the multifaceted role of the state in the protection of geographical indications a worldwide review summary geographical indications gis serve to designate goods with a quality characteristics or reputation attributed to its geographical origin they are increasingly protected in many countries of the south as a tool for economic social territorial and ecological development implemented in the wake of the weakly prescriptive wto agreement on trade related intellectual property rights trips of 1995 the choice of the institutional framework for protecting gis nationally as well as associated public support infrastructure was left open this led to divergences in overarching approaches and to gi institutionalization that differs remarkably across countries twenty years after trips the purpose of both this paper and of the special issue is to advance our understanding of the institutionalization of gis as an ipr a quality standard and a policy instrument in harnessing all of the expected benefits of gi protection building upon the contributions to this special issue we use an original multilevel governance framework to analyze all the multifaceted roles of the state in different empirical situations worldwide this reflects the experiences of countries that have only recently implemented gi protection such as brazil colombia india indonesia vietnam south africa kenya and west african countries as well as of regions with a long history of gi protection including the eu and the us based on an analysis of the complexity and diversity of all state we show that global harmonization is underway with a convergence toward a prominent role of the state in gi regulation in particular for defining gi content which is specific for gis when compared to other iprs or quality standards we suggest that the intervention of the state is supported by a universal desire to guard against unfair exclusion and to protect a common heritage

long term competition in a dynamic game the cold fish war this article presents a model of credible voluntary collective agreements in a dynamic game these agreements are implicit in collections of history dependent threat strategies i consider the strategies in a game of resource exploitation credibility is represented by perfect equilibrium voluntarism requires at least that all behavior be supported by the threat of collapse of the agreement which would return the players to the memoryless equilibrium collective rationality requires that the agreement be robust to the possibility of mutually beneficial renegotiation i analyze the set of agreements meeting each of these restrictions

a positive effect of human capital on growth abstract recent studies have found that economic growth appears to be unrelated to increases in educational attainment in this note i show that there is a correlation in one dataset but it is typically hidden by unrepresentative observations

the real effects of financial integration abstract this paper shows how correlations in gdp fluctuations rise with financial integration finance serves to increase international correlations in both consumption and gdp fluctuations which explains the persistent gap between the two in the data a quantity puzzle the positive association between financial integration and gdp correlation constitutes a puzzle as theory suggests a negative relation if anything nevertheless it prevails in the data even after the effects of finance on trade and specialization are accounted for

on measuring the quality of life abstract it is widely recognized that per capita income is not an adequate indicator of aggregate well being it has thus become customary to use a range of socioeconomic indices for assessing the quality of life in a society in this article we extend measures of general well being in current use by including ordinal indices of political and civil liberties and we provide a ranking of the world s poorest countries on the basis of the borda rule we then compare improvements in socioeconomic performance with the availability of political and civil liberties during the decade of the 1970s and observe that improvements in per capita national income life expectancy at birth and infant mortality are positively correlated with the extent of political and civil liberties enjoyed by citizens while improvements in literacy are negatively correlated with these liberties

skills schooling and household income in ghana this article examines the impact of cognitive skills on the income of households in ghana it uses scores on mathematics and english tests to measure cognitive skills and estimates the returns to these skills based on farm profit off farm income and total income the article uses powell s censored least absolute deviations and symmetrically trimmed least squares estimators to estimate farm and off farm income in contrast to heckman s two step or the tobit estimator powell s estimators are consistent in the presence of heteroscedasticity and are robust to other violations of normality the results show that cognitive skills have a positive effect on total and off farm income but do not have a statistically significant effect on farm income

risk taking global diversification and growth this paper develops a continuous time stochastic model in which international risk sharing can yield substantial welfare gains through its effect on expected consumption growth the mechanism linking global diversification to growth is an attendant world portfolio shift from safe low yield capital to riskier high yield capital the presence of these two types of capital captures the idea that growth depends on the availability of an ever increasing array of specialized hence inherently risky production inputs calibration exercises using consumption and stock market data imply that most countries reap large steady state welfare gains from global financial integration copyright 1994 by american economic association

trade finance specialization and synchronization i investigate the determinants of business cycle synchronization across regions the linkages between trade in goods financial openness specialization and business cycle synchronization are evaluated in the context of a system of simultaneous equations the main results are as follows i specialization patterns have a sizable effect on business cycles most of this effect is independent of trade or financial policy but directly reflects differences in gdp per capita ii a variety of measures of financial integration suggest that economic regions with strong financial links are significantly more synchronized even though they also tend to be more specialized iii the estimated role of trade is closer to that implied by existing models once intra industry trade is held constant the results obtain in a variety of data sets measurement strategies and specifications they relate to a recent strand of international business cycle models with incomplete markets and transport costs and on the empir

a latent structure approach to measuring reputation the present study provides estimates of reputation as a dynamic latent variable that is determined by price premiums and market data further it analyzes the effect of extrinsic factors on reputation specifically this study seeks to i quantify the reputation of washington apples over time ii study the dynamic nature of reputation and iii analyze the effect of the label washington apple the model adopted in this study is the dynamic multiple indicator multiple cause dymimic modeling approach which is a special case of the general latent variable modeling scheme called state space models both dymimic and hedonic approaches are applied to the data on washington apples and results from the two approaches are compared reputation plays an important role in assuring product quality in markets where consumers can only imperfectly judge the product quality until after consumption if reputation effects are absent in these types of markets there is an incentive for producers to reduce quality and take short run gains before buyers catch on in order to avoid such quality cutting products with good reputations will sell for premium prices shapiro 1983 showed theoretically that price premiums are necessary for producers to invest in quality and reputation there is an extensive theoretical literature on reputation but empirical studies are limited empirical studies on the impact of firm reputation on shareholder wealth or product demand include jarrell and peltzman 1985 borenstein and zimmerman 1988 and karpoff and lott 1993 caves and green 1996 showed that factors that may affect a firm s reputation influence the relationship between price and quality gorton 1996 analyzed how a bank s reputation for default affects the discount rate on its debt the measurement of the value of reputation to producers in terms of price premiums and how a reputation can be built up and destroyed are important issues that have not been empirically analyzed the current study provides estimates of reputation as a dynamic latent variable that is determined by price premiums and market data further it analyzes the effect of extrinsic factors on reputation steenkamp 1990 points out that consumers observe at the moment of purchase the intrinsic and extrinsic product quality cues but not the quality attributes intrinsic cues are characteristics of the product such as color freshness texture and flavor while extrinsic

caveat emptor cross country data on education and the labor force abstract cross country data on education and the labor force frequently are used to describe important dimensions of development and to estimate models of economic growth and growth determinants the impact of education and related phenomena this investigation finds 1 there are serious intertemporal and inter country comparability problems with these data that may importantly affect inferences about labor force size trends and productivity and schooling investments and impact 2 data gaps are systematically related to levels of development and literacy and 3 conclusions about the determinants or consequences of development based on constructed data that have been made available to fill data gaps can be seriously misleading

monopolistic competition with experience goods this paper constructs a model of monopolistic competition where consumers cannot directly verify product quality prior to an initial purchase instead consumers base initial purchases on observed prices which perfectly signal firms qualities both in and out of equilibrium equilibrium quality is less than efficient but generally bounded away from the minimum quality with free entry observable product variety exceeds what would prevail with perfect information as repeat purchases become large relative to initial purchases or as firms become small relative to the size of the market equilibrium product quality rises and the market converges to the full information equilibrium

threshold effects of human capital schooling and economic growth abstract empirical growth studies have often found average years of schooling to be unrelated with economic growth this note shows that the significant positive effect of schooling can only be realized after an economy crosses a threshold level of development

changes in the u s wage structure 1963 1987 application of quantile regression the 1980 s witnessed rapid changes in the structure of wages in the united states in this study recently developed techniques for quantile regression are applied to every march current population survey since 1964 and changes in the return to schooling and experience at different points of the wage distribution are examined the quantile regression technique parsimoniously describes the entire conditional wage distribution this conditional distribution is used to examine changes in within group wage inequality as measured by the difference between conditional quantiles two linear models are considered a simple one group model and a 16 group model the results suggest that the returns to schooling and experience differ across quantiles of the wage distribution but their patterns of change are similar significant differences in wage inequality are also found across the various skill groups the paper also presents a new imputation method for cps data

effect of quantity and quality of education on per capita real gdp growth evidence from low and middle income african countries although several empirical studies have investigated the growth impact of the quantity of schooling in african countries research on the impact of schooling quality the degree to which schooling

review of easterly s the elusive quest for growth 1 the failure of development panaceas all encompassing hypotheses concerning the sources of economic growth periodically surface and with the support of adequately chosen cross country correlations enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame over the last few decades the list of proposed panaceas for growth in per capita income has included high rates of physical capital investment rapid human capital accumulation low income inequality low fertility being located far from the equator a low incidence of tropical diseases access to the sea favorable weather patterns hands off governments trade policy openness capital markets development political freedom economic freedom ethnic homogeneity british colonial origins a common law legal system the protection of property rights and the rule of law good governance political stability infrastructure market determined prices including exchange rates foreign direct investment and suitably conditioned foreign aid this is a growing and non exhaustive list

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

a theory of collective reputations with applications to the persistence of corruption and to firm quality the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by his past behaviour and because his track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper thus studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality 1 collective reputations collective reputations play an important role in economics and the social sciences countries ethnic racial or religious groups are known to be hard working honest corrupt hospitable or belligerent some firms enjoy substantial rents from their reputations for producing high quality products some departments are reported to treat their faculty or students fairly the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by her past behaviour and because her track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations in a model in which current generations are progressively replaced by new ones and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature see section 2 for a detailed comparison with the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality let us spell out the building blocks of our theory in more detail a a group s reputation is only as good as that of its members each member is characterized by individual traits such as talent diligence or honesty past individual behaviour conveys information about these traits and generates individual reputations

a game theoretic approach to behavioral food risks the case of grain producers abstract food risks may be caused by malpractice of suppliers who exploit the fact that their production processes and resulting product properties cannot be directly observed by buyers the probability of malpractice increases with the profits that can be earned through opportunistic behavior in this paper we develop a moral hazard model for the empirical analyses of behavioral risks it accounts for the essential fact that incomplete inspection and tracing increase the profitability of rule breaking behavior and that monitoring tracing and sanctioning are costly using the model we first demonstrate how to design efficient contracts in various situations in a case study we then analyze farmers incentives with regard to the minimum waiting period after fungicide use data are gathered in interviews with three large scale german farmers and a grain dealer we find that while their perception of parameters varies widely high temptations for rule breaking arise in some cases we conclude that empirical moral hazard analyses have significant potential to shed light on behavioral risks

collective reputation and quality firms who sell regional or specialty products often share a collective reputation based on aggregate quality collective reputation can be approached as a dynamic common property resource problem we show that for an experience good without firm traceability individual firms have the incentive to choose quality levels that are sub optimal for the group these results support minimum quality standards trigger strategies are analyzed as an alternative solution to this problem finally the implications of these results are discussed as they relate to the case study of washington apples specialty regional authentic and local food products have become a more important part of consumer purchases in recent years firms have responded by marketing food products that come from specific geographic areas this trend in consumers preferences has led the european union to introduce protected designations of origin labels and protected geographical identification labels which provide protection of food names on a geographical or traditional basis ranging from parmesan cheese to such lesser known items such as galician veal in the united states there are popular state products that carry labels such as washington apples idaho potatoes

economic development and the return to human capital a smooth coefficient semiparametric approach this paper investigates the impact of human capital on the process of economic growth by allowing the contribution of traditional inputs capital and labour as well as that of human capital to vary both across countries and time the former is accomplished by constructing an index of tfp growth for traditional inputs while the latter through semiparametric methods we derive estimates of the output elasticity and social return to human capital for 51 countries at various stages of economic development copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

brain drain and economic growth theory and evidence we focus on the impact of migration prospects on human capital formation and growth in a small open developing economy we assume that agents are heterogeneous in skills and take their educational decisions in a context of uncertainty regarding future migrations we distinguish two growth effects an ex ante brain effect migration prospects foster investments in education because of higher returns abroad and an ex post drain effect because of actual migration flows the case for a beneficial brain drain bbd emerges when the first effect dominates i e when the average level of human capital is higher in the economy opened to migrations than in the closed economy we derive the theoretical conditions required for such a possibility to be observed using cross section data for 37 developing countries we find that the possibility of a bbd could be more than a theoretical curiosity

economic growth fossil fuel and non fossil consumption a pooled mean group analysis using proxies for capital this study employs a pooled mean group estimator to examine the nexus between economic growth and fossil and non fossil fuel consumption for 53 countries between 1990 and 2012 the global sample was divided into four categories developed exporters developed importers developing exporters and developing importers the purpose of these categories was to observe whether factors unique to these countries influence the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth with the exception of developing importers evidence of bi directional causality between fossil fuel consumption and real gdp across all subsamples is observed this leads to the conclusion that efforts to directly conserve fossil fuels may harm economic growth in terms of non fossil fuel use the results are more diverse bi directional causality between non fossil fuel use and real gdp is found in the long and short run for developed importers bi directional causality only in the long run for developed exporters negative long run causality from real gdp to non fossil fuels for developing exporters and long run causality from non fossil fuel use to real gdp for developing importers these results lead to the conclusion that other factors have been responsible for the progress seen in non fossil fuel use thus it is concluded that economic growth on its own is insufficient to promote clean energy development there is a need for policy makers to create an environment conducive to renewable energy investment

the economics of collective reputation evidence from the wine industry we use original data regarding the array of italian winery coalitions wine denominations to analyze the economics and determinants of collective reputation we first run a cross sectional analysis with 2008 data and the full set of control variables then move to the dynamics of collective reputation with panel data analysis on a 30 year time span 1978 2008 group reputation is history dependent in particular past bad collective behavior increases the probability of being stuck in a bad reputation trap minimum quality standards and effective enforcement are fundamental drivers of group reputation the relationship between group size and collective reputation is non linear free entry may not be optimal due to free riding problems finally institutional signals such as the wine classification system are useful because they can be used by consumers as easily available proxies for information that is much more difficult to acquire

the social outcomes of education and feedbacks on growth in africa most of the effects of education included in the complete model presented here are shown to be consistent with those found in the mainstream of the research on each outcome using microeconomic data this however is a first effort to estimate net education effects more comprehensively beyond just growth and health effects on other key measures of development in africa and also a new view of indirect feedbacks on economic growth and of externalities after developing the conceptual framework the regression estimates are presented together with a discussion of the net direct and indirect effects of education on each outcome these are shown to improve infant mortality increase longevity strengthen civic institutions and democratisation increase political stability and increase investment in physical capital which in turn have positive delayed feedback effects on the economic growth process the effects also lower fertility rates and population growth rates but the latter occurs only after long dela

regional business cycle synchronization in emerging and developing countries regional or global integration trade or financial integration abstract this paper examines the effects of regional versus global integration and trade versus financial integration on regional business cycle synchronization in three regions containing developing and emerging countries east asia latin america and central and eastern europe the main empirical results are as follows 1 strong and similar common global linkages especially financial linkages have significant positive effects on the synchronization of regional business cycles 2 after controlling global linkages regional trade integration has a positive effect on regional business cycle synchronization whereas regional financial integration has a negative effect and 3 although the direction for the effect of each type of integration is similar across regions the relative importance of each in explaining regional business cycle synchronization is different specifically while global financial linkages play the most important role in east asia and latin america regional trade integration is most important in central and eastern europe

inflation targeting in latin america toward a monetary union this paper examines how monetary policy decisions in brazil regarding short term interest rates have affected the term structure of interest rates we apply an event study methodology in two distinct periods between january 2000 and august 2003 right after the implementation of the inflation targeting in brazil and between september 2003 and july 2008 the main results are 1 the surprise effects have decreased 2 the explanation power has increased in the second period indicating enhancement of monetary policy 3 market participants adjust their expectations with greater advance 4 the surprise effects of decisions on short term rates on the term structure of interest rates are now close to those found in the usa and germany but higher to those found in the uk and italy therefore the results indicate that fixed income market expectations are better adjusted to the central bank anti inflationary policy

education and economic growth a meta regression analysis summary this paper surveys the literature which examines the effect of education on economic growth specifically we apply meta regression analysis to 57 studies with 989 estimates and show that there is substantial publication selection bias toward a positive impact of education on growth once we account for this the genuine growth effect of education is not homogeneous across studies but varies according to several factors specifically it is attributed to differences in education measurement and study characteristics mainly model specification as well as type of data used and the quality of research outlets where studies are published e g academic journals vs working papers

schooling data technological diffusion and the neoclassical model this research was supported by the spanish ministry of science and technology through cicyt grants sec99 1189 and sec99 0820 and by the spanish ministry of finance and fundacion caixa galicia

markets with untraceable goods of unknown quality beyond the small country case when importing durables and nondurables consumers often cannot discern quality prior to purchase if they cannot also identify the individual producer exporters have diminished incentives to produce high quality goods to raise the quality of traded experience goods previous international literature has proposed consolidation of export firms and the imposition of export quotas policies that may be appropriate for tiny taiwan but not a colossus like china we contribute to this literature in three ways first we explicitly model the way in which consumers of experience goods rely on the reviews of previous buyers who in turn rely on the reviews of buyers before them when deciding whether to purchase an experience good second we endogenize the price of any given quality third we assume that firms may exercise market power as we show once the small country assumption is dropped policies advocated in the literature such as the merger of exporters or the imposition of export quotas can have adverse consequences on the profits of domestic exporters and on the welfare of all consumers on the other hand the unilateral imposition of minimum quality standards will increase the profits of domestic exporters while improving the welfare of all consumers

social welfare in a common property oligopoly output in a markov nash cournot equilibrium to a noncooperative differential game in which in oligopolists extract a common property nonrenewable resource is bounded by the output of in firm and in i firm static oligopolies we discuss the welfare effects of the number of firms and of the divergence between private and social discount rates we compare extraction under the markov and open loop equilibria and then offer an explanation for the possibility that the resource is exhausted instantaneously in a continuous time game this explanation does not depend on the fact that the period of commitment is infinitesimal this essay models the extraction by an oligopolistic industry of a common property nonrenewable resource we characterize the markov perfect equilibrium mpe in a game amongst firms and then provide general conditions under which the resource is exhausted instantaneously if there is unrestricted access to a resource agents perceive its shadow value to be 0 and extract too rapidly when access is restricted to a finite number of agents in none of whom possess exclusive property rights an additional complication may arise if firms behave as oligopolists in the product market they have an incentive to extract the resource too slowly in order to increase the price thus where m firms exploit a resource in the absence of property rights there are conflicting tendencies the absence of property rights encourages excessive exploitation whereas the finite number of firms encourages insufficiently rapid exploitation there are a number of situations where the lack of property rights and the presence of market power coexist examples include i national fisheries which are large enough to affect fish populations and output prices ii common exploitation of aquifers or rivers where individual use affects the price of an agricultural output or of another input iii production by oligopolistic firms which degrades the environment we consider the case of nonrenewable resources such as oil this implies a simple equation of motion for the stock of the resource and emphasizes the role of the number of firms and the stock size such models are often appropriate even if the resource is not literally nonrenewable for example tropical forests or groundwater aquifers are potentially renewable given enough time as indeed oil deposits may be however the rate of replenishment may be insignificant given

sparkling wine choice from supermarket shelves the impact of certification of origin and production practices we report the results of a study based on revealed and stated preference data on choice of prosecco wines in retail stores close to the origin of production in northern italy emphasis is placed on ability to reconcile the utility structure of stated preference data with that underlying revealed preference data we extend the analysis to cover nonattendance of key attributes such as price and certification of origin while controlling for the large range of brand effects

demand for collective food safety standards in 2007 leading members of the u s fresh tomato industry responded to pressure from the u s food and drug administration regarding the industry s long history of poor food safety outcomes and adopted a set of standards for production practices related to food safety at all levels of the fresh tomato supply chain adherence to these standards was required under a federal marketing order that applied to essentially all tomatoes grown in florida the california tomato farmers cooperative whose members produced the vast majority of fresh tomatoes grown in california also required that its members adopt these standards the collective food safety standards for fresh tomatoes closely resemble the requirements of the u s food safety modernization act fsma produce safety rule so the collective adoption of these standards provides an excellent case study to illustrate the possible effects of fsma implementation on demand i assess the hypothesis that demand for tomatoes from florida and california increased following the adoption of standards for food safety practices by growers in those states relative to demand for tomatoes from other regions my analysis demonstrates essentially no evidence that demand for fresh tomatoes responded positively to the implementation of collective food safety practices

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

consumer activism producer groups and production standards we examine competition between groups of producers when consumers prefer costly ethical production technologies consumers are unable to identify or monitor production technologies producers can freeride on their group s reputation by substituting cheaper unethical technologies when an ethical technology is pareto optimal social pressures within competing producer groups can ensure long run dominance of groups relying most heavily on the ethical technology even if social pressures cannot support the choice of the ethical technology in the long run competition between producer groups can increase the average level of adoption of the ethical technology for an arbitrarily long period of time

the effects of public sector hiring and compensation policies on the egyptian labor market this article examines the combined impact of the employment guarantee for graduates and public sector compensation policies on the egyptian labor market besides contributing to an unsustainable rate of growth in the government labor force these policies have encouraged queuing for government jobs contributed to high graduate unemployment rates and reduced the employment of graduates in the private sector despite substantial wage erosion in the public sector in recent years government wages when appropriately corrected for observed heterogeneity and sample selection are on a par with or higher than private sector wages especially for graduates when combined with the more desirable nonwage aspects of government jobs these compensation levels explain the attractiveness of public sector employment to graduates government pay scales are especially advantageous to female secondary school graduates who appear to face considerable discrimination in the private sector

exports growth and threshold effects in africa abstract the relationship between openness and growth remains a controversial issue in development economics with many studies focusing on the export growth relationship this paper examines whether the relationship between exports and growth found in large cross section studies also holds in the context of african economies the paper employs threshold regression techniques to examine whether african countries benefit more from exports when they reach a certain level of development or openness our results suggest that there is indeed a positive relationship between exports and growth in africa the threshold regression analysis also suggests that it is not necessary for a country to reach a certain level of development or to have an existing export base for this relationship to hold though it is found that the relationship is stronger for countries that experience higher rates of export growth

private eradication of mobile public bads we consider analytically the non cooperative behavior of many private property owners who each controls the stock of a public bad such as an invasive weed species infectious disease fire or agricultural pest the stock of the public bad can grow and disperse across a spatial domain of arbitrary size in this setting we characterize the conditions under which private property owners will control or eradicate and determine how this decision depends on property specific environmental features and on the behavior of other landowners we show that high mobility or lower control by others result in lower private control but when the marginal dynamic cost of the bad is sufficiently large we find that complete eradication may be privately optimal despite the lack of consideration of others welfare in these cases eradication arises in the non cooperative game and is also socially optimal so there is in effect no externality finally when property harboring the bad is not owned or is owned in common we derive the side payments required to efficiently control the mobile public bad

where has all the education gone cross national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker this implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor production is large strongly statistically significant and negative these are on average results derived from imposing a constant coefficient however the development impact of education varied widely across countries and has fallen short of expectations for three possible reasons first the institutional governance environment could have been sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educational capital lowered economic growth second marginal returns to education could have fallen rapidly as the supply of educated labor expanded while demand remained stagnant third educational quality could have been so low that years of schooling created no human capital the extent and mix of these three phenomena vary from country to country in explaining the actual economic impact of education or the lack thereof

estimates of the economic returns to schooling from a new sample of twins this paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling the data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward but that measurement error does bias it downward adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 12 to 16 percent a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found copyright 1994 by american economic association

government bias in education schooling attainment and long run growth a surprising cross country stylized fact is that higher public spending on education tends to lower the long run growth rate of per capita gdp and the returns to schooling this is contrary to the conventional wisdom that education is a major driver of growth in this article we revisit this issue and try to understand these puzzling facts in terms of an endogenous growth model our cross country calibration of the growth model predicts that countries with a greater government involvement in education experience lower schooling efforts and lower growth

breaking free of a stereotype should a domestic brand pretend to be a foreign one consumers in many emerging markets exhibit a pronounced preference for western and global brands while domestic brands are often associated with a cheap but low quality image frustrated with the negative country of origin coo stereotype imposed on them many domestic brands from emerging markets follow a variety of approaches to disguise their coo and pretend to be foreign this paper studies the strategic aspects of this phenomenon we consider an experience good market where consumers learn about each brand s quality using its coo as a prior each firm can invest in product quality or coo dissociation the former generates better quality signals while the latter simply masks the firm s coo identity the analysis reveals a few main insights sharing a reputation leads to a common good problem where firms free ride on each other s quality investments as a high quality firm dissociates itself from the stereotype it ceases to contribute to the coo image but also prevents its low quality peers from free riding on it this incurs a negative direct effect but a positive strategic effect on the group image consequently a country s coo image may actually improve when more high quality brands shun their identities and pretend to be foreign in equilibrium coo image improves monotonically as firms become more efficient in providing quality however the prevalence of coo dissociation may first increase then decrease we discuss the implications of these results for emerging market brands as well as policy makers

the economics of nested names name specificity reputations and price premia a good can be identified by its region or country of origin the firm that produces it and its product name in other words names can nest within each other to categorize goods with increasing specificity this article develops a conceptual framework for jointly analyzing the effect of product firm and collective reputations on market price the model is estimated via quantile regression with california wine market data the results portray how the structure and relative importance of reputations change as product prices vary specifically reputation premia migrate from collective to specific names as prices increase

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

price and quality cycles for experience goods we explore a dynamic competitive model for experience goods and study an equilibrium for it in which firms plan initially to produce high quality at low price then high quality at high price then low quality at high price each consumer is aware that all firms eventually intend to run down their reputations at customers expense yet he rationally chooses to wait for direct evidence that the firm to which he is attached has already entered into the exploitative phase

dodging adverse selection how donor type and governance condition aid s effects on school enrollment summary we employ aiddata to test the effects of primary education aid on school enrollment we argue that the problem of adverse selection complicates both the allocation and the effectiveness of aid we hypothesize that bilateral donors ought to have greater freedom to condition aid on recipient governance quality than multilateral donors which are often bound by institutional rules to provide aid more impartially compared to their multilateral counterparts bilateral donors may have advantages in overcoming adverse selection resulting in bilateral aid s boosting enrollments to a greater degree aiddata s extensive coverage of multilateral aid enables this analysis for up to 100 low and low middle income countries from 1995 to 2008 latent growth regression analysis suggests that compared to multilateral donors bilateral donors indeed condition their primary education aid on recipient control of corruption and that bilateral aid is significantly related to improved enrollments

education social cohesion and economic growth analysis of the contribution of education to growth through its role in promoting a common culture indicates that when different cultural groups separately determine the social content of their school curricula excessive polarization can result with less than optimal growth the optimal trajectory involves a gradual reciprocal convergence of school curricula towards the middle ground this may be difficult to implement in a political context in which all agents are identified with one group or another when curricula are determined by legislative bargaining centralization of schooling may result in overly rapid homogenization in some cases and perhaps surprisingly excessive polarization in others this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

trade and financial integration in east asia effects on co movements in this paper we explore three important areas where deeper trade and financial integration in east asia can influence 1 business cycle co movements in the region 2 the extent of risk sharing across countries and 3 price co movements across countries we find evidence that trade integration enhances co movements of output but not of consumption across countries especially the fact that trade integration does not raise co movements of consumption as much as that of output is interpreted as trade integration does not improve the extent of risk sharing co movements of price arise most significantly as trade integration deepens lowering the border effects and allowing better opportunities for resource reallocation across countries in contrast financial integration demonstrates much weaker evidence of enhancing co movements across countries deeper financial integration improves price co movements weakly but does not enhance output or consumption co movements at all however since the current level of financial integration in east asia is quite low our evidence is too early to firmly determine the role of financial integration

evaluating the net benefits of collective reputation the case of bordeaux wine in this paper we develop an original approach to assess the net benefits associated with a generic promotion program using an application to bordeaux wines the benefit is computed from the marginal impact of the program s collective reputation on the individual reputation for sub regions within bordeaux these different marginal impacts are estimated using detailed survey data about the image of bordeaux wines in seven european countries we find positive and significant spillover effects from the collective reputation bordeaux that moreover increase with the reputation of the sub region these spillover effects when significantly positive vary from a minimum of 5 to a maximum of 15 of additional favorable quality opinions we then calculate a measure of the average net benefits earned by producers from the regional promotion program in selected sub regions within bordeaux our results indicate that producers in some sub regions are more likely to benefit from the promotion program and suggest that the current fee structure may not be properly aligned with market conditions

when are private standards more stringent than public standards retailers private standards are increasingly important for addressing consumer concerns about safety quality and social and environmental issues empirical evidence shows that these private standards are frequently more stringent than their public counterparts this article develops a political economy model that helps explain this stylized fact we show that if producers exercise their political power to persuade the government to impose a lower public standard retailers may apply their market power to install a private standard at a higher level than the public one depending on several factors

a new database on human capital stock in developing and industrial countries sources methodology and results abstract the paper describes the techniques and data adopted for the construction of a new series of estimates of the stock of education in 85 countries over 28 years 1960 1987 the series are built from enrollment data using the perpetual inventory method adjusted for mortality estimates are corrected for grade repetition among school goers and country specific drop out rates for primary and secondary students enrollment data series used start as far back as 1930 for most countries and even earlier for others this reduces the need for backward extrapolation of enrollments to provide the initial estimates of the investment inventory

public sector employment rent seeking and economic growth surplus labor in the public sector a characteristic of many developing countries is viewed in this paper as the consequence of rent seeking behavior a theory is presented of a segmented labor market with endogenous government hiring in response to unemployment a simple computable general equilibrium model is used to illustrate how this can give rise to dynamic social costs and to quantify them fiscal resources are diverted to support the unproductive sink the effect of surplus labor on economic growth is shown to be substantial while the government s attempt to reduce unemployment is shown to be futile copyright 1991 by royal economic society

global banks and crisis transmission abstract we study the effect of financial integration through banks on the transmission of international business cycles in a sample of 18 20 developed countries between 1978 and 2009 we find that in periods without financial crises increases in bilateral banking linkages are associated with more divergent output cycles this relation is significantly weaker during financial turmoil periods suggesting that financial crises induce co movement among more financially integrated countries we also show that countries with stronger direct and indirect financial ties to the u s experienced more synchronized cycles with the u s during the recent 2007 2009 crisis we then interpret these findings using a simple general equilibrium model of international business cycles with banks and shocks to banking activity the model suggests that the relation between integration and synchronization depends on the type of shocks hitting the world economy and that shocks to global banks played an important role in triggering and spreading the 2007 2009 crisis

higher education and economic growth in africa abstract this paper uses panel data over the 1960 2000 period a modified neoclassical growth equation and a dynamic panel estimator to investigate the effect of higher education human capital on economic growth in african countries we find that all levels of education human capital including higher education human capital have positive and statistically significant effect on the growth rate of per capita income in african counties our result differs from those of earlier research that find no significant relationship between higher education human capital and income growth we estimate the growth elasticity of higher education human capital to be about 0 09 an estimate that is twice as large as the growth impact of physical capital investment while this is likely to be an overestimate of the growth impact of higher education it is robust to different specifications and points to the need for african countries to effectively use higher education human capital in growth policies

collective reputation social norms and participation this paper analyzes a repeated games model of collective reputation with imperfect public monitoring and perfect local peer monitoring of efforts even when peer monitoring is local firms may achieve higher profits under collective reputation by decreasing the cost of maintaining customers trust the optimal number of firms that share a common reputation is greater when 1 trades are more frequent and public information is disseminated more rapidly 2 the deviation gain is smaller compared to the quality premium 3 customers information regarding firms quality is more precise or 4 intragroup information about firms quality is more global from a positive perspective we suggest how social norms can influence the reputation of regional products we also offer an efficiency explanation for food scares from a normative point of view in our model protection of geographical indications increases and mandatory traceability decreases welfare and incentives to provide quality without taking into account direct implementation costs copyright 2012 oxford university press

endowments and the allocation of schooling in the family and in the marriage market the twins experiment 03 we show how comparisons between the within twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 42 percent of the variance in log earnings obesity is due to variability in individual specific endowments allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments and individual specific earnings endowments of men and their wives schooling are negatively associated

towards a differentiated modelling of origin effects in hedonic analysis an application to auction prices of specialty coffee abstract origin matters this has been shown by numerous studies using either discrete choice or hedonic approaches to derive implicit prices for origin as a product attribute in most of the hedonic studies intercept dummies were introduced for specific regional origins and statistically significant coefficients of those variables were seen as an indication of either a superior or inferior reputation compared to products from other origins we argue that hedonic pricing models of this type may be too simple to detect the true origin effects if assessments of a product s sensory quality are available and interact with prior beliefs about reputation based on a supply and demand framework to explain auction prices a reduced form hedonic pricing model is suggested that includes intercept as well as slope dummy effects of the regional origin because reputation and the objective product quality are particularly important for markets of differentiated high quality foods and beverages we analyze electronic auction markets for specialty coffees the findings for the cup of excellence data reveal that it is important to distinguish reputation sensory quality and their interaction as determinants of coffee auction prices as well as varying origin impacts across market segments

the human capital and economic growth nexus in east and south asia abstractthis study adopts a disaggregated regional focus to test for the human capital hc growth nexus in selected nine asian countries it utilizes the empirical bayesian methodology which addresses not only the heterogeneity issue but it also utilizes the common structural priors of regional countries to yield informationally efficient estimates of the impact of hc on the stock and levels of gdp various measures of hc are utilized to determine which of these produces a better explanation of economic growth in the two asian regions the study finds that primary and secondary education was more prominent in explaining the fluctuations of economic growth in east asia whereas tertiary and vocational education showed positive effects on economic growth in south asia government expenditures on education were also found to positively affect economic growth in both regions the results shed new evidence to establish that the differences in growth rates within east and south asia are associated with diffe

the quality of schooling quantity alone is misleading although much research discusses the quantity of schooling as an effective impact on productivity and earnings most such research leaves out the idea of the quality of schooling which may cause biases in the estimated returns to schooling this paper consequently attempts to extend the standard mincerian approach to incorporate school quality as well as quantity it demonstrates how exclusion of quality in the standard procedure may cause biases in the estimated returns to years of schooling probably in the upward direction the paper explores the implications of this extension of the standard model for the case of young brazilian males it shows that the estimate of the private return to years of schooling using the preferred quality inclusive specification is only one half the estimate using the standard procedure indicating substantial upward bias in the standard estimates it further outlines a method for estimating a social return to quality and finds that it exceeds substantially the social return to quantity the paper then shows why this in turn suggests there may be an equity productivity trade off in schooling investments

international real business cycles we ask whether a two country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles with this question in mind we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data the most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries in the data outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions in the model we see the opposite

the welfare implications of minimum quality standards previous analysis of the social welfare implications of minimum quality standards has yielded no decisive results in this paper the specific nature of consumer and producer responses to quality standards is incorporated into the analysis both consumer and producer gains are shown to be impossible when consumers can perceive quality before purchase even if low quality produce is diverted to secondary markets standards unambiguously reduce net social benefits the paper explores the possibility that minimum quality standards are a form of rent seeking behavior

basic needs government debt and economic growth this paper investigates the relationships between basic needs and economic growth where the interactions between output health nutrition and education are explicitly simultaneous we find a unidirectional relationship that improving basic welfare contributes strongly to labour productivity change but a clear reverse causation only from growth to nutrition there are substantial differences in the patterns of simultaneous interactions at different income and welfare levels there are strong self reinforcing effects of literacy and debt service on poverty making it difficult for poor countries to rectify their situation channelling resources towards improving health education and nutrition could bring dramatic economic returns