ipo underpricing and flotation methods in taiwan a stochastic frontier approach adopting stochastic frontier analysis this article studies the pricing model and underpricing phenomenon of the initial public offerings ipos in taiwan and further elucidates the potential impact of offering mechanisms on underpricing the sampling period is from 1996 to 2003 in which 647 ipos are selected empirical results suggest that issuing firms with greater earning potentials less risk or less asymmetric information have lower underpricing furthermore the variables included to explain underpricing are mostly significant especially the proxy variable for flotation method observed mean ipo underpricing is 20 59 in the sample period compared to 17 12 for the subgroup using the auction method this statistically significant difference implies that the introduction of the auction method can help reduce ipo underpricing

learning about a new technology pineapple in ghana this paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agri cultural technology in ghana we use unique data on farmers communication patterns to define each individual s information neighborhood conditional on many potentially confounding variables we find evidence that farmers adjust their inputs to align with those of their information neighbors who were surpris ingly successful in previous periods the relationship of these input adjustments to experience further indicates the presence of social learning in addition applying the same method to input choices for another crop of known technol ogy correctly indicates an absence of social learning effects jel d83 013 033 q16

challenges in the portuguese textile and clothing industry a fight for survival abstractthe portuguese textile and clothing industry thrived after 1960 when portugal joined the european free trade association and it has been an important industry in portugal in terms of valu

cost relationships and globalization in the australian clothing industry abstractaustralia developed a substantial clothing industry with protectionist international trade policies including prohibitively high tariffs quotas and subsidies the industry became an important source of jobs with over 6 5 per cent of total manufacturing employment at the close of the 1960s as australia has moved towards freer trade employment in clothing production has fallen substantially the question of whether the clothing industry can remain viable in its new environment became an important issue here we examine two crucial economic considerations relating to that question economies of scale and relations substitute complementary between the various inputs both domestic and outsourced foreign the findings strongly indicate the presence of economies of scale and that the industry has reduced its unit costs over the period of study the results also suggest that most of the inputs are substitutes for one another although only the estimated cross price elasticities between capital a

production technologies and technical efficiency evidence from portuguese manufacturing industry this paper aims to test whether a given type of process innovation namely flexible production technologies fpts contributes to increased firm efficiency using one year firm data from the portuguese manufacturing industry and applying a parametric stochastic frontier approach individual technical efficiencies are obtained and their determinants simultaneously estimated using a single step procedure recently proposed by battese and coelli 1995 the results support the hypothesis that technological flexibility measured through the use of fpts is important in explaining differences in efficiency furthermore given the specifications of the stochastic frontier function the null hypothesis that portuguese firms are fully technically efficient is rejected

social networks and technology adoption in northern mozambique despite their potentially strong impact on poverty agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in mozambique we analyse whether and how individual adoption decisions depend upon the choices of others in the same social networks since farmers anticipate that they will share information with others we expect farmers to be more likely to adopt when they know many other adopters dynamic considerations however suggest that farmers who know many adopters might strategically delay adoption to free ride on the information gathered by others we present empirical evidence that shows that the relationship between the probability of adoption and the number of known adopters is shaped as an inverse u in line with information sharing the network effect is stronger for farmers who report discussing agriculture with others the data contains information which is needed to ameliorate the identification issues that commonly arise in this context in particular social networks are precisely identified and in addition we can control for village heterogeneity and endogenous group formation

how many more cites is a 3 000 open access fee buying you empirical evidence from a natural experiment we analyze the effect of open access oa status of journal articles on citations using cross sectional and panel data from mathematics and economics we perform negative binomial poisson and generalized method of moments instrumental variable methods regressions we benefit from a natural experiment via hybrid oa pilot agreements citations to pre prints allow us to identify the intrinsic quality of articles prior to journal publication overall our analysis suggests that there is no hybrid oa citation benefit however for the subpopulation of articles without oa pre or post prints we find positive hybrid oa effects for the full sample and each discipline separately jel l17 o33 a11

open access and academic journal quality ing from complicated signaling behavior by informed authors lerner and tirole show that adding upstream private information does not alter their basic analysis their proposition 4 454 aea papers and proceedings may 2005

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

computer use and productivity growth in us federal government agencies 1987 92 we examine the impact of information technology it on productivity in the public sector econometrically using data from the bls federal productivity measurement program and from computer intelligence infocorp and by interviewing some government officials we estimate a production function for government services that includes it capital as an input and find a strong positive relationship across federal agencies between productivity growth and computer intensity growth during the period 1987 92 controlling for growth in compensation and other outlays per employee and in the number of employees our estimates are consistent with the hypothesis that there are excess returns to it capital

the economics of technical change this paper reviews the recent rapidly growing literature on technical change in the economy it concentrates on innovations and their diffusion at firm and industry level since this was the area designated as relatively weak in earlier literature surveys the review argues that the extensive empirical evidence and theoretical analysis now available presents a basic challenge to neoclassical theory after indicating some weaknesses in the neo schumpeterian literature the paper concludes by advocating an experiment with a new form of assessment by neighboring disciplines to economics itself which would take full account of the fundamental issues at stake in this modern methodenstreit c 1994 academic press inc copyright 1994 by oxford university press

the korean textile industry still competitive after all these years although a vital part of the economy the korean textile industry has been challenged by the recent reduction of international trade barriers particularly as this industry was fully integrated into general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt in 2005 the textile industries in japan and many other countries have also faced difficulties this study examines future prospects for the korean industry by investigating the presence of economies of scale and relationships among the inputs of domestic capital labour and intermediate goods as well as foreign intermediate goods the findings are consistent with constant returns to scale and a substitutes relationship among all input pairs except for domestic capital and foreign intermediate goods thus there appear to be no further cost reductions available through increased output and economies of scale however some reduction in industry output may not result in increased unit costs either a reduction in the price of foreign intermediate goods will not onl

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

the inevitable limits of eu r d funding abstract the experience of the past 40 years in national policies for and european cooperation in science and technology points to clear conclusions about eu policies first the prevailing notions of technology gaps between europe and japan and the usa notions which have been a driving force in the eu policy for research and technology have been exaggerated however real gaps exist amongst the eu member countries themselves secondly it is unrealistic to expect eu funded r d programmes by themselves to make a substantial difference to the rate and direction of technical change in europe however eu policies for competition and other forms of regulation trade and investment can have a major influence on corporate decisions about technical change it is important for eu innovation policy to promote favourable framework conditions within which business firms are encouraged to improve their technological and related organisational practices

fair trade organic coffee rural livelihoods and the agrarian question southern mexican coffee families in transition summary we use a random sample of coffee producing households in southern mexico to compare opportunities associated with government subsidies and migration to the role of fair trade organic coffee in household livelihoods although land and labor returns among fair trade organic coffee growers are higher than for conventional growers differences in yields are more important than price premiums moreover investment in education and labor opportunities outside coffee dominate those in fair trade organic coffee the results highlight the value of an integrated approach to the agrarian question that improves productivity and prices and supports other pathways for improving incomes

actual versus virtual employment in europe is spain different we study the evolution of sectoral employment and labor cost in eleven european countries in the last two decades our statistical approach consists in decomposing for country industry and temporal effects virtual economies are constructed by filtering country effects we find that sectoral effects account for more than 80 of the long run differentials across countries and industries in employment growth whereas countryspecific effects are more important in the analysis of labor cost dynamics the initial distribution of labor across sectors plays a crucial role in explaining cross country differences on employment we pay special attention to spain the country that has experienced a higher persistent unemployment rate and show that this can be the effect of a severe problem of sectoral reallocation originating from the very high weight of the agricultural employment in 1975 our study of the virtual economies also provides new evidence about the relative performance of some industries and or countries e g the poor performance of belgium the relatively good performance of italy in particular its textile sector etc

identifying the effect of open access on citations using a panel of science journals an open access journal allows free online access to its articles obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support using panel data on science journals we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations in contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies we find a more modest effect moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8 on average in our sample the benefit is concentrated among top ranked journals in fact open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom ranked journals in our sample leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers attention generating losers as well as winners jel l17 o33

ranking economics departments in europe a statistical approach we provide a ranking of economics departments in europe and we discuss the methods used to obtain it the jel cd rom serves as a database for a period covering 10 years journals are ranked using a combination of expert opinions and citation data to produce a scale from 1 to 10 the publication output and habits of fifteen european countries plus california are then compared individuals with a contribution greater than a predetermined minimum level are regrouped into departments which are ranked according to their total scores a standard deviation is provided to underline the uncertainty of this ranking

productivity returns to scale and the elasticity of factor substitution in the usa apparel industry abstract in light of the growing trade deficit and unemployment in the us apparel industry we estimate the industry s productivity and efficiency for the period 1976 93 utilizing a variable elasticity of factor substitution production function the results indicate industry adjustment by increasing labor productivity and maintaining fairly stable profits despite job losses performance thus far does not justify additional protectionist trade policy however due to evidence of rapidly decreasing capital productivity substantial technological improvements will be necessary with an elasticity of factor substitution less than one and decreasing an increase in factor prices could result in higher apparel prices and preference for cheaper imports competition in the industry could be intensified by recent rules of the wto to liberalize trade in apparel

cost relationships and challenges in the spanish apparel industry in the twenty first century the spanish textile and apparel industries have faced substantial challenges resulting in declining sales and employment this study concentrates on the apparel industry since its economic challenges and opportunities differ from those of the textile industry the analysis employs a transcendental logarithmic cost function to investigate the presence of scale economies and the interrelationships among inputs of domestic capital labour and intermediate goods as well as outsourced intermediate products for the spanish apparel industry and discusses the implications for its future competitiveness and the demand for domestic inputs the results are consistent with diseconomies of scale or in the case of one model possibly constant returns to scale indicating that some contraction of the industry due to international competition will not raise unit costs all of the inputs except for capital and intermediate goods were found to be substitutes an important finding is that the

enlargement and the textiles clothing and footwear industry the textiles clothing and footwear tcf industry is a labour intensive industry strongly determined by globalization and easy relocation to low cost countries hence also in the european union this industry is relatively more important in the low wage regions of the eu southern periphery with the envisaged enlargement however these countries fear a further shift of the sector to central and eastern europe as these countries still have a comparative advantage in terms of low labour costs the present article investigates whether this fear is justified looking at three main aspects first at the position and history of the tcf sector in the european union and its role in the eu periphery second at the sector in the central and eastern accession countries and third at gobalization issues the second aspect is dealt with in great detail as development trends in the central and east european countries are important and telling much has happened during the 15 year and more period between the collapse of communism and the eu membership in this region most important the integration to the eu by the means of trade in particular outward processing trade these developments mainly seem to determine future trends in an enlarged europe overall however future prospects have to be seen in a global context strongly influencing the sector via changes in global trade policies

the development and use of machine tools in historical perspective abstract improvements and diffusion of machine tools have had a major impact on productivity in manufacturing industry since the industrial revolution the impact has been both direct and indirect the direct impact consists of rising labor productivity through the use of faster more accurate more mechanized machines and of the higher capital productivity through higher operating rates greater reliability and higher utilization rates the indirect impact arises as the use of new or improved machine tools has necessitated or facilitated organizational changes affecting both labor capital raw materials and energy the magnitude of these impacts has varied over the years with the areas of application as new production methods have made possible entirely new products or lowered the cost of existing products sufficiently to create new markets the first part of the paper contains a review of the historical development of machine tool technology since the industrial revolution paying particular attention to the role of interaction between producers and users of machine tools the second part focuses on the way in which recent development differs from that in earlier periods in particular it is found that the major changes in machine tool technology from the so called american system of manufactures in the early 19th century to the development of detroit automation in the 1950s have tended to improve mass production methods by contrast the development of numerical control beginning in 1948 has opened up the possibility of extending industrial production methods and automation to areas previously characterized more by handicraft methods even though this technology is not yet fully utilized it is clear that the economics of industrial production has been revolutionized by the cost reduction of small scale production relative to large scale and the degree of flexibility offered by the technology the third section of the paper deals with the present development trends particularly discussing the increasing importance of flexibility and the shifting emphasis from development of individual pieces of machinery to integration and control of entire manufacturing processes i a through the use of industrial robots the reasons for the need for greater flexibility in manufacturing are also identified

does online availability increase citations theory and evidence from a panel of economics and business journals abstract does online availability boost citations using a panel of citations to economics and business journals we show that the enormous effects found in previous studies were an artifact of their failure to control for article quality disappearing once fixed effects are added as controls the absence of aggregate effects masks heterogeneity across platforms jstor has a uniquely large effect boosting citations around 10 we examine other sources of heterogeneity including whether jstor disproportionately increases cites from developing countries or to long tail articles our theoretical analysis informs the econometric specification and allows citation increases to be translated into welfare terms

free labor for costly journals there is a remarkable difference between the prices that commercial publishers charge to libraries for economics journals and the prices charged by professional societies and university presses this price difference does not reflect a difference in quality the six most cited economics journals listed in the social science citation index are all nonprofit journals and their library subscription prices average about 180 per year only five of the 20 most cited journals are owned by commercial publishers and the average price of these five journals is about 1660 per year tables 1 and 2 compare library costs and measures of cost effectiveness for the ten most cited nonprofit journals and the ten most cited journals owned by commercial presses the average price per page of the commercial journals is about six times as high and the average price per citation is about 16 times as high as for the nonprofit journals in tables 1 and 2 the first column shows the year 2001 library subscription price and the second column shows the price per page calculated by dividing year 2001 price by the number of pages published in the year 2000 the third column reports the price per citation this is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that articles in this journal were cited in 1998 as recorded by the social science citation index the fourth column price per recent citation is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that the 1996 and 1997 volumes of the journal were cited in 1998 the citation rank is found by ranking journals according to the number of times that this journal was cited in 1998 the differences in prices and cost effectiveness between nonprofit and commercial journals are similar for less prestigious journals i have assembled a data

comparative advantage in manufacturing as a determinant of industrialization the korean case abstract this paper provides appropriate empirical evidence to test competing hypotheses regarding korean industrialization has korea followed the neoclassical path of comparative advantage or did korea anticipate comparative advantage by calculating revealed comparative advantage rca indexes of korean manufacturing sectors for 1965 1992 my empirical results support the hypotheses of blumenthal and amsden that korea gained dynamic comparative advantage by forcing capital intensive industry within a labor surplus economy the results also show however that comparative advantage of labor intensive industries should not be underestimated my results show that korea rapidly gained competitiveness in some heavy or medium industries through antineoclassical political behavior while it maintained competitiveness for a relatively long time in some light industries through neoclassical market behavior

the economic sustainability of certified coffee recent evidence from mexico and peru consumers increasingly act on preferences for a more just and sustainable world by purchasing certified agricultural products using survey data from coffee growers in mexico and peru we explore the economic sustainability of certified coffee looking at conventional fair trade organic and rainforest alliance certified growers the analysis reveals that yields rather than price premiums are most important for increasing net cash returns for coffee growing households given the link between net returns and producer participation in certified coffee schemes the findings suggest that certification norms that permit improving yields are essential for improving grower welfare and attracting and maintaining growers

disentangling the effects of fair trade on the quality of malian cotton the increasing importance of premium segments and private labels raise skepticism about the ability of fair trade to help smallholders compete in high value added markets using panel data collected in mali this paper contributes to the debate by estimating the impact of fairtrade certification on the quality of malian cotton controlling for the nonrandom certification of producers results show a significant impact on the quality of cotton produced by both certified and geographically close noncertified growers via spillover effects the analysis suggests that contract farming enforced by third parties and demonstration effects foster the adoption of innovative agricultural practices

adoption curves and social interactions this paper considers the observational implications of social influences on adoption decisions for an environment of perfect foresight adopters we argue that social influences can produce two observable effects 1 discontinuities in unconditional adoption curves and 2 pattern reversals in conditional adoption curves in which earlier adoption is found for one group of actors versus another when fundamentals suggest the reverse ordering should occur in turn the presence of either of these features can under weak assumptions be interpreted as evidence of social influences as such these properties are robust implications of social effects jel c40 d01 o33

two sided markets a progress report the paper provides a road map to the burgeoning literature on two sided markets and presents new results it identifies two sided markets with markets in which the structure and not only the level of prices charged by platforms matters the failure of the coase theorem is necessary but not sufficient for two sidedness the paper builds a model integrating usage and membership externalities that unifies two hitherto disparate strands of the literature emphasizing either form of externality and obtains new results on the mix of membership and usage charges when price setting or bargaining determine payments between end users

are there spatial spillovers in the adoption of clean technology the case of organic dairy farming this paper examines spatial spillovers associated with the adoption of organic dairy farming we hypothesize that neighboring farmers can help to reduce the uncertainty of organic conversion by lowering the fixed costs of learning about the organic system a spatially explicit 10 year panel dataset of more than 1 900 dairy farms in southwestern wisconsin is used as input into a reduced form econometric model of the decision to convert to organic production using an identification strategy that exploits the panel aspect of the micro dataset we find evidence that the presence of neighboring organic dairy farms affects the conversion decision

constructing confidence intervals using the bootstrap an application to a multi product cost function a multi product cost function system is estimated for 387 banks in states that allow branch banking the bootstrap resampling method is used to construct confidence intervals for marginal costs output cost elasticities economies of scale and scope and allen elasticities of substitution confidence intervals for these measures are usually constructed using a first order variance approximation under a normality assumption but such confidence intervals are inexact if the measures are not normally distributed or the variance approximations are imprecise we find that the bootstrap standard error estimates can differ significantly from the usual estimates furthermore we use the bootstrap to expand the analysis of cost function regularity properties copyright 1990 by mit press

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

production technology elasticity of substitution and technical efficiency of the handloom textile industry of bangladesh a number of translog and cobb douglas frontier production models were estimated for the bangladesh handloom textile industry to investigate its production technology and technical efficiency in production it was found that the technical efficiency of the industry in producing cloth was only 41 it was concluded that the industry might improve its technical efficiency by increasing its male female labour ratio and yarn capital ratio and decreasing its hired family labour ratio and labour capital ratio the production technology of the industry was found to be characterized by a linearly homogeneous cobb douglas function the elasticity of substitution between labour and capital for the industry was found to be unity

the importance of learning in the adoption of high yielding variety seeds to date due to the lack of panel data most micro level empirical studies of technology adoption have used cross sectional data these studies cannot examine the dynamic processes of adoption such as learning this article uses panel data to study the adoption of a new high yielding variety seed first it establishes that learning is an important variable in the adoption process second it establishes that cross sectional estimates of a dynamic process are biased but that the extent of this bias may be small third it illustrates the econometric methods needed to estimate a dynamic model when controlling for unobserved household heterogeneity

information transmission in irrigation technology adoption and diffusion social learning extension services and spatial effects in this article we investigate the role of information transmission in promoting agricultural technology adoption and diffusion through extension services and social learning we develop a theoretical model of technology adoption and diffusion which we then empirically apply using duration analysis on a micro dataset consisting of recall data covering the period 1994 2004 for olive producing farms from crete greece our findings suggest that both extension services and social learning are strong determinants of technology adoption and diffusion while the effectiveness of each of the two informational channels is enhanced by the presence of the other

the complex dynamics of smallholder technology adoption the case of sri in madagascar this article explores the dynamics of smallholder technology adoption with particular reference to a high yielding low external input rice production method in madagascar we present a simple model of technology adoption by farm households in an environment of incomplete financial and land markets we then use a probit model and symmetrically censored least squares estimation of a dynamic tobit model to analyze the decisions to adopt expand and disadopt the method we find that seasonal liquidity constraints discourage adoption by poorer farmers learning effects both from extension agents and from other farmers exert significant influence over adoption decisions

social learning and technology adoption the case of coffee pruning in peru a unique natural experiment involving a coffee pruning technology is used to study social learning the yield effects of pruning take two years to appear a characteristic that aids in identifying social learning apart from correlated unobservable variables that are a concern in the social learning and technology adoption literature panel data are employed that start with a private initiative which introduced systematic pruning in central peru and that contain the population of participating growers results show a jump of at least 0 15 in the probability of adoption two years after the first pruning in a grower s group jel classifications d83 q12

diffusion of development the late industrializing model and greater east asia diffusion of development the late industrializing model and greater east asia author s alice h amsden source the american economic review vol 81 no 2 papers and proceedings of the hundred and third annual meeting of the american economic association may 1991 pp 282 286 published by american economic association stable url http www jstor org stable 2006870 accessed 15 01 2010 13 30

the impact of unionization on motor carrier costs i introduction the increasingly competitive markets fostered by the motor carrier act of 1980 have forced motor carriers to focus on cost saving strategies intended to reduce operating miles fuel consumption and capital and labor expenses there are two reasons unions firms may be at a competitive disadvantage in these efforts first although the union nonunion wage differential has decreased following regulatory reform rose 1987 and hirsch 1988 find that union firms still pay higher wages second managers of unionized firms may have less flexibility in the use of inputs since union work rules restrict the activities and substitutability of drivers terminal workers and terminal facilities indeed harrington 1987 reports that post 1980 trucking expenses are still 40 higher for unionized motor carriers than for nonunion firms unionization may affect carrier cost both by increasing the price of labor and by potentially affecting cost function parameters if union rules make labor less productive the entire cost function will shift upwards for a given set of factor input prices further freeman and medoff 1982 argue that work rules may be expected to result in reduced elasticities of substitution between labor and other inputs in the unionized setting indeed they find that substitution between production labor and other labor in manufacturing is generally lower in unionized settings the impact of unionization on production has been investigated in industries such as construction coal mining hospitals and the cement industry by allen 1984 1986a 1986b byrnes et al 1988 and clark 1980a 1980b the results have been inconclusive with unionized firms being more productive than nonunion firms in some instances and less productive in others studies such as allen 1986c and addison and hirsch 1989 have utilized production function methodologies that use restrictive functional forms which impose homogeneity and identical elasticities of substitution between pairs of inputs allen 1986c examines the relative efficiency of union and nonunion firms with a translog cost function allowing for union effects using intercept and slope parameters that vary by union status in his study of different types of construction projects he finds significant differences between the cost functions for union and nonunion firms but no evidence of the inelasticity of factor substitutions as hypothesized by medoff and freeman in fact his estimates of factor demand elasticities show no discernible pattern for union versus nonunion firms leading him to conclude that work rules do not have the anticipated impact on elasticity the purpose of this study is to test whether unionization impacts motor carrier costs and if so to determine the direction of the impact of particular interest is whether the work rules imposed by the teamster s union have had a significant impact on factor substitutability in unionized firms as argued by freeman and medoff 1982 friedlaender and spady 1981 daughety et al 1985 mcmullen and stanley 1988 grimm et al 1989 and ying s 1990 studies of motor carrier industry costs have used translog cost functions which implicitly assume that union and nonunion cost functions arise from the same production technology this is equivalent to accepting the hypothesis that unionization does not affect the production structure of motor carrier firms if unionization does affect a firm s production process the results from these studies could be biased accordingly this study uses a translog cost function to test for differences in the cost structure of union and nonunion carriers not only is the translog cost function standard in the motor carrier literature permitting comparison of these results with those of previous work it also allows the flexibility necessary to examine the differential impact of unions on cost function parameters and elasticities of substitution between factors

estimating total factor productivity growth in singapore at sectoral level using data envelopment analysis trends in total factor productivity growth tfpg are examined in the ten major sectors of singapore data are drawn from the yearbook of statistics singapore various issues and economic survey of singapore series ranging from the year 1985 to 2000 due to the heterogeneous characteristic of each sector and non availability of reliable input price data this study uses a non parametric frontier methodology known as data envelopment analysis dea to obtain the malmquist productivity index at the sectoral level the results can help singapore identify the best practice sector and laggards in three aspects efficiency change technical change and tfpg which is the qualitative productivity improvements needed for long term economic growth the three sets of productivity estimates are adjusted for effects of inflation and business cycles so that they are more reliable for policy implications this exercise will provide a platform for more detailed study on the determinants of tfp growth in different s

strategic choice of flexible production technologies and welfare implications this paper examines the market conditions under which firms would choose a more flexible production technology with respect to product design the authors use a two stage game in which firms choose between flexible and less flexible production technologies in the first stage and subsequently choose output they find that consumers would benefit from the introductions of flexible production technologies in their model the authors also find that the production technology game is a prisoner s dilemma when firms invest in flexible manufacturing systems they derive the conditions under which the resulting equilibria are efficient copyright 1990 by blackwell publishing ltd