technology and transaction cost economics a reply abstract i argue here as i have previously that technology is neither fully determinative of nor irrelevant to economic organization transaction cost economizing occupies a prominent position in any effort to assess the efficacy of alternative forms of economic organization

the new frontier of american fisheries governance abstract throughout its history america has viewed its oceans as vast fishery frontiers these frontiers are suffering depletion as large amounts of fishing power combined with significant oceanographic changes are straining the limits of sustainability the new ocean frontier is not the promise of undeveloped resources but rather the challenge of undeveloped sustainable governance systems this paper discusses the institutional transformation necessary to achieve sustainable governance the first part provides an historical overview of the american use of resources as frontiers the second part characterizes the frontier as an extreme form of resource use contrasting it to its opposite ideal the commons the third part outlines behavioral differences between the users of frontiers and commons the pioneers and shareholders building on the attributes of resource management under the two ideals the fourth part of the discussion focuses on the necessary conditions and major challenges to developing the institutional capital required for sustainable us fishery management the institutional capital needed for sustainable fisheries governance is comprised of several pieces 1 a perception of the fishery as an integrated ecosystem 2 an identification of shareholders 3 an allocation of decision making power and responsibility which vests all interests and internalizes the source of control 4 incentive structures to promote long term management 5 management skills among fishery interests 6 management processes that promote adaptability to change the final section provides conclusions and an assessment of the progress us fishery management has made in institutional capital development pressures of scarcity are forcing us fisheries management to evolve away from the frontier ideal but the development of the institutional capital necessary for sustainable fishery governance is incomplete

multivariate partial adjustment of financial ratios a bayesian hierarchical approach in this paper we propose a multivariate extension of the partial adjustment model of financial ratios to that end we use a dynamic factor model which assumes that financial ratios measuring essentially the same economic financial dimension of the firm evolve in a similar way reflecting the evolution of the common factor the proposed model is hierarchical with three levels the first describes the relationship between each ratio and its common factor the second describes the evolution of the common factors over time by means of lev s 1969 partial adjustment model and the third analyzes the similarity of firms adjustment coefficients taking into account their characteristics the methodology is applied to the analysis of a set of financial ratios related to the business and financial structure of the firm copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

regulation of a spatial externality refuges versus tax for managing pest resistance we examine regulations for managing pest resistance to pesticide varieties in a temporally and spatially explicit framework we compare the performance of the epa s mandatory refuges and a tax or subsidy on the pesticide variety under several biological assumptions on pest mobility and the heterogeneity of farmers pest vulnerability we find that only the tax or subsidy restores efficiency if pest mobility is perfect within the area if pest mobility is imperfect and when farmers face identical pest vulnerability only the refuge might restore efficiency with simulations we illustrate that complex outcomes may arise for intermediate levels of pest mobility and farmers heterogeneity our results shed light on the choice of regulatory instruments for common pool resource regulations where spatial localization matters

the tragedy of the commons and economic growth why does capital flow from poor to rich countries we analyze a differential game in which all interest groups have access to a common capital stock we show that the introduction of a technology that has inferior productivity but enjoys private access may ameliorate the tragedy of the commons we use this model to analyze capital flight in many poor countries property rights are not well defined since safe bank accounts in rich countries the inferior technology are available to citizens of these countries they engage in capital flight we show that the occurrence of capital flight does not imply that opening the capital account reduces growth and welfare

exploiting ergodicity in forecasts of corporate profitability abstract theory suggests that competition tends to equalize profit rates through the process of capital reallocation and numerous studies have confirmed that profit rates are indeed persistent and mean reverting recent empirical evidence further shows that fluctuations in the profitability of surviving corporations are well approximated by a stationary laplace distribution here we show that a parsimonious diffusion process of corporate profitability that accounts for all three features of the data achieves better out of sample forecasting performance across different time horizons than previously suggested time series and cross sectional models as a consequence of replicating the empirical distribution of profit rates the model prescribes a particular strength or speed for the mean reversion of all returns which leads to superior forecasts of individual time series when we exploit information from the cross sectional collection of firms the new model should appeal to managers analysts investors and other groups of corporate stakeholders who are interested in accurate forecasts of profitability to the extent that mean reversion in profitability is the source of predictable variation in earnings our approach can also be used in forecasts of earnings and is thus useful for firm valuation

a statistical equilibrium model of competitive firms abstract we find that the empirical density of firm profit rates measured as returns on assets is markedly non gaussian and reasonably well described by an exponential power or subbotin distribution we start from a statistical equilibrium model that leads to a stationary subbotin density in the presence of complex interactions among competitive heterogeneous firms to investigate the dynamics of firm profitability we construct a diffusion process that has the subbotin distribution as its stationary probability density this leads to a phenomenologically inspired interpretation of variations in the shape parameter of the subbotin distribution which essentially measures the competitive pressure in and across industries our findings have profound implications both for the previous literature on the persistence of profits as well as for understanding competition as a dynamic process our main formal finding is that firms idiosyncratic efforts and the tendency for competition to equalize profit rates are two sides of the same coin and that a ratio of these two effects ultimately determines the dispersion of the equilibrium distribution

rational forecasts or social opinion dynamics identification of interaction effects in a business climate survey this paper develops a methodology for estimating the parameters of dynamic opinion or expectation formation processes with social interactions we study a simple stochastic framework of a collective process of opinion formation by a group of agents who face a binary decision problem the aggregate dynamics of the individuals decisions can be analyzed via the stochastic process governing the ensemble average of choices numerical approximations to the transient density for this ensemble average allow the evaluation of the likelihood function on the base of discrete observations of the social dynamics this approach can be used to estimate the parameters of the opinion formation process from aggregate data on its average realization our application to a well known business climate index provides strong indication of social interaction as an important element in respondents assessment of the business climate

complementarities of innovation activities an empirical analysis of the german manufacturing sector abstract innovation strategies in manufacturing often involve internal rd it is based on data from the german part of the community innovation survey cis 3 the results provide evidence for significant complementarities between internal r d and r d cooperation but cast doubt on the complementarity of internal and contracted r d since a productivity effect on firms patenting probability or sales with new products cannot be found

management of a transboundary wildlife population a self enforcing cooperative agreement with renegotiation and variable transfer payments abstract this paper characterizes a dynamic contract that allows renegotiation and variable transfer payments vtp between owners of two independently harvested ecologically dependent mammal populations the decision environment is modeled as a two person differential game we develop a recursive efficiency criterion that forms the basis for determining the size of the vtp which makes the bargaining contract renegotiation proof and self enforcing we further show that the vtp is just as pareto efficient as a lump sum or fixed annual transfer payment a nuisance wildlife species management forms a basis for numerical illustration

poverty voracity and growth abstract this article investigates economic performance when enforceable property rights are missing and basic needs matter for consumption it suggests a new view of the so called voracity effect according to which windfall gains in productivity induce behavior that leads to lower economic growth taking into account that the rate of intertemporal substitution in consumption depends on the level of consumption it is shown that voracious behavior is situation specific it occurs when an economy is in decline and sufficiently close to stagnation

voracity vs scale effect in a growing economy without secure property rights abstract this paper extends the standard model of growth with insecure property rights by introducing variable labor supply and increasing returns to scale it is assumed that capital stock is jointly owned by multiple interest groups and that each group participates in production activities by supplying its labor force in this setting there are two opposing factors that affect growth over consumption in the absence of secure property rights and the scale effect due to the presence of increasing returns the growth performance of the economy thus depends on which factor dominates

dynamic programming models of fishing competition it is natural to consider the stock of any renewable resource as a capital stock and treat the exploitation of that resource in much the same way as one would treat accumulation of a capital stock this has been done to some extent by cohn clark and gordon monro and by ngo van long whose papers contain a discussion of this point of view however the analysis is much simpler than it appears in the literature especially since the interaction between markets and the natural biological dynamics has not been made clear three issues which have been raised only tangentially are important for the understanding of the economics of renewable resources the first arises from the fact that the fish population might not be able to sustain the market determined amount of fish and hence should be allocated optimally over time second there is the cost externality here costs are affected by the size of the stock of fish which again affects the optimal allocation over time the third issue is how central planning typically used in capital theory can be employed as a tool in analyzing a decentralized economy with perfect futures markets and property rights in this paper a simple framework using only elementary mathematical techniques will be provided in which many important results new to the literature as well as many familiar results can be derived one bonus of this approach is that much of the previous literature can be organized and rationalized the simplicity of the mathematics has the effect of revealing the underlying economic intuition of the subject throughout the paper as a matter of convenience the selfrenewing resource will be referred to as fish however it should be clear that the analysis is perfectly general in that it can be applied to any self renewing resource in fact by specializing the production function an elementary exposition of the theory of exhaustible resources is implicit there are two main sections to this work plus an appendix the first section analyzes the time path of prices output and resource stock under the assumption of free entry competition and the second section studies optimal planning or perfect competition in the first part of the discussion of each market structure extraction costs are assumed to be independent of the size of the fish stock in the second part of each section this assumption is relaxed finally the appendix contains several of the results used in the body of the paper the case of free entry competition can be treated in a very simple manner each period s output is determined by the intersection of the demand and marginal harvesting cost curves i e supply equals demand subtracting this output from the natural dynamics yields the dynamics of free entry competition using this technique it is easy to see the conditions under which free entry competition leads to the exhaustion of the stock of fish furthermore the free entry case serves as a benchmark by which to evaluate the effects of the institution of property rights on the exploitation of the resource the case of a centrally planned economy is studied next this case is shown to be identical to a competitive outcome in which property rights are clearly defined and prices and outputs are endogenously determined so as to be consistent with demand conditions one result coincidentally is that it is possible that the optimal solution might be obtained without property rights the tech the hebrew university university of virginia university of illinois and northwestern university respectively research support from the national science foundation under grants soc 77 27340 and soc 7905900 and the us israel bsf under grant 1828 79 is gratefully acknowledged

governing a groundwater commons a strategic and laboratory analysis of western water law we examine strategic behavior in groundwater depletion within the setting of state governance of groundwater resources in the american west solving a dynamic common pool resource model for its optimal solution and its subgame perfect equilibrium provides benchmarks for behavior observed in laboratory experiments three forms of legal rules common pool depletion with a rule of capture to establish ownership absolute ownership doctrine entry restrictions prior appropriation doctrine and stock quotas correlative rights doctrinekre examined in terms of their impact on individual strategic behavior in laboratory experiments

a private property rights regime for the commons the case for groundwater we compare the social welfare of pumping groundwater under central optimal control to that obtained under a private property rights regime in which firms are granted tradeable permits to the in situ groundwater stock when firms are risk averse both regimes are suboptimal and the matter of which regime yields greater welfare is an empirical one when firms are risk neutral central control dominates the private property rights regime still a stochastic dynamic programming model of madera county california demonstrates that even in this case the private property rights regime is a promising alternative to central control

does classical competition explain the statistical features of firm growth abstract we propose a statistical equilibrium model where the tendency for competition to equalize profit rates results in an exponential power or subbotin distribution the model supports and extends recent evidence on the laplace distribution of firm growth rates

the pareto zipf and other power laws abstract many empirical size distributions in economics and elsewhere exhibit power law behaviour in the upper tail this article contains a simple explanation for this it also predicts lower tail power law behaviour which is verified empirically for income and city size data

politico economic equilibrium and economic growth abstract we propose a notion of dynamic politico economic equilibrium which builds on two key assumptions policies are determined sequentially and agents are fully rational in their roles as both consumers and voters we examine a simple model of endogenous growth and infinitely lived agents where taxes on income are endogenous and where growth critically depends on the initial distribution of asset holdings we relate our equilibrium definition and results to existing literature on time consistency and on political economy and growth we show that our equilibria are time consistent and we argue that the choice of equilibrium concept might have important quantitative implications

the persistence of profit a new empirical interpretation abstract inferences are drawn about the true coefficients which correspond to sample estimates of a persistence of profit model fitted over a large number of firms this is done by generating simulated sampling distributions for the estimators over various distributional assumptions profits seem to be stationary for all firms with an average short run persistence coefficient of 0 59 higher than most previous estimates long run profit rates differ between firms although by less than is suggested by direct observation of variations in mean profit rates calculated over time short run persistence appears to be inversely related to unsystematic variation in profit

implications of quantal response statistical equilibrium abstract this paper explores the foundations and properties of the quantal response statistical equilibrium qrse model developed by scharfenaker and foley 2017 the qrse model provides a behavioral foundation for the formation of aggregate economic outcomes in social systems characterized by negative feedbacks it can approximate a wide range of commonly encountered theoretical distributions that have been identified as economic statistical equilibrium and displays qualitatively similar behavior to the subbotin and asymmetric subbotin distributions that range from the laplace to the normal distribution in the limit asymmetry in the frequency distributions of economic outcomes can be understood as arising from the unfulfilled expectations of entropy constrained decision makers this paper demonstrates the logic of the qrse model in an application to us stock market data dating back to 1926 the model provides a parsimonious explanation for the distribution of rates of return on private equities as well as a behavioral foundation for asset price fluctuations

the persistence of profits a european comparison this paper is concerned with modeling the movements in profits of firms over time at the heart of the emp irical model is a latent variables problem which arises from the fact that entry and imitation do not actually have to occur to have an ef fect on profits a solution to this problem is explored and then emp irical results are presented comparing a sample of firms from the uni ted kingdom france and west germany copyright 1988 by royal economic society

natural resource federalism preferences versus connectivity for patchy resources we examine the efficiency of centralized versus decentralized management of spatially connected renewable resources when users have heterogeneous preferences for conservation versus extraction resource mobility induces a spatial externality while spatial preference heterogeneity drives a wedge between users privately optimal extraction rates we first address these market failures analytically and show that the first is most efficiently handled with centralized planning while the second is best tackled with decentralized management except in special cases neither approach will be first best but which arises as second best depends on the relative strength of preference heterogeneity versus spatial mobility of the resource we illustrate the theory and test its robustness with a numerical example

a transaction costs analysis of innovations in the organization of pharmaceutical r d abstract this paper uses transaction costs economics to analyze the increasing importance of vertical disintegration of r d by large pharmaceutical and chemical firms first it discusses three characteristics of the research based pharmaceutical industry then it shows that market failures related to long term joint venture r d contracts between firms and university laboratories are less significant than appears at first and may account for their striking increase over the past fifteen years

optimal harvesting of stochastic spatial resources abstract we characterize the optimal harvest of a renewable resource in a generalized stochastic spatially explicit model despite the complexity of the model we are able to obtain sharp analytical results we find that the optimal harvest rule in general depends upon dispersal patterns of the resource across space and only in special circumstances do we find a modified golden rule of growth that is independent of dispersal patterns we also find that the optimal harvest rule may include closure of some areas to harvest either on a temporary or permanent basis biological reserves reserves alone cannot correct open access but may under sufficient spatial heterogeneity and connectivity increase profits if appropriate harvest controls are in place outside of reserves

dynamic use of closures and imperfectly enforced quotas in a metapopulation the dynamic efficiency of closures in bioeconomic systems depends upon stock levels and in situ values that evolve over time and on relative costs of implementation a model of a harvested metapopulation is presented in which second best reduction of harvest from open access levels using input quotas balances monitoring costs against dynamic benefits of mitigating overharvesting temporary or permanent closures though generally still second best are preferable to quotas under certain conditions as demonstrated for a representative patch and time period interactions between patches are discussed numerical solutions illustrate comparative dynamics of closure use and show their potential benefits in a dynamic regulatory path

are output growth rate distributions fat tailed some evidence from oecd countries this work explores some distributional properties of aggregate output growth rate time series we show that in the majority of oecd countries output growth rate distributions are well approximated by symmetric exponential power densities with tails much fatter than those of a gaussian fat tails robustly emerge in output growth rates independently of i the way we measure aggregate output ii the family of densities employed in the estimation iii the length of time lags used to compute growth rates we also show that fat tails still characterize output growth rate distributions even after one washes away outliers autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity

scaling in economics a reader s guide this paper discusses examples of scaling laws in economics and finance it argues that these regularities in data are useful for disciplining theory formation estimation of the conditional predictive distribution and estimation of impulse response functions is a main goal of econometric work scaling type regularities give useful information on the underlying data generating process the ability of scaling laws to suggest lines of potentially fruitful research was illustrated by the suggestion of several speculative research projects in this paper most importantly the paper stresses the challenges that face empirical and theoretical researchers who wish to make use of scaling law type regularities to improve econometric identification of the underlying causal data generating mechanism copyright 1999 by oxford university press

the voracity effect abstract we analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate capital stock in equilibrium this leads to slow economic growth and a voracity effect by which a shock such as a terms of trade windfall perversely generates a more than proportionate increase in fiscal redistribution and reduces growth we also show that a dilution in the concentration of power leads to faster growth and a less procyclical response to shocks jel f43 o10 o23 o40

technology development mode a transaction cost conceptualization technology alliances have emerged in the past decade as a significant mode for the development of innovation the present research assesses the factors explaining whether firms will engage in such technology alliances or utilize the more traditional mode of internal r d the hypotheses stem from a transaction cost conceptualization results suggest that firms which pursue technology alliances are likely to have less commitment to product category specific assets to face higher technological uncertainty to be more capable at measuring innovation performance to have more successful technology alliance experiences and to compete in lower growth product categories 1998 john wiley sons ltd

why are distributions of firm growth rates tent shaped abstract recent empirical analyses on different datasets have revealed a common exponential behavior in the shape of the probability density of the corporate growth rates we present new evidence on this topic from the italian manufacturing industry and propose a very simple mechanism that under rather general assumptions provides a robust explanation for the observed regularities

economic impacts of marine reserves the importance of spatial behavior abstract marine biologists have shown virtually unqualified support for managing fisheries with marine reserves signifying a new resource management paradigm that recognizes the importance of spatial processes in exploited systems most modeling of reserves employs simplifying assumptions about the behavior of fishermen in response to spatial closures we show that a realistic depiction of fishermen behavior dramatically alters the conclusions about reserves we develop estimate and calibrate an integrated bioeconomic model of the sea urchin fishery in northern california and use it to simulate reserve policies our behavioral model shows how economic incentives determine both participation and location choices of fishermen we compare simulations with behavioral response to biological modeling that presumes that effort is spatially uniform and unresponsive to economic incentives we demonstrate that optimistic conclusions about reserves may be an artifact of simplifying assumptions that ignore economic behavior

policy effectiveness in spatial resource wars a two region model abstract we develop a spatial resource model in continuous time in which two agents strategically exploit a mobile resource in a two region setup to counteract the overexploitation of the resource the tragedy of commons that occurs when players are free to choose where to harvest the regulator can establish a series of spatially structured policies we compare the equilibria in the case of a common resource with those that emerge when the regulator either creates a natural reserve or assigns territorial user rights to the players we show that when technological and preference parameters dictate a low harvesting effort the policies are ineffective in promoting the conservation of the resource and in addition they lead to a lower payoff for at least one of the players conversely in a context of higher harvesting effort the intervention can help to safeguard the resource preventing extinction while also improving the welfare of both players

explaining the distribution of firm growth rates empirical analyses on aggregated datasets have revealed a common exponential behavior in the shape of the probability density of corporate growth rates we present clear cut evidence on this topic using disaggregated data we explain the observed regularities proposing a model in which firms ability to take up new business opportunities increases with the number of opportunities already exploited a theoretical result is presented for the limiting case in which the number of firms and opportunities go to infinity moreover using simulations we show that even in a small industry the agreement with asymptotic results is almost complete

optimal harvesting of a spatial renewable resource abstract in this paper we investigate the optimal harvesting of a renewable natural resource while in most standard approaches the resource is located at a single point we allow the resource to be distributed spatially consequently an agent who exploits the resource has to travel from one location to another for a fixed planning horizon we investigate the speed and the path of harvesting chosen by the agent we show that the agent adjusts this speed so as to visit each location only once even in the absence of travelling cost since the agent does not return to any location for a second harvest it is optimal to fully deplete the resource upon arrival a similar type of bang bang solution results when we drop the assumption of a constant harvesting rate allowing for a variable harvesting rate the agent chooses to fully exploit the resource either in the last or in the first travelling period a society interested in conserving some of the resource thus has to take measures to limit the exploitative behaviour of the agent

partial enclosure of the commons abstract we examine the efficiency distributional and environmental consequences of assigning spatial property rights to part of a spatially connected natural resource while the remainder is competed for by an open access fringe we refer to this as partial enclosure of the commons we obtain sharp analytical results regarding partial enclosure of the commons including 1 while second best it typically improves welfare relative to no property rights 2 all resource users can be made better off 3 positive rents arise in the open access area and 4 the resource maintains higher stocks under spatial heterogeneity we also characterize spatial regions that are ideal candidates for partial enclosure typically society should seek to enclose those patches with high environmental productivity and high self retention but whether high economic productivity promotes or relegates a patch may depend on one s objective

wealth varying intertemporal elasticities of substitution evidence from panel and aggregate data abstract this paper constructs and estimates a model of consumer preferences in which the intertemporal elasticity of substitution ies of consumption expenditure rises with the level of wealth the purpose of this paper is to measure the effect that systematic variation in the ies of poor and rich consumers has on the ies of aggregate consumption expenditure we find economically significant differences in the ies of poor and rich consumers in indian panel data on the consumption of individual households we also find economically significant differences in the ies measured in aggregate time series data for the u s and india

optimal ecosystem management when species compete for limiting resources abstract resource based models of species competition have been introduced recently as an alternative to the classical theory based on the lotca volterra methodological approach to species competition we consider economic management of an ecosystem for a tilman model of mechanistic resource based species competition where the growth of species is limited by resource availability we analyze the equilibrium ecosystem state resulting from nature s equilibrium and two basic management problems the privately optimal management problem and the socially optimal management problem under private optimization agents do not take into account externalities associated with the effects of their management practices on ecosystem service flows while these effects are accounted for at the socially optimal management we show that in general three different equilibrium species specialization patterns emerge we completely characterize these patterns for the ecological economic model with linear structure and we provide policy rules so that the privately optimal state could be driven toward the socially optimal or the natural equilibrium we also develop an approach for unifying equilibrium price theory with tilman ecological modeling and we prove the existence and analyze the stability of a price equilibrium for a stochastic discrete choice model of species specialization finally we discuss equilibrium specialization and policy issues for a generalized model where species and resources interact among themselves as a conceptual basis for incorporating detailed ecological modeling into economic management

r d cooperation between firms a perceived transaction cost perspective transaction cost is considered as an explanatory variable for the choice between markets and various organizational arrangements for performing some predefined tasks such as engaging in private r d with respect to r d cooperation between firms we show that the perception of high transaction cost is related to certain characteristics of the firm and to the type of r d task we also show a relationship between the perception of transaction cost and the perceived success of the cooperation the analysis sheds light on various determinants of transaction costs

spatial renewable resource extraction under possible regime shift how will countries harvesting mobile natural resources react to the possibility of regime shift we address the non cooperative exploitation of a migratory renewable resource in the presence of possible regime shift that affects its movement motivated by the anticipated effects of climate change we model a regime shift that will alter the spatial movement patterns of the resource at some point in the future we develop a stochastic spatial bioeconomic model to address the effects of this class of regime shift on non cooperative harvest decisions made by decentralized owners such as countries exploiting a migratory fish or other natural resource stock we find that the threat of a future shift modies the standard golden rule and may induce more aggressive harvest everywhere irrespective of whether the owner will be advantaged or disadvantaged by the shift we also identify conditions under which the threat of regime shift induces owners to reduce harvest rates in advance of the shift our analysis suggests that different property rights structures single ownership vs common property or heterogeneous growth can give rise to previously unexplored incentives and can even reverse conventional wisdom about how countries will react to the prospect of future environmental change

implementation issues the political economy of efficient fishing responses to over fishing are very similar efforts begin with gear restrictions area closures and seasonal closures entry restrictions including a license moratorium and a license buyback program often follow the results are similar too over fishing and effort increases continue common property not open access regimes community development quotas cdqs private property regimes individual transferable quotas itqs and pigouvian taxes can produce the optimal amount at the minimum cost of course the details of each are critical political feasibility issues and local conditions are factored into the cdq itq tax decision and the resolution of the key details of each fisher heterogeneity and possible ways to reduce it are especially important issues since over fishing problems initial government responses and results are so common the policy formulation process and recommended outcome have potential global relevance 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

exposing strategic assets to create new competencies the case of technological acquisition in the waste management industry in europe and north america this paper presents a model that complements the research stream of transaction cost economics with the dynamic capabilities approach the paper shows that even though technological alliances involving specific assets deployed in emerging industries are exposed to high transaction costs they possess attributes that make them attractive first they facilitate the creation of tacit competencies and second they reduce the uncertainty arising from technological innovation and regulatory changes the model is empirically tested in the hazardous waste management industry by using primary data collected through the use of questionnaires the method links governance structure choices to managers perceptions of the uncertainty surrounding the acquisition of technology

the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption in the united states and the united kingdom as robert e hall 1988 notes the magnitude of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption is one of the central questions of macroeconomics do higher expected real interest rates lead to deferred consumption the authors extend hall s methodology and model and compare results for the united sta tes and the united kingdom in both cases they directly estimate the mo ving average process that temporal aggregation might induce in the random disturbances and take account of consumers who do not follow the lif e cycle permanent income model of consumption copyright 1992 by mit press

public transaction costs of agri environmental schemes and their determinants analysing stakeholders involvement and perceptions despite an overall budget increase for rural development in the new programming period 2007 2013 most older member states in the now expanded european union are facing a substantial reduction in their budget for rural development and thus for agri environmental schemes aess it can be assumed that in most countries none or at best only part of this loss can be offset by national funds therefore the design of more efficient national governance structures for aess which decrease public transaction costs tcs would be an appropriate solution to this problem the objective of this paper is to define the factors that influence these public tcs so that appropriate action can then be taken to reduce them a statistical analysis with a proxy for public tcs is combined with an analysis of stakeholder perceptions excluding farmers concerning public tc influencing factors the research showed that it is mainly scheme related factors that are perceived to be important although the governance structure institutional environment and level of trust also play a role finally the analysis of perceptions concerning tcs also showed that aes related actors have a limited knowledge of tcs

asymmetric competition risk and return distribution abstract we propose a parsimonious statistical model of firm competition where structural differences in the strength of competitive pressure and the magnitude of return fluctuations above and below the system wide benchmark translate into a skewed subbotin or asymmetric exponential power aep distribution of returns to capital empirical evidence from us data illustrates that the aep distribution compares favorably to popular alternative models such as the symmetric or asymmetric laplace density in terms of goodness of fit when entry and exit dynamics of markets are taken into account

gibrat s law redux think profitability instead of growth we argue that firm profitability can be conveniently characterized by one and the same diffusion process for all firms akin to gibrat s seminal idea of a common stochastic description for the dynamics of firm growth here we show that the diffusion of profit rates applies across all surviving corporations irrespective of their size or industry which is not true for growth rates the diffusion process is empirically consistent with both the cross sectional distribution of profit rates and the individual time series of corporate profit rates leading to the notion of a statistical equilibrium this has stark and unexpected implications for our understanding of individual destinies since the model and data suggest that idiosyncratic efforts have no impact on the aggregate distributional outcome instead idiosyncratic efforts merely affect the individual persistence of abnormal profits from the system wide norm put differently corporations have to participate in the same game and can merely choose the speed at which they play it but they cannot bend the rules

do industry level analyses improve forecasts of financial performance prior research documents mean reversion in firm profitability and growth under the implicit assumption that profitability and growth of all firms revert to a common benchmark at the same rate however a large body of academic research suggests that there are systematic interindustry differences e g industry barriers to entry that differentially affect firm performance based on industry membership we evaluate the relative forecast accuracy of mean reverting models at the industry and economywide levels and find that industry specific models are generally more accurate in predicting firm growth but not profitability

bioeconomics of spatial exploitation in a patchy environment abstract this paper presents a model of renewable resource exploitation that incorporates both intertemporal dynamics and spatial movement the model combines the h s gordon vernon smith hypothesis of a rent dissipation process with ricardian notions that resources are exploited across space in a pattern dependent upon relative profitabilities the population structure is characterized in a manner consistent with modern biological ideas that stress patchiness heterogeneity and interconnections among and between patches generally we find the equilibrium patterns of biomass and effort across the system to be dependent upon bioeconomic conditions within each patch and the nature of the biological dispersal mechanism between patches we use simple examples to illustrate how the distribution of effort throughout the system reflects the heterogeneity and the spatial biological linkages

earnings management to avoid earnings decreases and losses this paper provides evidence that firms manage reported earnings to avoid earnings decreases and losses specifically in cross sectional distributions of earnings changes and earnings we lind unusually low frequencies of small decreases in earnings and small losscs and unusually high frequencies of small increases in earnings and small positive income we find evidence that two components of earnings cash flow from operations and changes in working capital are used to achieve increases in earnings we present two theories based on stakeholder use of information processing heuristics and prospect theory about the motivation for avoidance of earnings decreases and losses

social composition social conflict and economic development this article investigates how the existence of non cooperative social groups that appropriate resources either peacefully or through contest affects economic growth when property rights are unenforceable for symmetric groups it shows that economic growth is generated only in peaceful societies for the case of asymmetric groups rebel equilibria are investigated in which a large majority behaves peacefully although challenged by an aggressive minority the article explains how conflict intensity and the rate of economic growth depend on social fractionalisation general productivity of the economy power of social elites and the ease at which resources are appropriated

technology and oliver williamson s transaction cost economics abstract oliver williamson has greatly contributed to refining neoclassical economics by incorporating transaction costs and internal organization yet his new institutional economics too easily dismisses the role of technology in doing so he has replaced the determinism of technological production efficiencies with the determinism of transaction cost efficiencies a review shows that williamson s new institutionalism has evolved through three stages in terms of the focus of his analysis and his views of transactions throughout this evolution however his proposed solutions to organizational failures have actually continued to rely heavily upon technology

an examination of opportunistic action within research alliances evidence from the biotechnology industry abstract like a photographer trying to take a perfect picture an entrepreneur trying to increase the odds of survival must learn very quickly that focus is everything and what demands an entrepreneur s immediate focus is the development of new products entrepreneurial ventures depend on the rapid creation of new products to gain access to early cash flows create legitimacy grab early market share and increase their odds of survival schoonhoven eisenhardt and lymman 1990 however the increasing costs and complexity of new product development are making it difficult for entrepreneurial ventures to contain the assets needed for successful r d within their boundaries forcing them to reach beyond their borders to access resources barley et al 1992 document the use of more than 900 contractual research agreements within the biotechnology industry alone recent research has also found a positive relationship between the use of alliances in the r d process and the rate of new product development deeds and hill 1996 shan walker and kogut 1994 this particular study focuses on the use of relational contracts in the r d process and extends the prior work on relational contracts to create an explanatory model of the deterrents to opportunism within a relational contract the article begins with a discussion of the traditional modes of deterring opportunism and of modes of deterring opportunism based on the development of a strong cross boundary relationship from this discussion hypotheses are derived that relate certain characteristics of the alliance frequency of communication strength of contractual deterrents hostage investments age of the relationship etc to the level of opportunism within the relationship these hypotheses are then tested on a sample of 109 research alliances in the biotechnology industry we found significant evidence that a strong relationship between the partners serves as a much more effective deterrent to opportunistic action than the creation of hostage investments or contingent claims contracts in particular the results for frequency of communication and the background of the firm highlight the importance of the top management team s understanding and involvement in the management of research alliances the strong results for background congruence indicates the importance of shared expectations and understandings between the partners the strong empirical results for the hypothesized u shaped relationship between age and opportunism provide support for the existence of both a honeymoon period in the relationship and a liability of adolescence among research alliances the data also suggest that the honeymoon period for an alliance will last about 4 6 years we also find that the honeymoon period for alliances that are of little importance to the future of the firm is only 4 1 years and in our sample of alliances that were important to the future of the firm the honeymoon period extended from 4 6 years to 6 1 years

industry differences in the persistence of firm specific returns some firms such as kellogg nestle hewlett packard and boeing have consistently earned significantly higher returns than their immediate competitors why do intraindustry rents persist for these firms competition typically erodes these rents as evidenced by the strong convergence of firm profitability to the industry mean illustrated in figure 1 i claim that the persistence of these firmspecific rents depends at least partly on industry economic structure similar to richard e caves and michael e porter s 1977 mobility barriers so the rents are more persistent in some industries than others in this paper i test which of the theoretical industry factors are significant to support my claim i also show that the persistence of abnormal returns differs widely and systematically across industries for example an industry with highly persistent profitability differences is the american automobile industry in the 1970 s as illustrated by figure 2 which graphs differences in returns on assets roa s over time throughout the 1970 s general motors maintained a persistent significant profitability advantage over ford while ford held a persistent advantage over chrysler this situation did change later but it is still true that during the 1970 s there was no apparent convergence of profitability differences among the big three auto makers a comparison of figures 1 and 2 suggests that the economy wide result of figure 1 is merely an average over very different industries with convergence rates ranging from almost zero as in automobiles in the 1970 s to very rapid my methods for estimating persistence of above average returns improve on previous studies in several ways first i only consider the persistence of returns around the industry mean the persistence of this intra industry or firm specific rent rather than total rent has not been previously investigated yet the factors affecting firm specific rents need not be the same as those affecting industry rents second i estimate persistence in several ways finally i use a wider range of explanatory variables than earlier studies this study is structured as follows section i explains the concept of persistent firmspecific rents later sections specify the empirical model and estimate persistence by industry section ii theoretically relate industry factors to these varying persistence estimates section iii discuss cross sectional regression estimates section iv and provide conclusions section v

profit persistence in the very long run evidence from survivors and exiters one of the main shortcomings of the profit persistence literature is the fact that it looks only at surviving companies this paper uses a unique dataset to analyse profit persistence in two different samples of stationary series 85 surviving us companies from 1950 1999 and 72 exiters while the exiters perform more competitively than the survivors there is still significant evidence for profit persistence in both samples concentration and growth of the industry as well as size and volatility of profits seem to play an important role in explaining persistence

a metapopulation model with private property and a common pool abstract a metapopulation illustrated by barnacles has a spatial distribution and a two stage life cycle in the model developed here space limits expansion introducing a profitable harvest activity of adults leads to harvest at only one site a solution driven by biological increasing returns the model is of interdisciplinary interest because the natural resource has common property characteristics in its larval stage but a private property character in its adult stage the model permits economic valuation of lost habitat

harvesting the commons we study a socio ecological model in which a continuum of consumers harvest a common property renewable natural resource markov perfect nash equilibria of the corresponding non cooperative game are derived and are compared with collectively optimal harvesting policies the underlying mechanisms that drive open access commons in our model are shaped by population size harvesting costs and the ecosystem s productivity if other things equal population is small relative to harvesting costs unmanaged commons do not face destruction more strikingly they are harvested at the collectively optimal rate property rights do not matter in that parametric regime because the resource has no social scarcity value however if other things equal population is large relative to harvesting costs open access renewable natural resources suffer from the tragedy of the commons property rights matter there because the resource has a social scarcity price the population size relative to harvesting costs at which the socio ecological system bifurcates is an increasing function of the ecosystem s productivity a sudden crash in productivity population overshoot or decline in harvesting costs can tip an unmanaged common into ruin the model provides a way to interpret historical and archaeological findings on the collapse of those societies that have been studied by scholars

existence and properties of equilibria for a dynamic game on productive assets abstract we consider a model in which two agents share access to the same stock of a productive asset and study the implications of non cooperative consumption behavior over time under standard assumptions on the production function we construct infinitely many nash equilibria all of which consist of stationary markovian strategies these equilibria result in overconsumption so that the uniquely determined long run asset stock is too low as compared to the cooperative solution however in the limit as the discount rate becomes sufficiently small the stead states generated by the markovian nash equilibria converge to the efficient steady state journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c73 o41 q22

social fractionalization endogenous appropriation norms and economic development we investigate how social composition affects competitive and cooperative behaviour in a linear growth model without secure property rights if a society is homogeneous or highly fractionalized it is in the self interest of people to cooperate the first best allocation is enforced through trigger strategies and growth is independent from social structure if a society is polarized i e if it consists of a small number of groups the first best solution can turn out to be unenforceable and groups will follow an exploitative strategy in this case the rate of growth is monotonously decreasing in the degree of fractionalization

sharing clams tragedy of an incomplete commons abstract a dispersive phase is part of the reproductive cycle of most living organisms when economic agents are limited to harvesting a renewable resource from a fixed geographical area dispersion of the resource creates a tragedy of the commons a dynamic optimization problem is constructed where economic agents control fixed areas the growth of the resource occurring in each area disperses it is shown that the desired stock size for maximizing agents in their own area decreases inversely with the amount of leakage the degree to which the resource is common the socially optimal stock in each region is a function of the marginal profit for all areas that receive dispersing organisms and may be greater than the privately optimal stock for an area if that area captured all of its own resource growth this effect is enhanced if the dispersal rate is stock dependent possibly creating a double tragedy in a source and sink situation the socially optimal solution may involve eliminating all harvesting in the source region

book rate of return and prediction of earnings changes an empirical investigation over the years there has developed a fairly substantial body of research on the time series of earnings as a whole this literature concludes that changes in annual accounting earnings are unpredictable that is earnings follow a random walk 1 based on this result some inferences of economic substance policy have been claimed 2 in this paper we reconsider empirical issues which at least to some extent have been obscured by this conclusion we argue that the above result is only true in a limited sense since a modest enlargement of the predictive information set should allow for a rejection of the hypothesis that earnings changes are

forecasting profitability and earnings a study of the uk market 1982 2000 an approach recently developed by fama and french 2000 is applied to the study of whether uk company profitability is mean reverting a sample of roughly 987 firms per year for a period from 1982 2000 is used drawn from datastream in a simple partial adjustment model convergence towards the mean at a rate of about 25 per year is found the results are very similar in direction to those of fama and french 2000 but the results do not display significant non linearities the change in profitability appears to be more strongly influenced by dividends in the uk

the evolution of social norms in common property resource use the problem of extracting commonly owned renewable resources is examined within an evolutionary game theoretic framework it is shown that cooperative behavior guided by norms of restraint and punishment may be stable in a well defined sense against invasion by narrowly self interested behavior the resource stock dynamics are integrated with the evolutionary game dynamics effects of changes in prices technology and social cohesion on extraction behavior and the long run stock are analyzed when threshold values of the parameters are crossed social norms can break down leading generally to the lowering of the long run stock and possibly to its extinction copyright 1996 by american economic association

why not africa growth and welfare effects of secure property rights this paper presents the long run equilibrium and developmentdynamics in the neoclassical growth model and a simple modelof endogenous growth when property rights are absent theresults are compared to the outcome in a corresponding modelwith secure property rights the main findings are that thereexists a considerable gain in level and growth of consumptionfrom establishing secure property rights that economicperformance without property rights worsens with an increasingnumber of competing social groups and that the existence orabsence of property rights explains conditional convergence

consumption over the life cycle and over the business cycle the main aim of this paper is to assess the validity of the life cycle model of consumption in particular we address an issue that has recently received much attention especially in the macroeconomic literature that of excess sensitivity of consumption growth to income growth we do this using a time series of cross sections and a novel and flexible parameterization of preferences the former allows us to address aggregation issues directly while with the latter we can allow both the discount factor and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution eis to be affected by various observable variables and lifetime wealth the main findings can be summarized as follows i the excess sensitivity of consumption growth to labor income disappears when we control for demographic variables this is true both at life cycle and business cycle frequencies ii estimation of a flexible specification of preferences indicates that the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is a function of several variables including the level of consumption the eis increases with the level of consumption as expected iii the variables that change the eis are also important in explaining why we observe excess sensitivity over the business cycle iv we are able to reconcile our results with those reported both in the macro and micro literature v in our specification the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is not very well determined this result however should be taken with care as we have not made an effort to construct a preferred specification which would probably include additional controls for labor supply behavior the evidence presented shows that the life cycle model cannot be easily dismissed indeed we believe that the model does a good job at representing consumption behavior both over the life cycle and over the business cycle