a dialogue is presented between growth theory and the historical literature on the industrial revolution in britain and america s surge to international economic leadership in the late nineteenth century in conclusion economists recent thinking about the microeconomics of technological change has provided fruitful material for the economic historian of growth unfortunately the models of endogenous growth on the other hand present too aggregated a view of the economy to prove helpful when confronted with the details of economic history jel classification n0 n1 1 theorie de la croissance et revolutions industrielles en grande bretagne et en amerique la croissance economique a long terme est redevenue un point d interet majeur pour la theorie economique une perception du changement technologique comme processus economique porteur d externalites a engendre le developpement de modeles agreges qui generent differents sentiers de croissance en regime permanent l histoire economique s interesse depuis longtemps a la croissance economique a long terme ce texte engage le dialogue entre la theorie de la croissance et la litterature historique a propos de la revolution industrielle en grande bretagne et de l emergence de l amerique au statut de leader international a la fin du dix neuvieme siecle on en arrive a la conclusion que les recents developpements dans la pensee economique a propos de la micro economie du changement technologique ont produit des resultats utiles pour l histoire economique de la croissance malheureusement d autre part les modeles de croissance endogene presente une vue trop agregee de l economie pour s averer utile dans l examen des details de l histoire economique

buyer exuberance and price premium it has been demonstrated that the real estate market disciplines irrational price premiums however the persistence of price premiums begs the question of what causes price premiums in the first place this paper seeks to examine two explanations for price premiums the conventional information asymmetry explanation and the buyer exuberance explanation as motivated by behavioural studies the results show that information asymmetry explains price premiums and this finding is robust across two sub hypotheses tested namely information differences arising from market familiarity and product characteristics in addition we find that price premiums are also caused by buyer exuberance specifically exuberance arising from representativeness purchasing power and anchoring effects

the price of launching a new product empirical evidence on factors affecting the relative magnitude of slotting allowances slotting allowances are a relatively recent trend particular to the retail food industry these allowances are lump sum up front transfer payments from manufacturer to retailer when the manufacturer launches a new product the practice has attracted some scrutiny because of uncertainty about its purposes and consequences we draw from the extant literature to identify factors that potentially influence the relative magnitude of slotting allowances based on analysis of primary survey data from retailers and manufacturers we observe that charging and paying of slotting allowances are affected by the relative strength of the players among retailers the relative magnitude of slotting fees increases with retailers informational advantage over the manufacturer about the likely success of the new product even when retailers recognize that the product is likely to be successful additionally and consistent with the first finding retailers with lower costs i e potentially more efficient and powerful retailers received higher slotting allowances furthermore retailers charge higher slotting fees even when concerns about manufacturers fulfilling postlaunch advertising commitments are minimal implying that relatively powerless manufacturers are asked to provide credible commitments regarding postlaunch activitiesand are asked to pay relatively high slotting fees among manufacturers the relative magnitude of slotting fees paid is lower for those who have a strong market share position we discuss the theoretical managerial and public policy implications of our findings

exploration and development of u s oil and gas fields 1955 2002 we study the exploration and development of oil and gas fields in the u s over the period 1955 2002 we make four contributions to explain the economic evolution of the oil and gas industry during this period first we derive a testable model of the dynamics of competitive oil and gas field exploration and development second we show how to empirically distinguish hotelling scarcity effects from effects due to technological change third we test these hypotheses using statewide panel data of exploration and development drilling we find that the time paths of exploration development and total wells drilled are dominated by hotelling scarcity effects finally we offer an explanation for why fixed costs from exploration can make the contracting equilibrium in the mineral rights market efficient

alfred chandler and knowledge management within the firm this essay examines the role of knowledge management defined as the management of processes affecting the creation communication distribution and exploitation of knowledge concerning corporate strategy markets product and process technologies and management practices within the corporation in alfred d chandler s work on the modern corporation along with efforts to avoid transaction cost problems the management of firm specific information and knowledge was central to the 19th century transformation of us corporate structure that chandler examined in the visible hand knowledge management also played a key role in the creation of intrafirm organizations for managing the creation of knowledge management of innovation and acquisition of technologies from external sources industrial r d and the product diversification that emerged from the in house r d facilities of many of these firms contributed to the development of the so called m form corporation examined by chandler in strategy and structure in which corporate management and strategy formulation were organizationally differentiated and separated from functional management finally chandler s last work on the success and failure of united states japanese and western european firms in the modern electronics pharmaceuticals and chemicals industries emphasized the role of the integrated learning base within these firms and the varying degrees of success with which established firms were able to sustain these learning bases and or apply them to new markets and technologies copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

beyond the algebra of explanation hov for the technology age it is hard to believe that factor endowments theory could offer an adequate explanation of international trade patterns while the theory adequately predicts saudi arabian oil exports it hardly seems appropriate for explaining the revolutionary impact of new technologies on world trade yet to take this position is to misunderstand the thrust of recent empirical research in international trade research that is giving shape to a new generation of heckscher ohlin vanek hov thinking the core of this new thinking is a class of hov predictions that allow for international differences in technology and choice of techniques the literature is in the process of rapid evolution as a result the key questions tend to get lost there have been three of them first what empirical regularities account for the poor performance of the hov model second are there alternative assumptions about technology that lead to better test results for the model both of these are interesting questions but they hardly constitute an end point for understanding the impacts of international trade as edward e leamer 1993 p 439 pointed out e conomists ought to abandon the idea that models are either true or false in favor of the notion that models are sometimes useful and sometimes misleading the third and most important question is whether the hov model provides a useful framework for thinking about international technology differences in spite of the defects of the model the answer is a definite yes 9

the shifting natural wealth of nations the role of market orientation this paper explores the effect of market orientation on known natural resource wealth using a novel dataset of world wide major hydrocarbon and mineral discoveries consistent with the predictions of a two region model the empirical estimates based on a large panel of countries show that increased market orientation causes a significant increase in discoveries of natural resources in a thought experiment whereby economies in latin america and sub saharan africa remained closed they would have only achieved one quarter of the actual increase in discoveries they have experienced since the early 1990s the results call into question the commonly held view that natural resource endowments are exogenous

corruption via media capture the effect of competition in this article we compare a government s optimal choice of whether to engage in corruption by capturing the media outlets through bribery in two alternative media market structures monopoly versus duopoly while there is an extra bribe claimant in a media duopoly relative to monopoly it may also be harder for each firm to individually expose corruption when the rival co opts with the government we find that when the latter effect is stronger than the former media is captured at lower bribes under duopoly relative to monopoly and in such instances media competition facilitates rather than hindering corruption

the economics of organization the transaction cost approach the transaction cost approach to the study of economic organization regards the transaction as the basic unit of analysis and holds that an understanding of transaction cost economizing is central to the study of organizations applications of this approach require that transactions be dimensionalized and that alternative governance structures be described economizing is accomplished by assigning transactions to governance structures in a discriminating way the approach applies both to the determination of efficient boundaries as between firms and markets and to the organization of internal transactions including the design of employment relations the approach is compared and contrasted with selected parts of the organization theory literature

institutions and the resource curse countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners we claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down when institutions are grabber friendly while more resources raise income when institutions are producer friendly we test this theory building on sachs and warner s influential works on the resource curse our main hypothesis that institutions are decisive for the resource curse is confirmed our results contrast the claims of sachs and warner that institutions do not play a role

increasing returns and the genesis of american resource abundance the usa became the world s leading mineral producing nation between 1870 and 1910 a development paralleled by the rising resource intensity of american manufacturing this paper challenges the premise that resource abundance simply reflected the country s geological endowment of mineral deposits instead in the century following 1850 the usa exploited its natural resource potentials to a far greater extent than other countries and did so across virtually the entire range of industrial minerals the paper argues that natural resource abundance was an endogenous socially constructed condition that was not geologically preordained it examines the complex legal institutional technological and organizational adaptations that shaped the us supply responses to the expanding domestic and international industrial demands for minerals and mineral products it suggests that strong positive feedbacks even in the exploitation of depletable resources were responsible for the explosive growth of the american minerals economy

the salesperson as outside agent or employee a transaction cost analysis this descriptive study explores the reasons for integration of the personal selling function i e the use of employee direct salespeople rather than manufacturers representatives reps a hypothesized model is developed based on both transaction cost analysis and the sales force management literature data from 13 electronic component manufacturers covering 159 u s sales districts are used to estimate a logistic model of the probability of going direct in a given district results are shown to be stable across specification and estimation methods and to fit the data well the transaction cost model is generally supported the principal finding is that the greater the difficulty of evaluating a salesperson s performance the more likely the firm to substitute surveillance for commission as a control mechanism i e to use a direct sales force among other findings direct sales forces are also associated with complex hard to learn product lines and with districts that demand considerable nonselling activities several factors prove unrelated including company size the amount of travel a district requires and the importance of key accounts this article was originally published in marketing science volume 4 issue 3 pages 234 254 in 1985

resource abundance and economic growth in the united states abstract it is a common assumption that regions within the same country converge to approximately the same steady state income levels the so called absolute convergence hypothesis focuses on initial income levels to account for the variability in income growth among regions empirical data seem to support the absolute convergence hypothesis for us states but the data also show that natural resource abundance is a significant negative determinant of growth we find that natural resource abundance decreases investment schooling openness and r d expenditure and increases corruption and we show that these effects can fully explain the negative effect of natural resource abundance on growth

the dynamics of innovative activity and competitive advantage the case of australian retail banking 1981 to 1995 this study examines the adoption of new products and processes in the australian retail banking industry over the 1981 to 1995 period our analysis demonstrates that the vast majority of observed innovative activity was based on ideas sourced from outside the focal firm and that innovations diffused very quickly across competing banks as such there were no periods during which any bank had proprietary possession of a major product or process innovation we therefore ask how the banks innovative activity could affect their relative financial performance positions we answer this question by developing a set of hypotheses that relate specific features of their histories of innovative activity to their current financial performance these hypotheses are tested using a detailed data set describing 1 297 modifications made to products and services distribution technologies and back office processes within a sample of australian retail banks over the sample period our results provide support for the general position that establishing an attractive competitive position depends on the specific history of a firm s innovative activity banks that undertook more innovative activity that were more consistent in that activity and whose composition of activity was somewhat differentiated from the industry norm tended to display superior financial performance rather than looking solely for internally generated inimitable innovations to deliver competitive advantage these results suggest that active and consistent innovative activity that is somewhat differentiated from competitors can also deliver superior financial performance

inside the black box technology and economics economists have long treated technological phenomena as events transpiring inside a black box and on the whole have adhered rather strictly to a self imposed ordinance not to inquire too seriously into what transpires inside that box the purpose of professor rosenberg s work is to break open and examine the contents of the black box in so doing a number of important economic problems be powerfully illuminated the author clearly shows how specific features of individual technologies have shaped a number of variables of great concern to economists the rate of productivity improvement the nature of learning processes underlying technological change itself the speed of technology transfer and the effectiveness of government policies that are intended to influence technologies in particular ways the separate chapters of this book reflect a primary concern with some of the distinctive aspects of industrial technologies in the twentieth century such as the increasing reliance upon science but also the considerable subtlety and complexity of the dialectic between science and technology other concerns include the rapid growth in the development of costs associated with new technologies as well as the difficulty of predicting the eventual performance characteristics of newly emerging technologies

indexing product quality issues theory and results jn the concept of quality and the efficiency of markets for consumer products hjorth andersen 1984 strongly condemns the use of overall productquality rankings such as those published by consumer reports as a basis for scientific research his primary criticism is that creating an index of quality as a weighted average of subscores is usually misleading he claims that this averaging process is unjustified except for brands that occupy approximately the same rank position on each attribute this article reviews hjorth andersen s arguments and identifies several important related questions on the use of published quality ratings in academic research statistical theory is developed to demonstrate that hjorth andersen s conclusions are limited and to examine the precise conditions under which his conclusions hold empirical evidence is presented that reveals the statistical frequency in real markets of the logical conditions deduced using our theory our conclusions differ significantly from those drawn by hjorthandersen a debate about the efficacy of quality indices is relevant not only to academic research but also to consumer welfare and strategic marketing planning consumer welfare and choice is affected by published quality ratings archibald haulman and moody 1983 beales et al 1981 thorelli and thorelli 1977 commercial importance is evident from the widespread distribution of magazines like consumer reports the consumer testing movement started in 1927 by chase and schlink has spread to agencies in more than 50 nations these agencies are members of the international organization of consumers unions iocu and the combined circulation of their magazines is in the millions published quality ratings also influence academic research our literature review identified more than 30 studies that use objective quality ratings as data from which to draw inferences about price versus quality tradeoffs advertising versus quality interactions price versus quality changes over product life cycles brand switching market efficiency and rational consumer judgments since this review concentrated on the marketing and economics literature it is likely that the role of published quality ratings in academic research has been underestimated in any case academic researchers can and should assist product testing agencies in understanding sources of potential error in their quality scales strategic research such as that conducted by the strategic planning institute at harvard university has focused management attention on the influence of product quality on market performance measures like market share and rate of return on investment for example phillips chang and buzzell 1983 indicate that product quality influences a firm s market share directly and its rate of return on investment indirectly through market share see also day 1986 farris and reibstein 1979 urban et al 1984 it is important that future research define coherently and measure accurately the construct of quality

media capture in a democracy the role of wealth concentration abstract since objective news coverage is vital to democracy captured media can seriously distort collective decisions the current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from the mass media the media might however secretly collude with interest groups in order to influence the public opinion in the case of voting over the level of a productivity enhancing public bad it is shown that an increase in the concentration of firm ownership makes the occurrence of media bias more likely although media bias is not always welfare worsening conditions for it to raise welfare are restrictive

would economic democracy decrease the amount of public bads the general argument of those who believe that economic democracy decreases the amount of public bads is that with economic democracy the people would make decisions rather than a small class of capitalists an attempt is made to evaluate and analyze this argument several possibilities emerge and the situation is found to be more subtle than implied by this popular argument copyright 1993 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

more oil less democracy evidence from worldwide crude oil discoveries this article exploits variations in the timing and size of oil discoveries to identify the impact of oil wealth on democracy i find that discovering 100 billion barrels of oil approximately the initial endowment of iraq pushes a country s democracy level almost 20 percentage points below trend after three decades the estimated effect is larger for oilfields with higher quality oil and lower exploration and extraction costs however the estimates become less precise when oil abundance is measured by oil discovery per capita suggesting politicians may care about the level instead of the per capita value of oil wealth

inequality and media capture abstract popular support of redistributive policies depends on information they have about the tax system and efficiency of public projects mass media provides a convenient means for manipulating public opinion even when voters understand that the media can be biased i develop a theory of media capture in which the rich can influence information published in a media outlet at a cost the model shows that higher inequality is associated with lower media freedom this effect is stronger in democratic regimes i find empirical support for the model in both panel data and cross country analysis

the resource curse and its potential reversal several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough we try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure using alternative measures of both resources and institutions and by studying different time periods while an institutional reversal is present in many specifications only ores and metals interacted with the icrg measure of institutional quality consistently have a negative growth effect but a positive interaction that turns the curse around when institutions are good enough

mass media competition political competition and public policy if better informed voters receive favourable policies then mass media will affect policy because mass media provide most of the information people use in voting this paper models the incentives of the media to deliver news to different groups the increasing returns to scale technology and advertising financing of media firms induce them to provide more news to large groups such as taxpayers and dispersed consumer interests and groups that are valuable to advertisers this news bias alters the tradeoff in political competition and therefore introduces a bias in public policy the paper also discusses the effects of broadcast media replacing newspapers as the main information source about politics the model predicts that this change should raise spending on government programmes used by poor and rural voters

who owns the media the authors examine patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world they find that almost universally the largest media firms are controlled by the government or by private families government ownership is more pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media government ownership is generally associated with less press freedom fewer political and economic rights inferior governance and most conspicuously inferior social outcomes in education and health the adverse effects of government ownership on political and economic freedom are stronger for newspapers than for television the adverse effects of government ownership of the media do not appear to be restricted solely to instances of government monopoly the authors present a range of evidence on the adverse consequences of state ownership of the media state ownership of the media is often argued to be justified on behalf of the social needs of the disadvantaged but if their findings are correct increasing private ownership of the media through privatization or by encouraging the entry of privately owned media can advance a variety of political and economic goals especially those of meeting the social needs of the poor

advertising and media capture the case of climate change abstract this paper analyzes whether media capture by advertisers is a potential source of the divergence between the scientific consensus and public discourse about climate change i develop an objective measure of the tone of climate change coverage by creating an index that builds on gentzkow and shapiro 2010 using phrase frequency analysis to compare newspaper text with the un s ipcc reports and the heartland institute s skeptical response each of which are lengthy official reports with clear stances on climate change i also develop a measure of potential advertising from the auto industry using national shocks to advertising at the manufacturer level weighted by previous advertising at the newspaper level the empirical analysis shows that this potential advertising allows firms to capture newspapers within newspaper the potential for advertising from car manufacturers shifts the tone of coverage towards skepticism i also find suggestive evidence that potential advertising reduces the overall quantity of coverage of climate change

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

using privileged information to manipulate markets insiders gurus and credibility access to private information is shown to generate both the incentives and the ability to manipulate asset markets through strategically distorted announcements the fact that privileged information is noisy interferes with the public s attempts to learn whether such announcements are honest it allows opportunistic individuals to manipulate prices repeatedly without ever being fully found out this leads us to extend sobel s 1985 model of strategic communication to the case of noisy private signals our results show that when truthfulness is not easily verifiable restrictions on trading by insiders may be needed to preserve the integrity of information embodied in prices

oil and democracy endogenous natural resources and the political resource curse by the end of the twentieth century a scholarly consensus emerged around the idea that oil fuels authoritarianism and slow growth the natural abundance once thought to be a blessing was unconditionally and then later only conditionally a curse for political and economic development we re examine the relationship between oil wealth and political regimes challenging the conventional wisdom that such natural resource rents lead to authoritarian outcomes we contend that most efforts to examine the causal linkages between natural resource abundance and political regime have been complicated by the likelihood that both democracy and oil revenue are endogenous to the industrialization processes itself particularly in its developmentalist form our quantitative results based on an analysis of global data from 1970 to 2006 show that both resource endogeneity and several mechanisms of intraregional regime diffusion are powerful determinants of democratic outcomes qualitative evidence from the history of industrialization in latin america yields support for our proposed causal claim oil wealth is not necessarily a curse and may even be a blessing with respect to democratic development