productivity in swedish electricity retail distribution this paper examines productivity growth in electricity retail distribution in sweden in a multiple output multiple input framework the approach used is nonparametric data envelopment analysis dea productivity is measured by means of the malmquist index productivity comparisons are made between different types of ownership and between different service areas the study indicates a high rate of productivity growth due to economies of density when measured over a period of 17 years the results show no significant differences in productivity growth between different types of ownership or economic organization

measuring and decomposing the gender pay gap a new frontier approach abstract the gender pay gap measures the differences in the wages earned by female workers when compared to male workers accurately measuring the gender pay gap is an important exercise in order to assess how far we are from the ideal of equal pay for work of equal value determining the different sources of the gender pay gap is also very important in order to design appropriate policies for eliminating this gap we develop an enhanced method to measure and decompose the gender pay gap this method is based on the data envelopment analysis dea technique and on the malmquist index mi we use dea and the mi to construct an index reflecting an adjusted measure of the gender pay gap taking into account multiple productive characteristics and multiple types of pay furthermore we propose a decomposition of the gender pay gap into four components same gender pay gap cross gender frontier gap magnitude productive characteristics bias and pay package bias the method is applied to data relative to 15 712 men and 17 175 women working as business and administration associate professionals in the finance and insurance industry in 20 countries the results reveal the existence of a gender pay gap in all countries and that the value of the gap and of its components vary considerably between countries requiring different policies to tackle it

light duty vehicles and external impacts product and policy performance assessment abstract in order to demonstrate that welfare theory can be put into practice mathematical programming methods are used here which can handle the aggregation problems facing us when information concerning the relative valuation of external factors emissions safety risks non renewable energy use noise etc is highly uncertain product and policy performance measures are presented and then applied to one time period real data on the single perhaps most welfare affecting man made consumer product of the 20th century light duty vehicles ldvs the focus when examining costs imposed on society due to individuals or other economic units purchase and use of ldvs is here the total external cost from the choice of ldv technology the relative weights of the external factors are then determined endogenously by first using for each ldv model the unconstrained set of weights most favorable to itself the flexibility of the relative weights is then constrained according to assumed knowledge about true external relative costs by this procedure it is possible to aggregate the multiple societal impact factors of ldvs and thus to measure the total external impact of individual ldv models relative to current best practice technology

executive constraint and sovereign debt quasi experimental evidence from argentina during the baring crisis the literature on whether executive constraint improves the credibility of sovereign debt takes the political regime as the unit of analysis typically computing an average yield or price for each

macroeconomic features of the french revolution this paper describes aspects of the french revolution from the perspective of theories about money and government budget constraints we describe how unpleasant fiscal arithmetic gripped the old regime how the estates general responded to reorganize france s fiscal affairs and how fiscal exigencies impelled the revolution into a procession of monetary experiments ending in hyper inflation

state capacity and long run economic performance we present new evidence about the long run relationship between state capacity the fiscal and administrative power of states and economic performance our database is novel and spans 11 european countries and 4 centuries from the old regime to world war i we argue that national governments undertook two political transformations over this period fiscal centralization and limited government we find a significant direct relationship between fiscal centralization and economic growth furthermore we find that an increase in the state s capacity to extract greater tax revenues was one mechanism through which both political transformations improved economic performance our analysis shows systematic evidence that state capacity is an important determinant of long run economic growth

cities constitutions and sovereign borrowing in europe 1274 1785 this article investigates the politics of sovereign borrowing in europe over the very long run i consider three alternative hypotheses regarding the sources of borrower credibility according to the first european states with constitutional checks on executive authority found it easier to obtain credit at low interest rates than did states that lacked such constraints my second hypothesis focuses on state type city state versus territorial state and the way in which this may have influ enced the balance of political power between owners of land and owners of capital in a society this hypothesis suggests that after controlling for other factors one should observe that city states in europe found it easier to borrow than did larger territorial states and that these city states paid lower interest rates on their debt finally my third hypothesis suggests that borrower credibility depended on the simultaneous presence of both constitutional checks and balances and a city state when one con siders a broad sample of cases over a long time span there is strong support for the proposition involving city states and merchant power but less support for the argu ment that constitutional checks influenced credibility regardless of state type city state or territorial state there is however some empirical evidence of an interaction effect whereby constitutional constraints on rulers made city states particularly cred ible as borrowers my results are robust to a number of controls for alternative deter minants for sample selection bias and for the endogeneity of city state development one of the most frequently cited recent arguments about european state develop ment involves the effect of constitutional checks and balances on economic per formance in areas where political institutions placed constraints on rulers scholars have argued that property rights were more secure which helped stimulate invest ment innovation and growth authors have suggested that checks and balances also facilitated long term borrowing by governments since creditors found it less likely that constrained rulers would default on loans easier access to loans at low interest rates gave some states an advantage in international competition the con trasting cases of great britain and france provide a popular illustration of the

the rise of europe atlantic trade institutional change and economic growth the rise of western europe after 1500 is due largely to growth in countries with access to the atlantic ocean and with substantial trade with the new world africa and asia via the atlantic this trade and the associatedcolonialism affected europe not only directly but also indirectly by inducing institutional change where initial political institutions those established before 1500 placed significant checks on the monarchy the growth of atlantic trade strengthened merchant groups by constraining the power of the monarchy and helped merchants obtain changes in institutions to protect property rights these changes were central to subsequent economic growth

relocation of headquarters and international taxation about 6 of multinationals relocated their headquarters to another country in the 1997 2007 period this paper presents empirical evidence on the role of taxes in these relocation decisions it considers a sample of 140 multinationals that relocated their headquarters over the past decade and compares them to a control group of 1943 multinationals that did not relocate it is found that the additional tax due in the home country upon repatriation of foreign profits has a positive effect on the probability of relocation the empirical results suggest that an increase in the repatriation tax by 10 percentage points would raise the share of relocating multinationals by 2 2 percentage points equivalent to an increase in the number of relocations by more than one third furthermore the presence of controlled foreign corporation legislation also has a positive effect on the number of relocations

princes and merchants european city growth before the industrial revolution as measured by the pace of city growth in western europe from 1000 to 1800 absolutist monarchs stunted the growth of commerce and industry a region ruled by an absolutist prince saw its total urban population shrink by one hundred thousand people per century relative to a region without absolutist government this might be explained by higher rates of taxation under revenue maximizing absolutist governments than under nonabsolutist governments which care more about general economic prosperity and less about state revenue

the democratic advantage institutional foundations of financial power in international competition despite their presumed liabilities institutions associated with democracy serve as a source of power in prolonged international competition by increasing the financial resources that states can bring to bear the theory of sovereign debt suggests that a state s ability to raise money through public borrowing is enhanced when debtholders have mechanisms for sanctioning state leaders in the event of default institutions associated with liberal government provide such mechanisms all other things being equal states that possess these institutions enjoy superior access to credit and lower interest rates than do states in which the sovereign has more discretion to default unilaterally liberal states can not only raise more money from a given economic base but can also pursue tax smoothing policies that minimize economic distortions the ability to finance competition in a manner that is consistent with long term economic growth generates a significant advantage in prolonged rivalries these claims are explored by analyzing the anglo french rivalry 1688 1815 and the cold war

industry performance and structural efficiency measures solutions to problems in firm models abstract it is shown that average unit structural efficiency measures do not measure the level of technical efficiency in a firm model of an industry alternative structural efficiency measures generalized to multiple input and multiple output technologies are presented as a solution to the problem of how to estimate the relative performance of an industry as a whole where reallocation of inputs across firms is not feasible compared to existing measures the proposed measures require additional information therefore the linear programming dea models needed to obtain this information are presented this non parametric approach to relative efficiency measurement is also used to obtain economic efficiency estimates for an industry as a whole without imposing a priori restrictions on the relative input and output weights

efficiency productivity and determinants of inefficiency at public day care centers in sweden efficiency differences among day care centers and productivity change over time are examined on the basis of nonparametric frontiers calculated using the dea methodology the data consist of approximately 200 public day care centers in gothenburg sweden for the years 1988 and 1989 the findings indicate a potential output increase of about 10 to 15 per cent each year and a productivity decrease of 3 per cent between the years an attempt is also made to explain the differences in inefficiency by applying a tobit model

linear programming models for firm and industry performance programming models of technology are enjoying a revival in several strands of literature one such strand is the growing literature devoted to the assessment of firm performance based on the work of farrell 1957 and the later popularized by charnes cooper and rhodes 1978 under the name of data envelopment analysis dea for an early programming model see boles 1966 a second strand of literature seeks to model the industry production function and is associated with johansen 1972 fbrsund and hjalmarsson 1987 and aigner and chu 1968 a third strand of literature uses programming techniques such as nonparametric tests of regularity conditions in production see afriat 1972 hanoch and rothschild 1972 diewert and parkan 1983 and varian 1984 one of the purposes of this paper is to examine the relationship between the first two areas i e analysis of firm and industry programming models of technology and performance in order to compare the industry and firm models we restate them in a general programming form and ignore issues of functional form examination of these models in primal and dual form reveals that the industry approach constructs technology from firm data but allows hypothetical reallocation of aggregate resources across firms to yield an industry function the firm models also construct technology from the data on all firms in the sample industry but do not allow for reallocation of inputs across firms this suggests a natural hybrid an industry model which allows for both firm specific inputs and inputs which can be reallocated across firms the paper unfolds as follows we begin by presenting a stylized version of the aigner and chu and johansen models of industry production we

history institutions and economic performance the legacy of colonial land tenure systems in india we analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the british in india and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators these areas also have significantly lower investments in health and education these differences are not driven by omitted variables or endogeneity problems they probably arise because differences in historical institutions lead to very different policy choices

different paths to the modern state in europe the interaction between warfare economic structure and political regime theoretical work on taxation and state building borrows heavily from early modern european experience while a number of european states increased centralized tax revenues during this period for others revenues stagnated or even declined and these variations have motivated alternative arguments for the determinants of fiscal and state capacity this study reviews the arguments concerning the three determinants that have received most attention namely warfare economic structure and political regime and tests them by making use of a new and comprehensive tax revenue dataset our main finding is that these three determinants worked in interaction with each other specifically when under pressure of war it was representative regimes in more urbanized commercial economies and authoritarian regimes in more rural agrarian economies that tended to better aggregate domestic interests towards state building

malmquist indices of productivity growth during the deregulation of norwegian banking 1980 89 productivity growth during the deregulation of the norwegian banking industry is studied within the framework of data envelopment analysis which explicitly allows for multiple outputs introducing malmquist indices for productivity growth total growth can be decomposed into frontier growth and change in each bank s distance to the frontier both the total growth index and its components can be consistently chained over time we find productivity regress at the average bank prior to the deregulation but rapid growth when deregulation took place deregulation also led to less dispersion of productivity levels within the industry

a postscript on aggregate farrell efficiencies abstract in this note we derive alternative weighting schemes that complement those of fare and zelenyuk 2003 for consistent aggregation of farrell efficiencies when the technology exhibits global constant returns to scale

the law of one price in data envelopment analysis restricting weight flexibility across firms abstract the law of one price loop states that all firms face the same prices for their inputs and outputs under market equilibrium taken here as a normative condition for efficiency prices this law has powerful implications for productive efficiency analysis which have remained unexploited thus far this paper shows how loop based weight restrictions can be incorporated in data envelopment analysis dea utilizing the relation between industry level and firm level cost efficiency measures we propose to apply a set of input prices that is common for all firms and that maximizes the cost efficiency of the industry our framework allows for firm specific output weights and for variable returns to scale and preserves the linear programming structure of the standard dea we apply the proposed methodology to the evaluation of the research efficiency of economics departments of dutch universities this application shows that the methodology is computationally tractable for practical efficiency analysis and that it helps in deepening the dea analysis

elite self interest and economic decline in early modern europe why does the leading economic power of its time lose its dominance competing theories are tested through a comparison of four historical cases the florentine city state the spanish empire and the dutch and british nation states institutional context determined social actors capacities to apply their polities human and material resources to foreign economic competition specifically the dominant elites in each polity established the social relations and institutions that protected them from domestic challenges from rival elites and classes but these relations and institutions had the effect of limiting elites capacities to adapt to foreign economic rivals elites acting locally determined their capacities to act globally

costly monitoring loan contracts and equilibrium credit rationing this paper develops a model with asymmetrically informed agents and costly monitoring of loan contracts where an equilibrium can exhibit credit rationing borrowers are identical ex ante but some receive loans and others do not in contrast to existing credit rationing theories rationing does not occur here due to inflexible prices adverse selection or moral hazard optimizing behaviour produces a standard debt contract in equilibrium the aggregate quantity of loans and equilibrium interest rates respond differently depending on whether there is rationing in equilibrium

banking efficiency in the nordic countries abstract evidence of the relative competitiveness of the banking industries in three nordic countries is provided by applying data envelopment analysis of productivity on the national and the pooled data sets the analysis produces a detailed account of how well banks from different countries and different sizes may be prepared to meet the more intense competition of a common european banking market

money and monetary stability in europe 1300 1914 abstract this paper investigates the determinants of monetary stability in europe from the late medieval era until world war i through this period the anchor for monetary policy was the silver or gold value of the monetary unit states however frequently abandoned this anchor some depreciating their monetary units against silver and gold less than 10 fold and others more than 10 000 fold between 1500 and 1914 to understand the determinants of these differences we compile a new and comprehensive monetary history dataset for all major states in europe and test alternative theories we find strong evidence that political factors and in particular fiscal capacity political regime and warfare explain patterns of monetary stability this finding is robust to addressing endogeneity controlling for the instability induced by the mechanics of the monetary system and accounting for the impacts of new monetary technologies and the advent of fiat standard

a dea estimation of a lower bound for firms allocative efficiency without information on price data abstract in this paper we estimate a lower bound for the sum of firms allocative efficiencies in the absence of information on prices for this purpose we only estimate technical efficiency at both the firm and the industry level using a directional distance function and choosing a relevant direction our result relies on the decomposition of overall inefficiency into technical and allocative inefficiency at both the firm and the industry level the convexity of a technology induces a transfer from both total technical inefficiency and part of allocative inefficiency at the firm level to technical inefficiency solely at the industry level the remaining firms allocative inefficiency could be counted at the industry level hence the difference between technical inefficiencies at both levels can be interpreted as a lower bound for the sum of allocative inefficiency in the industry we show how to implement this bound in a dea framework