stock market linkages evidence from latin america abstract this study investigates the dynamic interdependence of the major stock markets in latin america using data from 1995 to 2000 we examine the stock market indexes of argentina brazil chile colombia mexico and venezuela the index level series are non stationary and so we employ cointegration analysis and error correction vector autoregressions var techniques to model the interdependencies we find that there is one cointegrating vector which appears to explain the dependencies in prices the results are robust to sensitivity tests based on translating indexes to us dollars i e a common currency for all the markets and to partitioning the sample into periods before and after the asian and russian financial crises of 1997 and 1998 respectively our results suggest that the potential for diversifying risk by investing in different latin american markets is limited

property rights externalities and resource degradation locating the tragedy abstract resource degradation in the third world is largely driven by the demands of farm households for fuelwood and land for agriculture since resources are often controlled through indigenous systems of property the tragedy of the commons has been used to explain resource degradation as a result private property is suggested as a solution to resource degradation a dynamic model capable of examining household incentives for resource use under private and common property is developed results of the model reject the conventional wisdom that gives rise to the presumed optimality of private individual property in natural resources and the correlated indictment of group management regimes

business cycle analysis with a markov switching model this article explores the hamilton markov switching model through an analysis of the business cycles of eight developed market economies forecasting and specification tests suggest only marginal improvements over linear autoregressive models yet filtered and smoothed conditional probabilities indicate turning points in business cycles that closely correlate with turning points from traditional methods tests regarding the asymmetry of business cycles reject the null of symmetry for most countries

intrinsic motivation in public service theory and evidence from state supreme courts abstractthis paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the intrinsic preferences of state appellate court judges we construct a panel data set using published decisions from all state supreme courts from 1947 to 1994 we estimate the effects of changes in judges employment conditions on a number of measures of judicial performance the results are consistent with the hypothesis that judges are intrinsically motivated to provide high quality decisions and that at the margin they prefer quality over quantity when judges face less time pressure whether from the introduction of an intermediate appellate court the weakening of electoral demands or an increased salary they write more well researched opinions that are cited more often by other judges these effects are strongest when judges have more discretion to select their portfolios of cases

the motivation and bias of bureaucrats many individuals are motivated to exert effort because they care about their jobs rather than because there are monetary consequences to their actions the intrinsic motivation of bureaucrats is the focus of this paper and three primary results are shown first bureaucrats should be biased second sometimes this bias takes the form of advocating for their clients more than would their principal while in other cases they are more hostile to their interests for a range of bureaucracies those who are biased against clients lead to more efficient outcomes third self selection need not produce the desired bias instead selection to bureaucracies is likely to be bifurcated in the sense that it becomes composed of those who are most preferred by the principal and those who are least preferred

an endogenous growth model for the evolution of water rights systems this article presents a model to help explain the transition path from one water management system to another typically a commons framework to one of tradable permit based property rights furthermore drawing from transaction cost literature the model demonstrates how this takes place when externalities the strain on water resources become severe enough to warrant the increased transaction costs inherent with more complex water rights management frameworks

unobservable shocks as carriers of contagion we propose an identified structural garch model to disentangle the dynamics of financial market crises we distinguish between the hypersensitivity of a domestic market in crisis to news from foreign non crisis markets and the contagion imported to a tranquil domestic market from foreign crises the model also enables us to connect unobserved structural shocks with their source markets using variance decompositions and to compare the size and dynamics of impulses during crises periods with tranquil period impulses to illustrate we apply the method to data from the 1997 1998 asian financial crisis which consists of a complicated set of interacting crises we find significant hypersensitivity and contagion between these markets but also show that links may strengthen or weaken impulse response functions for an equally weighted equity portfolio show the increasing dominance of korean and hong kong shocks during the crises and covariance responses demonstrate multiple layers of contagion effects

lottery or waiting line auction abstract this paper studies the efficiencies of the two most widely used non price allocation mechanisms lotteries and waiting line auctions as our analysis suggests in addition to the fairness of the mechanism the use of lotteries in lieu of waiting line auctions can be also justified from an efficiency point of view in particular we show that the less dispersed consumers time valuations are the more efficient is a lottery relative to a waiting line auction in addition we identify four conditions under which a lottery dominates a waiting line auction in expected social surplus preserving furthermore the numerical simulations we conduct indicate that over a predominantly wide range of circumstances a lottery is more socially efficient than a waiting line auction as an allocative mechanism in the absence of a conventional price system

understanding the evolution and performance of water markets and allocation policy a transaction costs analysis framework abstract water markets and associated allocation policy reforms have struggled to achieve their intended goals in many water stressed rivers in part due to the institutional friction imposed by transition and transaction costs this paper elaborates a transaction costs analysis framework to examine the evolution and performance of water markets and allocation policy reforms this analysis rests on three pillars i a synthesis of three theoretical traditions of institutional analysis williamson north and ostrom often considered independently ii a framework to examine the types and interactions of transaction costs in market based water allocation over time and iii an illustrative analysis of three large river basins the colorado columbia and murray darling with varying levels of success in market based water policy reforms the resulting framework accounts for water s complexity as an economic good this framework and the case studies lead to the identification of several policy implications including the need for a multiphase sequencing of reform strategic investment in institutional transition costs and institutional choices that preserve future flexibility to adjust water rights and diversion limits to manage social and environmental externalities

dynamic reform of public institutions a model of motivated agents and collective reputation abstract state capacity is optimized when public institutions are staffed by individuals with public service motivation however when motivated agents value the collective reputation of their place of employment steady state equilibria with both high and low aggregate motivation reputation in the mission oriented sector exist reforming a low motivation institution requires a non monotonic wage path since the effect of higher wages on motivation is negative for a high reputation institution but positive for a low reputation institution a transition to a high reputation steady state requires an initial wage increase to crowd motivated workers in followed by a wage decrease to crowd non motivated workers out

does the allocation of property rights matter in the commons abstract a popular solution to the tragedy of the commons is to create private property rights to access the commons if resource users care about the welfare of others they may be unwilling to respect property rights regimes that lead to unfair or inequitable outcomes we explore in a series of laboratory experiments whether it is possible to undermine the efficacy of property rights solutions through the allocation process we find that both the extent to which property rights are enforced and how they are allocated significantly affect extraction and compliance our findings suggest that one of the most popular allocation methods is suboptimal we observe that occasional enforcement and the proportional allocation of property rights is dominated by no enforcement and the equal or inverse allocation of property rights our results support the view that allocation matters for property rights solutions to the commons problem

cross compliance as payment for public goods understanding eu and us agricultural policies cross compliance cc is a mechanism for encouraging farmers to fulfill certain environmental conditions in return for governmental support payments introduced to united states us and european union eu agricultural policy from the 80s onwards upcoming new us farm bill 2012 and eu common agricultural policy after 2013 policies will include cc cross compliance is seen i as a policy for enforcing environmental objectives or ii as a way to organize and reward agricultural public good production in recent years the instrument s effectiveness and efficiency have been criticized to validate the deviating understandings we drew back on an economic institutionalist perspective we found that regarding eu cc as payment for public goods does not generally align with the existing german property rights distribution in both the eu and us cc standards above those contained regulatory law have characteristics of a payment for public goods but create severe problems we conclude that cc even if useful for triggering and broadening environmental protection efforts may cause several long term problems therefore the rights structure should be clearly communicated law enforcement function should be temporary the instrument should be included in an overall concept and payments should be better linked to the environmental output

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis revisited summary more than two decades ago schlager and ostrom 1992 developed a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights the conceptual framework has profoundly influenced research on natural resource governance common property and community resource management however currently natural resource governance has changed dramatically challenging the applicability of the conceptual schema there are now many more social actors involved in resource management than the local communities at the focus of original analysis additionally resource management increasingly provides access to various kinds of benefits from outside the immediate context including indirect benefits such as payments for environmental services and results based payments for redd these changes demand addition of new property rights to the original framework this paper updates the conceptual schema in reaction to changes in natural resource governance proposing three specific modifications on the focus of use rights control rights and authoritative rights to come up with a framework that distinguishes eight types of property rights we apply the framework to three purposefully selected governance interventions in china and laos that include the provision of indirect benefits in addition to the direct benefits derived by local people from natural resources the empirical application shows how contemporary governance changes may not lead to local people s outright dispossession since they continue to possess direct use rights to natural resources however local people may be excluded from control and authoritative rights which are exercised exclusively by state agencies and international actors the latter make available indirect benefits to local people which may or may not translate into use rights in the sense of policy based entitlements the empirical insights suggest the possibility of a wider trend of compensated exclusions in natural resource governance

investigation of stated and revealed preferences for an elk hunting raffle the charter forest experiment at the valles caldera national preserve vcnp in new mexico provides land managers policymakers and researchers a unique opportunity to examine an alternative public land management institution the vcnp mature bull elk permit lottery has been the largest revenue generating recreation program at the preserve since the program s inception in 2002 this paper uses stated and revealed preference ticket purchase data collected through an online survey to estimate a set of ticket demand equations for the purpose of assessing revenue generation access and the willingness to donate to this program

institutions and environmental governance a reconceptualization abstract this article presents the conceptual revisions needed to extend the new institutional approach to environmental governance from its current local and international domains of application to all governance solutions including national environmental and natural resource use policies and multi level governance solutions that are increasingly used to address global environmental change the article suggests that environmental governance is best understood as the establishment reaffirmation or change of institutions to resolve conflicts over environmental resources it also explains why the choice of these institutions is a matter of social justice rather than of efficiency the article suggests a way to understand formal and state centered governance solutions as forms of collective ownership not unlike common property the article demonstrates how institutional analysis can gain resolution by looking at the functional and structural tiers organization of governance functions and formulation of key institutional rules as key aspects of the design of governance institutions

the international crash of october 1987 causality tests the paper analyzes lead lag relationships for six major stock market indexes new york s p 500 tokyo nikkei london ft 30 hong kong hang seng singapore straits times and australia all ordinaries for time periods before during and after the october 1987 market crash unidirectional and bidirectional causality tests are conducted by means of the granger methodology practically no lead lag relationships are found for the pre crash and post crash periods however important feedback relationships and unidirectional causality are detected for the month of the crash there is also an increase in contemporaneous causality during and after the month of the crash in general our findings suggest that the october 1987 market crash probably was an international crisis of the equity markets and that it might have begun simultaneously in all the national stock markets

inference in nonlinear econometric models with structural change this paper extends the classical test for structural change in linear regression models see chow 1960 to a wide variety of nonlinear models estimated by a variety of different procedures wald lagrange multiplier like and likelihood ratio like test statistics are introduced the results allow for heterogeneity and temporal dependence of the observations in the process of developing the above tests the paper also provides a compact presentation of general unifying results for estimation and testing in nonlinear parametric econometric models

privatizing the commons an improvement recent years have seen political economists turning to an institutional paradigm wherein the extent to which property rights are defined and enforced is an important determinant of human action furubotn 1972 the institutional or property rights approach has become an important component of explanations of both economic growth and economic inefficiency the institutional environment now holds a prominent place in explanations of differential growth rates among political units and over time 1 the property rights approach has also become commonplace in the analysis of the environmental crisis where the lack of well defined property rights is seen as the cause of environmental problems and movement toward a more complete specification of those rights as the solution even bureaucratic inefficiencies have been analyzed in the context of property rights mckean 1965

pricing policies and antlerless elk hunting permits one of the effects of increasing emphasis on leisure time in the u s has been a growth in demand for hunting privileges an example of such growth is the rapidly increasing demand for the opportunity to hunt elk in various western states potter 1982 from 1960 1979 the number of licensed elk hunters more than doubled in north america while average elk hunter success steadily declined from 25 to 14 over the same period even though total elk harvests are increasing elk populations are not growing at a rate anywhere near that of current demand growth thus state fish and wildlife departments must utilize methods to allocate elk resources such allocation procedures include split seasons waiting lines drawings and fee increases each with distinct efficiency and equity implications meyer 1979 peek pederson and thomas 1982 the problem of allocating rocky mountain antlerless elk hunting privileges in eastern oregon is instructive in this regard oregon s department of fish and wildlife controls the hunt of antlerless cow and calf elk by controlling the numbers of hunting tags annually issued for each designated geographic area the numbers of tags issued are determined by estimating the quantity of hunters needed to achieve the target harvest level of antlerless elk in each area for a one dollar processing fee prospective hunters may indicate a first and a second choice hunting area from

valuing environmental commodities some recent experiments a general model of consumer behavior is proposed to assess six recent experiments that have attempted to reveal preferences for environmental goals each experiment used a mix of both the techniques and the theory of demand for non market commodities and each was designed to estimate a non market attitude associated with the environment and to analyze potential biases in the techniques the six cases show some consistency in results the linkage within the contingent market between the environmental attribute institutional setting and the bidding instrument must be realistic and accepted by the respondent to avoid biased results possibly the most important result is the replication of results using a traditional property value study and a contingent bidding approach all evidence obtained to date suggests that hedonic studies of property values or wages travel costs and survey techniques all yield values well one order of magnitude in accuracy 41 references 2 tables

property rights to multi attribute fishery resources abstract the united nations code of conduct for responsible fisheries urges governments to manage multiple yield bycatch and habitat attributes of fishery resources the information and enforcement costs of multi attribute management are high however as a result relatively few attributes generally stock biomass age structure and growth are specified in yield targets exposing others e g localized abundance sex to excessive use in the public domain spillovers caused by fishing gear e g gear conflicts bycatch habitat damage generally are regulated with catch limits and area closures that artificially divide or exclude activities which interact due to attribute jointness total fishery income is compromised because tradeoffs are not evaluated at the margin alternative arrangements that bundle fishery resource attributes are suggested bundled property rights could evolve from a comprehensive assignment of usufruct rights which reduce the transaction costs of gathering information on unspecified attributes and of contracting for spillovers markets for harvest rights could resolve the simpler gear conflict and bycatch problems other interactions e g predation habitat requirements would require corporate or collective property rights and governance arrangements that make harvesters and other interested parties the residual claimants of their harvest decisions subject to government restrictions that protect public goods

motivations monitoring technologies and pay for performance monitoring technologies and pay for performance pfp contracts are becoming popular solutions to improve public services delivery their track record is however mixed to show why this may be the case this paper develops a principal agent model where agents motivations vary and so the effectiveness of monitoring technologies in such a set up it shows that i monitoring technologies should be introduced only if agents motivations are poor ii optimal pfp contracts are non linear non monotonic in agents motivations and monitoring effectiveness iii investments aimed at improving agents motivations and monitoring quality are substitutes when agents are motivated complements otherwise iv if the agents type is private information the more and less motivated agents could be separated through a menu of pfp non pfp contracts designed in a way that only the less motivated ones choose the pfp

intrinsic motivation and incentives workers act in the interests of their employ ers for a host of reasons sometimes money is the motivation but often it is because they care about what they do despite the importance of such intrinsic motivation the economic litera ture has offered little in terms of understanding relevant trade offs when alignment of inherent preferences rather than monetary interests is what motivates people 1 instead the literature has focused largely on the efficiency gains that arise from agents sharing the preferences of their employers 2 this paper offers such a theory of intrinsic motivation where firms partially solve agency problems by hiring agents with particu lar preferences unlike the previous literature i show that firms in general hire agents who do not share their interests instead agents are disproportionately motivated to carry out a sub set of what the firm cares about specifically i show that the institution hires the agent with similar preferences to himself only in the limit ing case where the agent s preferences are irrel evant namely when output can be perfectly contracted on instead the optimal response of the institution is to hire biased agents with the degree of bias increasing as contracting mea sures get worse the reason for this is rather simple that jobs within firms are specialized so for example some people make things others design them yet other sell them and so on similarly aca demics do research deans raise money admin istrators do the books social workers provide services to clients while their superiors are charged with cost control etc the principal novelty of this paper is to show how hiring practices and specifically the intrinsic moti vation of those hired changes as the ability to contract worsens in a world where tasks are specialized in doing so it paints a picture of firms responding to noncontractibility by hiring agents with very extreme interests at the cost of their ignoring other aspects of their jobs so for example if the output of a social worker cannot be measured a natural response will be to hire agents who are highly motivated to get benefits to clients at the cost of their ignoring things like cost control simple though this observation is it illustrates a cost to using intrinsic motiva tion namely the endogenous hiring of those who increasingly care only about one aspect of their job in this way the simple model outlined here lays the foundation for a view of poor contracting firms as fiefdoms where those with extreme competing interests reside a point i elaborate on elsewhere prendergast 2008 for a theory of intrinsic motivation to be use ful firms must have some control over it the central assumption here is that firms have some ability to hire employees based on these intrin sic preferences i build a model of an institution that carries out two activities say service pro vision and cost control it employs two agents to do so the tasks are somewhat specialized in that one agent primarily but not exclusively does service provision and the other primarily does cost control the institution has an objec tive that trades off these two components and has a performance measure that can reward agents the firm also chooses whom to hire potential discussant robert gibbons massachusetts institute of technology

common stochastic trends in international stock markets abstract this paper presents evidence concerning the number of common stochastic trends in the equity markets of the u s japan england germany and canada monthly and quarterly data from january 1974 through august 1990 on morgan stanley s capital international indices are used to compute johansen 1990 tests for common trends the results indicate the presence of a single common trend driving these countries stock markets estimates of the factor loadings suggest that this trend is most important in the japanese market and least important in the canadian market to interpret this evidence the paper demonstrates that under weak conditions the unit root and cointegration structure of stock prices should mirror the unit root and cointegration structure of their dividend payments the paper tests this prediction by constructing national dividend series from capital international s dividend yield data as well as by using gnp data as with stock prices the evidence points to a single common trend although the stochastic properties and relative importance of this trend differs somewhat from the trend in stock prices

measuring business cycles a modern perspective in the first half of this century special attention was given to two features of the business cycle 1 the comovement of many individual economic series and 2 the different behavior of the economy during expansions and contractions both of these attributes were ignored in many subsequent business cycle models which were often linear representations of a single macroeconomic aggregate however recent theoretical and empirical research has revived interest in each attribute separately notably dynamic factor models have been used to obtain a single common factor from a set of macroeconomic variables and nonlinear models have been used to describe the regime switching nature of aggregate output we survey these two strands of research and then provide some suggestive empirical analysis in an effort to unite the two literatures and to assess their usefulness in a statistical characterization of business cycle dynamics

land ownership and conflicts over the use of resources implication for household vulnerability in eastern ethiopia abstract survey data from hirna watershed in eastern ethiopia were used to identify determinants of household choice among alternative land property right regimes to help mitigate negative consequences of scarcity induced land related conflicts and so as to help reduce household vulnerability it has been observed that absence of clearly defined property right and management plan has led to overexploitation of the hillsides leading to perpetuation of poverty and food insecurity multinomial discrete choice models were specified and estimated for explaining decision of household heads for most preferred property right regimes overall two variables namely the dependency ratio and the level of education of the household head provided the most predictive power whether or not the household prefers common property resource regime whereas the number of household members the livestock holding of the household and the area of cultivated land lost due to enclosure of part of the watershed were found to be more relevant in determining household s preference for resettlement to other potential areas on the other hand the age of household head the number of household members and the level of education of the household head were found to be statistically significant in determining the likelihood that a household prefers intensifying agriculture

portfolio management of wild fish stocks abstract managing fish stocks in terms of a portfolio of economic assets is likely to significantly increase benefits for society relative to single species approaches a portfolio framework systematically combines fish stocks that are joined by ecology e g predation competition and unspecialized fishing technologies e g mixed species trawls into a portfolio which balances expected aggregate returns against the risks associated with stock attribute and other uncertainties to be productive however this framework must be combined with property rights institutions that clearly state management objectives create long run time horizons among harvesters internalize spillovers caused by ecological and technological jointness and reduce uncertainty through research and adaptive management although the cost of reducing scientific uncertainty about ecological interactions may limit the portfolio approach to intensive management of relatively few species its scope can be broadened to integrate tradeoffs among more types of marine resources such as nature preserves and oil and gas deposits

identity and the economics of organizations on plebes first day at west point called r day they strip down to their underwear their hair is cut off they are put in uniform they then must address an older cadet with the proper salute and with the statement sir new cadet doe reports to the cadet in the red sash for the first time as ordered plebes must stand and salute and repeat and stand and salute and repeat until they get it exactly right all the while being reprimanded for every tiny mistake in the summary of david lipsky 2003 pp 145 154 who spent four years tracking a company of cadets at west point on r day you surrender your old self in stages but r day is just the beginning of the training and personal re engineering that is to come so that west point graduates emerge four years later as loyal officers in the u s army lipsky shows that despite some failure this tough program is remarkably successful in creating officers with the will to lead in battle economists current picture of organizations and work incentives has no place for the west point program and the motivations it seeks to inculcate in recruits in a standard economic model an individual s preferences are fixed and utility depends only on pecuniary variables the army s aim at west point is to change cadets preferences they wish to inculcate non economic motives in the cadets so that they have the same goals as the u s army alternatively stated the goal of west point is to change the identity of the cadets so they will think of themselves above all else as officers in the u s army they will feel bad about themselves they will lose utility if they fall short of the ideals of such an officer this change in identity

social comparison and effort provision evidence from a field experiment social comparison has potentially far reaching consequences in many economic domains we conducted a field experiment to examine how social comparison affects workers effort provision if their own wage or that of a co worker is cut workers were assigned to groups of two performed identical individual tasks and received the same performance independent hourly wage cutting both group members wages caused a decrease in performance but when only one group member s wage was cut the affected workers decreased their performance more than twice as much as when both workers wages were cut this finding indicates that social comparison among workers affects effort provision because the only difference between the two wage cut treatments is the other group member s wage level in contrast workers whose wage was not cut but who witnessed their group member s pay being cut displayed no change in performance relative to the baseline treatment in which both workers wages remained unchanged this indicates that social comparison exerts asymmetric effects on effort jel c93 j33 m53

rules and games this paper reconsiders the relationship between the rules of a game and its outcomes we develop a notion of rule reform that leads to the selection of pareto improved equilibria points we then apply this notion to a series of naturally occurring fishing rules including examples from malaysia india brazil turkey and canada we show that reforming a game is conceptually akin to reforming an economy

a note on the functional form of travel cost models with zones of unequal populations as bowes and loomis 1980 noted in their contribution for recreation demand functions of a linear form the existence of unequal zonal populations in travel cost models leads to the problem of nonconstant error variances when observations are expressed on a per capita basis i e when the zone average method is used for a model with nonhomogeneous variances the ordinary least squares ols parameter estimates will be unbiased but inefficient these properties will hold true of the consumer surplus estimates as well a weighting of the observations is the well known solution to the heteroskedasticity problem where in this case the appropriate weighting factor for each observation is the square root of the associated zone of origin s population while preserving unbiasedness the weighted least squares wls approach generates parameter estimates that are equivalent to the generalized least squares gls minimum variance estimators in their application of the travel cost method to recreation trips during 1977 down the westwater canyon in utah bowes and loomis illustrated the efficacy of wls in predicting recreation trips more accurately than ols for a linear first stage demand curve as in previous studies the ols linear regression equation grossly mispredicted the total number of trips taken at the actual price per trip of zero and seemingly overestimated the value of consumer surplus further evidence of this latter finding was obtained in a study of warm water fishing in georgia by ziemer musser and

natural resource federalism preferences versus connectivity for patchy resources we examine the efficiency of centralized versus decentralized management of spatially connected renewable resources when users have heterogeneous preferences for conservation versus extraction resource mobility induces a spatial externality while spatial preference heterogeneity drives a wedge between users privately optimal extraction rates we first address these market failures analytically and show that the first is most efficiently handled with centralized planning while the second is best tackled with decentralized management except in special cases neither approach will be first best but which arises as second best depends on the relative strength of preference heterogeneity versus spatial mobility of the resource we illustrate the theory and test its robustness with a numerical example

on measuring synchronization of bulls and bears the case of east asia abstract this paper implements estimation and testing procedures for comovements of stock market cycles or phases in asia we extend the harding and pagan harding d pagan a p 2006 synchronization of cycles journal of econometrics 132 1 59 79 test for strong multivariate nonsynchronization smns between business cycles to a test that allows for an imperfect degree of multivariate synchronization between stock market cycles moreover we propose a test for endogenously determining structural change in the bivariate and multivariate synchronization indices upon applying the technique to five asian stock markets we find a significant increase in the cross country comovements of asian bullish and bearish periods in 1997 a power study of the stability test suggests that the detected increase in comovement is more of a sudden nature i e contagion or asian flu instead of gradual i e financial integration it is furthermore argued that stock market cycles and their propensity toward increased synchronization contain useful information for both investors policy makers and financial regulators

contagion as a domino effect in global stock markets this paper shows that stock market contagion occurs as a domino effect where confined local crashes evolve into more widespread crashes using a novel framework based on ordered logit regressions we model the occurrence of local regional and global crashes as a function of their past occurrences and financial variables we find significant evidence that global crashes do not occur abruptly but are preceded by local and regional crashes besides this form of contagion interdependence shows up by the effect of interest rates bond returns and stock market volatility on crash probabilities when it comes to forecasting global crashes our model outperforms a binomial model for global crashes only

rethinking the economics of water an assessment water is rising on the policy agenda as population growth and climate change intensify scarcity shocks and access inequalities the conventional economic policy recommendations privatization pricing and property rights have struggled due to a failure to account adequately for the politics of water and the associated distributional conflicts we identify distinctive social and physical characteristics of water supply and demand and explore their implications for three central areas of water policy financing infrastructure pricing and property rights reform growing dependence on groundwater and non networked water supplies exacerbates these challenges and reinforces the need to rethink the economics of water and tackle the political challenges head on meeting the water sustainable development goals would require institutional and technological innovations to supply allocate and manage water as well as a sustained political and financial commitment to address those who might be left behind

optimal management of transfers an odd paradox abstract this paper considers the case of transfers when there exists a serious preference misalignment between the transfer maker and the beneficiary the former wants to reduce the resulting outcome discrepancy through monitoring the use of the transfer and imposing sanctions if the discrepancy proves too large this external discipline combines with the internal discipline of the beneficiary that is his her willingness and ability to align with the transfer maker s objective besides the fact that costs of monitoring and sanctioning are explicitly taken into account an original feature of our model specification is that the two types of discipline are made comparable they can be summed up to obtain an aggregate discipline we show that paradoxically an exogenous improvement of internal discipline may be over compensated by a fall of external discipline total discipline thus decreases and the discrepancy between the actual and the intended uses of the transfer increases instead of decreasing another consequence is that the relationship between internal and total disciplines may be non monotonic these results generalize to alternative specifications of the basic model

the nested collective lottery that maximizes welfare under consumption interdependence we develop a generalized lottery mechanism in this article that allows people to choose to succeed separately while retaining both merits fairness and options to succeed jointly of the collective lottery developed by chen et al 2010 we use the rationing of hunting permits in the us and canada as examples to show the applicability of this generalized lottery mechanism

underpricing in public lotteries a critique of user pay and all pay tariffs i introduction a body of literature spanning from medical ethics to public economics has amassed regarding the nonmarket rationing of public resources a dominant focus has surrounded the merits and shortcomings of alternative rationing mechanisms as gauged by their effectiveness distributive justness and allocative efficiency these instruments include administrative criteria such as need merit or seniority based rules queues or waiting lines whereby access to the rationed good or service is determined by arrival times and lotteries whereby chance dictates the distribution of the good while nonmarket rationing in any case may lead to the misallocation of resources compared to rationing solely by price e g glaeser and luttmer 2003 empirical observation reveals that public agencies commonly distribute underpriced goods and services to individual consumers and firms the current study takes nonmarket rationing as given and investigates the properties of alternative lottery mechanisms the use of lot teries dates to biblical times boyce 1994 elster 1992 with modern examples including the military draft fienberg 1971 medical services cookson and dolan 2000 recreational privileges on public lands and waterways scrogin 2005 residential housing following hurricane katrina the white house office of the press secretary 2005 and public school admission and voucher programs berry cullen jacob and levitt 2006 from a design perspective lotteries are intriguing because they can take a variety of forms with each possessing unique incentive and revenue generating properties however given the purported inefficiencies of lottery rationing it is natural to question how they have sustained in allocative situations entailing public resources two explanations have emerged in the literature the first historic explanation is attributed to the fairness of the classic lottery mechanism in which the probability of being drawn is uniform and endogenous to the number of participants because entrants are equally likely to be drawn the mechanism is perceived as being nondiscriminatory empirical evidence presented in kemp and bolle 1999 supports this hypothesis in the rationing of some types of goods and services to individual consumers the fairness of lottery rationing is also consistent with the distributive objective of specific egalitarianism put forth by tobin 1970 and discussed later by elster 1992 whereby specific goods and services are allocated such that a greater degree of equality is attained relative to that of a competitive market while egalitarianism and efficiency would appear to be at odds che and gale 2007 demonstrated that lotteries can be more efficient than markets when individuals face binding wealth constraints in a similar vein wijkander 1988 demonstrated that social welfare can be increased by lottery rationing under certain conditions a second more objective explanation for the sustained use of lotteries is that public agencies may be legally constrained by price controls particularly when rationing to individuals and households taylor tsui and zhu 2003 acting as a self sustaining regulated monopolist the agency is confronted with selecting a rationing mechanism and a pricing policy that are both politically feasible and financially viable compared to need merit and seniority based allocation rules lotteries and queues are administratively simple and low cost to implement alternatively lotteries eschew the waiting time and coordination costs confronted by potential entrants under queuing however the initial distribution under lottery rationing may prove allocatively inefficient collectively the literature suggests that agency objectives may deviate from revenue maximization in distributing some types of scarce public resources with lotteries proving to be superior in some settings to alternative nonmarket rationing mechanisms

property rights regimes in complex fishery management systems a choice experiment application the tonle sap wetland fishery was previously divided into 3 different management zones for conservation open access fishing and private fishing rights to the private fishing zone involved auctions for exclusive rights to temporarily designated plots this paper aims to explore the auction based system by investigating how this fishery management system affects different groups of small scale fishermen and how different characteristics of the fishing lots affect the bidding a choice experiment approach was used to model fishermen s choices in a hypothetical auction market by offering fishermen the choice between purchasing different potential fishing lots and a no purchase option implying fishing only in the communal fishing grounds the preferred latent class model with two segments of fishermen showed that the bidding behavior of the more privileged group out competes the other group irrespective of the lot characteristics this result suggests that it is unlikely that the redesign of the auction system itself would be an effective way of securing access to fishing resources for the two observed groups of fishermen this implies that open access fishing grounds and or other regulations may also be needed in future management as they serve an important role for the poorer segments

community enforcement of fisheries effort restrictions abstract this paper models the use of community sanctions to restrict effort in a simple gordon schaefer style model of the fishery with heterogeneous fishing costs the withdrawal of cooperation in other areas of life is used to both restrict effort and to sanction those who continue to cooperate with those who have not restricted effort coalition proof nash equilibria are generated by a combination of sanctions discouraging the defection of small groups and stock reductions discouraging noncooperation by large groups both entry restrictions and individual quotas can be supported by community sanctions under some parameter combinations however there are cases where each can generate lower total rents than would be available under open access relatively low cost fishers are more likely to support entry restrictions and ignore community attempts to restrict individual effort while high cost fishers are more likely to support quotas

institutional ecological economics abstract new institutional economics and its forerunners have we argue made important contributions to the evolving agenda of ecological economics the conceptualisation of environmental problems as instances of interdependence and the acknowledgement of positive transaction costs are key insights into the nature of environmental problems we also discuss how plurality of behavioural motivations and limited cognitive capacity have important implications for environmental decision making and its analysis we show how evolutionary and collective action theories offer complementary takes on the choice and change of environmental governance institutions and how the concept of social capital can enrich analyses of environmental governance we conclude that an emerging institutional ecological economics has the greatest relative advantage in analysing the design implementation and effectiveness of environmental governance solutions

options using a collective lottery to ration vaccines during an influenza pandemic for many countries the best way to counter an influenza pandemic is to provide citizens with a pandemic vaccine however since the global supply of the vaccines is far smaller than the quantity demanded how to allocate the limited vaccines can be a very challenging task for them in this study we introduce a collective lottery mechanism that allocates vaccines as fairly as the traditional lottery while also offering more options for family members or those who are close so that they can choose the joint probability of successes that can maximize their welfare this mechanism thus gives rise to a pareto improvement over the traditional lottery our empirical study uses the us and the uk as examples in sequential collective lotteries that are simulated to prove that such an improvement while maintaining fairness in fact exists

stock market cycles financial liberalization and volatility in this paper we analyze the cycles of the stock markets in four latin american and two asian countries and we compare their characteristics we divide our sample in two subperiods in order to account for differences induced by the financial liberalization processes of the early 1990s we find that cycles in emerging countries tend to have shorter duration and larger amplitude and volatility than in developed countries however after financial liberalization latin american stock markets have behaved more similarly to stock markets in developed countries whereas asian countries have become more dissimilar concordance of cycles across markets has increased significantly over time especially for latin american countries after liberalization

the economics of career concerns part ii application to missions and accountability of government agencies the paper uses a simple multitask career concern model in order to analyse the incentives of government agencies officials incentives are impaired by the agency pursuing multiple missions a lack of focus is even more problematic in the case of fuzzy missions that is when outsiders are uncertain about the exact nature of the missions actually pursued by the agency consequently agencies pursuing multiple missions receive less autonomy the paper further shows that professionalization creates a sense of mission for the agency and that the specialization of officials raises their incentives last the paper compares its predictions with the stylized facts on government bureaucracies 1999 the review of economic studies limited

the race for property rights economics literature on the evolution of property rights has increasingly emphasized the optimal timing for establishing those rights yoram barzel dale mortensen 2 and partha dasgupta and joseph stiglitz 3 for example have shown that competition among firms for the rents associated with innovative devices and ideas can lead to the dissipation of those rents in the process when property rights and the rents therefrom are up for grabs it is possible for expenditures to establish rights to fully dissipate the rents leaving the efficiency gains from privatization in question 4 before any conclusions about the welfare gains from establishing property rights can be reached attention must be paid to the evolutionary

land property rights and resource allocation abstractin this paper we review the most significant empirical literature on the causal effects of land property rights the literature indicates that secure property rights boost investment in both rural and urban areas these effects however do not appear to be the result of improved credit conditions in rural areas clear land rights also lead to increases in productivity and farm earnings in contrast for urban areas the evidence for an effect on earnings is mixed we find little empirical evidence to suggest that land titling programs enhance the development of land markets finally some evidence suggests that land titling induces changes in household structure that foster human capital accumulation and may help to increase the incomes of future generations

hourly volatility spillovers between international equity markets abstract this paper examines the timing of mean and volatility spillovers between new york and london equity markets using an arch model it is found that the evidence of volatility spillovers between these markets is minimal and have a duration which lasts only an hour or so the most significant effects surround the movement of share prices around the new york opening but these results are not strong several new arch models are estimated including an asymmetric or leverage model and a non linear model which allows big shocks to have a different impact from small shocks

on the sustainability of common property resources abstract we provide a model where a common property resource is managed by two types of agents cooperators and non cooperators who adjust their extraction strategies in response to persistent differential payoffs in our model the social approval of cooperators works as a reward mechanism which as we show favors both the pervasiveness of cooperative behavior and the sustainable management of natural resources specifically we show that in the presence of such a reward mechanism a stable equilibrium can be reached with both strategies being practiced simultaneously and a decentralized and sustainable management of common property resources is possible

gender property rights and natural resources abstract attention to gender differences in property rights can improve the outcomes of natural resource management policies and projects in terms of efficiency environmental sustainability equity and empowerment of resource users although it is impossible to generalize across cultures and resources it is important to identify the nature of rights to land trees and water held by women and men and how they are acquired and transmitted from one user to another the paper particularly examines how the shift from customary tenure systems to private property in land trees and water has affected women the effect of gender differences in property on collective action and the implications for project design

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis the term common property resource is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one it is also used for property owned by a community of resource users such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis in this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user to claimant to proprietor and to owner we apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the maine lobster industry

rhetoric and reality in protected area governance institutional change under different conservation discourses in mount elgon national park uganda abstract the approach to governance of protected areas has been in transition over last decades partly driven by evolving policy discourses that shape the ways in which conservation is thought to be delivered the most influential discourses are the fortress approach community conservation and back to the barriers how different discourses translate and are instituted on ground are however complex and disputed inclusive policy strategies in relation to local involvement in developing countries are of particular concern the study analyses how conservation policy discourses have become manifested taking the case of mount elgon national park menp uganda it outlines main conservation policy discourses analyses actor s interests and power relations and further examines how institutions for park governance have evolved and changed according to the different discourses the results indicate that conservation discourses and donor support come and go while menp seems to outlast all the worrying reality is that menp administration strongly influenced by the interplay of path dependent institutional forces rooted in the fortress discourse simply sticks to its guns maintaining the application of law enforcement as key management instruments in its approach to governance especially to local people interactions there is an apparent gap between rhetoric and reality in protected area governance

lottery rationed public access under alternative tariff arrangements changes in quality quantity and expected utility abstract a recent phenomenon is the emergence of quotas restricting individual access to public resources as regulators commonly ration access opportunities by lottery this paper extends the traditional open access destination choice framework for non market demand and welfare analysis conceptual results for one and two part tariff lotteries indicate that individuals may sustain welfare losses from improvements in quality or increases in the quota if aggregate demand is sufficiently responsive relative to individual utility nested random expected utility models reums are estimated with a panel dataset of individual choices of lottery rationed harvest rights for wild game empirical results indicate that the types and timing of tariff payments affect participation choices over rationed and open access alternatives and the benefits derived from changes in the quality and quantity of the lottery rationed access opportunities

a simple framework for analysing bull and bear markets bull and bear markets are a common way of describing cycles in equity prices to fully describe such cycles one would need to know the data generating process dgp for equity prices we begin with a definition of bull and bear markets and use an algorithm based on it to sort a given time series of equity prices into periods that can be designated as bull and bear markets the rule to do this is then studied analytically and it is shown that bull and bear market characteristics depend upon the dgp for capital gains by simulation methods we examine a number of dgps that are known to fit the data quite well random walks garch models and models with duration dependence we find that a pure random walk provides as good an explanation of bull and bear markets as the more complex statistical models in the final section of the paper we look at some asset pricing models that appear in the literature from the viewpoint of their success in producing bull and bear markets which resemble those in the data copyright 2002 john wiley sons ltd

competition and incentives with motivated agents a unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private nonprofits is the importance of mission as opposed to profit as an organizational goal such mission oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission this paper studies incentives in such contexts and emphasizes the role of matching the mission preferences of principals and agents in increasing organizational efficiency matching economizes on the need for high powered incentives it can also however entrench bureaucratic conservatism and resistance to innovations the framework developed in this paper is applied to school competition incentives in the public sector and in private nonprofits and the interdependence of incentives and productivity between the private for profit sector and the mission oriented sector through occupational choice jel d23 d73 h41 l31 the late twentieth century witnessed a historic high in the march of market capitalism with unbridled optimism in the role of the profit motive in promoting welfare in the production of private goods moreover this generated a broad consensus on the optimal organization of private good production through privately owned competitive firms when it comes to the provision of collective goods no such consensus has emerged debates about the relative merits of public and private provision still dominate this paper suggests a contracting approach to the provision of collective goods it focuses on two key issues how to structure incentives and the role of competition between providers at its heart is the idea that organizations that provide collective goods cohere around a mission 2 thus production of collective goods can be viewed as mission oriented

the effects of compensation plans for employee inventions on r d productivity new evidence from japanese panel data abstract this article reports the first results on how monetary compensation plans for employee inventions affect r d productivity based on the notable panel data of japanese firms the study finds that the introduction of revenue based compensation plans that are linked to patent performance lead to an increase in the number of high cited patents while this never leads to an increase in the number of patent applications furthermore this is strongly effective in smaller firms these results indicate that the monetary incentives based on patent performance are effective on enhancing the motivation of employee inventors

intraday patterns and trading strategies in the spanish stock market different rating and investment companies have recently pointed out spain s brightening growth outlook which has energized the spanish stock market by anticipating greater interest in the behaviour of the spanish stock market we show that the best trading strategy is that in which the investor enters long or short after the opening of the new york stock exchange nyse till the end of the trading day at 17 30 this strategy should be complemented with that of entering long or short from the opening of the trading day till the closing price before the opening of the nyse in no coincidence phases

do higher oil prices push the stock market into bear territory this paper investigates whether a higher oil price pushes the stock market into bear territory by using time varying transition probability markov switching models it examines different measures of oil price shocks empirical evidence from monthly returns on the standard poor s s p 500 price index suggests that an increase in oil prices leads to a higher probability of a bear market emerging

rationed access and welfare case of public resource lotteries pressures on public lands and waterways are resulting increasingly in the rationing of public access by lottery upon accounting for the uncertainties of random rationing discrete choice models lend themselves to analyzing participation in public resource lotteries and estimating welfare changes key to valuing lotteryrationed rights is accounting for changes in access probabilities that result from policy changes the empirical application models the discrete choices of more than 18 000 participants in a new mexico lottery system for elk harvest rights welfare estimates are obtained from simulated policy changes that affect individually and jointly the access probability and indirect utility

allocation of goods by lottery i introduction many goods such as hunting permits oil drilling leases cellular telephone licenses and rights to fishing berths as well as some buds such as the military draft jury duty and who is to be thrown overboard on a sinking life raft are or have been allocated by lotteries in neo classical welfare economics the random distribution of property rights does not affect allocative efficiency as long as transferability is allowed and the transactions costs are non prohibitive lottery allocations however are generally not transferable thus lottery allocations are inefficient since the goods are not ultimately allocated to the users who value them the most a number of authors such as aubert 1959 fienberg 1971 eckhoff 1989 and elster 1989 36 122 have argued that lotteries are chosen as the allocative instrument because it represents a fair or just means of allocating the goods rawls 1971 374 and eckhoff 1989 have noted that where it is impractical to divide the goods equally among those who desire them a lottery serves to satisfy both the requirement that the process be fair and that the allocation problem be resolved relatively costlessly elster 1989 113 however notes that lotteries are not the only fair allocation mechanism for example he points out that in jewish ethics the problem of allocating an indivisible good such as life saving resources is resolved by denying it to everyone even economists would probably prefer a lottery to this resolution the fairness hypothesis has a rich history in the old testament lotteries are deemed a fair way of allocating goods such as the inheritance of land numbers 33 54 lotteries are also used to allocate bads in perhaps the most famous biblical example of use of lots jonah was chosen by lot to be sacrificed to appease god who had brought a storm that threatened to wreck the ship the story goes that the lot selected jonah because he was shirking his duties elsewhere and should not have even been on the vessel jonah 1 6 1 notice that fair here is taken to mean just given this theological foundation it is not surprising that the lottery has seen frequent use in legal history as well one of the most interesting cases occurred in swedish and finnish trials in the 17th and 18th centuries in cases where a man was murdered by a mob lotteries were used to allocate punishment since the law required an eye for an eye no more and no less eckhoff says that if it was impossible to ascertain which of them had dealt the mortal blow the courts determined that one of the responsible parties be sentenced to death and that the person be selected by lottery 1989 19 a similar use of lotteries occurs in military history to deal with cases of mass desertion in roman armies every tenth man was executed decimated and the remainder pardoned in more modern times the lottery has been used in u s law 2 first of course is the use of a lottery to decide who shall sit on a jury a connection between fairness and lotteries however has also appeared in the common law in an 1842 case u s v holmes which has been discussed by fienberg 1971 eckhoff 1989 and elster 1989 a ship sank in a heavy storm and the lone surviving life raft was in grave danger of sinking the crew threw overboard fourteen male passengers in an effort to save the rest when back in port after being rescued a crewman named holmes the only crew member who had not disappeared upon arrival to port was brought to trial for the deaths of the passengers the court ruled that the non essential members of the crew should have been thrown overboard before any passengers and if that was not sufficient then passengers should have been selected by lot which is the fairest mode elster 1989 65 the fact that a human life presumably a large cost was at stake ex post did not affect the decision 3 the environmental economics literature contains a number of references to the social preferences for and benefits of lottery allocations

the week end effect in common stock returns the international evidence this paper examines the daily stock market returns for four foreign countries we find a so called week end effect in each country in addition the lowest mean returns for the japanese and australian stock markets occur on tuesday the remainder of the paper answers four questions are seasonal patterns in foreign stock markets independent of those previously reported in the u s do japan and australia exhibit a seasonal one day out of phase due to different time zones do settlement procedures across countries bias week end effects does the seasonal pattern in foreign exchange offset the week end effect in stocks for americans investing overseas some of the most anomalous empirical findings in finance are associated with the sample distributions of daily common stock returns cross 1 french 2 gibbons and hess 3 and keim and stambaugh 4 have documented that the average return on friday is abnormally high and the average return on monday is abnormally low to our knowledge this so called day of the week effect or week end effect has yet to be explained because this anomaly has been reported primarily for u s stock returns it is appropriate to investigate whether similar results occur for other countries positive findings would strongly support the proposition that the weekly seasonal effect is a general world wide phenomenon rather than the result of a special type of institutional arrangement in the u s to shed more light on this proposition our paper examines stock market returns in the u k japan canada and australia since we find a week end effect in each country we can examine a set of interesting questions for example are these seasonals independent of the previously reported seasonal in the u s due to different time zones do far eastern countries exhibit a seasonal one day out of phase do different settlement procedures across countries influence weekend effects does the seasonal in foreign exchange fluctuations see mcfarland pettit and sung 7 and levi 6 offset the week end effect in stock market returns for americans investing overseas

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

influences of transaction costs in environmental policy abstract there is a growing literature reporting the extent of transaction costs for environmental policies however understanding why transaction costs occur and why they are small or large is also important for efficient policy selection and evaluation following an analysis of the organisational economics literature and reports of the extent of transaction costs for a number of environmental policies three key influences to transaction costs in environmental policies are identified these are the following 1 the characteristics of the transaction for the environmental good 2 the nature of the transactors and 3 the current institutional environment and arrangements these affect transaction costs to the government and all other parties influenced by a policy transaction costs occur due to actions of information collection and policy design policy enactment and establishment implementation and contracting administration and monitoring and enforcement an interrogation of transaction cost influences reveals that 1 the influence varies between parties and is affected by the actions and interactions of and between all parties to a policy 2 how transaction costs are experienced varies across time and 3 who experiences transaction costs depends on the policy itself future policy selection and refinement will benefit from empirical analysis of the causes of transaction costs

decommodification as a foundation for ecological economics ecological economists have emphasized the study of commodification i e the development of market based exchange and valuation rather than decommodification processes i e the degree of immunization from market dependency this is surprising given the fact that large scale decommodification may be our best option for a post growth transition so dear to many ecological economists based on heinsohn and steiger s theory of ownership we seek to provide an institutional foundation to processes of de commodification these two authors distinguish between property and possession two bundles of rights generating different logics and consequences we illustrate this approach with three cases taken from an advanced capitalist economy switzerland showing how commodification and decommodification processes may appear together or vigorously oppose each other cooperatives forests and municipal land are examples of partial decommodified assets that follow a logic of possession and are therefore more likely to be sustainable it is high time that the study of decommodification becomes central to ecological economics

the economical management of multispecies fisheries resource based theory implicitly assumes that property rights to resources are secure extant property rights theory enables us to relax this assumption to take into account processes where there are struggles in establishing property rights that enhance

the cost of rent seeking evidence from cellular telephone license lotteries the inventors of the theory of rent seeking used an analogy with competitive markets to conclude that all monopoly rents would be dissipated in the competition to obtain the property rights to them 23 29 subsequent theorists showed that this conclusion is quite sensitive to assumptions about foresight risk aversion conjectures and bias 15 21 30 since little quantitative information about actual rent seeking competitions is available the theory has developed in an empirical vacuum in this paper we attempt to fill that vacuum with an estimate of rent seeking expenditure by applicants in the federal communications commission s fcc cellular telephone license lotteries held between 1986 and 1989 we go on to compare expenditures with estimates of the value of the licenses at stake these lotteries constitute a unique natural experiment any u s citizen was eligible to enter each geographic lottery once and only once for an expense which we calculate as modest the lotteries were widely publicized and heavily entered there were over 320 000 applications one per market filed for 643 cellular licenses and third party application preparers entered the market rapidly because licenses were awarded sequentially prospective participants in later lotteries could find out that expected net returns from earlier lotteries were positive because of undersubscription the value of the prize was known because sales of previously awarded licenses had begun to take place before later lotteries were held and market analysts were using such sale prices to value licenses not yet awarded the later lotteries seem almost optimally contrived to maximize the dissipation of rents yet comparing the resources invested in entry the price of a fully prepared application with the rents available the market value of cellular telephone licenses shows that dissipation was far short of complete

contracting problems and regulation the case of the fishery the inefficiencies of common property fisheries are of continuing concern to economists the early work by scott gordon 1954 and anthony scott 1955 outlined the problem and later studies by james crutchfield and giulio pontecorvo 1969 and frederick bell 1972 provided empirical estimates of the losses that result those studies were followed by the dynamic models of colin clark 1976 and james quirk and vernon smith 1970 of optimal harvest rates and the use of corrective taxes or quotas to achieve them but in spite of a large and growing literature and the persuasiveness of the outlined efficiency criteria most fisheries retain common property aspects with overcapitalization and excessive labor input why those conditions persist and the failure of the regulatory response to them are the issues addressed in this paper we examine a number of fisheries but focus on the texas shrimp industry which is one of the nation s most valuable fisheries for a single species and which shares the common property characteristics observed elsewhere it is considered overcapitalized and catch per unit of effort is falling 2 examination of the fishery reveals the many margins along which rent dissipation occurs and the nature of the regulations necessary for controlling fishing effort to avoid those losses the regulatory environment in texas is complicated by conflict within the fishery between inshore and offshore fishermen the latter assert that bay shrimping reduces the number of shrimp that successfully migrate to the gulf the inshore fishery is highlighted by another issue the recent resettlement of some 30 45 000 vietnamese refugees including many fishermen along the texas coast marine advisory service paul starr their entry has been met by hostility and violence from existing shrimpers who recognize that they are in an environment characterized by the absence of property rights bay shrimpers have lobbied the texas legislature for broad limits on new entrants yet ironically the sale of additional boats by individual shrimpers to the vietnamese has facilitated entry of the refugees into the fishery regulations in the texas shrimp and other fisheries are incomplete leaving many options for rent dissipation uncontrolled because of high contracting costs among fishermen and political factors that mold government actions contracting costs are high among heterogeneous fishermen who vary principally with regard to fishing skill 3 montana state university and texas a m university respectively we benefitted from comments by terry anderson raymond c battalio gardner brown oscar burt micha gisser wade griffin john r moroney anthony d scott peter temin and participants in workshops at texas a m university and the university of washington research assistance was provided by scott barnhart and phil mizzi funding was provided by sea grant texas a m university throughout this paper we use the terms common property and open access interchangeably here the terms describe a situation where no property rights group or individual exist s for the resource 2catch per unit of effort in the inshore texas gulf and federal gulf waters is presented for 1963 77 by w l griffin c g tydlacka and w e grant they show catch per unit of effort generally falling in inshore and offshore waters while catch per unit of effort fluctuates from year to year it falls from approximately 360 kg shrimp per unit of effort to 220 kg from 1963 to 1977 the common property nature of the fishery is reflected in the following statistics since 1975 the number of vessels has grown by 23 percent nelson swartz for fish houses the record of entry is similar between 1970 a d 1977 the number of firms grew from 259 to 287 though during that period many left the industry as others entered the number of fish houses was calculated from license data supplied by the texas parks and wildlife department the record of entry by fish houses suggests that monopsony as discussed by colin clark and gordon munro is absent in the fishery 3there may be minor differences in labor leisure choices and capital but our statistical evidence and discussions with fishermen indicate that catch variations are largely due to skill government regulations in the texas bays restrict capital and our empirical evidence shows boats to be relatively homogeneous

subdividing the commons distributional conflict in the transition from collective to individual property rights in kenya s maasailand summary this paper suggests that explanations of property rights transformation need to move beyond models of relative price change and state enforcement to include accounts that accommodate conflict and competition among actors and the possibility that state actors may not provide the enforcement that is often taken for granted the transition from collective to individualized holdings in kenya s maasailand is burdened with politics and procedural problems that can undermine the gains anticipated in that move moreover in semi arid ecological settings individualization results in unstable land holdings necessitating re contracting and reaggregation by individual parcel owners

revisiting the empirical linkages between stock returns and trading volume abstract this paper investigates whether the empirical linkages between stock returns and trading volume differ over the fluctuations of stock markets i e whether the return volume relation is asymmetric in bull and bear stock markets using monthly data for the s p 500 price index and trading volume from 1973m2 to 2008m10 strong evidence of asymmetry in contemporaneous correlation is found as for a dynamic causal relation it is found that the stock return is capable of predicting trading volume in both bear and bull markets however the evidence for trade volume predicting returns is weaker

booms and slumps in world commodity prices abstract this paper examines the duration and magnitude of cycles in world commodity prices cycles are a dominant feature of commodity prices and dealing with the economic consequences of booms and slumps in prices continues to be one of the most challenging issues facing policymakers in commodity exporting developing countries we find that there is an asymmetry in commodity price cycles as price slumps last longer than price booms how far prices fall in a slump is found to be slightly larger than how far they tend to rebound in a subsequent boom in addition for most commodities the probability of an end to a slump boom in prices is independent of the time already spent in the slump boom

optimal pricing of public lotteries and comparison of competing mechanisms this article establishes optimal pricing rules for rationing indivisible units of rival and otherwise nonexcludable goods by lottery or a hybrid of a lottery and outright sale by posted price given the distributional objective of maximizing expected consumer surplus the solutions to unconstrained and constrained versions of the pricing problem may be expressed in classic inverse elasticity form with the lottery price appearing as an entry fee user fee or a combination of the two numerical analysis of a rich class of private value distributions indicates that sizable gains in expected consumer surplus can be realized over competitive pricing and zero pricing

an econometric analysis of some models for constructed binary time series macroeconometric and financial researchers often use binary data constructed in a way that creates serial dependence we show that this dependence can be allowed for if the binary states are treated as markov processes in addition the methods of construction ensure that certain sequences are never observed in the constructed data together these features make it difficult to utilize static and dynamic probit models we develop modeling methods that respect the markov process nature of constructed binary data and explicitly deals with censoring constraints an application is provided that investigates the relation between the business cycle and the yield spread