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

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

material flows vs natural capital what makes an economy sustainable abstract in the discourse about sustainable development constant natural capital is frequently referred to as a criterion for ecological sustainability but what is natural capital the concept will be analyzed by presenting arguments in favour of using the term and different versions of sustainability strong and weak subsequently a critique of the natural capital concept is brought forward from an ecological as well as from an economic perspective following this critique the use of material inputs and the material input per unit of service mips as a measure for the environmental impact potential is suggested dematerialisation is understood to be an alternative management rule for sustainability in conclusion a change of perspective is proposed due to the conceptual and measurement problems associated with the constant natural capital criterion which refers to a stock it seems more reasonable from a scientific as well as from a practical perspective to add flows i e material inputs to a decision criterion for whether a development is sustainable or not

introduction to dynamic general equilibrium this introduces the symposium on dynamic general equilibrium 2009 elsevier inc all rights reserved jel classification e10 e20 e30

the accounting push and the policy pull balancing environment and economic decisions abstract the use of information in environmental and economic policy has been a theme for over 100 years but standards for integrating environmental and economic information were not adopted until 2012 through the system of environmental economic accounting seea for 20 years the technical push to develop accounts proceeded largely independently of the pull from the intended or likely end users of accounts consequently governments have little knowledge of the accounting or how it might be used we examine why public policy imperatives have not yet pulled environmental accounting into the mainstream and explain how accounting can help reshape government decision making as part of this a model showing the place of accounts in the information system and the policy cycle is presented along with a research agenda and principles for the decision centred design of accounts we conclude that a phased implementation of the accounts as well as additional research into their applications will be needed to build practical understanding and political acceptance of the accounts

adaptation to climate change a review through a development economics lens abstract this paper looks at adaptation to climate change from the point of view of poor households since the development literature has firmly established the role of weather risk as a source of income volatility for the poor and climate change is expected to increase this risk we review the range of risk coping mechanisms available to poorer households with a focus on possible barriers to adaptation we ask both how government interventions affect the set of options available for adaptation and risk coping and also what these adaptive responses imply for the prospects of sustainable development support for adaptation can involve efforts to make existing locations livelihoods and forms of production more resilient to climate risk in situ adaptation or reductions in vulnerability through the geographical and sectoral mobility of the poor transformational adaptation our review shows how successful adaptation will need to strike a balance between the two forms of adaptation avoiding locking in unsustainable practices in locations that are already marginal from an economic perspective and taking account of broader socio economic trends already taking place in many developing countries such as population growth and urbanisation we also highlight important considerations for policy makers which to date have been relatively neglected in the literature in particular related to the dynamic interaction between adaptation and sustainable development

structural change in an open economy we study the importance of international trade in structural change our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks and allows for non unitary income and substitution elasticities we calibrate our model to investigate south korea s structural change between 1971 and 2005 we nd that the shock processes propagated through the model s two main transmission mechanisms non homothetic preferences and the open economy explain virtually all of the evolution of agriculture and services labor shares and the rising part of the hump shape in manufacturing counterfactual exercises show that the role of the open economy is quantitatively important for explaining south korea s structural change

change of competition regime and regional innovative capacities evidence from dairy restructuring in france the aim of this article is to analyze how market actors and farmers in particular mobilize collective coordination capacities to face global changes market price or sectorial policies within different regional contexts a multi scale conceptual framework is proposed to analyze market functioning and transformation over time and space we extend commons and fligstein s work on market institutions to define the notion of competition regime as a combination of four market institutions that legitimizes competition strategies we also mobilize ostrom s work on common property rights regimes to show that a competition regime relies on the creation and management of two systems of common pool resources namely innovation capacity and reputation building this paper then shows the relevance of this framework through the case study of the current restructuring of dairy supply chains in mountainous areas in france it shows that market liberalization strongly destabilizes the regional competition regimes that were based on the appropriation of social rights inherent to the national public policies in the hybrid and specific competition regimes existing territorial coordination devices are not directly threatened and can support the development of new cooperative strategies in all cases with the development of a contractual economy farmers are incited to develop or to strengthen coordination devices to become effective market participants through the development of large territorial producers organizations capable of managing milk supply in volume and quality they would be able to take part in the management of the supply chains to do so the present paper suggests that farmers organizations need material and immaterial investments and assistance from regional public players to build new local collective capacities the competition regime framework is an asset for the design of such public supports in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity taking the regional specificity of the markets institutions and collective capacities into account

perceptual and structural barriers to investing in natural capital economics from an ecological footprint perspective this paper argues that perceptual distortions and prevailing economic rationality far from encouraging investment in natural capital actually accelerate the depletion of natural capital stocks moreover conventional monetary analyses cannot detect the problem this paper therefore makes the case for direct biophysical measurement of relevant stocks and flows and uses for this purpose the ecological footprint concept to develop the argument the paper elaborates the natural capital concept and asserts the need of investing in natural capital to compensate for net losses it shows how the ecological footprint can be used as a biophysical measure for such capital and applies this concept as an analytical tool for examining the barriers to investing in natural capital it picks four issues from a rough taxonomy of barriers and discusses them from an ecological footprint perspective it shows why marginal prices cannot reflect ecological necessities how interregional risk pooling encourages resource liquidation how present terms of trade undermine both local and global ecological stability and how efficiency strategies may actually accelerate resource throughput affirming the necessity of biophysical approaches for exploring the sustainability implications of basic ecological and thermodynamic principles it draws lessons for current development

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

weather variations and international trade in this paper i investigate the effect of weather variations in the exporter and importer countries separately as well as a the difference between weather variations in both countries on bilateral trade flows the analysis is done at the country sectoral and product levels worldwide and over the 1992 2014 period i find a negative effect of temperature variations in the exporter country and in the difference between exporter and importer countries on bilateral trade at the country level at the product level both negative and positive effects arise but the negative effect of temperature dominates the temperature effects are on the agricultural and manufacturing sectors especially in the textile and metals sectors i show that possible channels are the impact of temperature on output and labour productivity the negative impacts are larger in exporter countries that are closer to the equator that have lower quality of institutions and that export to more remote countries if countries are able to adapt to climate change the long term effects of temperature variations should be lower than the contemporaneous effect nevertheless my results on the long term effects analysis do not support this hypothesis suggesting no or very low adaptation moreover the negative effect of temperature is persistent and cumulative through several years after the temperature shock concerning precipitation variation effects they are found mainly at the product level with the positive effect dominating for the affected products

the fossil episode abstract agriculture sector output biocarbon is a good substitute for oil in energy production but oil cannot be used as food this one way substitutability is analyzed in a dynamic general equilibrium model it features three endogenous phases a pure fossil a mixed fossil and biocarbon and an absorbing biocarbon fuel only phase in the latter two the demand for biocarbon as fuel leads to increasing food prices depending on how easily capital and labor can reallocate food prices increase by between 40 and 240 the model is also used to analyze climate consequences of biocarbon fuel polices and of the shale revolution

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

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

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

the economic impacts of climate change evidence from agricultural output and random fluctuations in weather fisher et al 2012 hereafter fhrs have uncovered coding and data errors in our paper deschenes and greenstone 2007 hereafter dg we acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes we are grateful to fhrs for uncovering them we hope that this reply will also contribute to advancing the literature on the vital question of the impact of climate change on the us agricultural sector fhrs main critiques of dg are as follows i there are errors in the weather data and climate change projections used by dg ii the climate change projections are based on the hadley 2 model and scenarios rather than the more recent hadley 3 model and scenarios iii standard errors are biased due to spatial correlation iv the inclusion of state by year fixed effects does not leave enough weather variation to obtain meaningful estimates of the relationship between agriculture profits and weather v storage and inventory adjustment in response to yield shocks invalidate the use of annual profit data and vi fhrs argue that a better specified hedonic model produces robust estimates unlike the results reported in dg four of these critiques have little basis and we respond to them here in the introduction specifically with respect to ii the more recent daily climate predictions were not available when we wrote dg nevertheless the most important issue is providing the reliable estimates of climate change and in this note we report estimates based on the climate model we used in dg and a more recent one that we gained access to in the meantime iii in the primary table on agricultural profits dg reports two sets of standard errors with the first clustered at the county level and the second based on a variance covariance matrix that accounts for spatial correlation using the method proposed in conley 1999 thus the claim of fhrs 2012 seems overblown nevertheless to ease comparisons of papers in this literature this note will adopt the fhrs convention of reporting estimated standard errors clustered at the county and state levels we find that inference is largely unaffected by the choice between these different assumptions about the variance covariance matrix

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

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

economic growth effects of alternative climate change impact channels in economic modeling despite increasing empirical evidence of strong links between climate and economic growth there is no established model to describe the dynamics of how different types of climate shocks affect growth patterns here we present the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the long term dynamics of one time temporary climate shocks on production factors and factor productivity respectively in a ramsey type growth model damages acting directly on production factors allow us to study dynamic effects on factor allocation savings and economic growth we find that the persistence of impacts on economic activity is smallest for climate shocks directly impacting output and successively increases for direct damages on capital loss of labor and productivity shocks related to different responses in savings rates and factor specific growth recurring shocks lead to large welfare effects and long term growth effects directly linked to the persistence of individual shocks endogenous savings and shock anticipation both have adaptive effects but do not eliminate differences between impact channels or significantly lower the dissipation time accounting for endogenous growth mechanisms increases the effects we also find strong effects on income shares important for distributional implications this work fosters conceptual understanding of impact dynamics in growth models opening options for links to empirics

which sectors make poor countries so unproductive which sectors are most responsible for the low total factor productivities of developing countries to answer this question we develop a new framework for sectoral development accounting applying this framework to the penn world table we find that in equipment construction and food the sectoral tfp differences between developing countries and the united states are much larger than in the aggregate however in manufactured consumption the sectoral tfp differences are about equal to the aggregate tfp differences and in services they are much smaller we show that our level of disaggregation allows us to reconcile the results of existing studies of sectoral productivity differences which have focused on noncomparable two sector decompositions of the aggregate data we also show that our results help shed light on existing theories of aggregate tfp differences

embracing uncertainty in building energy efficiency policy a case study of a building energy standard abstract quantified goals for reducing energy consumption in buildings play a significant role in national and international energy policy calculations of potential energy savings from different interventions may be unreliable due to various types of uncertainty resulting in a performance gap between predictions and actual energy consumption yet building energy policy continues to rely heavily on apparently robust calculations of energy savings raising the question of why and how the policy process tolerates uncertainty and inaccuracy when quantification is its central logic we describe a case study of the development of a new mandatory building energy standard in which there is a lack of consensus on the energy it would save we found that when this uncertainty was brought to light the policy process raised other unquantified logics in favour of energy efficiency measures using literature on calculation and expertise we discuss how quantification is used in policy making and how uncertainties are repressed enabling the energy performance gap to persist we conclude that broader awareness of the modes in which quantitative and other logics are used in energy policy and a reframing of the types of energy savings to be made may serve policy making better than an illusion of calculative certainty

green accounting and economic policy abstract through the lens of conventional national accounting resource depletion and natural environment degradation often appear misleadingly as desirable economic growth the old system of national accounts sna has been revised and a set of environmental satellite accounts proposed certain weaknesses however pervade the new proposals the conventional measurements remain largely unaltered and the satellite accounts are of unclear purpose and unnecessarily complex as proposed they rely on the valuation of environmental stocks while the economically more important flow accounts to their detriment are to be derived indirectly from changes in stock values the sna the paper stresses is primarily an economic framework incapable of capturing all environmental change and the national accounts are far more useful economically than environmentally greening the accounts would be optional for most affluent countries whose overriding environmental concern is pollution this can be addressed directly through taxation and regulation pollution information in satellite accounts can indeed be valuable but revised and fully integrated resource accounting is a priority concern for those developing countries that are running down natural resources and for which conventional accounting distorts macroeconomic measurement analysis and policy the paper argues that green accounting can only ensure income sometimes called weak sustainability which should be considered as a step leading ultimately to an ecological or stronger sustainability

how does natural resource accounting become powerful in policymaking a case study of changing calculative frames in local energy policy in finland abstract the paper explores the role of natural resource accounting and calculations as tools for inducing movement towards ecologically sound policy making we draw from the theoretical debates in social studies of science and technology sts to understand how calculations gain their power in real world decision making through in depth case analysis of a local energy production decision in finland we study how and under what conditions calculative methods related to environmental valuation affect the rationalities applied in policy decisions on the basis of our analysis we claim that new calculative rationalities do not become significant through changing ways of thinking alone there is a need for shift of calculative framing this shift requires active promotion by powerful actors and furthermore new framings need to become embedded in the rules of the game of decision making our analysis suggests that the methods of sts can provide a valuable tool for economists creation of richer understanding of the dynamics between calculative rationalities and the institutions of decision making in depth case analysis of decision making involving the use of natural resources brings out the multitude of ways in which calculations can take part in or be excluded from the making of natural resource policy

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

the impact of global warming on agriculture a ricardian analysis reply we measure the economic impact of climate on land prices using cross sectional data on climate farmland prices and other economic and geophysical data for almost 3 000 counties in the united states we find that higher temperatures in all seasons except autumn reduce average farm values while more precipitation outside of autumn increases farm values applying the model to a global warming scenario shows a significantly lower estimated impact of global warming on u s agriculture than the traditional production function approach and in one case suggests that even without co sub 2 fertilization global warming may have economic benefits for agriculture 16 refs 5 figs 5 tabs

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

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

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

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

wage determination of registered nurses in proprietary and nonprofit nursing homes this study explores why registered nurses employed in nonprofit nursing homes earn higher wages than those employed in proprietary facilities previous studies have explained this finding in a property rights context where higher wages were posited to result from the weaker incentives for cost minimization accompanying nonprofit status this paper tests an alternative explanation of sectoral wage differences which is predicated on the reason for the coexistence offor profit and nonprofit firms in a given industry informational constraints concerning the quality of care are posited to cause the long term health care market to fail to provide care at the upper levels of a quality of care continuum nonprofits are viewed as a response to this form of market failure acting to fulfill customers demand for higher quality and higher cost long term care with attendant demand for higher quality nurses than in for profit homes both the observed sectoral pattern in selectivity and wage decompositions based on selectivity corrected wage regressions call into question the property right explanation yet are consistent with an asymmetric information explanation

the role of the structural transformation in aggregate productivity we investigate the role of sectoral differences in labor productivity in explaining the process of structural transformation the secular reallocation of labor across sectors and the time path of aggregate productivity across countries using a simple model of the structural transformation that is calibrated to the growth experience of the united states we measure sectoral labor productivity differences across countries productivity differences between rich and poor countries are large in agriculture and services and smaller in manufacturing moreover over time productivity gaps have been substantially reduced in agriculture and industry but not nearly as much in services in the model these sectoral productivity patterns generate implications that are broadly consistent with the cross country evidence on the structural transformation aggregate productivity paths and relative prices we show that productivity catch up in industry explains about 50 percent of the gains in aggregate productivity across countries while low relative productivity in services and the lack of catch up explains all the experiences of slowdown stagnation and decline observed across countries

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

what do we learn from the weather the new climate economy literature a rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature precipitation and windstorms influence economic outcomes these studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output industrial output labor productivity energy demand health conflict and economic growth among other outcomes by harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit these studies help credibly identify i the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy ii heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations and iii nonlinear effects of weather variables this paper reviews the new literature with two purposes first we summarize recent work providing a guide to its methodologies datasets and findings second we consider applications of the new literature including insights for the damage function within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change jel c51 d72 o13 q51 q54

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

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

evolving comparative advantage and the impact of climate change in agricultural markets evidence from 1 7 million fields around the world a large agronomic literature models the implications of climate change for a variety of crops and locations around the world the goal of the present paper is to quantify the macro level consequences of these micro level shocks using an extremely rich micro level data set that contains information about the productivity both before and after climate change of each of 10 crops for each of 1 7 million fields covering the surface of the earth we find that the impact of climate change on these agricultural markets would amount to a 0 26 percent reduction in global gdp when trade and production patterns are allowed to adjust since the value of output in our 10 crops is equal to 1 8 percent of world gdp this corresponds to about one sixth of total crop value

optimal taxes on fossil fuel in general equilibrium we analyze a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model with an externality through climate change from using fossil energy our central result is a simple formula for the marginal externality damage of emissions or equivalently for the optimal carbon tax this formula which holds under quite plausible assumptions reveals that the damage is proportional to current gdp with the proportion depending only on three factors i discounting ii the expected damage elasticity how many percent of the output flow is lost from an extra unit of carbon in the atmosphere and iii the structure of carbon depreciation in the atmosphere thus the stochastic values of future output consumption and the atmospheric co2 concentration as well as the paths of technology whether endogenous or exogenous and population and so on all disappear from the formula we find that the optimal tax should be a bit higher than the median or most well known estimates in the literature we also formulate a parsimonious yet comprehensive and easily solved model allowing us to compute the optimal and market paths for the use of different sources of energy and the corresponding climate change we find coal rather than oil to be the main threat to economic welfare largely due to its abundance we also find that the costs of inaction are particularly sensitive to the assumptions regarding the substitutability of different energy sources and technological progress

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

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

the cost of recessions revisited a reverse liquidationist view the observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy one view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring another view holds that this rise in restructuring is costly since liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful this paper proposes an alternative perspective on the basis of a combination of theory with empirical evidence on gross job flows and on financial and labour market rents we find that cumulatively recessions result in reduced rather than increased restructuring and that this is likely to be socially costly once we consider inefficiencies on both the creation and destruction margins copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

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

pensions and wage premia i introduction despite the widespread acceptance of the theory of compensating differences empirical efforts to estimate the magnitude of these differences have met with only mixed success 1 with the exception of fatal risks economists have not been able to consistently find a significant relationship between wages and other job characteristics the failure to find consistent evidence on compensating differentials has been attributed to either poor measures of non wage characteristics or inadequate controls for worker productivity 2 studies by gunderson hyatt and pesando 1992 montgomery shaw and benedict 1992 and moore 1987 which have been able to explicitly address these issues have had greater success in finding significant compensating differentials in this paper we focus on an alternative explanation for the variation in estimated compensating differentials that the magnitude of the compensating differential varies systematically across different sectors in the labor market the theory of compensating differentials predicts that the implicit price or cost of providing a job attribute such as pensions will be a function of firm or industry technological differences and that the value attached to that attribute will also vary across workers depending on their tastes if workers and firms are not randomly assigned to sectors this will lead to systematic variations in the size of the estimated compensating differential across sectors or markets the result of this variation is that studies using different subsamples of the labor force will yield very different estimates of the size of the compensating differential the few studies that have addressed sources of heterogeneity in compensating differentials have concentrated on testing for individual differences in tastes for risk 3 in contrast our emphasis is on firm side differences in technologies or market power we estimate the compensating differential between annual pension accruals and wage rates and let this tradeoff vary by firm size and union status with corrections for selectivity bias the implicit cost of pensions and hence the size of the compensating differential may vary by finn size or union status for a number of reasons greater ability to spread fixed administrative costs across a large work force more difficulty monitoring worker effort or the presence of market power thus the cost of fringe benefits to the firm may be lower in large or unionized firms than in small nonunion firms we find empirical evidence supporting this view the estimated wage pension compensating differentials are smaller in unionized and large firms than in small nonunion firms the results from this paper are significant for several reasons 1 they provide evidence that compensating differentials vary across markets this evidence could account for some of the differences in estimates of tradeoffs across studies that have used different nonrandom samples 4 more importantly these sectoral differences serve as a reminder that the labor market is in fact a multitude of markets and that technological differences that vary across markets should be considered when addressing issues ranging from estimating the returns to human capital investment to the impact of the minimum wage 5 2 these results also deepen our knowledge of the relationship between pensions and wages a relationship that has important implications for the shape of workers wage earnings profiles or for the mechanisms for motivating workers and for the returns to human capital and for the distribution of income regarding the latter pensions are a large component of compensation and work by even and macpherson 1990 mccarthy and turner 1983 and moore 1987 suggests that coverage rates and returns are smaller for women and blacks our analysis suggests that an element of the differences could be sectoral choices

making sense of institutions as a factor shaping economic performance abstract there has recently been a resurgence of interest in how institutions affect economic performance a review of this literature reveals that the concept of an institution means different things to different scholars both within economics and across the social sciences we discuss what factors unify the different definitions of institutions and develop a concept of institutions useful for the analysis of economic performance and economic growth in particular specifically we develop the notion of institutions as standard social technologies economic growth results from the co evolution of physical and social technologies

environmental regulations and the problem of sustainability moving beyond market failure abstract the standard metaphor of market failure is an impediment to the crafting of environmental policy that can escape policy lock in sustainability requires a policy process that can avoid this lock in sustainability concerns the creation of dynamic human processes that can respond to indeed anticipate unanticipated feedback from biological processes

optimal dynamic carbon taxes in a climate economy model with distortionary fiscal policy how should carbon be taxed as a part of fiscal policy the literature on optimal carbon pricing often abstracts from other taxes however when governments raise revenues with distortionary taxes carbon levies have fiscal impacts while they raise revenues directly they may shrink the bases of other taxes e g by decreasing employment this article theoretically characterizes and then quantifies optimal carbon taxes in a dynamic general equilibrium climate economy model with distortionary fiscal policy first this article establishes a novel theoretical relationship between the optimal taxation of carbon and of capital income this link arises because carbon emissions destroy natural capital they accumulate in the atmosphere and decrease future output consequently this article shows how the standard logic against capital income taxes extends to distortions on environmental capital investments second this article characterizes optimal climate policy in sub optimal fiscal settings where income taxes are constrained to remain at their observed levels third this article presents a detailed calibration that builds on the seminal dice approach but adds features essential for a setting with distortionary taxes such as a differentiation between climate change production impacts e g on agriculture and direct utility impacts e g on biodiversity existence value the central quantitative finding is that optimal carbon tax schedules are 8 24 lower when there are distortionary taxes compared to the setting with lump sum taxes considered in the literature

small streams diverse sources who invests in renewable energy in finland during the financial downturn this article addresses the investment gap in renewable energy sources identified by several authors examining the case of a country finland which introduced policy measures to diversify its renewable energy portfolio we analyse the development of investments in renewable heat and power in response to new policy measures and contextual factors during the downturn period 2009 2013 we investigate investor heterogeneity i e the diversity of logics employed by different types of res investors in spite of a severe financial recession we find an emergence of new sources of investment among these new investor types we find diversity in investment drivers and available options these include investors mobilized by the feed in tariff to seek profitable targets and investors such as real estate owners investing in heat pumps for their own use and benefiting from low interest rates we find that the diversification of investors supports the diversification in res sources and brings in new investors undeterred by the financial downturn our findings imply that policy makers should recognize that the responses to distinct incentives and pressures vary by investor types this also means that a mix of policies is required to maximize the contribution of different sectors to filling the renewable energy investment gap

interindustry wage differentials and the gender wage gap using data from the march 1988 current population survey the authors find that the wages of female workers differ significantly by industry even when the analysis controls for workers productivity related characteristics although these interindustry wage differentials are at least as large as men s and are highly correlated with them as well there are statistically significant differences between the two of the overall gender wage gap the average female worker earns about 65 as much as the average male worker 12 22 can be explained by differences between the patterns of interindustry wage differentials of men and women and 15 19 by differences in the distribution of male and female workers across industries thus the combined industry effects explain about one third of the overall gender wage gap

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

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

macroeconomic narratives in a world of crises an analysis of stories about solving the system crisis since the financial crisis in 2008 a series of publications on macroeconomic responses to the compound crises of the economy and the environment have emerged under labels such as green new deal green growth and the great transition attempts at offering coherent responses to the crises have been made these responses have in common that they all present a large number of policy proposals for ways in which to solve the current crises and achieve a sustainable economy this article provides a mapping of a selection of such responses and an analysis of their content the analysis combines discourse theory and narrative analysis and investigates discourses by studying the narratives they produce the study thus contributes to the long line of analyses on discourses on sustainable economy empirically by investigating and analysing a number of macroeconomic proposals for solving the system crisis and theoretically by elaborating on the concept of narrative dynamics in relation to persuasive strength in political decision making

pension portability and labor market efficiency a survey of the literature this paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature evaluating the labor market effects of policies to enhance pension portability one perspective is that reducing the cost of job change w

applying economic sociology to understand the meaning of quality in food markets this article reviews the concept of the market and questions the standard view of the market developed by orthodox economic theory the article highlights how economic sociology and convention theory is more useful in understanding markets and appreciating markets as social constructs which are governed by institutions and social orders this adjustment in the analytical framework to study markets and especially food markets is useful in unpacking the various dimensions of quality in food products and illustrating that quality is an institution that is shaped by society and by culture

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

the nobel memorial prize for william d nordhaus william d nordhaus and paul m romer received the 2018 sveriges riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of alfred nobel this paper surveys nordhaus contributions on integrating climate change into long run macroeconomic analysis for which he was recognized with this prize

on the spatial economic impact of global warming we propose a dynamic spatial theory to analyze the geographic impact of climate change agricultural and manufacturing firms locate on a hemisphere trade is costly firms innovate and technology diffuses over space emissions from energy used in production contribute to the atmospheric stock of carbon which increases temperature warming differs across latitudes and its effect on productivity varies across sectors we calibrate the model to analyze how climate change affects the spatial distribution of economic activity trade migration growth and welfare we assess quantitatively the impact of migration and trade restrictions energy taxes and innovation subsidies

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

heterogeneous producers facing common shocks an overlapping generations example abstract an analytically tractable model of a competitive full information economy is provided in which for some parameter values entry and exit over the course of the business cycle is concentrated among small firms this model is intended to make the logical point that the relatively high sensitivity of small firms to business cycle fluctuations does not necessarily indicate the presence of informational or incentive constraints in financial markets

heterogeneous firms and the organization of production firms in the same industry exhibit systematic differences in the organization of production and the structure of employment entrepreneurial ability is the specific scarce input that limits the size of a firm this input must be allocated to two activities coordinating production and monitoring workers able entrepreneurs can convert calendar time into larger supplies of coordinating effort that enable them to assemble large firms greater ability implies a higher shadow price of time which increases the implicit costs of monitoring a dispersion of entrepreneurial abilities generates an equilibrium size distribution of firms differences in monitoring costs affect the choice of worker productivities the design of products and the organization of production the monitoring cost hypothesis advanced in this paper goes a long way in explaining the equilibrium of an industry containing heterogeneous firms that differ in size and behavior

idiosyncratic shocks and the role of nonconvexities in plant and aggregate investment dynamics we examine a model of lumpy investment wherein establishments face persistent shocks to common and plant specific productivity and nonconvex adjustment costs lead them to pursue generalized s s investment rules we allow persistent heterogeneity in both capital and total factor productivity alongside low level investments exempt from adjustment costs to develop the first model consistent with available evidence on establishment level investment rates reassessing the implications of lumpy investment for aggregate dynamics in this setting we find that they remain substantial when factor supply considerations are ignored but are quantitatively irrelevant in general equilibrium the substantial implications of general equilibrium extend beyond the dynamics of aggregate series while the presence of idiosyncratic shocks makes the time averaged distribution of plant level investment rates largely invariant to market clearing movements in real wages and interest rates we show that the dynamics of plants investments differ sharply in their presence thus model based estimations of capital adjustment costs involving panel data may be quite sensitive to the assumption about equilibrium our analysis also offers new insights about how nonconvex adjustment costs influence investment at the plant when establishments face large and weakly persistent idiosyncratic productivity shocks consistent with existing estimates we find that nonconvex costs do not cause lumpy investments but act to eliminate them

on modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change with climate change as prototype example this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low probability high impact catastrophes even when updated by bayesian learning uncertain structural parameters induce a critical tail fattening of posterior predictive distributions such fattened tails have strong im plications for situations like climate change where a catastrophe is theoretically possible because prior knowledge cannot place sufficiently narrow bounds on overall damages this paper shows that the economic consequences of fat tailed structural uncertainty along with unsureness about high temperature damages can readily outweigh the effects of discounting in climate change policy analysis

the cleansing effect of recessions the authors investigate industry response to cyclical variations in demand production units that embody the newest process and product innovations are continuously being created and outdated units are being destroyed although outdated units are the most likely to turn unprofitable and be scrapped in a recession they can be insulated from the fall in demand by a reduction in creation the structure of adjustment costs plays a determinant role in the responsiveness of those two margins the calibrated model matches the relative volatilities of the observed manufacturing job creation and destruction series and their asymmetries over the cycle copyright 1994 by american economic association

economics and climate change integrated assessment in a multi region world this paper develops a model that integrates the climate and the global economy an integrated assessment model with which different policy scenarios can be analyzed and compared the model is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium setup with a continuum of regions thus it is a full stochastic general equilibrium version of rice nordhaus s pioneering multi region integrated assessment model like rice our model features traded fossil fuel but otherwise has no markets across regions there is no insurance nor any intertemporal trade across them the extreme form of market incompleteness is not fully realistic but arguably not a bad approximation of reality its major advantage is that along with a set of reasonable assumptions on preferences technology and nature it allows a closed form model solution we use the model to assess the welfare consequences of carbon taxes that differ across as well as within oil consuming and producing regions we show that surprisingly only taxes on oil producers can improve the climate taxes on oil consumers have no effect at all the calibrated model suggests large differences in views on climate policy across regions

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