economic growth and greenhouse gases in europe a non radial multi sector nonparametric production frontier analysis abstract energy use has become a topical issue when assessing the economic growth of countries indeed energy use gives rise to greenhouse gas emissions which are undesirable side products of economic growth in this paper we present a non radial multi sector nonparametric production frontier approach specially tailored for addressing this issue our approach is consistent with previous works and in line with recent policy and regulation implementations we also make use of second stage country and sector level regression analyses to investigate how the efficiency results are affected by exogenous factors we apply our method to the case of 10 sectors in 19 european countries our results highlight the need for policy and regulation implementations for each sector individually indeed our efficiency and regression results show that there exists a sector heterogeneity and that the room for increasing economic growth reducing greenhouse gas emissions is clearly different for each sector in every country finally our results highlight two sectors 1 agriculture and 2 electricity gas and water and that the europe 2020 objectives are well set since they target the most inefficient countries sectors

optimal farm size in an uncertain land market the case of kyrgyz republic this article applies a real options model to the problem of land development making use of the 1998 2001 kyrgyz household budget survey we show that when the hypothesis of decreasing return to scale holds the relation between the threshold value of revenue per hectare and the amount of land cultivated is positive in addition the relation between the threshold and the amount of land owned is positive in the case of continuous supply of land and negative when there is discontinuous supply of land the direct consequence is that in the first case smaller farms will be more willing to rent land and exercise the option where in the second case larger farms will exercise first the results suggest three main conclusions i the combination of uncertainty and irreversibility is an important factor in land development decisions ii farmer behavior is consistent with the continuous profit maximization model and iii farming unit revenue tends to be positively related to farm size once uncertainty is properly accounted for

bertrand equilibria with entry limit results abstract we study the limiting behaviour of bertrand equilibria where firms must supply the whole of the demand coming to them for two different cases first when entry is exogenous and second when it is free the limit equilibrium set is characterised for both cases for a large class of cost functions

capital and the theory of productivity measurement the purpose of this paper is twofold to provide a brief survey of recent approaches to the measurement of total factor productivity and to comment on some of the special problems which are associated with capital thus in sections i iv below four approaches to the measurement of total factor productivity are outlined while section v compares and contrasts the approaches in section vi i consider how the various approaches have to be modified when welldefined rental markets for components of the capital stock do not exist the usual case

long run competition in capacity short run competition in price and the cournot model in this article we investigate the nature of equilibrium in markets in which firms choose the scale of operation before they make pricing decisions we analyze a duopoly model in which firms choose their capacities before engaging in bertrand like price competition we demonstrate that the cournot outcome is unlikely to emerge in such markets and that the equilibrium tends to be more competitive than the cournot model would predict in addition our results indicate a tendency toward asymmetric firm sizes and price dispersion that results from the mixed strategies firms use in equilibrium

bertrand the cournot paradigm and the theory of perfect competition in this paper we extend to a general equilibrium context bertrand s classic critique of cournot we present a game theoretic model of a pure exchange monetary economy in which buyers as well as sellers announce both quantities and prices when buyers act strategically the edgeworth nonexistence problem is circumvented under weak conditions a pure strategy nash equilibrium exists for this game we make precise the bertrand idea that when agents in a finite economy are permitted to compete by price the resulting allocations will be competitive specifically the nash equilibria for our game yield allocations that are competitive allocations for the underlying exchange economy provided that there are at least two buyers and two sellers actively trading in every market under this characterization of strategic behaviour then two is enough for competition our objective is to provide a general equilibrium game theoretic formulation of the idea of bertrand price competition bertrand s classic critique of cournot can be paraphrased as follows when agents regard price rather than quantity as the strategic variable no price above the competitive equilibrium price can be sustained as a noncooperative equilibrium this idea is made precise in our game theoretic model of a pure exchange economy in which buyers as well as sellers act strategically our treatment of buyers behaviour is novel while sellers announce price and quantity vectors buyers specify sums of money and menus of alternative nonmonetary commodity bundles a buyer s action is a commitment to purchase any one of the specified commodity bundles in exchange for the sum of money our first result is that under weak conditions a nash equilibrium in pure strategies exists the paper thus also points to a way of resolving the classical edgeworth nonexistence problem second all nash equilibria yield allocations that are competitive for the underlying economy provided that in every market at least two buyers and two sellers are actively trading under this characterization of strategic

price quantity strategic market games this paper is yet another in a rapidly growing series e g 2 11 on strategic approaches to economic equilibrium our aim here is to make precise the remark implicitly due to bertrand 1 or 10 ch 4 5 that if the agents in an economy use price setting strategies then the strategic nash equilibria will in fact be walrasian and this without any assumption of a large number of small agents however in our models not only prices but also quantities are set by the agents thus it might actually be more appropriate to call them bertrand cournot types of models we begin with a standard walras exchange economy with a finite number of traders and commodities this is recast as a game in strategic form in essentially two different ways there is a trading post for each commodity to which traders send contingent statements about how much they wish to buy and sell and at what prices in model 1 the trading point is determined by the intersection of the aggregate supply and demand curves in model 2 trade takes place so as to meet as many contingent statements as possible each buyer whose orders are filled pays the price he quoted using a fiat money which can be borrowed costlessly and limitlessly but after trade is over there is a settlement of accounts and a penalty is levied on those who are bankrupt no attempt is made to model the penalty in any detail it is simply described in the form of a disutility but this in turn may be imagined to stem from confiscation of assets see remark 5 or the necessity of procuring highly priced loans etc call a noncooperative equilibrium active if it turns out that no trader is isolated i e trapped as the sole buyer or seller at some trading post then our results may be described as follows in model 1 the active2 n e of the game coincide with the c e of the market furthermore there is a subset of tight active n e which also coincide with the c e and each n e in this subset is strong

understanding rent dissipation on the use of game theory in industrial organization game theory has had a deep impact on the theory of industrial organization in a similar but less controversial way as the rational expectations revolution in macroeconomics the reason it has been embraced by a majority of researchers in the field is that it imposes some discipline on theoretical thinking it forces economists to clearly specify the strategic variables their timing and the information structure faced by firms as is often the case in economics the researcher learns as much from constructing the model the extensive form as from

transforming rural economies migration income generation and inequality in rural mexico abstract we analyse how migration shapes the distribution and sources of rural income using nationally representative panel data from mexico income source gini decompositions provide some support for the migration diffusion hypothesis nevertheless migration s influence on other income sources and household re ranking substantially alter distributional impacts we find significant impacts of migration on non remittance income as well as changes in the effects of non migration activities on inequality over time we conclude that migration is transforming rural economies in ways that go beyond the scope of most past research on migration and inequality

from bond yield to macroeconomic instability a parsimonious affine model abstract we present a hybrid heston model with a common stochastic volatility to describe government bond yield dynamics the model is analytically tractable and therefore can be efficiently estimated using the maximum likelihood approach and a specific expansion in order to cope with the curse of dimensionality twofold is the model contribution first it captures changes in the yield volatility and predict future yield values of germany french italy and spain the result is an early warning indicator which anticipates phases of instability characterizing the time series investigated then the model describes convergence divergence phenomena among european government bond yields and explores the countries reactions to a common monetary policy described through the eonia interbank rate we also investigate the potential of this indicator on u s data treasury bills

rationing rules and bertrand edgeworth equilibria in large markets abstract in a market with concave downward sloping demand and symmetric firms which compete in prices with constant marginal costs and capacity limits it is shown that the supports of the symmetric mixed strategy nash equilibria converge to the unique competitive price provided that unsatisfied demand is allocated according to the surplus maximizing rationing rule

technological change technological catch up and capital deepening relative contributions to growth and convergence we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to 1 technological change shifts in the world production frontier 2 technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and 3 capital accumulation movement along the frontier the world production frontier is constructed using deterministic methods requiring no specification of functional form for the technology nor any assumption about market structure or the absence of market imperfections we analyze the evolution of the cross country distribution of labor productivity in terms of the tripartite decomposition finding that technological change is decidedly nonneutral and that both growth and bipolar international divergence are driven primarily by capital deepening jel o30 o47 d24

a theory of dynamic oligopoly ii price competition kinked demand curves and edgeworth cycles we provide game theoretic foundations for the classic kinked demand curve equilibrium and edgeworth cycle we analyze a model in which firms take turns choosing prices the model is intended to capture the idea of reactions based on short run commitment in a markov perfect equilibrium mpe a firm s move in any period depends only on the other firm s current price there are multiple mpe s consisting of both kinked demand curve equilibria and edgeworth cycles in any mpe profit is bounded away from the bertrand equilibrium level we show that a kinked demand curve at the monopoly price is the unique symmetric renegotiation proof equilibrium when there is little discounting we then endogenize the timing by allowing firms to move at any time subject to short run commitments we find that firms end up alternating thus vindicating the ad hoc timing assumption of our simpler model we also discuss how the model can be enriched to provide explanations for excess capacity and market sharing keiiwords tacit collusion markov perfect equilibrium kinked demand curve edgeworth cycle excess capacity market sharing endogenous timing

efficiency and total factor productivity in ukrainian agriculture in transition this article analyzes efficiency and total factor productivity tfp change of large agricultural enterprises during their transition to a market economy in ukraine efficiency is calculated by data envelopment analysis and productivity change is measured by the malmquist productivity change index in the period between 1990 and 1999 on average tfp declined by 6 annually dropping a total 42 the main reason for the observed tfp decline is a decrease in technical efficiency which is found to be remarkably significant at the same time there is a high variation among individual enterprises the distribution of efficiency scores widens which indicates that the farms diverge with respect to their economic performance a tobit regression analysis is conducted in which efficiency scores are related to factors such as farm type farm size initial conditions and legal form

a continuous state space approach to convergence by parts abstract using a continuous state space approach this note extends feyrer s feyrer j 2003 convergence by parts manuscript dartmouth college available at http www dartmouth edu jfeyrer parts pdf study of the proximate determinants of the shape of the long run distribution of income per capita contrary to feyrer s finding of the primacy of total factor productivity tfp the results here imply that traps in both tfp growth and capital accumulation may matter

rank dynamics and club convergence of sustainable development for countries around the world abstract assessment of country level sustainable development is a critical research topic entrenched in the global battle against climate change this study employs the frontier approach combined with convergence analysis to assess the sustainable development for a set of 121 countries over 1990 2014 focusing on analyzing the countries rank dynamics and convergence behavior the levels of the countries sustainable development are captured by data envelopment analysis a nonparametric frontier approach that can jointly assess a country s economic and environmental performance reflecting the divergent views on the importance of economic and environmental objectives in the pursuit of sustainability the proposed approach generates the countries sustainability scores by prioritizing either economic or environmental criterion this study finds that developed countries have significantly outperformed developing countries if environmental criterion takes precedence over economic criterion in performance assessment moreover regardless of the model employed there is strong evidence of club convergence i e convergence in subgroups of countries to different steady states rather than convergence in full sample we analyze the pattern of convergence paths and discuss policy implications obtained from our empirical findings

price competition in a capacity constrained duopoly abstract this paper characterizes the set of nash equilibria in a model of price setting duopoly in which each firm has limited capacity and demand is continuous and decreasing in general there is a unique equilibrium so that comparative static exercises are meaningful the properties of the equilibrium conform with a number of stylized facts the equilibrium prices are lower the smaller is demand relative to capacity when demand is in an intermediate range the firms use mixed strategies they randomly hold sales if capacities are chosen simultaneously before prices the set of equilibrium capacities coincides with the set of cournot quantities

bertrand edgeworth duopoly with proportional residual demand a complete characterization is given for the prices charged by bertrand edgeworth duopolists with capacity constraints in general for the game in which firms strategy spaces consist of price offers nash equilibrium involves nondegenerate mixed strategi es equilibria never extend below the highest competitive price with tw o firms the bertrand edgeworth model displays a bias for the highest of several market clearing prices moreover these strategies never stop short of the lowest monopoly price if firms are of unequal siz e the larger firm assigns positive probability to a monopoly price possibly even to several monopoly prices copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a two stage bertrand edgeworth game abstract in our investigation we are expanding a bertrand edgeworth duopoly into a two stage game in which during the first stage the firms can select their rationing rule we will show that under certain conditions the efficient rationing rule is an equilibrium action of the first stage

productivity growth in pre 1990 mongolian agriculture spiralling disaster or emerging success the reasons for the spectacular collapse of so many centrally planned economies are a source of ongoing debate in this paper we use detailed farm level data to measure total factor productivity tfp changes in mongolian grain and potato farming during the 14 year period immediately preceding the 1990 economic reforms we measure tfp growth using stochastic frontier analysis sfa and data envelopment analysis dea methods our results indicate quite poor overall performance with an average annual tfp change of 1 7 in grain and 0 8 in potatoes over the 14 year period however the pattern of tfp growth changed substantially during this period with tfp growth exceeding 7 per year in the latter half of this period this suggests that the new policies of improved education greater management autonomy and improved incentives which were introduced in final two planning periods in the 1980s were beginning to have a significant influence upon the performance of mongolian crop farming crown copyright c 2002 published by elsevier science b v all rights reserved

approximate bertrand equilibria in a replicated industry this paper considers the existence and properties of approximate bertrand equilibria in a replicated industry price setting firms produce a homogeneous product with weakly convex costs the main results are that a given e 0 an e equilibrium exists if the industry is large enough b if the e is small enough and the industry large enough any e equilibrium is approximately competitive these results depend on how contingent demand is specified

spatial dynamic analysis of productivity growth of agri food companies this study analyzes the spatial dynamics in productivity growth and its components for a sample of agri food companies in murcia spain over the period 2005 2014 we find that productivity growth of a company is related to productivity growth of neighboring companies in both the short and long term the marginal effects of the different factors on productivity growth are stronger in the short run rather than in the long run land characteristics and economic territorial conditions have the largest marginal effect on productivity growth and its components this study contributes to the existing literature by including spatial interactions in the analysis of productivity growth

bertrand edgeworth equilibria with unobservable output uncoordinated consumers and large number of firms abstract we examine a bertrand edgeworth model of price competition where the output levels of the firms are unobservable and consumers are uncoordinated we show that if the number of firms is large enough then any price greater than the competitive one can be sustained as a pure strategy nash equilibrium

verifying the relation between labor productivity and productive efficiency by means of the properties of the input output matrices the european case abstract this article discusses the relationship between labor productivity and the degree of production efficiency for 24 countries inside the european union eu over a period of 17 years a panel data econometric model is used to estimate it to this end an indicator of productive efficiency has been applied it is based on the dominant eigenvalue of the matrix of technical coefficients of the input output model this indicator allows the relationship between the economic sectors of each country and its productive technologies to be taken into account the results reveal a significant relationship between the proposed productive efficiency indicator and labor productivity finally several implications from a policy perspective are suggested as concluding remarks

the nature of the farm abstract using a model based on a trade off between moral hazard incentives and gains from specialization this paper explains why farming has generally not converted from small family based firms into large factory style corporate firms nature is both seasonal and random and the interplay of these qualities generates moral hazard limits the gains from specialization and causes timing problems between stages of production by identifying conditions in which these forces vary we derive testable predictions about the choice of organization and the extent of farm integration to test these predictions we study the historical development of several agricultural industries and analyze data from a sample of over 1 000 farms in british columbia and louisiana in general seasonality and randomness so limit the benefits of specialization that family farms are optimal but when farmers are successful in mitigating the effects of seasonality and random shocks to output farm organizations gravitate toward fa

productivity developments in european agriculture relations to and opportunities for biomass production abstract this paper discusses if how fast and to what maximum yield improvements can be realized in europe in the coming decades and what the opportunities and relations are to biomass production the starting point for the analysis is the historic context of developments in european agriculture over the past five decades historic developments in european crop and animal protein productivity between 1961 and 2007 show an average mean annual growth rate of 1 6 in relative terms developments are slower on average in the netherlands and france at 1 0 y 1 than in poland and ukraine ussr at 2 2 y 1 in absolute figures however growth has been considerable in wec and modest in the ceec yield trends further show that significant yield changes can be realized over a short period of time positive growth rates of 3 5 y 1 were reached in several countries and for several crops in several decades in eastern european countries during their transition in the 1990s negative growth rates as low as 7 y 1 occurred outcomes suggest that productivity levels can be actively steered rather than being just the result of autonomous developments current yield gaps differ greatly between western europe france 1 high yielding lignocellulosic crops could double this potential it is concluded that the potential to free up agricultural lands for the production of bioenergy crops in europe is considerable the degree to and the pace at which yields develop will determine how much of the potential is opened up agricultural policy and technological development are key to open up the potential

migration and farm technical efficiency evidence from kosovo this article investigates the effect of migration on farm technical efficiency drawing on a large and representative sample of agricultural households in kosovo a two stage estimation procedure is applied a frontier technique to estimate the effect of migration on farm efficiency followed by a propensity score based matching approach to robustly estimate the sample average effect on efficiency for different levels of migration intensity migration is found to have an efficiency decreasing effect which is amplified for better educated workers the observed negative effect of migration on efficiency is evident even at low levels of migration intensity

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games i theory the article presents information about the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games in this paper and its sequel presents study the existence of nash equilibrium in games where agents payoff functions are discontinuous the enquiry is motivated by a number of recent studies that have uncovered serious existence problems in seemingly innocuous economic games in the sequel to this paper authors have explained the utility function in the economic games referred to earlier are neither continuous nor quasi concave however they demonstrate that the payoff functions in mildly modified versions of these constructs exhibit two weaker forms of continuity which together with the requirement of quasi concavity suffice for the existence of an equilibrium from this one may conclude that at least in the modified versions of these models discontinuities in the payoff functions are not the real source of the problem rather it is the failure of the payoff functions to the quasi concave which is responsible for the non existence of equilibrium these observations bear on the existence of nash equilibrium in pure strategies

the existence of mixed strategy equilibria in a price setting oligopoly with convex costs this paper shows that a mixed strategy equilibrium will exist in an industry producing a homogeneous product with perfectly informed consumers if firms are identical and have weakly convex costs this generalises an earlier result by dasgupta and maskin

on the strategic importance of prices versus quantities in this article i investigate three single shot models of differentiated products oligopoly in each model firms choose both output and price the demand cost and spillover demand specifications are quite general and there are three main results first with simultaneous choice there is no pure strategy noncooperative equilibrium second with output chosen first and announced to all firms before the choice of price equilibrium sometimes exists and when it does it is the same as in a quantity only model third with price chosen and announced first equilibrium always exists and is the same as in a price only model

existence of pure strategy nash equilibrium in bertrand edgeworth oligopolies abstract this article is searching for necessary and sufficient conditions which are to be imposed on the demand curve to guarantee the existence of pure strategy nash equilibrium in a bertrand edgeworth game with capacity constraints

the new economics of labor migration this paper reviews selected theoretical and empirical developments in the field of labor migration economics the migration behavior of individuals differs in accordance with their perceived relative deprivation those who are relatively more deprived tend to have stronger incentive to migrate than those who are relatively less deprived moreover a reference group characterized by more income inequality is likely to generate more relative deprivation highly skilled workers are also more likely to migrate migration decisions are often made jointly by the migrant and nonmigrant with a contractual arrangement regarding the sharing of costs and returns the exchange of commitments to share income provides coinsurance of particular interest are the determinants of the speed of adoption of migration as an innovation and the characteristics associated with the delay in the adoption of innovation new econometric techniques including techniques for the analysis of qualitative dependent variables techniques that correct for sample selection bias and those for the analysis of longitudinal data have substantially benefited empirical research in this area new methods that can correct for the biased estimate of the wages particular individuals would receive at 2 or more locations at the same point in time allow researchers to test locational decsion making models estimates of these structural models of labor migration support the hypothesis that individuals respond to income incentives in making the decsion to migrate further research is needed on the pazzling observation that migrant workers earn less than native born workers with similar characteristics during the 1st few years after migration but more thereafter other topics that need further research include the macroeconomic effects of migration the microeconomic and macroeconomic relationships between aging and labor migration and the migration behavior of dual earner families

iterated elimination of dominated strategies in a bertrand edgeworth model we consider a bertrand edgeworth model of price competition firms have identical and constant marginal costs and finite exogeneous capacities firms choose prices our interest is in the set of those prices which are left over after the iterated elimination of dominated strategies we show that in two circumstances this set will be close to the set containing only the marketclearing walrasian price i if any n 1 out of n firms assumed to be in the market have sufficient capacity to cover demand at marginal costs ii if any given total capacity is owned by a very large number of very small firms

economic efficiency in polish peasant farming an international perspective one decade following the market transition in poland the agricultural sector still exhibits low productivity policy makers often describe the sector as fragmented and inefficient to understand why small scale farming in poland is inefficient despite longstanding secure property rights a survey of economic efficiency in southern agriculture was conducted and compared with limited studies of efficiency in poland the most important issues particularly related to farm size and efficiency are price risk uncertainty and low rural development comparative studies across regions with varying institutional arrangements and economic organization are powerful but must be made carefully and critically

collusion in a price quantity oligopoly abstract in the context of an infinitely repeated oligopoly game we study collusion among firms that simultaneously choose prices and quantities we compare a price cartel with a price quota cartel and analyze when and why firms prefer the latter to the former output quota may be required to solve coordination and incentive problems when market demand is sufficiently elastic if market demand is sufficiently inelastic then the cartel faces a trade off between increasing prices and the amount of costly overproduction we find that a price cartel prices consistently below the monopoly price to mitigate excessive production in this case a quota arrangement allows firms to avoid overproduction and to sustain the monopoly price from a policy perspective our findings suggest that an overall price increase in conjunction with more stable prices and market shares is indicative of collusion in industries where production precedes sales and outputs are imperfectly observable

capital market imperfections in economic transition empirical evidence from ukrainian agriculture this article investigates the link between financing and investment in ukrainian agriculture during economic transition the main contribution of the study is to provide empirical evidence for the coexistence of financial constraints and soft budget constraints sbcs this is of particular importance because credit constraints and sbcs have completely different economic effects the lack of differentiation between these forms of capital market imperfections yields overlapping effects of financing on investment and may therefore cause a misinterpretation of econometric results our empirical analyses are based on an econometric estimation of the euler investment equations for 529 large farms from three ukrainian regions between 2001 and 2005 the results confirm that financial variables significantly influence farms investment providing empirical evidence of an imperfect capital market in ukrainian agriculture it turns out that credit constraints in the ukrainian agricultural sector are more important than sbcs we show that the estimated level of financial constraints for profitable farms with access to loans is higher if both types of capital market imperfections are appropriately distinguished

success and failure of reform insights from the transition of agriculture this paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance the authors focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes fundamental differences among countries and relative simplicity of agricultural relationships the authors document post reform performance in the transition countries of asia and europe the authors show how a pricing reform and subsidy reductions b land rights reform and policies that affect farm restructuring and c the presence institutions that facilitate exchange either markets or market substitutes affect output and productivity the paper ends with general lessons on reforms and transition

nonuniform bertrand competition the feasibility of bertrand undercutting with nonuniform prices is established and properties are derived for bertrand equilibrium in nonuniform price strategies with free entry equilibrium entails zero profit minimum average cost production if there is more than one producing firm all prices collapse to a minimum average cost uniform price an existence condition is compared to conditions from uniform price theory without free entry equilibrium prices may not collapse to a uniform price positive profit may occur but all firms earn equal profit and incur equal marginal cost while consumers pay average outlay no greater than marginal cost copyright 1992 by the econometric society

multi output efficiency with good and bad outputs abstract cherchye de rock dierynck roodhooft and sabbe 2013 introduced a dea methodology that is specially tailored for multi output efficiency measurement the methodology accounts for jointly used inputs and incorporates information on how inputs are allocated to outputs in this paper we present extensions that render the methodology useful to deal with undesirable or bad outputs in addition to desirable or good outputs interestingly these extensions deal in a natural way with several limitations of existing dea approaches to treat undesirable outputs we also demonstrate the practical usefulness of our methodological extensions through an application to us electric utilities

human capital and convergence a production frontier approach using nonparametric production frontier methods we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to technological change shifts in the world production frontier technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and physical and human capital accumulation movements along the frontier we find that 1 technological change is decidedly nonneutral 2 productivity growth is driven primarily by physical and human capital accumulation 3 the increased international dispersion of productivity is explained primarily by physical capital accumulation and 4 international polarization the shift from a unimodal to a bimodal distribution is brought about primarily by efficiency changes technological catch up

on the evolution of the world income distribution the post world war ii period has seen substantial changes in the distribution of gdp per worker around the world in the upper half of the distribution a number of countries have exhibited large increases in income relative to the richest countries in the bottom half several countries have seen incomes fall relative to the richest countries the net result of these changes is a movement in the shape of the world income distribution from something that looks like a normal distribution in 1960 to a bi modal twin peaks distribution in 1988 projecting these changes into the future suggests a number of interesting ndings first it seems likely that the united states will lose its position as the country with the highest level of gdp per worker second growth miracles have been more common in recent decades than growth disasters if these dynamics continue the future income distribution will involve far more rich countries and far fewer poor countries than currently observed

bertrand edgeworth equilibria when firms avoid turning customers away this paper provides a simple solution to the problem of nonexistence of pure strategy equilibria in bertrand edgeworth models with strictly convex costs the voluntary trading constraint in standard bertrand edgeworth models is generalized to allow for there being costs incurred when customers are turned away so long as the industry is sufficiently large the presence of such costs ensures that the competitive price will be an equilibrium there will be other single price equilibria but if the offense costs are small all equilibria will be close to the competitive outcome

an analysis of grain production decline during the early transition in ukraine a bayesian inference the first years of reforms in the former soviet union resulted in a sharp decline in agricultural production between 1989 and 1992 ukrainian gross agricultural product dropped some 20 and the output of grain which is produced mostly in the collective sector went down some 25 world bank several reasons for the fall have been advanced in addition to weather variation across years there was a drop in state deliveries of production inputs especially fertilizer and pesticides world bank the emergence of private opportunities resulted in labor and management migration from the large scale collective system csaki and lerman thus reducing the average labor quality in the sector the ability of farms to produce efficiently was also affected by the transition related break in old production ties and networks blanchard and kremer while all three explanations of production differences between years weather variability input quantities decline and loss of production efficiency are plausible little is known about the relative contribution of these factors to the overall decline in production identifying the reasons for the decline in agricultural output in countries like ukraine is not

trade and dietary diversity in eastern europe and central asia abstract in public and academic debates the linkages between agricultural markets and nutrition across the world are vividly discussed this paper contributes to the ongoing debate by analyzing the relationship between greater openness to trade and dietary diversity it focuses on the post communist countries of eastern europe and central asia where trade reforms triggered growth in trade flows and foreign direct investment which in turn affected food systems in these countries this shift provides a natural experiment for studying the effects of trade openness on agricultural markets and consumer behaviour reduction in trade barriers for instance in the context of the accession to the wto and the eu and the gradual integration with world markets after 1991 had implications for diets through changes in production prices and incomes we utilize country level panel data for 26 post communist countries in the period 1996 2013 to assess the effects of trade costs agricultural trade openness and incomes on dietary diversity measured by the shannon entropy index the results from fixed effects and instrumental variables estimation are consistent with previous findings that income growth affects dietary diversity positively they also provide novel evidence that trade barriers reduce variety of products available in domestic markets in particular fruits and vegetables

migration remittances and agricultural productivity in china in our paper we have used the new economics of labor migration framework to trace the complex linkages that exist among migration remittances and agricultural productivity in china constraints in the operation of on farm labor and capital or insurance markets or institutions provide households with a motivation to migrate and distort on farm operations when labor leaves in our household sample the net impact of migration and remittances on maize production is negative excerpt

bayesian estimation of technical efficiency of a single input the authors propose estimation of a stochastic production frontier model within a bayesian framework to obtain the posterior distribution of single input oriented technical efficiency at the firm level this method can be used to estimate the environmental efficiency of agricultural production when the technology interaction with the environment is modeled via public inputs such as soil quality and environmental conditions all computations are carried out using markov chain monte carlo methods the approach is illustrated through its application to production data from ukrainian collective farms

is there a farm size productivity relationship in african agriculture evidence from rwanda whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in africa is of considerable policy relevance this paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in rwanda where policy makers consider land fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for the growth of the agricultural sector nationwide plot level data from rwanda point toward a constant returns to scale crop production function and a strong negative relationship between farm size and output per hectare as well as intensity of labor use that is robust across specifications the inverse relationship continues to hold if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used but disappears if family labor is rather valued at village level market wage rates these findings imply that in rwanda labor market imperfections rather than other unobserved factors seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm size productivity relationship

testing for country heterogeneity in growth models using a finite mixture approach we define a bivariate mixture model to test whether economic growth can be considered exogenous in the solovian sense for this purpose the multivariate mixture approach proposed by alfo and trovato is applied to the bernanke and gurkaynak extension of the solow model we find that the explanatory power of the solow growth model is enhanced since growth rates are not statistically significantly associated with investment rates when cross country heterogeneity is considered moreover no sign of convergence to a single equilibrium is found copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

relative sources of european regional productivity convergence a bootstrap frontier approach enflo k and hjertstrand p relative sources of european regional productivity convergence a bootstrap frontier approach regional studies this paper addresses the issue of western european regional productivity growth and convergence by means of data envelopment analysis dea decomposing labour productivity into efficiency change technical change and capital accumulation the decomposition shows that most regions have fallen behind the production frontier in efficiency and that capital accumulation has had a diverging effect on the labour productivity distribution using bootstrapping methods the paper also accounts for the inherent bias and the stochastic elements in the efficiency estimation it is found that the relative ranking of the efficiency scores remains stable after the bias correction even after controlling for spatially correlated measurement errors and that the dea successfully identifies the regions on the production frontier as significantly more efficient than other regions enfl

rational inefficiency adjustment costs and sequential technologies abstract in this paper we propose a novel approach to estimate the rational inefficiency of decision making units in the presence of adjustment costs using sequential definitions of the production technology we show how cost inefficiency can be decomposed into rational and residual inefficiency as well as inefficiency caused by technical change furthermore we estimate lower bounds for the unobserved adjustment costs based on unexploited cost reductions due to rational inefficiency these adjustment costs are used to evaluate the feasibility of exploiting cost reductions caused by residual inefficiency we demonstrate the empirical applicability of our model by estimating and decomposing the cost inefficiency of u s coal fired power plants using panel data which cover the period between 1994 and 2009

bertrand edgeworth equilibrium with a large number of firms abstract we examine a model of price competition with strictly convex costs where the firms simultaneously decide on both price and quantity are free to supply less than the quantity demanded and there is discrete pricing if firms are symmetric then for a large class of residual demand functions there is a unique equilibrium in pure strategies whenever for a fixed grid size the number of firms is sufficiently large moreover this equilibrium price is within a grid unit of the competitive price the results go through to a large extent when the firms are asymmetric or they are symmetric but play a two stage game and the tie breaking rule is weakly manipulable

walrasian equilibria as limits of noncooperative equilibria part ii pure strategies abstract we examine the connection between walrasian equilibria of a limit economy with infinitesimal firms and noncooperative cournot equilibria of approximating finite economies with significant firms nonconvex production sets decreasing returns in the aggregate and endogenous determination of the number of active firms are allowed a walrasian equilibrium is a limit of pure strategy noncooperative equilibria only if a condition loosely analogous to downward sloping demand in the partial equilibrium constant returns to scale case holds the condition is also sufficient to guarantee the existence of a robust sequence of pure strategy noncooperative equilibria which converges to the walrasian equilibrium

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

bertrand edgeworth oligopoly in large markets the relation between perfectly competitive and monopolistically competitive equilibria is analysed for a bertrand edgeworth model of a single market in which capacity constrained firms choose prices as strategies the market always has a nash equilibrium in pure or mixed strategies as the number of firms increases the corresponding equilibria converge in distribution to a perfectly competitive price this result provides a justification for perfect competition that is based on an explicit account of price formation however monopoly prices persist with a positive but vanishing probability regularity or well defined inverse demand functions are not required

the contestable outcome as a bertrand equilibrium abstract we consider a bertrand duopoly with increasing returns to scale where firms simultaneously decide on their prices and outputs the unique equilibrium of this game yields the contestable outcome

growth and convergence of the oecd countries a multi sector production frontier approach abstract kumar and russell 2002 henderson and russell 2005 and badunenko henderson and russell 2013 have proposed a production frontier methodology to analyze the economic growth and the convergence of growth rates across countries they see two main advantages to this methodology 1 it reconstructs the world production frontier without relying on any particular typically unverifiable assumptions on any aspects of the growth process and 2 it allows to decompose labor productivity growth into several parts in this paper i extend the previous approach by considering a multi sector setting this setting allows to propose a more realistic and complete country level analysis while keeping the same advantages as with the previous methodology i also tackle the criticism of less reliable data at the sector level than at the country level by showing how the multi sector approach can easily be adapted i apply it to the oecd countries from 1995 to 2008 the results confirm the non neutrality of technological change i also find that capital accumulation plays the biggest role in the increase of output labor productivity while technological change and human capital accumulation also play an important role but it is twice as small as capital accumulation interestingly these results suggest the emergence of two groups eastern and central european countries and the eu15 and korea the two groups seem to diverge over time

agricultural reforms in central and eastern europe and the former soviet union status and perspectives the current status of the agricultural sector in central and eastern europe and the former soviet union is described in the context of reforms undertaken during the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market based one sectoral performance is analyzed focussing especially on general trends in production and emerging trading patterns five critical basic elements of reform are described and a table is presented rating each country in the study on progress in completing each type of reform overall conclusions are presented indicating that in each basic element of reform the cee countries have achieved considerably more success than those of the cis the paper concludes with a discussion of prospects for development in the region

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded