research productivity of the economics profession in east asia i introduction research productivity is often ranked for economics departments based on page counts of journal publications for example graves marchand and thompson 1982 while others rate the departments by the number of citations attributed to their faculty for example davis and papanek 1984 recently scott and mitias 1996 used flow and stock concepts in their departmental rankings while the flow of research can be counted to give credit to the department where authors are affiliated at the time of publication the stock ranking counts a currently affiliated faculty s stock of past and current research the alternative rankings also use different sets of journals as well as varied weighting schemes to standardize the length of journal pages and to adjust for journal quality while several different methods have been used to rank economics departments in the united states no such assessment has been done for east asian universities this article aims to fill this gap by ranking economics professions in east asia based solely on research productivity for the purpose of comparison with u s universities our methodology closely follows that of scott and mitias 1996 with some variations in the sample length first the ranking counts the stock of past and current research for example hogan 1984 laband 1985 conroy and dusansky 1995 scott and mitias 1996 and dusansky and vernon 1998 fine research scholars move from one university to another a phenomenon that sometimes leads to dramatic changes in school performance however labor mobility depends to some extent on the degree of importance of research to which a university is attached more open and research oriented schools often hire researchers and their accompanying stock of published research from other institutions in the region or more often from abroad while others more or less insulate themselves from inflows of new research a more accurate reflection of current reality is therefore to know who is at a particular university today not who was at it in the past thus economics faculty affiliated with east asian universities during the autumn 1997 semester are counted for the stock ranking in east asia the economics faculty include all economists in business schools as well as all in economics departments 1 faculty names were obtained directly from department chairs and each school s home page on the internet second the basic ranking relies on page counts of articles published in a set of 36 quality journals over the period 1990 96 page counts are employed to capture many variations in the length of articles across journals the econlit cd rom september 1997 includes all international journals that have appeared in the journal of economic literature the choice of a set of quality journals is however open to question graves marchand and thompson 1982 for example examined publications in a set of 24 journals hogan 1984 looked at a set of 4 laband 1985 a set of 27 bairam 1994 a set of 5 and conroy and dusansky 1995 and dusansky and vernon 1998 each a set of 8 journals the criterion employed here for top 36 journals relies on the choice in scott and mitias 1996 in which the original set of top 24 journals in graves marchand and thompson 1982 was updated 2 to check the sensitivity of our findings with alternative sets of journals we ranked these schools based on top 24 and top 42 journals the list of 42 top journals was provided to us by dusansky and vernon 1998 3 third standardized page counts are employed for example graves marchand and thompson 1982 hirsch austin brooks and moore 1984 conroy and dusansky 1995 scott and mitias 1996 and dusansky and vernon 1998 the scott mitias 1996 conversion factors are used for the basic ranking in which the number of pages published in 36 journals were standardized to the average length of a page in the aer

formulating research policy on expert advice abstract national research assessments represent the principal policy used by countries with public university systems to improve the quality of their universities research they typically employ expert panels of local academics to assess journal quality and use such assessments to reward publications we propose a model of how experts assess quality and test this model using data from the recent australian assessment controlling for objective quality we show that experts cognitive biases dominate their assessments consequently such assessments exaggerate the quality of the experts research and understate that of their colleagues our model can explain 95 of the variation in assessments

evaluating the influence of personal relationships on land sale prices a case study in oregon land transactions typically involve substantial personal interaction between buyer and seller despite this fact researchers have made little attempt to determine how personal relationships influence the terms of trade for a property in this study linn county oregon farm land sales from 1992 1997 were examined to better understand and quantify the influences of personal relationships transactions between relatives and neighbors involved special considerations with greater frequency than did those between strangers and acquaintances transactions between parent and child and between neighbors brought significantly less than sales between strangers transactions resulting from a realtor or advertisement sold at a significant premium

hedonic estimation applied to a water rights market rights is concerned with the efficiency of water allocations where there are legal and institutional constraints on water rights trades economists have argued that such constraints prohibit water from moving to its socially highest valued uses and hence that the allocation of water under these restrictions is inefficient on the other hand if water rights associated with a certain parcel of farm real estate could be sold separately from the land in a perfectly competitive market the allocation of water would be efficient hirshleifer et al 1969 42 43 anderson 1983 1 the past attempts to examine and compare the efficiency of water rights markets have been qualitative one notable example is the study by brown et al 1982 which hypothesized that water rights markets are more efficient in regions where water is relatively scarce six basins were examined and as

where are the economists who publish publication concentration and rankings in europe based on cumulative publications we measure the past production of research articles by current members of european economics institutions all econlit journals are used weighted to reflect differences in quality both a long 1971 2000 and a short 1996 2000 time period are considered we also provide production indices that take into account the authors career length the total output of each research center is measured as well as its production per member the focus is on 600 centers from eighteen european countries eu 14 israel norway switzerland and turkey european centers are compared to the top sixty u s economics departments statistics regarding the concentration of article production across researchers institutions and countries are provided as well as on publication habits jel a14 l11 r32

installed base and compatibility innovation product preannouncements and predation a good is often more valuable to any user the more others use compatible goods the authors show that this effect may inhibit innovation if an installed base exists and transition to a new standard must be gradual early adopters bear a disproportionate share of transient incompatibility costs this can produce excess inertia the installed base however is stranded if the new standard is adopted this may create excess momentum these dynamic effects have strategic implications temporary price cutting can permanently prevent entry and product preannouncements can be critical in innovation these strategic actions have ambiguous welfare effects

trends in rankings of economics departments in the u s an update economics departments in the u s are ranked based on 1 the number of pages published in thirty six economics journals 2 publications in five of the top journals 3 output per faculty member and 4 an index of the concentration of research in a department evidence shows that the top twenty departments have generally retained their positions since the 1970s but rather large changes have occurred in departments ranked from 240 to 100 an economists hall of fame is developed listing the top fifty individual producers of research in the thirty six journal set and the top five journals

economic research in europe abstract the purpose of this paper is to give an account of the resources devoted to economic research at the national for the e e c level and at the european level and in addition to give a summary account of the output from that activity the findings permit us to make a certain amount of comparison between countries though no doubt some of the measures used will be subject to criticism the outcome of the study should serve to stimulate a more informed debate on the state of economic research in europe

a model of the evolution of duopoly does the asymmetry between firms tend to increase or decrease this paper is an attempt to identify some of the factors that affect the evolution of market structure in a model of dynamic competition between two firms the stochastic evolution of the state of competition depends on the respective effort rates of the firms the question is whether the current leader works harder than the laggard does the gap between firms tend to increase or decrease we show that several effects are at work the state tends to evolve in the direction where joint payoffs are greater since joint payoffs are related to joint product market profits less joint effort costs there are two classes of effect the joint profit effect and various joint cost effects the latter result in part from the pattern of profits and in part from endpoint effects that give relief from efforts asymptotic expansions illuminate these influences moreover we show by numerical simulation that there is another kind of joint cost effect the pattern of joint effort costs can influence the pattern of evolution of market structure and the evolution of the pattern of market structure can influence the pattern of efforts in a mutually self reinforcing manner in particular there may be equilibria in which this last effect means that the laggard works harder than the leader even though all the other effects work in favour of the leader

the value of agricultural water rights in agricultural properties in the path of development article i nfo article history this paper estimates the value of water rights in a rapidly urbanizing semi arid area phoenix arizona to do this we use hedonic pricing to explore the impact of water rights on property values in 151 agricultural land transactions that occurred between 2001 and 2005 we test two main hypotheses 1 that the marginal will ingness to pay for water rights is higher in more developed urbanizing areas than in less developed rural areas and 2 that the marginal willingness to pay for water rights in urban areas is increasing in the value of developed land we find that the marginal willingness to pay for water rights is highest among properties in urbanized or urbanizing areas where a significant proportion of the land has already been developed additionally we find that the marginal willingness to pay for agricultural water rights is greatest in cities where developed land is most valuable

sequential product innovation and industry revolution a certain sequence of innovations in a vertically differentiated good is considered two firms are engaged in a series of bidding games to acquire the infinitely lived patents to these managerial diseconomies restrict firms to producing a single good which is chosen optimally from the set of patents owned by the firm product market equilibrium is bertrand two theorems provide 1 a sufficient condition for the current leader to be overthrown action reaction and 2 a necessary and sufficient condition for persistent dominance an illustrative example shows that sequences satisfying these conditions can always be constructed copyright 1987 by royal economic society

european economics an analysis based on publications in the core journals abstract in this paper we provide a ranking of european economics institutions and countries based on publications in a core set of 10 economic journals from 1991 to 1996 we find that the three leading universities in europe are the london school of economics tel aviv university and oxford university while the three top ranked countries are the u k france and israel

deterrence by market sharing a strategic incentive for licensing the potential of an incumbent firm to retain its dominant position in a market is a focal point of the modem theory of industrial organization a recent literature examines this issue for markets in which challengers threaten an incumbent s position by engaging in research for a new technology richard gilbert and david newbery 1982 show that an incumbent firm with a firstmover advantage will preempt potential entrants by inventing a new technology slightly earlier than would its rivals in a stochastic r d therefore its introduction does not alter the decision to research when the pre innovation market is characterized by an incumbent and potential entrants stephen salant 1984 shows that licensing ex post to innovation can alter the research decision as anticipation of the returns from future licensing encourages research by the entrant as a counterpoint to the salant result i find that licensing ex ante to research may discourage further research by the entrant indeed this strategic incentive for licensing may be so strong as to persuade the incumbent as well as the entrant to terminate research activity to isolate this incentive for licensing from the one discussed by salant a simple model is constructed in which licensing of future technologies is not desirable anecdotal evidence suggests that the strategic incentive does lead innovators in some markets to license their technologies examples of this information sharing are prevalent in markets where technological change is rapid in the 1940 s standard oil of new jersey discovered a process for synthetic rubber it traded patent rights on this process for a synthetic oil production process discovered by farben a german rubber company in both the synthetic oil and synthetic rubber markets rival companies were department of economics scarsborough college university of toronto toronto ontario canada m5s lal i thank jon cohen and ron saunders for discussions that inspired this paper i am also grateful to yehuda kotowitz andy mclennan jennifer reinganum ralph winter myma wooders two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the university of toronto for helpful comments on earlier drafts

revealed performances worldwide rankings of economists and economics departments 1990 2000 in this paper i study the production of academic research by economics departments and economists worldwide rankings are provided based on both citations and publications these rankings reveal a dominant position of the united states in the production of economics literature over time however the extent of this dominance is decreasing jel a10 a14

the evolution of market structure when there is a sequence of innovations the paper explores the question of how market structure evolves when there is a sequence of opportunities to innovate does one firm extend its technological superiority to become increasingly dominant or does technological leadership constantly change hands in a process of actionreaction a simple duopoly model is proposed in which the answer to this question depends upon the nature of product market behaviour in that model highly competitive product market behaviour leads to increasing dominance whereas cournot behaviour may lead to action reaction

an integrated analysis of the effects of local water institutions on irrigated agriculture outcomes in the arid western united states abstractirrigation water rights and their governance structures constitute the foundation of local water institutions and profoundly influence water resource allocations irrigated agricultural productivity and other consumptive water uses in the arid climate zones this article explores the regional structures of irrigation water rights and water governance and empirically analyses the priority effects of water rights on irrigated agriculture at the micro level in idaho an arid and semiarid state in the western united states we integrate a unique data set of water rights and water supplies with agricultural features and environmental characteristics into our empirical analysis results indicate that seniority in water resources allocation has significant positive effects on both the average crop revenue and crop water use efficiency local water rights structures differ significantly in seniority and water sources from region to region in response to the heterogeneity in local water rights structures

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

the relative impacts of economics journals 1970 1990 our data collection and database assembly efforts were assisted by john p sophocleus mark gwartney michele butler and scott ralston we received extremely valuable computer programming assistance from jon brunson and edward novak constructive comments were receivedfrom two anonymous reviewers financial supportfrom the faculty development committee at salisbury state university is gratefully acknowledged

the institutional concentration of authors in top journals of economics during the last two decades this paper addresses the institutional concentration of authors in 15 top economics journals from 1977 to 1997 the concentration of authors phd affiliations is substantially higher than the concentration of authors current affiliations relating input indicators such as population number of universities with economics departments or manpower in economics to publication output reduces the us dominance considerably whereas israel and the united kingdom come out excellently exporters and importers of phds among universities are identified concentration ratios like the herfindahl index lack a clear time trend nevertheless the position of the united states has been weakening in recent years

persistence of leadership in product innovation in a firm model of vertical product differentiation three distinct patterns of market shares emerge as an equilibrium outcome reflecting three distinct strategies in respect of timing of the introduction of new products the main novelty relative to the existing literature on vertical product differentiation lies in the incorporation of learning by doing this assumption generates stability of market share patterns over a sequence of product innovations copyright 1992 by blackwell publishing ltd

technology adoption in the presence of network externalities we analyze technology adoption in industries where network externalities are significant the pattern of adoption depends on whether technologies are sponsored a sponsor is an entity that has property rights to the technology and hence is willing to make investments to promote it key findings include the following 1 compatibility tends to be undersupplied by the market but excessive standardization can occur 2 in the absence of sponsors the technology superior today has a strategic advantage and is likely to dominate the market 3 when one of two rival technologies is sponsored that technology has a strategic advantage and may be adopted even if it is inferior 4 when two competing technologies both are sponsored the technology that will be superior tomorrow has a strategic advantage

trade policy and learning by doing the case of semiconductors abstract the study examines the role of learning by doing for production of different types of semiconductors and how this affects the dynamics of market structure for erasable programmable read only memories eproms the learning curve determines aggregate market dynamics whereas for dynamic random access memories drams economies of scale seem to be more important these results are compared with some stylised facts for eproms persistence of leadership in product innovation could be observed whereas for drams there was leap frogging in product innovation moreover scope for vertical product differentiation is more enhanced for eproms and price competition is less intense these findings are then related to the problem of identifying the appropriate trade policies in oligopolistic industries the analysis concerns the antidumping actions undertaken by the european commission it is shown how markets enjoying similar patterns of protection have a completely different evolution of market shares for european producers the conclusion for strategic trade policy is that industry specific features matter crucially

testing dynamic oligopolistic interaction evidence from the semiconductor industry abstract the objective of this paper is to test whether firms in the dynamic random access memory dram industry take the intertemporal strategic effect of their contemporaneous output decision on their rivals future output decision into account or whether they precommit themselves to a production plan learning by doing and spillovers are present in this industry and introduce an intertemporal component to firms strategies a simplified version of jarmin s rand j econ 250 1994 441 dynamic oligopolistic model is applied to firm level data demand and pricing relations for five dram generations are estimated the empirical results show that firms behave strategically and price cost margins are likely overestimated in a precommitment specification

r d rivalry with licensing or imitation the authors study the rivalry between two firms to develop an innovation in a dynamic setting that allows for post development dissemination of the innovation such as licensing or imitation this dissemination may cause the noninnovating firm to benefit from the discovery when this occurs conventional results in the economics of r d no longer need apply they find that industry leaders will tend to develop minor innovations but will develop major innovations only if imitation is difficult copyright 1987 by american economic association

the evolution of market structure in semiconductors the role of product standards abstract this paper looks at the role of product standards in determining the evolution of market structure in semiconductors theory suggests that product standards along with learning by doing effects lead to market concentration and persistence of leadership in product innovation empirical evidence supports this with some qualifications the market concentration hypothesis is confirmed for all submarkets of the semiconductor industry persistence of leadership is obtained for markets based on proprietary product standards in the market for microprocessors we have persistence of leadership in product innovation that is accompanied with overall market dominance for microcontrollers we observe persistence of leadership in product innovation but not concomitant overall market dominance whereas learning by doing effects seem to be strong in the small market for microprocessors they are weaker in the much larger market for microcontrollers

preemptive patenting and the persistence of monopoly this article takes a different tack and inquires whether institutions such as the patent system create opportunities for firms with monopoly power to maintain their monopoly power the results apply to other situations such as brand identification spatial location and capacity expansion which share the characteristic that early or preemptive actions may lower the returns to potential competitors

bargaining rules for a thin spot water market markets for water rights have long been advocated to resolve user conflicts and to improve efficiency trelease 1961 hartman and seastone 1970 the potential for efficiency gains from market allocation of water has been well established burness and quirk 1979 eheart lyon and wong 1983 moore 1986 almost all studies of water markets address the transferability of long term water rights i e base or property rights eheart et al 1983 lyon 1986 saliba bush and martin 1987 crouter 1987 however rental or spot markets for water can improve efficiency by allowing allocational adjustments in line with changing conditions without disturbing the base rights system exchanges of either base rights or spot rights that entail a change in the point of diversion may result in third party effects even in the absence of return flow problems johnson gisser and werner 1981 eheart et al 1983 2 such third party effects place practical limits on the geographic scope of water exchanges and result in a thin market i e a market with few eligible participants thin markets are likely to be manipulated by participants leading to inefficiency unless suitable bargaining rules are designed to counter market manipulation the efficiency gains from water exchanges cannot be fully realized this paper uses multilateral bargaining models based on a game theoretic approach to address bargaining rules that will facilitate the efficient operation of a thin water market across a variety of bargaining environments institutional features such as the size of the water market the water rights system the distribution of farm sizes and the level of participants information define the bargaining environment the models are translated into computer simulations based on data representing irrigation water demand in the crane creek watershed of kankakee county illinois thin water markets are likely to be the rule rather than the exception especially in the u s west where many streams with insufficient flows are fully or overappropriated given this fact it is crucial to investigate how the efficiency of a thin water market is affected by the relative bargaining strengths of the participants and to suggest suitable bargaining rules that could improve the social gains achieved in thin water markets

land markets and the value of water hedonic analysis using repeat sales of farmland author s buck s auffhammer m sunding d abstract the lack of robust water markets makes it difficult to value irrigation water because water rights are appurtenant to land it is possible to infer the value of water from observed differences in the market price of land we use panel data on repeat farmland sales in california s san joaquin valley to estimate a hedonic regression equation with parcel fixed effects this controls for sources of omitted variables bias and allows us to recover the value of irrigation water to landowners in our sample we show that a more traditional cross sectional regression results in an artificially low value of irrigation water the author 2014

the value of heterogeneous property rights and the costs of water volatility the system of prior appropriation in the western unites states prioritizes property rights for water based on the establishment of beneficial use creating a hierarchy where rights initiated first are more secure i estimate the demand for security in water rights through their capitalization in agricultural property markets in the yakima river basin a major watershed in washington state all water rights are satisfied in an average year so the relative value of secure property rights is a function of water supply volatility and the costs of droughts are predominantly born by those with weak rights in aggregate security in water rights does not capitalize into property values at the irrigation district level however there is heterogeneity in the premium for secure water rights the lack of a premium for district level water security is robust to a variety of econometric methods to account for correlated district unobservables and the null result produces an economically significant upper bound on the value to water security for the district the ability for farmers to adapt to water supply volatility as well as expectations about water markets and government infrastructure investment are leading explanations for the lack of an aggregate premium these explanations are supported by the pattern of heterogeneity in the water security premium

preemption and rent equalization in the adoption of new technology we study the adoption of a new technology to illustrate the effects of preemption in games of timing we show that the threat of preemption equalizes rents in a duopoly but that this result does not extend to the general oligopoly game if the gain to preemption is sufficiently small then the optimal symmetric outcome which involves late adoption is an equilibrium this contrasts with reinganum s result that in precommitment equilibria there must be diffusion we develop a new and richer formalism for modeling games of timing which permits a continuoustime representation of the limit of discrete time mixed strategy equilibria

a revisionist perspective of european research in economics abstract the study by kalaitzidakis et al eur econom rev 113 1999a 1150 1168 hereafter kms continues to exert significant influence on the literature that evaluates the relative publication performance of european centres of research in economics the current paper argues that the methodology employed by kms is deficient and that it is not the methodology these authors intended to employ i utilise an improved approach to revise the original rankings that relied on publication output from 1991 to 1996 and to update the relevant findings using 1997 2002 data the revised rankings differ greatly from those reported by kms the results also suggest that there have been dramatic shifts in the relative ranking of the various european institutions over time as expected rankings are sensitive to the choice of journals considered however ranking sensitivity is considerably more pronounced with respect to changes in individual performance over time than to the group of journals used to measure performance

estimating irrigation water value using hedonic price analysis a case study in malheur county oregon hedonic price analysis is applied to agricultural land sales to reveal the implicit market price of water in irrigation this provides price information where otherwise absent which can facilitate reallocation of water supplies to meet growing demands the failure to include available information on soil quality an impor tant determinant of agricultural land value re sults in erroneous conclusions joint testing of heteroskedasticity and functional form is demon strated the value of irrigation water in this loca tion is estimated at 9 for an acre foot on the least productive land irrigated and up to 44 per acre foot on the most productive land jel q15