the ces production function the accounting identity and occam s razor this paper reconsiders the argument that empirical estimations of aggregate production functions may be interpreted merely as statistical artefact the reason is that occam s razor or herbert simon s principle of parsimony suggests that the aggregate production function together with the side equations derived from the usual neoclassical optimizing conditions simply reflect the underlying accounting identity that value added definitionally equals the wage bill plus total profits this argument is illustrated with respect to the empirical evidence presented by arrow chenery minhas and solow review of economics and statistics xliii 225 50 1961 and which led them to derive the constant elasticity of substitution aggregate production function it is shown that their results are more parsimoniously explained with reference to the underlying accounting identity than to any technological relationship

the summer vacation influences on the hours students work the authors look at what determines the number of hours united kingdom undergraduate students work in summer vacation employment this is of interest because such employment is now because of the nature of the united kingdom higher education system providing an important means of financing for students they find the differing personal characteristics of students do not either on their own or collectively exert a significant influence on the total number of hours individual students were employed during their summer vacation this finding would suggest that students were treated in the labour market as a homogeneous group although the students themselves exercised a degree of self selection regarding the decision as to whether to seek full or part time employment a possible explanation for these findings is the similarity of the work being sought by students during the summer vacation the authors find no evidence of a backward bending labour supply curve for students which may be due to the limite

the labour market participation of northern ireland university students this paper seeks to examine what factors are associated with student labour force participation in northern ireland in both term time and vacation making use of quarterly labour force survey data for the period march 1998 february 1999 the results suggest female students are more likely to work than male students mature students are less likely to work than non mature students roman catholic students are less likely to work than non roman catholic students students living at home are more likely to work than student living away from home and an increase in the actual or predicted wage increases the probability of labour force participation the author suggests that some of these results are due to the particular nature of the northern ireland socio economic situation while others are likely to be true for the rest of the united kingdom

agglomeration economies and industrial decentralization the wage productivity trade offs abstract this paper examines the industrial location trade offs between the productivity advantages of the metropolitan center and the lower land and the labor costs in outlying regions within the state of sao paulo brazil the results indicate that while plant productivity is enhanced by the considerable agglomeration economies existing within metropolitan sao paulo firms must pay for these benefits in high wages and land costs offsetting labor cost savings can be achieved by locating in outlying regions the evidence presented in this paper suggests that market forces may lead eventually to a spontaneous decentralization of industry

public capital and long run costs in u k manufacturing a model of u k manufacturing production that incorporates the inputs of public as well as private capital is specified and estimated the model is then used to measure the contribution of public capital to productivity growth over the period 1966 to 1990 it is found that before 1980 the public and private capital contributions were of comparable magnitude after 1980 the contribution of public capital declined significantly copyright 1993 by royal economic society

economics of scale versus technological change an aggregate product function for switzerland in estimating a production function for an economy constant returns to scale has been a traditionally maintained hypothesis in modelling switzerland s gross output as a function of labor capital and imports a general functional form is selected which displays increasing returns to scale and is not hicks neutral it is a technology which is labor saving import saving and capital using this paper also quantifies the mismeasurements associated with using a constant returns to scale model to estimate such variables as own elasticities of demand elasticities of substitution impacts on factor income and rate of technical progress

localization economies vertical organization and trade this paper develops a model of regional production networks based on localization economies i consider an industry with two activities one with location specific external economies the other with constant returns under autarky localization economies imply the formation of an industry center agglomeration drives up wages in the center causing the constant returns activity to disperse to outlying regions trade recreates the regional production network on a global scale i apply the model to data from the mexican apparel industry estimation results on mexico s pre and post trade regional apparel wage structure are consistent with localization economies implications for the north american free trade agreement nafta are discussed this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

aggregate returns to scale in greek manufacturing this paper takes an imperfect competition model of the economy in order to investigate for retuns to scale in greek manufacturing and examines through a small scale macroeconomic model the implication of estimates for this purpose a price wage and demand for output equations are estimated using annual data for the period 1954 94 prices come through the profits maximization process and depend on wage capital rental demand and a number of other variables denoing technology and market competition results are clearly in favour of increasing returns to scale hypothesis although alternative explanations for the negative demand effect on prices cannot be excluded

a new approach to understanding labour supply of disabled people abstractthe main interest of this article is to propose an individual utility maximization model to explain the low participation of disabled people we account for heterogeneity of preferences and

to reveal or not to reveal strategic disclosure of private information in negotiation abstract within the bargaining literature it is widely held that negotiators should never reveal information that will lead to disclosure of their reservation prices we analyze a simple bargaining and search model in which the informed buyer can choose to reveal his cost of searching for an outside price which determines his reservation price to the uninformed seller we demonstrate that buyers can be made better off by revealing their search cost more interestingly we also find that depending on the assumed distribution of search costs sometimes buyers with relatively low search costs should reveal their private information whereas in other cases buyers with relatively high search costs should do so we then test our model experimentally and find that subjects behavior is not entirely consistent with theoretical predictions in general bargainers behavior is better explained by a bounded rationality model similar to fictitious play

factor endowments and the international location of production econometric evidence for the oecd 1970 1985 abstract this paper uses data on manufacturing output and factor endowments for 20 oecd countries from 1970 to 1985 to examine the production side of the factor proportions model under well known conditions there will be a linear rybczynski relationship between sectoral outputs and factor endowments across countries this proposition is investigated using the kalman filter and maximum likelihood techniques to estimate time varying parameter models the results indicate that capital and unskilled labor are sources of comparative advantage for most industries while skilled labor is a source of comparative disadvantage residual analysis shows that the neoclassical model has poor explanatory power

the competitiveness of the uk aerospace industry porter s five competitive forces model provides an analytical framework for assessing the uk aerospace industry s competitiveness in this article various statistical indicators are used to measure competitiveness based on published data at the industry and firm level supplemented with information from company interviews the indicators include productivity output firm size development time scales labour hoarding exports and profitability the empirical results of this article suggest that over the period 1980 to 2000 the uk aerospace industry improved its competitiveness compared with the usa and the eu

declining city productivity and the growth of rural regions a test of alternative explanations prior to the 1970s the u s witnessed a net flow of migrants from its nonmetropolitan to its metropolitan region since then however a dramatic reversal of this long standing tendency for people to concentrate in metropolitan places has been observed nonmetropolitan places have gained migrants largely as the result of increased outmigration from metropolitan areas an open question has been to what extent the employment profile between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan places parallels that of population this paper introduces a data series compiled from county business patterns that is used to analyze the employment trends for the first time the analysis reveals that not only is total employment growing fastest in nonmetropolitan counties but it also appears that the turnaround in employment growth preceded the reversal in the rate of population increase manufacturing which had faster nonmetropolitan growth rates even during the 195os appears to have led in the development of nonmetropolitan counties this shift of manufacturing has attracted other sectors as well as people to nonmetropolitan places part of the recent growth of nonmetropolitan counties represented nothing more than a continuation of suburbanization or spillover of people and jobs which permitted one more outward bound into adjacent nonmetropolitan counties but there is more to nonmetropolitan development than simply metropolitan spillover nonmetropolitan counties far removed from metropolitan ones are also growing faster than metropolitan counties it is shown that this rural renaissance is part of a general deconcentration

international productivity and factor price comparisons abstract using oecd input output tables for a diverse group of 33 countries in the year 2000 and estimates of each country s factor stocks i compute factor payments for aggregate labor and capital with value added data adjusted for self employment by sector using a detailed technology matrix for the u s i compute factor specific productivity measures in each country relative to the u s and show that these measures are strongly correlated with the pattern of wages and rental rates i find that many low income countries with low labor productivity have relatively high capital productivity i also find a distinctive pattern between factor productivity and factor payments depending on whether a country has a high or low wage rental ratio compared to the u s i show these findings are consistent with the existence of sector based differences in production technology and complementarities between factors

uk regional plant and machinery capital stocks and premature scrapping harris r i d 1997 uk regional plant and machinery capital stocks and premature scrapping reg studies 31 737 750 historically a lack of capital stock data has severely limited the ability to carry out supply side analyses of the british regional economy hence the present paper extends an earlier study to produce uk regional plant and machinery capital stocks for the 1968 91 period in doing so it is necessary to take account of premature scrapping especially during the period after 1977 this was achieved using industry by region data on plant closures which provides a reasonable approximation that is much more reliable than when using figures obtained from interpolating the trend output capital ratio this paper also considers the importance of differing industrial structures on the composition and growth of regional manufacturing capital stock together with why it is important to adjust capital stocks for utilization when estimating supply side relationships based on uk regional data harr

firm turnover restructuring and labour productivity in transition the case of poland this article explores the impact of turnover and restructuring on labour productivity in the polish economy over the period 1988 to 1993 changes in aggregate productivity are decomposed into elements corresponding to productivity growth among survivors market share growth by survivors and the contributions of entering and exiting firms the traditional entry and exit effects begin to work as transition to a market economy progresses however initial productivity improvements are due to changes in market shares of the existing firms following the break up of large enterprises regression analysis shows that changes in the firm level productivity are affected by restructuring and a more competitive economic environment

equivalence scale relativities and the extent of inequality and poverty most inequality and poverty theory analyzes equivalent income distributions for homogeneous populations incomes are assumed to be deflated by an equivalence scale that accounts for differences in needs between households yet in practice there is no consensus about what the appropriate equivalence scale is the authors analyze how the choice of equivalence scale affects inequality and poverty measures and show that there is a systematic relationship between equivalence scale generosity and the extent of inequality and poverty they consider most of the measures in common use and provide some empirical illustrations copyright 1992 by royal economic society

productivity across industries and countries time series theory and evidence the authors examine whether convergence in aggregate productivity is also occurring at the industry level in fourteen oecd countries from 1970 to 1987 using both cross section and time series methods they find convergence in some sectors such as services however surprisingly the authors find that convergence does not hold for the manufacturing sector decomposing aggregate convergence into industry productivity gains and changing sectoral shares of output they find the service sector to be responsible for the bulk of cross country convergence to the united states the authors develop a new result on the asymptotic normality of panel unit root estimators to formally test within sector convergence copyright 1996 by mit press

the role of external search in bilateral bargaining we consider the problem of bargaining between two individuals who can also search for possible alternatives to each other s offers we explicitly incorporate the search activity into the process of bargaining a disagreement in bargaining will lead each individual to search for an outside offer in the hope of improving his future bargaining position and attaining a more favorable outcome we model the interlaced phases of bargaining and search over time as an extensive noncooperative game we characterize the associated subgame perfect equilibrium outcome and strategies finally we show that superior search ability yields an individual a more favorable outcome and hence represents a greater bargaining strength

tariffs and capacity utilization by monopolistically competitive firms abstract this paper examines the effect of a tariff imposed on a monopolistically competitive mc sector on firm output in a 2 2 2 model with nonhomothetic technology if the mc sector is capital intensive then a tariff will improve the terms of trade lower home firm demand elasticity but raise firm output relative to foreign firms if the mc sector is labor intensive then excess supply for firm output may be decreasing in price so the tariff may worsen the home country s terms of trade home firm demand elasticity falls but firm output rises relative to the partner country these results qualify conclusions based on single sector and single country models

unemployment in britain male unemployment in britain has risen from around 2 per cent in the 1950s to around 17 per cent in 1985 see figure 1 the figures are for male unemployment because there is no consistent series for women 1 even more remarkably unemployment has fallen in only three years out of the last twenty 1973 1978 and 1979 to account for this we need a model that explains both changes in the natural or non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu and deviations from it we use a three equation supply side model centred on the labour market this has two main features the first concerns the determination of employment in the short run the labour demand function that we use cuts through the fruitless debate now raging especially in europe as to whether current unemployment is classical or keynesian according to the classical view employment is too high because real wages are too high according to the keynesian view real wages are not binding and unemployment is high because the product market does not clear with prices too high relative to nominal demand the whole debate is set in the framework of perfect competition yet in perfect competition prices are set by impersonal forces and it is not clear what could possibly stop prices clearing the market it is much more reasonable to think of prices as being set by imperfectly competitive firms existing prices being the best they can think of given the demand they face in this context firms demand for labour will depend on both the real product wage and the level of real aggregate demand this is the demand function we estimate and it conforms both to common sense and to the data however this does not imply that employment can be made to grow without limit by pumping up real demand for in the medium term when price surprises are eliminated our model determines three variables employment real wages and real demand on the basis of three equations an employment equation a price equation and a wage equation thus in the medium term there is a natural level of employment and corresponding to this a natural level of real aggregate demand the second key feature of our model concerns the medium term determination of unemployment in the medium term the planned mark up of wages over prices in wage settlements must be consistent with the mark up of prices over wage costs in employers pricing behaviour for if wage setters try to set real product wages higher than is consistent with employers pricing behaviour this generates ever increasing inflation thus the key to understanding unemployment in the medium term is the behaviour of wage setters if events occur that push them towards too high real wages then unemployment has to rise to offset these influences we shall call these influences wage pressure variables or push factors and they are clearly crucial in understanding unemployment the variables here include the social security system employment protection

estimation of cross country differences in industry production functions abstract international trade economists typically assume that there are no cross country differences in industry total factor productivity tfp in contrast this paper finds large and persistent tfp differences across a group of industrialized countries in the 1980s the paper calculates tfp indices and statistically examines the sources of the observed large tfp differences across countries two hypotheses are examined to account for tfp differences constant returns to scale production with country specific technological differences and industry level scale economies with identical technology in each country the data support the constant returns different technology hypothesis over the increasing returns same technology hypothesis

bargaining and search with recall a two period model with complete information two standard results of previous bargaining models state that delay is generally not expected to occur under complete information and bargaining outcome depends crucially on the bargainers intrinsic characteristics that determine their reservation prices and in general bargainers with better reservation prices tend to get better outcomes this paper considers a bilateral bargaining problem with complete information in which one of the bargainers the buyer is allowed to search while bargaining more importantly we assume that the buyer is allowed to recall past outside offers we find that quite contrary to the standard results of previous complete information bargaining models complete information renders no guarantee for immediate resolution of bargaining and the effect of changing the buyer s search cost on each player s bargaining outcome is unpredictable the major driving force of these two results is the assumption that the buyer can recall past outside offers

disability insurance benefits and labor supply a critical input for assessing the optimal size of disability insurance programs is the elasticity of labor force participation with respect to the generosity of benefits unfortunately this parameter has been difficult to estimate in the context of the u s disability insurance program since all workers face an identical benefits schedule i surmount this problem by studying the experience of canada which operates two distinct disability insurance programs for quebec and for the rest of canada the latter program raised its benefits by 36 percent in january 1987 whereas benefits in quebec were constant i find a sizable labor supply response to the policy change my central estimates imply an elasticity of labor force nonparticipation with respect to disability insurance benefits of 0 28 0 36

married women s hours and participation revisited elasticity estimates are presented for participation and hours of work for a sample of married women in the social change and economic life initiative sceli 1986 data set a logit model is used to estimate the participation function and a tobit model is employed to estimate an hours of work equation the results are in agreement with the evidence available for the uk the own wage hours of work elasticity is found to be relatively elastic with negligible effects detected for non labour income and the husband or spouse s wage the effects on participation of an unemployed husband or spouse were examined and found to have a strong negative effect

why pay more corporate tax avoidance through transfer pricing in oecd countries this paper presents suggestive evidence of income shifting in response to differences in corporate tax rates for a large selection of oecd countries we use a new method to disentangle the income shifting effects from the effects of tax rates on real activity our baseline estimates suggest that a substantial share of the revenues from a unilateral increase in the corporate tax rate is lost because of a decline in reported income

an approximate solution to rent seeking contests with private information abstract we propose an approximate solution to rent seeking contests in which participants have heterogeneous and private valuations the procedure only requires common knowledge about the mean of the distribution of valuations we obtain a closed form expression for an agent s level of investment and subject it to comparative statics analysis we then assess the performance of the model and find that the proposed solution provides a remarkably effective approximation of the optimal solution for a wide range of parameter specifications

productivity growth in british manufacturing spatial variation in the role of scale economies technological growth and industrial structure this paper investigates the role of scale economies technological growth and industrial structure in creating spatial variation in manufacturing labour and total factor tfp productivity in britain separate estimates of a translog specification are presented for british manufacturing firms located in defined areas of the country over the period 1994 1998 the results show that tfp change due to scale economies and technological growth has been of much less important in influencing the output growth of manufacturing firms than input growth or industrial structure regarding the components of tfp technological growth has been the dominant force at play the analysis of average labour productivity identifies shifts to other factors of production and industrial structure as being the main determinants of change scale economies appear to have had a marginal role the results identify spatial patterns indicating that more favourable locational effects arise for firms in areas adjacent to large urban centre

value added in further education and vocational training in northern ireland at the age of 16 many young people in the uk decide to leave school and enter vocational education or training either at a further education fe college or on a government training scheme in spite of the size and importance of this group the current debate about education and training standards has tended to focus more on how to improve schools largely neglecting the potential contribution to be made by the fe and vocational training sectors this study seeks to begin to redress this imbalance by examining the extent to which those young people leaving school and entering vocational education or training at 16 obtained further qualifications up to the age of 18 in particular there is an examination of whether the choice between fe and government training schemes at age 16 influences the subsequent success of young people in terms of gaining additional qualifications adopting an ordered probit approach to modelling qualifications levels the results contradict the somewhat pessimistic common pe

finding common ground between ecological economics and post keynesian economics abstract post keynesian economics and ecological economics have in common that they are considered to be heterodox schools of thought aside from that there has not been a strong connection between them previous books on post keynesian economics contain no chapter on environmental or ecological issues this neglect has led leading ecological economists to criticize post keynesians for succumbing to the same growth paradigm as the neoclassical school this paper argues that the two approaches are complementary in the sense that they each have different strong points ecological economics has correctly pointed out that the growth of the global economy may not be welfare improving anymore whereas post keynesians have gained valuable insights into the functioning of the capitalist growth process to determine the feasibility of a synthesis between the two schools the paper compares their approaches to the problems of production consumption and economic dynamics as well as the associated policy recommendations it shows that on a theoretical level the two schools have much in common but their policy conclusions differ with regard to the desirability of further growth the paper concludes that a synthesis of both approaches may lead to a better understanding of how a capitalist economy operates in a natural environment with limits to growth and to better informed policy advice

multidimensional welfare distributions empirical application to household panel data from vietnam this article explores the empirical application of theoretical multidimensional welfare distribution analysis techniques to real household welfare distributions the article operationalizes recent conceptual developments in multidimensional distribution theory and assesses their usefulness for the measurement of multidimensional household inequality the results strongly highlight the importance of bringing nonmonetary aspects of household welfare into the forefront of inequality analysis agreement over the various approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality entails however nontrivial decisions that may limit the practical usefulness of these measures we suggest that the use of multidimensional inequality ranges and the application of restrictive dominance criteria to multidimensional welfare distributions may open significant scope for further developments in the empirical analysis of multidimensional inequality

the cyclical behavior of marginal cost and price the author examines the cyclical behavior of price marginal cost margins for u s manufac turing after 1956 short run marginal cost is markedly procyclical this is primarily due to procyclical overtime payments incurred beca use employment is not perfectly flexible in most industries output price fails to respond to the cyclical movement in marginal cost so price marginal cost margins are markedly countercyclical the res ults contradict business cycle theories that explain low production i n a recession by a high real cost of producing they support theories that explain low production in a recession by the inability of firms to sell their output copyright 1987 by american economic association

labour market discrimination on the basis of health an application to uk data an analysis of wage discrimination is carried out on the basis of health on uk data with a number of important modifications first selection is controlled for into both health and labour market status second the direct effect of health upon productivity is accounted for and third discrimination is examined with regard to participation as well as wages the question of selection into health status is found to be of little empirical importance but taking account of selection into labour market status and the direct impact of health upon productivity leads to a fall in measured discrimination the paper finds similar results with regard to participation it is also examined whether these effects differ across age and gender

adjustment costs production functions and capital labour substitution in greek manufacturing 1958 80 treating adjustment costs as part of the decision maker s objective function a differential system of factor demand equations is derived and estimated jointly with a ces production function using data for greek manufacturing estimates of production function parameters and adjustment cost functions are thus obtained the results show that the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour is slightly higher than one increasing or constant returns to scale exist for most manufacturing branches there is considerable technical progress of around 4 adjustment cost due to investment and employement changes are responsible for an annual loss of 8 54 of output whereas labour seems to be used inefficiently in greek manufacturing

barriers to entry and development we ask whether barriers to entry are a quantitatively important reason for the income gap between developing countries and the united states we develop a tractable general equilibrium model that captures the effects of barriers to entry and the other main distortions typically considered in the development literature we carry our model to the data and ask it to match the main development facts from the penn world table we find that this requires large barriers to entry in developing countries which account for about half of the income gap with the united states

dynamic factor demands under imperfect competition the greek manufucturing industry 1958 1981 the intertemporal maximization problem of the firm under adjustment costs for its factors of production and imperfect competition in the output market is considered the first order conditions with respect to capital and labour the production function and the demand equation have been jointly estimated using greek manufacturing data and values for the structural parameters have been obtained the estimates are plausible and most of them significant tests of the overidentifying restirctions are unable to reject the overall specification of the model at conventional levels of significance

trade effects of scale economies evidence from four eu countries abstract this paper investigates the empirical relationship between the magnitude of scale economies and trade scale economies are directly estimated from a non linear translog production function system these estimates are then introduced in an original supply demand export model the application of this model to four eu countries indicates that exports unambiguously rise with the degree of scale economies these results support schmitt and yu s econ lett 74 2001 127 theoretical expectations

bargaining and search with incomplete information about outside options abstract this paper considers a model of bargaining in which the seller makes offers and the buyer can search at a cost for an outside option the outside option cannot be credibly communicated and the seller s offer is recallable by the buyer for one period there are essentially two equilibrium regimes for sufficiently high search cost the game ends immediately otherwise the search occurs in equilibrium compared to the case where the buyer can communicate his outside option the seller is worse off and the game results in search for a smaller set of values of the search cost i e less equilibrium delay c72

agglomeration economies in urban manufacturing industries a case of japanese cities abstract the effects of urban agglomeration economies on productivities in two digit manufacturing industries is estimated using the cross section data of japanese cities in 1979 urbanization and localization economies which are major forms of urban agglomeration economies are explicitly separated the estimates of these economies vary considerably among industries light industries receive more productive advantages from urbanization economies than from localization economies but heavy industries experience these economies more from localization economies than from urbanization economies

how different are the production functions of the european manufacturing sectors new empirical evidence the neo classical model of international trade assumes that the total factor productivity tfp of a sector is common across countries that returns to scale are constant and that the sectoral production of the countries differs by virtue of the factor endowments in this article we consider whether the differences in production can also be explained by the economies of scale in the national industries and by the technological differences across countries to test this hypothesis we estimate three models proposed in harrigan 1999 with data for eight european union eu member states covering the period 1978 to 1992 and analyse how the tfp changes from country to country

correcting for biases when estimating production functions an illusion of the laws of algebra this paper shows that the endogeneity bias that allegedly appears when estimating production functions using value data and which the literature has tried to deal with since the 1940s is simply the result of omitted variable bias due to a poor approximation to an accounting identity this problem has no econometric solution as a result recent attempts to solve the problem by developing new estimators are questioned the only possible way to estimate the technological parameters of the production function is to use physical quantities

multiple equilibria in the british labour market some empirical evidence abstract this paper takes a simple imperfectly competitive aggregate labour market model with increasing returns which can lead to non existence or multiplicity of equilibria the model is estimated using annual aggregate data for britain some evidence is found and recent british economic history is interpreted using the model

disability in italian households income poverty and labour market participation this article studies the economic effects of disabled members on italian households with the aim of identifying a suitable target group for welfare policies survey of households income and wealth data for the year 2000 is used preliminary results show significant differences in levels of income and poverty diffusion to the detriment of households with disabled members we propose an exogenous explanation the replacement ratio between disability benefits and expected labour income shows that disability benefits do not compensate the potential incomes of the disabled person and of the possible carer except in households with severe socioeconomic disadvantages we also propose an endogenous explanation applying a logit model we show that the labour market participation of the possible carer is reduced in households with disabled persons in order to increase the income of the households with disabled members policy recommendations include the provision of care services and structural policies to impro

the translog production function and variable returns to scale this paper examines existing methods of estimating the translog production function and provides a general framework that allows for variable returns to scale the model is based on the inverse input demand function and embeds a nonhomothetic production technology previous estimation methods are valid only for homogeneous technologies with fixed scale effects estimation results for u s manufacturing show that neither homotheticity and homogeneity nor constant returns to scale is a proper characterization of the underlying structure of production thereby vindicating the empirical relevance of the inverse demand framework that entails a nonhomothetic technology copyright 1992 by mit press

firm location and city size reduced productivity advantages as a factor in the decline of manufacturing in urban areas abstract this paper develops a model of firm location and city size that arrives at theoretical conclusions that differ from those of other authors comparative statics results suggest that changes in national wage levels and productivity levels create no determinate dis advantage for large cities relative to small ones as sites for manufacturing activity increased wage and reduced productivity premiums of large cities however result in unambiguous disadvantages statistical analysis indicates that the productivity advantages of large cities have declined in as many as eight two digit manufacturing industries that provide more than one third of metropolitan production worker employment

pollution abatement and productivity growth evidence from germany japan the netherlands and the united states the passage of environmental legislation was accompanied by concerns about its potential detrimental effect on productivity we assume inputs can be assigned to either abatement activities or good output production this allows us to specify regulated and unregulated production frontiers to determine the association between pollution abatement and productivity growth we then employ our assigned input model to determine the association between productivity and abatement activities for manufacturing industries in germany japan the netherlands and the united states

trade integration and risk sharing what are the effects of increased trade in goods and services on the trade balance we study the effects of reducing transport costs in a ricardian model with complete asset markets and find that this increases the volatility of the trade balance this result applies regardless of whether supply or demand shocks are the main source of economic fluctuations both type of shocks generate fluctuations in the trade balance that are in part moderated by stabilizing movements in the terms of trade trade integration dampens these terms of trade movements and for a given distribution of shocks amplifies fluctuations in the trade balance to overturn this result one must assume that either trade integration is sufficiently biased towards goods with strong comparative advantage and or risk aversion is sufficiently extreme we calibrate the model to u s data and find that for reasonable parameter values increased trade in services could double the volatility of the trade balance

incentive contracts and total factor productivity we propose a transactions cost theory of total factor productivity tfp in a world with asymmetric information and transactions costs productivity must be induced by incentive schemes labor contracts trade off marginal benefits and costs of effort the latter include in addition to the workers marginal disutility of effort organizational costs and rents as the economy grows contracts change endogenously inducing higher effort and productivity transactions costs are also affected by societal characteristics that determine the power of incentives differences in these characteristics may explain cross economy productivity differences numerical experiments demonstrate the model s consistency with time series and cross country observations