learning your earning are labor income shocks really very persistent in this paper we examine the risk situation facing individuals in the labor market the current consensus in the literature is that the labor income process has a large random walk component we argue two points first the estimates of persistence from income data appear to be upward biased due to the omission of heterogeneity in income pro les across the population that would be implied for example by a human capital model with heterogeneity when we allow for dierences in pro les the estimated persistence falls from 0 99 to about 0 8 moreover the main evidence against pro le heterogeneity in the existing literature that the autocorrelations of income changes are small and typically negative is also replicated by the pro le heterogeneity model we estimate casting doubt on the previous interpretation of this evidence second we embed this process in a life cycle model to examine how it alters individuals consumption saving decision we assume that as seems plausible individuals do not know their pro les exactly at the beginning of life but learn in a bayesian way with successive income observations we nd that learning is very slow and aects consumption decision throughout the life cycle the model generates substantial rise in consumption inequality over the life cycle which matches empirical observations deaton and paxson 1994 moreover the shape of the age inequality pro le is non concave as in the data but unlike in a model with very persistent shocks finally the consumption pro les of college graduates are steeper than those of high school graduates in the model consistent with the data because they face a wider dispersion of and hence uncertainty about income growth rates overall this evidence indicates that income shocks may be signi cantly less persistent than what is currently assumed

institutional competition versus centralization quo vadis europe lots of steep and sometimes blind bends with harsh speed limits and frequent detours but still it has been one that has attracted more and more traffic after a successful period of shaping a customs union and a free trade area following the treaty of rome 1957 europe became infected with euro sclerosis in the seventies owing to an increased intensity of national regulation especially in the labour market the constructionist approach to harmonization from above slowed down the speed of integration almost to a halt only the change of two fundamental rules revitalized the european integration process namely the introduction of majority voting in the ec council and the mutual recognition of national regulations brought about by the 1979 ruling of the european court with the single european act and the launch of the internal market programme europhoria blossomed finally leading to the maastricht treaty which aimed to be the masterpiece of european integration only very recently the danish no and the unconvincing approval by the french voters cooled off hopes for a united states of europe signalling that european integration is at the crossroads once again

do stronger intellectual property rights increase innovation summary do stronger intellectual property rights ipr increase innovation recent decades have seen a global transformation in ipr standards underpinned by the theory that stronger iprs spur increased incentives to innovate this study tests the impact of ever more rigorous ipr systems on innovation through an index of economic complexity of 94 countries from 1965 to 2005 our results confirm that stronger intellectual property systems engender higher levels of economic complexity nevertheless only countries with an initial above average level of development and complexity enjoy this effect

an approximate consumption function this paper proposes an approximation to the consumption function in the buffer stock model the approximation is based on the analytic properties of the consumption function in the buffer stock model in such model the consumption function is increasing and concave and its derivative is bounded from above and below we compare the approximation with the consumption function obtained using the endogenous grid point algorithm and show that using the former or the latter for estimating the euler equation leads to very similar results

the starfish effect can market entry by one firm encourage further entry by others abstract this paper examines the impact of entry decisions into oligopolistic markets upon the entry and exit decisions of rival producers when learning economies are important entry by one firm may paradoxically make entry more attractive to others by weakening the ability of a dominant incumbent to produce at low cost the likelihood of this outcome depends upon the extent to which variable costs of production decline as output increases and is enhanced by scope economies in the presence of multi market contact as well as by the degree of cost asymmetry between firms it is suggested that entry inducing entry may actually have occurred in part of the market for large civilian passenger aircraft whether or not this is so a more general conclusion is robust in industries where scale and scope effects are large the impact of entry is not just upon competition but on costs and these effects work in opposite directions to influence the entry decisions of other firms

trade policy in a super size me world abstract when a foreign monopolist sets a single market clearing price for its product the sign of the optimal tariff is determined by the extent of pass through also known as the terms of trade effect however when a foreign monopolist employs a second degree price discrimination mechanism in the domestic market the calculus of welfare maximization is very different while there are still terms of trade effects from the imposition of a tariff the existence of such effects are neither necessary nor sufficient to determine the sign of the optimal tariff instead the distribution of valuations within the population is the key determinant of the nature of policy intervention this result differs significantly from the uniform price case and is driven by the incentive compatibility constraint which places the distribution of types at the center of the analysis if there is a relatively large fraction of high valuation types in the population then domestic information rents may be increased by subsidizing imports thereby increasing the consumption of the low valuation types and moving the incentive constraint in favor of the high valuation types however if the share of high types in the population is relatively small then the increase in information rents will also be small but the fiscal implications of a subsidy will be large consequently the optimal policy will be to impose a trade tax

labor supply and the optimality of social security abstract traditional economic theory predicts that an unfunded public pension system can be justified on the basis of its ability to provide intergenerational transfers and also for its ability to provide partial insurance against mortality and labor income risks in this paper i demonstrate that the quantitative importance of these traditional roles depends on how the pension system distorts households labor supply decisions using a general equilibrium life cycle consumption model calibrated to the u s economy i show that these distortions can be large enough to erase much of the traditional welfare gains from social security i also find that this fact is robust within the range of labor supply elasticities usually encountered in the macroeconomic literature

wealth distribution in life cycle economies abstract this paper compares the age wealth distribution produced in life cycle economies to the corresponding distribution in the us economy the idea is to calibrate the model economies to match features of the us earnings distribution and then examine the wealth distribution implications of the model economies the findings are that the calibrated model economies with earnings and lifetime uncertainty can replicate measures of both aggregate wealth and transfer wealth in the us furthermore the model economies produce the us wealth gini and a significant fraction of the wealth inequality within age groups however the model economies produce less than half the fraction of wealth held by the top 1 percent of us households

policy rivalry among industrial states what can we learn from models of strategic trade policy the economic theory of international trade has changed dramatically over the last decade by admitting into its mainstream a body of literature that focuses on the implications of monopolistic and oligopolistic elements in international markets by applying the tools of the new industrial organization in an international context two new classes of models have emerged models of intra industry trade and models of strategic trade policy the policy implications of models of strategic trade policy were quite disturbing for the economics profession since these models demonstrated that the classical harmony between national and cosmopolitan welfare maximization does not exist if one assumes opportunities for strategic manipulation of oligopolistic international industries this article reviews two prominent models of strategic trade policy the brander spencer model and the krugman model and relates them to more familiar earlier concepts such as stackelberg s asymmetrical duopoly solution and the venerable infant industry argument for government intervention the primary purpose of this article however is to provide a synopsis of the large literature addressing the question of whether models of strategic trade policy can give guidance for government policy

airbus versus boeing revisited international competition in the aircraft market this paper examines international competition in the commercial aircraft industry we estimate a discrete choice differentiated products demand system for wide body aircraft and examine the airbus boeing rivalry under various assumptions on firm conduct we then use this structure to evaluate two trade disputes between the united states and european union our results suggest that aircraft prices increased by about 3 7 percent after the 1992 u s e u agreement on trade in civil aircraft that limits subsidies this price hike is consistent with a 5 percent increase in firms marginal costs after the subsidy cuts we also simulate the impact of the future entry of the airbus a 380 super jumbo aircraft on the demand for other wide bodied aircraft notably the boeing 747 we find that the a 380 could reduce the market share of the 747 by up to 14 8 percentage points in the long range wide body market segment depending upon the discounts offered on the a 380 but would reduce the market for airbus s existing wide bodies by an even greater margin

endogenous market structures in international trade natura facit saltum abstract almost all of the large literature on international trade with imperfect competition assumes exogenous market structures the purpose of this paper is to develop a simple model that generates alternative market structures as nash equilibria for different parameterizations of the basic model equilibrium market structure is a function of the underlying technology familiar configurations such as a duopoly competing in exports or a single multinational producing in both markets arise as special cases small tax policy changes can produce large welfare effects as the equilibrium market structure shifts implying discontinuous jumps in prices quantities and profits

price discrimination copyright law and technological innovation evidence from the introduction of dvds u s copyright law effectively prevents direct price discrimination for copyright holders that sell to different markets in response these firms can engage in indirect price discrimination i derive theoretical predictions about the use of indirect price discrimination and i analyze how optimal pricing strategies differ for different products using data on vhs and dvd movie distribution i find that firms pricing choices are consistent with the predictions of theory and that firms use of indirect price discrimination benefits consumers but harms ancillary retailers finally i examine what optimal pricing strategies might look like in a legal environment that permits direct price discrimination

entry into the market for large transport aircraft abstract european governments have been accused of unfair trading practices in providing subsidies for market entry in the large commercial aircraft industry a capacity game is calibrated for 1987 to 2006 showing that the disadvantage of late entry is overcome only after a long time hence market entry is unlikely without government subsidies the scale and scope effects of production outweigh the output reducing effects of a monopoly government supported market entry as an anti monopoly policy yields higher consumer welfare overall welfare is lower due to large losses in producer surplus

on equivalence between cournot competition and the kreps scheinkman game abstract the existing literature dealing with the equivalence between the kreps scheinkman ks game and cournot competition has focused on the case of a concave demand function this paper analyzes the equivalence possibilities under the much extended circumstances of strictly decreasing marginal industrial revenue a twice differentiable demand function and convex costs it proves that in the extended context the outcomes in the subgame perfect nash equilibrium spne of the ks game are those of cournot equilibrium ce and that a ce is on the path of the spne of the ks game if the marginal cost of each firm in some special borderline cases is not too high it further proves that for decreasing continuous demand and strictly increasing costs the outcome in the spne of the ks game if the spne exists is that of ce based on these results we argue that the ks game can serve as the basic form for studying quantity competition and for developing a t stage game theoretical framework to make competition form and timing endogenous

persistent protection in an international exit game abstract this paper examines the strategic behavior of two countries in a duopoly exit game with declining demand in the export market we consider whether countries have a strategic rational to maintain rather than unilaterally or jointly reduce their subsidies conditions under which persistent subsidization is justified from a national perspective are derived by maintaining subsidies one country can gain a strategic advantage by forcing its rival to exit earlier an outcome where only one country applies the subsidy is not attainable free trade is less likely to occur close to the end of the game

a welfare analysis of global patent protection in a model with endogenous innovation and foreign direct investment abstract this paper constructs a north south quality ladder model in which foreign direct investment fdi is determined by the endogenous location choice of firms and examines analytically how strengthening patent protection in the south affects welfare in the south strengthening patent protection increases the south s welfare by enhancing innovation and fdi but it also allows the firms with patents to charge higher prices for their goods which decreases welfare however the model shows that the former positive welfare effect outweighs the latter negative effect moreover introducing the strictest form of patent protection in the south that is harmonizing patent protection in the south with that in the north may maximize welfare in the south as well as in the north further a similar result can also be obtained in a nonscale effect model

foreign actors and intellectual property protection regulations in developing countries international agreements and institutions affect innovation in developing countries we analyze the impact of advanced country multinational enterprises amnes and supranational organizations on the regulatory adoption of global intellectual property protection standards in particular we investigate 60 developing countries that signed the trade relate aspects of intellectual property rights trips agreement of the world trade organization in 1994 our empirical findings show that a greater involvement of amnes in the domestic innovation systems of developing countries results in more stringent trips adoption and convergence to advanced country ip protection standards this relationship is positively moderated by country dependency on supranational organizations such as the international monetary fund this analysis contributes to the literature on institutional change and institutional voids it provides insights into the influence of external actors on the underlying change processes

regulation in the european community all governments regulate economic activity in their own countries the single european market will involve a significant transfer of regulatory activity from member states to the european community as well as the initiation of regulatory activity in certain areas that have not previously been subject to regulation at all including the activities of member states themselves as in taxation or the provision of subsidies to industry why should governments wish to make such a transfer of powers what do they have to gain

reaping what you sow an empirical analysis of international patent harmonization abstract this paper extends analysis of the gatt uruguay round by quantifying the impact of international patent harmonization as implied by the trips agreement patent harmonization has the capacity to generate large transfers of income between countries the us being the major beneficiary developing countries are major contributors to these transfers but canada the uk and japan also make sizable contributions

public provision of sales contingent claims backed finance to smes a policy alternative abstract in europe and elsewhere governments intervene to stimulate innovation in the sme sector and because smes face financial constraints in particular governments encourage the provision of debt and equity venture capital finance to such firms this paper discusses sales contingent claim scc backed finance funding secured only on a claim written on sales that offers a different repayment profile to debt and equity the attractiveness of such finance to firms as well as the behaviour of firms financed in this way are analysed for various reasons scc backed financial instruments are generally not available to smes on the market but it is argued that wider availability could further stimulate the growth and innovative activity of smes the correction of this market incompleteness by the introduction of government schemes providing scc backed corporate finance for smes in higher risk higher tech sectors is recommended the workability of such a scheme is explored by looking at existing examples aimed largely at project finance for larger firms

export subsidies as an outcome of the management labor conspiracy a mercantilistic trade policy is often introduced as a tool to generate more jobs in some key industries when employment in an export import industry is perceived to be low the government would be tempted to adopt measures of export promotion import protection to increase it by effectively guaranteeing employment however these policies would reduce incentives for the private sector to reach efficient labor contracts for example the labor union might refuse to sign a profit sharing contract with management and unilaterally demand high wages believing that the resulting loss in competitiveness would not affect the well being of its members since the government would protect the industry it is also conceivable that management and the labor union conspire to reach inefficient contracts so as to invite government intervention in certain cases trade policies only transfer income without any allocative effect this is not merely a theoretical curiosum free trade advocates have often pointed out that protectionist policies would have deleterious effects on the pattern of collective bargaining in the trade sensitive sectors this paper constructs simple models to illustrate this point for export subsidies and so it can be viewed as an addition to the literature that aims to bring attention to the pitfalls of the new mercantilism such as eaton and grossman 1986 dixit and grossman 1986 and horstman and markusen 1986 unlike these studies however the government policies considered here are reactive in the sense that the private sector moves first anticipating the government s response dixit and kyle 1985 carmichael

dumping and dynamic competition abstract when the current output level affects future production costs domestic and foreign profit maximizing firms may set prices below current costs to gain experience antidumping enforcement which poses a barrier to below cost sales by foreign rivals changes the payoff structure of competition and alters the equilibrium decisions of both foreign and domestic firms a comparison of the nash equilibria with and without antidumping rules shows that these rules change market outcomes even when they do not appear to be binding ex post this positive analysis of antidumping enforcement complements previous studies that have considered the motivation for dumping

how pollution taxes may increase pollution and reduce net revenues this paper develops a positive theory of pollution taxation by a federal authority when pollution abatement subsidies are used by local governments environmental and industry lobby groups influence governments with campaign contributions first pollution may increase in the pollution tax because the abatement subsidy increases decreases with the tax and pollution increases decreases in the abatement subsidy this occurs because the lobbying incentives change at a pollution tax reform second pollution taxes may reduce net revenues because subsidy expenditures rise third pollution may increase simultaneously as net revenues fall finally the welfare effect of a pollution tax may be negative

determinants of patent rights a cross national study abstract this paper presents an index of patent rights for 110 countries for the period 1960 1990 the index is used to examine what factors or characteristics of economies determine how strongly patent rights will be protected the evidence does indicate that more developed economies tend to provide stronger protection but the underlying factors which influence patent protection levels are the country s level of research and development r d activity market environment and international integration which are correlated with its level of development the results qualify however that r d activity influences patent protection levels after a nation s research sector reaches a critical size an implication of this is that to raise patent protection levels in weakly protecting countries it is important to foster a significant research base in those countries and thereby create incentives for protecting patent rights

anti foreign bias in the court welfare explanation and evidence from canadian intellectual property litigations abstract are judges concerned in the same way as policy makers with the effects of their decisions on national welfare in this paper we analyze this question by examining the outcomes of intellectual property rights ipr litigations between domestic and foreign firms we use a simple model of oligopoly in which ipr takes the form of a more efficient production technology to illustrate how antiforeign bias varies across cases when judges have welfare concerns the predictions of the model are tested using data on all canadian ipr cases over a four year period we find that foreign firms have about 25 percentage points lower probability of protecting their ipr in canadian courts relative to domestic firms we also find that courts decisions are aligned with national welfare maximization principles so that foreign firms are less likely to win in those cases when the implied welfare gains from not protecting foreign ipr are greater these findings are robust to controlling for endogenous selection of firms into litigation

saving and liquidity constraints this paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior the models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not explained by traditional life cycle models copyright 1991 by the econometric society

intellectual property rights foreign direct investment and industrial development this paper develops a north south product cycle model in which innovation imitation and the ow of fdi are all endogenously determined in the model a strengthening of ipr protection in the south reduces the rate of imitation and it increases the ow of fdi indeed

retirement spending and biological age abstract we solve a lifecycle model in which the consumer s chronological age does not move in lockstep with calendar time instead biological age increases at a stochastic non linear rate in time like a broken clock that might occasionally move backwards in other words biological age could actually decline our paper is inspired by the growing body of medical literature that has identified biomarkers which indicate how people age at different rates this offers better estimates of expected remaining lifetime and future mortality rates it isn t farfetched to argue that in the not too distant future personal age will be more closely associated with biological vs calendar age thus after introducing our stochastic mortality model we derive optimal consumption rates in a classic yaari 1965 framework adjusted to our proper clock time in addition to the normative implications of having access to biological age our positive objective is to partially explain the cross sectional heterogeneity in retirement spending rates at any given chronological age in sum we argue that neither biological nor chronological age alone is a sufficient statistic for making economic decisions rather both ages are required to behave rationally

exchange rate misalignments in duopoly the case of airbus and boeing we examine the effect of exchange rate misalignments on competition in the market for large commercial aircraft this market is a duopoly where players compete in dollar denominated prices while one of them airbus incurs costs mostly in euros we construct and calibrate a simulation model to investigate how companies adjust their prices to deal with the effects of a temporary misalignment and how this affects profit margins and volumes we also explore the effects on the long run dynamics of competition we conclude that due to the duopolistic nature of the aircraft market airbus will pass only a small part of the exchange rate fluctuations on to customers through higher prices moreover due to features specific to the aircraft industry such as customer switching costs and learning by doing even a temporary departure of the exchange rate from its long run equilibrium level may have permanent effects on the industry

innovation intellectual property rights and economic development a unified empirical investigation two important strands of literature investigate the way the effect of intellectual property rights ipr on innovation depends on either the initial ipr level or the level of economic development we expand on this by studying their joint effect in a single unified empirical framework we find that the effect of ipr on innovation is more complex than previously thought displaying important nonlinearities depending on the initial levels of both ipr and per capita gdp the policy implications of this are examined and include the conclusion that a single global level of ipr is in general sub optimal

a dynamic analysis of the market for wide bodied commercial aircraft this paper uses an empirical dynamic oligopoly model of the commercial aircraft industry to analyse industry pricing industry performance and optimal industry policy a novel feature of the model with respect to the previous literature is that entry exit prices and quantities are endogenously determined in markov perfect equilibrium mpe we find that many unusual aspects of the aircraft data such as high concentration and persistent pricing below static marginal cost are explained by this model we also find that the unconstrained mpe is quite efficient from a social perspective providing only 10 less welfare on average than a social planner would obtain finally we provide simulation evidence that an anti trust policy in the form of a concentration restriction would be welfare reducing

optimal consumption and the timing of the resolution of uncertainty abstract as is well known consumers want to accumulate precautionary savings in the face of income risks when their marginal utility is convex prudence in this paper we explore the effect of the timing of the resolution of income uncertainty on savings an agent faces uncertainty about his income at date t 2 what is the effect of being informed that the uncertainty will be resolved at date t 1 on the consumption at date t we show that the effect is positive if and only if marginal utility is convex prudence when either the risk free rate is equal to the rate of pure preference for the present or when the utility function is hara the intuition is that an early resolution of uncertainty allows for time diversifying the risk it therefore plays a role similar to a reduction of the income risk whose effect on savings is negative under prudence

trade policy to promote entry with scale economies product variety and export potential with scale economies product variety and export potential production of socially desirable varieties of a product may be privately unprofitable if competition from imported varieties of the same general product is in part responsible for this market failure either tariffs or subsidies may be used to promote domestic entry this paper demonstrates that in domestic welfare terms tariffs may be superior to subsidies for this purpose furthermore because domestic firns will export as well as produce for the domestic market tariff protection which induces entry may give rise to intra industry trade that benefits foreigners and domestic residents la politique commerciale pour promouvoir 1 entree de producteurs domestiques dans les cas ou coexistent des e conomies d e chelle une varie te de produits et des possibilites d exporta tion quand coexistent les economies d echelle la variet6 de produits et les possibilit6s d exportation l auteur montre qu il peut etre non profitable au niveau prive de produire une variett de produits socialement d6sirables si c est la concurrence de vari6t6s import6es d un produit gdneral qui est responsable de cette defaillance du march6 on peut utiliser soit les droits de douane soit les subsides pour promouvoir l entr6e de producteurs domestiques ce memoire demontre que l utilisation des droits de douane est une solution pref6rable en termes de bien etre domestique de plus comme les entreprises domestiques vont exporter en plus de produire pour le march6 domestique la protection douaniere qui suscite l entr6e peut aussi donner lieu a du commerce intra industrie qui a des retombees ben6fiques pour les etrangers et pour les residents de l economie domestique

international diffusion and intellectual property rights an empirical analysis abstract does a stronger intellectual property rights regime lead to the faster diffusion of new products and technology while there is a presumption that this is the case our analysis of data on the international release patterns of hollywood movies suggests a more complex story although moderate standards of ipr encourage the spread of movies either very weak or very strong property rights tend to slow the speed with which american movies are released abroad this empirical finding is robust to a wide variety of specifications overall it appears that while some recognition of ipr may encourage diffusion very strong ipr may actually retard the speed of diffusion

heterogeneity of southern countries and southern intellectual property rights policy we develop a model with one innovating northern firm and heterogeneous southern firms that compete in a final product market we assume southern firms differ in their ability to adapt technology and study southern incentives to protect intellectual property rights we find that in a non cooperative equilibrium governments resist ipr protection but collectively southern countries benefit from some protection we show that in general countries with more efficient firms prefer higher collective ipr protection than those with less efficient firms given the aggregate level of ipr protection it is more efficient if the more efficient countries have weaker ipr protection les auteurs developpent un modele dans lequel coexistent une entreprise innovatrice du nord et des entreprises heterogenes du sud qui se concurrencent dans un marche de produit final on postule que les entreprises du sud different dans leur capacitea adopter la technologie et on etudie les differentes incitations au sud a proteger les droits de propriete intellectuelle dpi il appert que dans un equilibre sans cooperation les gouvernements resistent a la pression pour qu on protege les dpi mais que collectivement ils beneficient de cette protection on montre qu en general les pays dont les entreprises sont les plus efficaces supportent une protection collective des dpi plus robuste que ne le font les pays dont les entreprises sont moins efficaces le niveau general de protection des dpi etant donne c est plus effectif si les pays les plus efficaces ont des niveaux de protection des dpi plus faibles

intellectual property rights and quality improvement this paper explores why theories about the effects of intellectual property rights ipr protection on foreign direct investment fdi and innovation have reached mixed conclusions in our model northern firms innovate to improve the quality of existing products and may later shift production to the south through fdi southern firms may then imitate the products of multinationals we find that imitation can increase fdi and innovation for quality improvements whereas the opposite occurs when innovators develop new varieties hence stronger ipr protection by reducing imitation may shift innovation away from improvements in existing products toward development of new products

anti dumping and countervailing duties under oligopoly abstract this paper constructs a conjectural variations model of international oligopoly in which the home country s optimal policy responses to the foreign government s subsidies and foreign firms dumping can be calculated some theoretical support is found for tariffs that countervail part of the foreign export subsidy the optimal fraction depends on the size of own and cross effects in demand and on the extent of market competition however no normative case is found for anti dumping duties

optimal irrational behavior abstract contrary to the usual presumption that welfare in markets is maximized if consumers behave rationally we show in a two period overlapping generations model that there always exists an irrational consumption rule that can weakly improve upon the lifecycle permanent income rule in general equilibrium the market clearing mechanism introduces a pecuniary externality that individual rational households do not consider when making decisions but a publically shared rule of thumb can exploit for typical calibrations the improvement of the welfare of irrational households is robust to the introduction of rational agents although transitions to the optimal irrational steady state are not pareto improving transitions do exist that will improve a pareto social welfare function with a sufficiently small generational discount rate generalizing to a more realistic lifecycle model we find that the save more tomorrow smart plan if properly parameterized can confer higher lifetime utility than the permanent income rule

imitation costs and patents an empirical study it has long been recognised that the costs of imitating new products have an important effect on the incentives for innovation in a market economy as arrow i962 and others have pointed out if firms can imitate an innovation at a cost that is substantially below the cost to the innovator of developing the innovation there may be little or no incentive for the innovator to carry out the innovation in their discussions of the innovation process economists frequently have called attention to the major role played by the costs of imitation but there has been little or no attempt to measure these costs to test various hypotheses concerning the factors influencing them or to estimate their effects in this paper we report some findings of what seems to be the first study of this topic in addition we present data regarding the effects of patents on imitation costs and on the rate of innovation

the life cycle model of consumption and saving a central implication of life cycle models is that agents smooth consumption we review the empirical evidence on smoothing at frequencies from within the year up to across a lifetime we find that life cycle models particular those which incorporate realistic features of markets and goods have more empirical successes than failures we also show that some apparent deviations from theoretical predictions imply very small welfare losses for agents finally we emphasize that the coherence of life cycle models imposes an important discipline when incorporating new features into models

consumption and the timing of income risk abstract when formulating a plan for savings does the timing of income risks matter should one be concerned with whether uncertainty in income is in the near term or the distant future of course and the impact of the timing of income risk is the subject of this article using a three period framework we provide approximate solutions for optimal consumption choices for preferences that display constant relative risk aversion and derive the relationship between innovations to income and innovations to consumption growth these results are contrasted with those for quadratic preferences and preferences that display constant absolute risk aversion we analyze consumption saving plans for several different situations of near term and distant future income risk and different kinds of preferences we conclude with a demonstration of the high degree of accuracy of our consumption approximations by comparing them to exact values computed by stochastic simulation

intellectual property rights and the world trade organization retrospect and prospects this paper analyzes the main economic issues of intellectual property rights iprs protection in the context of the world trade organization wto a retrospective view on the establishment of the trips trade related aspects of intellectual property rights agreement a still controversial accomplishment of the uruguay round of trade liberalization is provided the paper reviews the economic rationale for the harmonization of iprs drawing both on economic theory considerations as well as emerging empirical evidence the logic of linking ipr protection and trade in the context of the wto is also re examined some specific attention is devoted to the implications of trips for agricultural and biotechnology innovations the impact that ipr protection can have in promoting growth and development and the relation of iprs with other economic policies is discussed the paper concludes with an analysis of the prospects for more or less iprs related consensus in the current round of wto negotiations

consumption puzzles and precautionary savings abstract when marginal utility is convex agents accumulate savings as a precautionary measure against labor income eventualities this paper shows that precautionary savings can go a long way in making the excess growth excess smoothness and excess sensitivity features of consumption consistent with the stochastic processes of labor income observed in the u s at the microeconomic level

strategic tariffs and endogenous market structures trade and industrial policies under imperfect competition abstract this paper examines strategic tariff policy tariff induced entry and endogenous market structures in a developing country setting it improves on recent theoretical treatments of optimal trade policy under imperfect competition by allowing for forward looking import substituting investment induced by an anticipated time consistent tariff policy it shows that the optimum tariff is robust across a subset of market structures and cost and demand specifications however it will usually involve insufficient or excessive entry by domestic firms and consequently industrial policy of various kinds is a necessary supplement to strategic tariff policy

estimates of the value of patent rights in european countries during the post 1950 period this paper examines the distribution of the values of patent rights in the united kingdom france and germany during the post 1950 period these values are inferred from the behavior of patentees with respect to payment of renewal fees on their patents a simple economic model of renewal decisions is combined with data on the proportion of patents renewed at alternative ages and the renewal fee schedules to produce estimates of the distribution and the total value of patent rights in these countries moreover the data indicate that there have been changes in the value distribution and we follow these changes over the period the empirical results of particular interest concern the total value of patent rights and the relationship between changes in it and changes in the quantity of patents the skew in the distribution of patent values and the rate of obsolescence on the returns to patents

information shocks and precautionary saving abstract skinner s 1988 risky income life cycle consumption and precautionary savings journal of monetary economics 22 237 255 second order approximation to the consumption function under crra utility is generalized to accommodate any structure of uninsurable income risk to second order a future income shock will induce precautionary saving in the present that depends on the variance of the expectation of the income shock at each intervening period however the expected rate of consumption growth depends only on the currently perceived variance of the expected present value of future income in a finite horizon model precautionary saving produces a hump shaped lifecycle profile of mean consumption primarily because the variance of future income decreases with age but the lifecycle dynamics of total wealth also affect the shape of the profile for a markov income process with autocorrelations on the order of 0 9 or less the second order approximation performs surprisingly well for common parameter choices from the literature but it does poorly as the autocorrelation approaches 1

second third and higher order consumption functions a precautionary tale abstract no analytic solution exists to the consumption problem of an agent who faces uninsurable income shocks though perturbation methods can be used to derive approximate solutions this paper shows it is straightforward to extend the well known second order consumption function to third order however for every n there is a threshold interest rate below which the nth order correction diverges this puts a bound on the accuracy that can be achieved with perturbation methods even a second order consumption function can perform spectacularly worse than a zeroth order function that disregards precautionary saving and this cannot be rectified by going to higher orders

patents as options some estimates of the value of holding european patent stocks in many countries holders of patents must pay an annual renewal fee in order to keep their patents in force this paper uses data on the proportion of patents renewed and the renewal fees faced by post world war ii cohorts of patents in france the united kingdom and germany in conjunction with a model of patent holders renewal decisions to estimate the returns earned from holding patents in these countries since patents are often applied for at a nearly stage in the innovation process the model allows agents to be uncertain about the sequence of returns that will be earned if the patent is kept inforce formally then the paper presents and solves a discrete choice optimal stochastic control model derives the implications of the model on aggregate behaviour and then estimates the parameters of the model from aggregate data the estimates enable a detailed description of the evolution of the distribution of returns earned from holding patents over their life spans and calculations of both the annual returns earned from holding the patents still in force or the patent stocks in the alternative countries and the distribution of the discounted value of returns earned from holding the patents in a cohort this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effect of patents on trade abstract in contrast with quotas and tariffs it is theoretically ambiguous whether fewer or weaker rules over intellectual property rights will increase or decrease trade in patentable goods the prevailing view is that anticipation of imitation reduces exporters incentive to export goods to jurisdictions with weak patent regimes this empirical paper uses new measures of how the destination country patent system can affect trade in contrast with existing studies which assume would be exporters can always get a patent in the target foreign market we construct measures of the bias against foreign patent applicants and patents which may block imported goods we find evidence that the presence of destination country blocking patents has the larger negative impact on international trade being refused a patent also has a negative impact on trade but the magnitude is smaller

foreign and domestic multinational presence in the uk the determinants of multinational presence in uk manufacturing industry in 1979 are analysed it is argued that maultinational presence may result from strategic interaction as well as other firm and industry characteristics the determinants of both foreign and uk multinational presence are estimated using a dataset that enables both types of multinational to be indentified results show an important effect of both scale and concentration on multinational presence

aggregate precautionary savings when is the third derivative irrelevant abstract when are aggregate precautionary savings positive we address this question in the context of a general equilibrium model where infinitely lived agents receive idiosyncratic labor endowment shocks hold a risk free asset to smooth consumption and face a liquidity constraint we prove that 1 the steady state capital stock is always larger in any equilibrium with idiosyncratic shocks and a liquidity constraint than without idiosyncratic shocks i e aggregate precautionary savings are positive as long as consumers are risk averse and 2 aggregate precautionary savings occurs if and only if the liquidity constraint binds for some agents

trade disputes in the commercial aircraft industry t he recent launch of airbus s new super jumbo the a 380 has provoked yet another trade conflict between the united states and european union eu in the aircraft industry the industry has strained trade relationship between the us and the eu ever since the airbus s entry into the market in 1974 these tensions tapered with the signing of the 1992 us eu agreement on trade in civil aircraft the 1992 agreement in fact boeing and airbus shortly considered cooperating on the superjumbo project during the early 1990s but the collaboration faltered because the two sides disagreed on the commercial viability of the aircraft while airbus forecasted that over the next 20 years airlines would demand approximately 1 500 superjumbos yielding around 345 billion in revenues boeing s projections were much more reserved it forecasted only 700 planes hence boeing doubted the project could break even the economist 2001 as a result airbus proceeded with the development of the new aircraft on its own like in previous airbus s programmes the eu will provide some direct financial support to airbus to partially cover the a 380 s 12 billion launch costs us trade officials question the legitimacy of this financial arrangement especially since boeing doubts the commercial viability of the project their objections are illustrated in the 2000 foreign trade barriers report of the us trade representative