extended benefits and the duration of ui spells evidence from the new jersey extended benefit program abstract this paper examines the impact on the duration of unemployment insurance receipt of a politically motivated program that offered 13 weeks of extended benefits for 6 months in 1996 using state level data and individual administrative records from before during and after the program we find that it raised the fraction of claimants who exhausted their regular benefits by 1 3 percentage points had the program run long enough to affect claimants from the first day of their spell the fraction exhausting would have risen by 7 percentage points and the average recipient would have collected regular benefits for one extra week

the long term effects of ui extensions on employment the majority of papers analyzing the employment effects of unemployment insurance ui benefit durations focus on the duration of the first unemployment spell in this paper we make two contributions first we use a regression discontinuity design to analyze the long term effects of extensions in ui durations these estimates differ from standard estimates in that they incorporate differences in ui benefit receipt and employment due to recurrent unemployment spells second we derive a welfare formula of ui extensions that incorporates recurrent nonemployment spells

the impact of unemployment insurance on job search evidence from google search data job search is a key choice variable in theories of labor markets but is difficult to measure directly we develop a job search activity index based on google search data the google job search index gjsi we validate the gjsi with both survey and web based measures of job search unlike those measures the gjsi is high frequency geographically precise and available in real time we demonstrate the gjsi s utility by using it to study the effects of unemployment insurance policy changes between 2008 and 2014 we find no evidence of an economically meaningful effect of these changes on aggregate search

does online search crowd out traditional search and improve matching efficiency evidence from craigslist ever since the seminal work of stigler 1962 economists have recognized that information in markets is costly to acquire and can lead to search frictions the remarkable growth in online search has substantially lowered the cost of information acquisition despite this there is little evidence concerning the extent to which this has altered the search process and raised overall matching efficiency to address this issue we analyze the expansion of the website craigslist which allows users to post job ads and apartment and housing rental ads at virtually no cost exploiting the sharp geographic and temporal variation in the availability of online search induced by craigslist we produce three key findings craigslist significantly lowered classified job advertisements in newspapers caused a significant reduction in the apartment and housing rental vacancy rate and had no effect on the unemployment rate

spillovers and governance an analysis of knowledge and reputational spillovers in information technology investigating spillovers potential costs and benefits to a firm that extend beyond an individual transaction i integrate transaction cost theory and the knowledge based view of the firm in an effort to better understand the efficient governance of knowledge contracts with detailed task descriptions were associated with transactions with the potential to generate new and reusable knowledge the risk of a firm s technology spilling over to others and the risk of reputation impairing spillovers were associated with suppliers using their own employees rather than subcontractors thus results suggest that the creation and protection of knowledge are key factors in understanding governance decisions

the perils of prescription economics and the macroeconomic policy adviser abstract the professional economist has had a checkered career since the war his star rose high for roughly the first 20 years of the postwar era when an activist government role in economic affairs was generally welcomed and the economist s advice readily sought in the ensuing 20 years a period characterized by severe economic dislocation and turbulence the economist s fortunes fell precipitously as he was seen unable to provide ready answers to complex problems and his forecasts were off the mark the economist can and does play a useful role but his effectiveness is subject to many limitations and restraints especially in the areas of prediction and prescription and these must be recognized by both his employer and himself

keeping organizational secrets protective institutional mechanisms and their costs the notion that firms generate rents from proprietary knowledge is widely accepted however the mechanisms that firms as institutions can differentially deploy to protect their knowledge form appropriation by rivals are not well understood this paper examines three broad classes of protective mechanisms that firms coon deploy to keep their knowledge secret rules compensation schemes and structural isolation the paper concludes that keeping organizational secrets through the deployment of protective mechanisms is both difficult and costly economizing considerations can therefore be expected to bear strongly on this aspect of firm organization copyright 1997 by oxford university press

stream ecosystem service markets under no net loss regulation abstract we analyze interactions between economics and ecology for ecosystem service markets under no net loss regulation previous studies of no net loss regulation address the ecological efficacy and valuation of restoration but largely ignore the effects of market dynamics we link an economic model of free entry equilibria with an ecological model that includes returns to scale and inefficiency of restored ecosystems and apply the result to stream mitigation banking in north carolina intuition from ecology alone must be modified to account for economic processes and vice versa to implement no net loss regulation one must not only account for ecological differences between restored and natural ecosystems but also consider the effect of market entry on the number and size of restoration projects in a purely economic model free entry equilibria are characterized by excess entry the equilibrium number of firms is greater than the welfare maximizing number ecological considerations may exacerbate or ameliorate this so that either excess entry or insufficient entry may occur depending on the specific ecosystem services sought

french firms strategies for protecting their intellectual property in attempting to protect their innovations firms can choose from a range of mechanisms which may be either non statutory trade secrets design complexity and lead time advantage over competitors or statutory patent design registration trademark copyright yet little is known about how firms do actually make their choices from among these different appropriability mechanisms the aim of this paper is to determine how french firms use of intellectual property protection mechanisms relates to the type of innovation the characteristics of the market sector in which they operate the firms characteristics and their human resources strategies our empirical model draws on four french databases covering the period 2001 2004 our results show that the choice of a means of protection matters and emerges out of a complex strategy our results also reveal that the different statutory and non statutory means of protection are complementary within their own categories but hardly so between categories

job search requirements effort provision and labor market outcomes abstract how effective are effort targets this paper provides novel evidence on the effects of job search requirements on effort provision and labor market outcomes based on large scale register data we estimate the returns to required job search effort instrumenting individual requirements with caseworker stringency identification is ensured by the conditional random assignment of job seekers to caseworkers we find that the duration of un and non employment both decrease by 3 if the requirement increases by one monthly application when instrumenting actual applications with caseworker stringency an additionally provided monthly application decreases the length of spells by 4 in line with theory we further find that the effect of required effort decreases in the individual s voluntary effort finally the requirement level causes small negative effects on job stability reducing the duration of re employment spells by 0 3 per required application we find a zero effect on re employment wages

job search and unemployment insurance new evidence from time use data article i nfo this paper provides new evidence on job search intensity of the unemployed in the u s modeling job search intensity as time allocated to job search activities the major findings are 1 the average u s unemployed worker devotes about 41 min to job search on weekdays which is substantially more than their european counterparts 2 workers who expect to be recalled by their previous employer search substantially less than the average unemployed worker 3 across the 50 states and d c job search is inversely related to the generosity of unemployment benefits with an elasticity between 1 6 and 2 2 4 job search intensity for those eligible for unemployment insurance ui increases prior to benefit exhaustion and 5 time devoted to job search is fairly constant regardless of unemployment duration for those who are ineligible for ui

the impact of the potential duration of unemployment benefits on the duration of unemployment abstract this paper examines the impact of the potential duration of unemployment insurance ui benefits on unemployment in the united states first we use a large sample of household heads to examine differences in the unemployment spell distributions of ui recipients and nonrecipients sharp increases in the escape rate from unemployment both through recalls and new job acceptances are apparent for ui recipients around the time of benefits exhaustion such increases are not apparent at similar points of spell duration for nonrecipients second our analysis of accurate administrative data from 12 states indicates that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of ui recipients by 0 16 to 0 20 weeks

when two wrongs make a right second best point nonpoint trading ratios most research on point nonpoint trading focuses on the choice of trading ratio the rate point source controls trade for nonpoint controls although the first best ratio is jointly determined with the optimal number of permits in practice program managers often do not have control over the number of permits only the trading ratio the trading ratio in this case can only be second best we derive the second best trading ratio and using a numerical example of trading in the susquehanna river basin we find the values are in line with current ratios but for different reasons than those that are normally provided

successful employer search an empirical analysis of vacancy duration using micro data this paper provides the first estimates of the determinants of the duration of employer search in the uk we model duration until a vacancy is either successfully filled or withdrawn from the market the econometric techniques deal with multiple vacancies and unobserved heterogeneity dependent risks using flexible and parametric baseline hazards the hazards to filling and withdrawing exhibit negative and positive duration dependence respectively implying that the conditional probability of successful employer search decreases with duration we also find that nonmanual vacancies are less likely to fill consistent with there being skill shortages in the sample period

unemployed but optimistic optimal insurance design with biased beliefs biased perceptions of risks change the perceived value of insurance and the per ceived returns to avoiding these risks i show empirically that unemployed workers overestimate how quickly they will nd work but underestimate the return to their search eorts i analyze the consequences for the optimal design of unemployment insurance with biased beliefs contracts equalizing the marginal smoothing ben e t and the moral hazard cost of insurance are suboptimal social and private insurance diverge a paternalistic social planner corrects the moral hazard cost for the distortion in the insured s eort choice while private insurers focus on the perceived rather than the true smoothing bene ts when unemployed workers are optimistic privatizing unemployment insurance may result in ine ciently low or rapidly decreasing unemployment bene ts

marketplaces and matching this paper models equilibrium trading patterns when marketplaces exist and goods are differentiated when first visiting the market a buyer samples a stock of goods if fortunate the buyer matches with and purchases one of these goods and then exits the market if an initial match does not exist the buyer can now only match with the flow of new goods for sale the previous stock has been sampled and rejected in a steady state the current stock of unmatched traders on one side of the market is trying to match with the flow of new traders on the other side it is shown that this market behaviour describes matching patterns between unemployed job seekers and vacancies in uk job centres

the effects of extended unemployment insurance over the business cycle evidence from regression discontinuity estimates over 20 years one goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance ui in recessions is to increase ui coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells although it is a common concern that such extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations it is not known how recessions would affect the magnitude of this moral hazard to obtain causal estimates of the differential effects of ui in booms and recessions this article exploits the fact that in germany potential ui benefit duration is a function of exact age which is itself invariant over the business cycle we implement a regression discontinuity design separately for 20 years and correlate our estimates with measures of the business cycle we find that the nonemployment effects of a month of additional ui benefits are at best somewhat declining in recessions yet the ui exhaustion rate and therefore the additional coverage provided by ui extensions rises substantially during a downturn the ratio of these two effects represents the nonemployment response of workers weighted by the probability of being affected by ui extensions hence our results imply that the effective moral hazard effect of ui extensions is significantly lower in recessions than in booms using a model of job search with liquidity constraints we also find that in the absence of market wide effects the net social benefits from ui extensions can be expressed either directly in terms of the exhaustion rate and the nonemployment effect of ui durations or as a declining function of our measure of effective moral hazard copyright 2012 oxford university press

the german generation internship and the minimum wage introduction evidence from big data abstractthe new german minimum wage applies a specific exemption clause for internships where internships that last up to three months are exempted while internships that exceed three months are d

is internet job search still ineffective using national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy97 data for 2005 8 we find that unemployed persons who look for work online are re employed about 25 faster than comparable workers who do not search online this finding contrasts with previous results for 1998 2001 and is robust to controls for cognitive test scores and detailed indicators of internet access internet job search ijs appears to be most effective in reducing unemployment durations when used to contact friends and relatives to send out resumes or fill out applications and also to look at advertisements we detect a weak positive relationship between ijs and wage growth between jobs over the past decade the internet has been credited for substantial reductions in search frictions in markets ranging from life insurance to apartment rentals brown and goolsbee 2002 kroft and pope 2010 in contrast studies of the internet s effects on labour market matching have been few in number and on balance find little or no evidence of a friction reducing effect for example kuhn and skuterud 2004 find that unemployed workers who look for work online have longer unemployment durations than comparable non internet searchers whereas kroft and pope 2010 find no evidence that the rapid expansion of craigslist as a job search tool has affected city level unemployment rates 1 at least on the surface these results seem puzzling in view of the dramatic expansion of online job search sites as well as the general decline in communication costs associated with the internet both of these changes should increase the arrival rate of matches between job searchers and vacancies thereby reducing search frictions in labour markets in this study we provide new evidence relevant to this puzzle of ineffective internet job search ijs using data on young us jobseekers during the period 2005 8 taken from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy97 our main result is that internet searchers unemployment durations are about 25 shorter than comparable workers who search offline only specifically after replicating kuhn and skuterud s 2004 estimate of a counterproductive effect of ijs using their current population survey cps data from 1998 2001 for this age group we show that this counterproductive effect is reversed in the more recent period in the same regression specification this reversal holds whether or not we control for a possible source of endogenous selection searchers scores on a widely used cognitive skills test that was not available in the earlier data we speculate that improvements in technology over this period ranging from better online job sites to network externalities associated with greater overall internet penetration might explain this change over time

point nonpoint effluent trading with spatial heterogeneity potential earnings from permits sales may provide an incentive for farmers to accept water quality regulation we derive optimal adjustments of point nonpoint effluent trading ratios for heterogeneity in marginal environmental damage and degradation retention of the pollutant across locations in a watershed a simulation based on data from the kymi river valley finland indicates that farmers are the greatest suppliers of permits as expected but that gains from trading vary substantially some farmers may become net buyers of permits and thus net losers from regulation the benefits of effluent trading are distributed unevenly among point sources as well copyright 2008 oxford university press

signaling through private equity placements and its impact on the valuation of biotechnology firms abstract this paper investigates how young publicly held technology firms contend with information asymmetry and the hazards it introduces to acquire the capital necessary for future growth we ascribe to the view that firms issuing private equity signal the marketplace that managers believe their growth opportunities are undervalued consistent with this view we find significant positive abnormal returns to announcements of private equity placements we develop theory suggesting that returns are determined by the timing of previous signals we also argue that the characteristics of the private placement signal specifically whether private equity is bundled with research partnerships influence the strength of the signal our results largely support our expectations

the risk concept for entrepreneurs reconsidered new challenges to the conventional wisdom abstract this paper explores the entrepreneurial risk construct focusing on how the decision to launch a new venture may entail risks different from what is found in established firms opportunities often emerge from the creation of specialized knowledge in start ups this knowledge is characterized by concerns for rent appropriation and information asymmetry we suggest that traditional measures of risk do not properly account for these concerns hence an illusion of greater risk taking attaches itself to entrepreneurs especially if the specialized knowledge is difficult to observe we suggest alternative measures that better capture these concerns including the dilution of control when issuing equity cash burn rates etc

economics of additionality for environmental services from agriculture abstract we present a model of additionality for offsets sold from agriculture to industrial sector sources regulated by cap and trade we consider a potential policy where agricultural sources would not be covered by cap and trade requirements but would be eligible to receive offsets whenever their emissions fall below a policy specified baseline and would not be penalized for emissions above their baseline major results are 1 the optimal baseline should be set above the average counterfactual emissions of participating farms an unexpected result that has been missing from the literature 2 the optimal trading ratio should be greater than one a ton of offsets counts for less than a ton of covered emissions even under emissions certainty previous research has justified such trading ratios by emissions uncertainty 3 emissions uncertainty does not justify a change in the baseline if the accompanying emissions model is unbiased 4 an optimal combination of policies is to subsidize offsets and tighten the baseline relative to the no subsidy case

moral hazard vs liquidity and optimal unemployment insurance this paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance ui benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from ui using this evidence i show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by ui benefits is due to a liquidity effect rather than distortions on marginal incentives to search moral hazard by combining two empirical strategies first i find that increases in benefits have much larger effects on durations for liquidity constrained households second lump sum severance payments increase durations substantially among constrained households i derive a formula for the optimal benefit level that depends only on the reduced form liquidity and moral hazard elasticities the formula implies that the optimal ui benefit level exceeds 50 percent of the wage the exact identification approach to welfare analysis proposed here yields robust optimal policy results because it does not require structural estimation of primitives

the inadvertent consequences of al qaeda news coverage abstract this paper explores the consequences of al qaeda news coverage related to i subsequent al qaeda attacks ii the group s popularity and iii radicalization i construct a daily index of al qaeda news coverage in the us from cnn nbc cbs fox news the nyt and the wapo to isolate causality i employ an instrumental variable strategy based on disaster deaths everything else equal the us media reports less on al qaeda when more people are dying from disasters worldwide at its mean al qaeda coverage is suggested to cause 0 2 0 3 attacks per day in the upcoming 1 4 weeks i find no evidence that attacks are merely rescheduled because of diminished media exposure rather the total number of attacks increases with coverage this effect is driven by easy to plan attack types and by al qaeda attacks in iraq results are robust to an array of alternative specifications and consistent when considering news coverage on al jazeera al qaeda coverage also increases the group s online popularity and search topics that are potentially indicative of radicalization such as jihad and al qaeda s magazine inspire are receiving more attention on google nevertheless these results should be interpreted carefully as it remains difficult to fully disentangle online interest in al qaeda and sympathy with the group s mission

reservation wages and unemployment insurance this paper argues that a risk averse worker s after tax reservation wage encodes all the relevant information about her welfare this insight leads to a novel test for the optimality of unemployment insurance based on the responsiveness of reservation wages to unemployment benefits some existing estimates imply significant gains to raising the current level of unemployment benefits in the united states but highlight the need for more research on the determinants of reservation wages our approach complements those based on baily s 1978 test

the spike at benefit exhaustion leaving the unemployment system or starting a new job in this paper we review the literature on the spike in unemployment exit rates around benefit exhaustion and present new evidence based on administrative data for a large sample of job losers in austria we find that the way unemployment spells are measured has a large effect on the magnitude of the spike at exhaustion both in existing studies and in our austrian data spikes are typically much smaller when spell length is defined by the time to next job than when it is defined by the time spent on the unemployment system in austria the exit rate from registered unemployment rises by over 200 at the expiration of benefits while the hazard rate of re employment rises by only 20 the difference between the two measures arises because many individuals leave the unemployment register immediately after their benefits expire without returning to work the modest spike in re employment rates implies that most job seekers do not wait until their ui benefits are exhausted to return to work fewer than 1 of jobless spells have an ending date that is manipulated to coincide with the expiration of ui benefits this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

transaction costs and tradeable permits abstract tradeable permit systems are at the center of current interest and activity in market based reforms of environmental policy because these systems can offer significant advantages over conventional approaches to pollution control unfortunately claims made for their relative cost effectiveness have often been exaggerated transaction costs which may be significant in these markets reduce trading levels and increase abatement costs in some cases equilibrium permit allocations and hence aggregate control costs are sensitive to initial permit distributions providing an efficiency justification for politicians typical focus on initial allocations

incremental and average control costs in a model of water quality trading with discrete abatement units this paper answers three questions related to the discrete nature of pollution abatement i does a source s incremental control cost as defined by the u s environmental protection agency necessarily exceed its average control cost ii is incremental control cost a better approximation of a source s willingness to pay for abatement credits than average control cost and iii exactly how does trading in discrete and continuous abatement markets differ we find that the answer to the first two questions are both no suggesting that the u s environmental protection agency needs to refine its reliance on incremental control cost as the sole measure upon which to assess the financial feasibility of water quality trading in answer to the third question we show that the outcome of bilateral trading in the presence of discrete abatement is determined by comparing the gains from trade associated with the full sequence of possible sunk cost trading scenarios for the most common case where trading partners average control cost curves cross the trading outcome with discrete abatement is inherently sensitive to the initial allocation of abatement responsibilities

leveraging research and development assessing the impact of the u s advanced technology program this paper examines the factors that affect a firm s chances of winning an award from the advanced technology program atp and the subsequent impact of the award on a firm s success in raising additional funds for its research and development rd the halo effect from the award increases the success of these firms in attracting additional funding from other sources our conclusion is that the atp is leveraging activities that have a strong potential for broad based economic benefit

google it up a google trends based uncertainty index for the united states and australia we develop uncertainty indices for the united states and australia based on freely accessible real time google trends data our google trends uncertainty gtu indices are found to be positively correlated to a variety of alternative proxies for uncertainty available for these two countries var investigations document an economically and statistically significant contribution to unemployment dynamics by gtu shocks in the united states in contrast the contribution of gtu shocks to unemployment dynamics in australia is found to be much milder and substantially lower than that of monetary policy shocks

unintentional unavoidable and beneficial knowledge leakage from the multinational enterprise knowledge leakage as an undesirable outcome for mnes is an accepted view in ib literature we challenge this view and argue that knowledge leakage is often unintentional unavoidable and beneficial for the mne in a highly networked and information rich society knowledge leakage from mnes 1 happens naturally due to interfirm relationships interactions and socialization 2 is unavoidable due to employee mobility and 3 facilitates knowledge inflows due to the reciprocity nature of knowledge exchange and hence is beneficial for mnes in addition the costs of protecting knowledge incurred by an mne will often outweigh the benefits

theoretical foundations for sticky wages abstract the paper compares three different types of theoretical explanation of sticky wages they are implicit contracts efficiency wage models and insider outsider models it then reconsiders keynes rationale for sticky wages which focuses on relative wage issues finally the paper considers possible directions for future research

endogenous risk and point nonpoint uncertainty trading ratios point nonpoint trading enables highly uncertain nonpoint pollution abatement to be substituted for relatively certain point source pollution abatement market designers use uncertainty trade ratios to address imperfect substitution between these commodities guidance from government agencies and other entities recommends large ratios that penalize trades for nonpoint abatement and extant programs universally implement this guidance previous research has shown that the standard guidance is based on an inappropriate framing of the risk effects of substituting nonpoint for point source pollution abatement and has demonstrated that the trade ratios should be set to encourage or discourage substitution depending on whether the substitution is risk reducing or risk increasing however the pigouvian pricing approach used to develop this result obscures the underlying economic calculus because it does not recognize or characterize the tradeoffs between abatement costs savings and environmental risk that must be considered in an economic evaluation of alternative ratios and that would be key to explaining why ratios recommended by economic analysis would be preferred to received wisdom we develop a new approach that explicitly identifies and characterizes the tradeoffs associated with the choice of ratio the approach is examined both in first best settings where trade ratios and initial permit allocations are jointly determined and in second best settings where permit allocations are taken as given we provide a numerical analysis of trading in the susquehanna river basin in pennsylvania to illustrate theory we find theoretical and numerical support suggesting that smaller ratios may be optimal

random interactions in the chamber legislators behavior and political distance abstract i investigate the role of social interaction among members of parliament mps and the impact of such interaction on the political distance between parties using the random allocation of seats in the icelandic parliament i find that mp s voting and speech behaviors are affected by the behavior of legislators seated nearby i also show that greater random exposure to mps from different parties ultimately reduces the political distance between parties similar evidence is found using historical data for the u s house of representatives by exploiting the introduction of a lottery mechanism to determine desk assignments in 1845 i argue that random seating arrangements could constitute a low cost way of reducing differences within the political arena

opec in the news abstract this paper introduces a newspaper article count index related to opec that rises in response to important opec meetings and events connected with opec production levels i use this index to measure how interest in opec varies over time and investigate how oil price volatility behaves when the index unexpectedly changes i find that unexpected increases in the newspaper index are strongly associated with higher levels of oil price volatility both realized and implied in some cases these unexpected movements appear to be driven by an unpredictable opec event such as the iraq invasion of kuwait in other cases such as the oil price collapses in late 2008 and late 2014 unforeseen developments in the oil market or broader economy seem to generate the unexpected movements in price volatility and interest in opec the newspaper index is highly correlated with google search volume data on opec an alternative measure of the amount of attention paid to opec events

building sectoral job search indices for the united states abstract this study investigates job search activity in the united states by constructing a set of sectoral job search activity indices based on internet search volumes the indices are positively associated with countercyclical labour market measures including unemployment and layoff rates but are negatively associated with procyclical measures overall our evidence supports previous empirical findings job search intensity is countercyclical which contradicts the theoretical model s prediction

search method use by unemployed youth this article presents a search model which shows that search method choices should be related to their costs and expected productivities as well as to nonwage income and wage offer distributions the empirical evidence then shows that the most frequently used search methods i e friends and relatives and direct applications without referral are also the most productive in generating offers and acceptances the number of methods used is affected by factors that presumably reflect opportunities as well as income sources and needs specific methods are chosen in a manner that generates positive average effects on outcomes for those using them

unemployment insurance and unemployment spells this paper tests the effects of the level and length of unemployment insurance benefits on unemployment durations the paper particularly studies individual behavior during the weeks just prior to when benefits lapse higher unemployment insurance benefits are found to have a strong negative effect on the probability of leaving unemployment however the probability of leaving unemployment rises dramatically just prior to when benefits lapse individual data are used with accurate information of spell durations and the level and length of benefits the semiparametric estimation techniques used in the paper yield more plausible estimates than conventional approaches and provide useful diagnostics copyright 1990 by the econometric society

internet job search and unemployment durations after decades of stability the technologies used by workers to locate new jobs began to change rapidly with the diffusion of internet access in the late 1990 s which types of persons incorporated the internet into their job search strategy and did searching for work on line help these workers find new jobs faster we address these questions using measures of internet job search derived from the december 1998 and august 2000 cps computer and internet supplements matched with job search outcomes from subsequent cps files we find that internet searchers are positively selected on observables but negatively selected on unobservables a beneficial unemployment duration reducing causal effect of internet job search is consistent with our estimates only if negative selection on unobservables is especially strong in other words only if the population of on line resumes is strongly adversely selected

local governments monopoly power and local tax reform theory and evidence from the u k this paper hypothesises the existence of several sources of monopoly power for local governments when the system of local taxation is reformed by central government in particular we argue that information asymmetries between tax payers and central and local government at the time of reform provide opportunities for local politicians to set tax levels which differ from those expected in a full information setting we predict that compared to pre reform tax levels local tax levels post reform will differ according to four local government characteristics i the size of the seat majority of the ruling local party ii whether the party controlling local government is the same as or is different from the ruling party of central government iii whether the local government structure has one or two tiers and whether the same party controls both tiers and iv the degree of indebtedness of the local authority testing the model on the u k local tax reform of 1990 we find strong evidence consistent with the hypothesis that inter authority differences in local tax levels reflect differences in the degree of local political monopoly power resulting from information asymmetries this monopoly power appears to have been used generally but not exclusively to raise tax levels

disentangling policy effects using proxy data which shutdown policies affected unemployment during the covid 19 pandemic abstract we use high frequency google search data combined with data on the announcement dates of non pharmaceutical interventions npis during the covid 19 pandemic in u s states to disentangle the short run direct impacts of multiple different state level npis in an event study framework exploiting differential timing in the announcements of restaurant and bar limitations non essential business closures stay at home orders large gatherings bans school closures and emergency declarations we leverage the high frequency search data to separately identify the effects of multiple npis that were introduced around the same time we then describe a set of assumptions under which proxy outcomes can be used to estimate a causal parameter of interest when data on the outcome of interest are limited using this method we quantify the share of overall growth in unemployment during the covid 19 pandemic that was directly due to each of these state level npis we find that between march 14 and 28 restaurant and bar limitations and non essential business closures can explain 6 0 and 6 4 of ui claims respectively while the other npis did not directly increase own state ui claims this suggests that most of the short run increase in ui claims during the pandemic was likely due to other factors including declines in consumer demand local policies and policies implemented by private firms and institutions

migrants ancestors and foreign investments we use 130 years of data on historical migrations to the u s to show a causal effect of the ancestry composition of u s counties on foreign direct investment fdi sent and received by local firms to isolate the causal effect of ancestry on fdi we build a simple reduced form model of migrations migrations from a foreign country to a u s county at a given time depend on 1 a push factor causing emigration from that foreign country to the entire u s and 2 a pull factor causing immigration from all origins into that u s county the interaction between time series variation in origin specific push factors and destination specific pull factors generates quasi random variation in the allocation of migrants across u s counties we find that doubling the number of residents with ancestry from a given foreign country relative to the mean increases the probability that at least one local firm engages in fdi with that country by 4 percentage points we present evidence that this effect is primarily driven by a reduction in information frictions and not by better contract enforcement taste similarities or a convergence in factor endowments

tradeable permits for pollution control when emission location matters what have we learned our knowledge about tradeable permit approaches to pollution control has grown rapidly in the two decades in which they have received serious analytical attention not only have the theoretical models become more focused and the empirical work more detailed but we have now had over a decade of experience with them in the u s this article draws upon economic theory empirical studies and actual experience with implementation to summarize what we have learned about applying tradeable permits to air pollution control in the special circumstance where the spatial aspects of the problem are a prime consideration

the paradox of openness appropriability external search and collaboration a b s t r a c t to innovate firms often need to draw from and collaborate with a large number of actors from outside their organization at the same time firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas this gives rise to a paradox of openness the creation of innovations often requires openness but the commercialization of innovations requires protection based on econometric analysis of data from a uk innovation survey we find a concave relationship between firms breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation and the strength of the firms appropriability strategies we show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for external search there is also partial evidence suggesting that the relationship is less pronounced for both external search and formal collaboration if firms do not draw ideas from or collaborate with competitors we explore the implications of these findings for the literature on open innovation and innovation strategy 2013 the authors published by elsevier b v all rights reserved

reversing property rights practice based approaches for controlling agricultural nonpoint source water pollution when emissions aggregate nonlinearly nonpoint source water pollution remains a major issue despite decades of research and sizable conservation programs we suggest that by taking advantage of contemporary modeling and optimization approaches good approximations to physical relationships can be constructed so that even in the presence of unobservable field emissions and nonlinear fate and transport relationships standard economic tools of command and control requirements performance standards and trading can be implemented the boone river watershed in the u s state of iowa is used for empirical demonstration although the approach can be used to construct voluntary conservation policies the described policies involve imposing requirements on agricultural polluters rather than relying on voluntary actions alone

differences in social and public risk perceptions and conflicting impacts on point nonpoint trading ratios if stochastic nonpoint pollution loads create socially costly risk then an economically optimal point nonpoint trading ratio the rate point source controls trade for nonpoint controls is adjusted downward a risk reward for nonpoint controls encouraging more nonpoint controls however in actual trading programs ratios are adjusted upward in response to nonpoint uncertainties a risk premium for nonpoint controls this contradiction is explained using a public choice model in which regulators focus on encouraging abatement instead of reducing damages the result is a divergence of public and social risk perceptions and a trading market that encourages economically suboptimal nonpoint controls copyright 2001 oxford university press