factors explaining local privatization a meta regression analysis this paper aims at explaining the differences in the results of empirical studies of motivations for local privatization by undertaking a meta regression our results suggest that fiscal constraints and interest groups were especially relevant in the early studies of the us which considered several services further studies that focus on one service capture the influence of scale economies more accurately finally our results show that small towns are more affected by fiscal and political factors while ideology plays a major role for european and large cities thus no clear conclusions emerge from this literature because the findings of each study are sensitive to its characteristics

uncertainty risk and the financial crisis of 2008 the distinction between uncertainty and risk originally drawn by frank knight and john maynard keynes in the 1920s remains fundamentally important today in the presence of uncertainty market actors and economic policy makers substitute other methods of decision making for rational calculation specifically actors decisions are rooted in social conventions drawing from innovations in financial markets and deliberations among top american monetary authorities in the years before the 2008 crisis we show how economic actors and policy makers live in worlds of risk and uncertainty in that world social conventions deserve much greater attention than conventional ipe analyses accords them such conventions must be part of our toolkit as we seek to understand the preferences and strategies of economic and political actors

wage norms capital accumulation and unemployment a post keynesian view the paper presents a post keynesian view of unemployment it argues first that the effective labour demand need not be downward sloping with respect to real wages and aggregate demand need not be downward sloping with respect to inflation second that there is a broad case for unemployment hysteresis understood as endogeneity of the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu based on social norms in wage bargaining and on the supply side effects of capital accumulation and third that much as keynes argued capital investment rather than labour market institutions is the key variable to explain changes in aggregate unemployment performance across countries and over time overall the paper advocates a keynesian view of the nairu where effective demand determines unemployment in the short run and the deviation of actual unemployment from the nairu determines the change in inflation in the medium term the nairu is endogenous and follows actual unemployment copyright 2011 oxford university press

a comparison of determinants of urban rural and farm poverty in costa rica abstract the lack of progress on reducing poverty in third world countries and its growth during the 1980s show that one of the fundamental goals of development has not been met addressing the renewed concern with poverty requires knowledge about the factors affecting poverty this paper uses logistic regression analysis to estimate the effects of variables on urban rural farm and nonfarm poverty among households in costa rica results show the complexity of the issue and imply policies to expand education through the secondary level to create more opportunities for rural off farm employ

climate change uncertainty irreversibility and the precautionary principle this paper begins with a critique of the option value argument used by economists to explain and justify the precautionary principle the argument is shown to misrepresent both uncertainty and irreversibility an alternative justification of the precautionary principle is discussed under conditions of keynesian uncertainty and irreversibility interpreted in terms of incommensurability recent formal decision theories under keynesian uncertainty are reviewed and their limitations explored with particular reference to the insights that decision theory can bring to understanding the precautionary principle throughout the decision problems under consideration are those faced by climate change policy makers copyright oxford university press

transmutability generalised darwinism and the limits to conceptual integration this article explores the limits to conceptual integration between evolutionary biology cognitive neuroscience and economics the new learning in the natural sciences supplies material to update and enrich the microfoundations of institutional economics specifically the instinct habit psychology the framing of social reality with evolutionary concepts is however misguided in important respects metaphorical modelling is the transfer of concepts developed for the understanding of one domain to another ontological distinct domain the argument is made that the generalisation of darwinian principles to the phenomena of institutional persistence and change is theorising by metaphor because there are crucial ontological differences separating the natural and social domains social reality has the property of transmutability meaning the social environment unlike the natural domain is changeable by human agency this article endeavours to explain how the generalisation of the natural selection principle evokes a fallacious conception of institutional reality the idea that fitness in the social economic sphere is a matter of purposive adaptation by agents to exogenous conditions is misleading because real success in business or politics is transformative and is achieved by catalysing and maintaining advantageous shifts of widely prevalent habits of thought and behaviour copyright oup

the last word on the wage curve abstract since 1990 there has been extensive international research on the responsiveness of wages of individuals to changing local labour market conditions for many countries an inverse relationship between wages and local unemployment rates has been found in their book the wage curve blanchflower and oswald argued that the unemployment elasticity of pay is around 0 1 in most countries in a 1995 literature survey card referred to this striking empirical regularity as being close to an empirical law of economics nonetheless reported elasticities do vary even excluding outliers between about 0 5 and 0 1 there is also considerable heterogeneity among wage curve studies in terms of data and model specification this paper carries out meta analytic techniques on a sample of 208 elasticities derived from the literature to uncover the reasons for the differences in empirical results across studies several causes of variation are identified there is also clear evidence of downward publication bias in addition many reported t statistics are biased upwards due to the use of aggregate unemployment rates a maximum likelihood method and a trimming procedure are used to correct for these biases both methods give similar results for our sample an unbiased estimate of the wage curve elasticity at the means of study characteristics is about 0 07

analysis of uncertainty as opposed to risk an experimental approach the paper illustrates the scope for enhancing the conceptual apparatus used by agricultural economists to analyse decision making under conditions of uncertainty selected empirical results from experiments on student subjects from three universities are reported three issues are considered first the reasons for choice and the understanding of a choice problem are examined second attitudes towards different levels of uncertainty are measured third the possibility that apparently non normative psychological factors influence choice is explored the paper serves to illustrate and support a number of methodological points the major points are that a risk uncertainty distinction is useful contrary to the aging conventional wisdom of economic theory that laboratory experiments can potentially provide data of use to agricultural economists and that predictive models of choice under uncertainty may be more accurate if they take account of psychological variables which influence the decision making processes of human subjects

slipping into and out of poverty the dynamics of spells this paper examines the dynamics of poverty previous analyses have examined either fluctuations in the male heads earnings or the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame our approach depends on a definition of spells of poverty using this methodology we find that the majority of poor persons at any time are in the midst of a rather long spell of poverty the methodology also allows us to estimate that less than 40 percent of poverty spells begin because of a drop in the heads earnings while 60 percent of the spells end when the heads earnings increase thus researchers must focus on household formation decisions and on the behavior of secondary family members there has been a dramatic resurgence recently of discussion of the underclass the discussion is reminiscent of debates about poverty during the 1960s when the notions of a culture of poverty particularly as popularized by michael harrington s other america 1962 dominated both intellectual and policy thinking the idea of an underclass seems inconsistent however with much of the research on the dynamics of poverty during the 1970s that research using new longitudinal data seemed to show that the bulk of the poor were poor for only a few years the research also showed that the poor were a very heterogeneous group including a small minority of persistently poor the persistence of poverty is of interest both for understanding the phenomenon and for developing policy claims about dependency and separate life styles among the poor rest on assumptions about the long term nature of poverty questions

poverty inequality and welfare this paper argues that in order to produce a coherent account of pov erty that makes it more than just a facet of inequality it is essent ial to capture at the individual level those factors that a k sen p townsend and others have argued to be important in generating po verty it is shown that having done this it is possible to produce me asures of poverty and inequality that are clearly and systematically related to each other and to the overall level of welfare but in whi ch poverty emerges as more than just a facet of a wider and more gene ral concern with inequality copyright 1987 by royal economic society

the aaea ever growing and changing research challenges the changing economic conditions over the past century along with changes in technology and developments in economic theory and quantitative methods helped shape the profession we currently refer to as agricultural and applied economics the broadening of the profession from the original focus on the farm and agricultural industry to encompass international affairs governmental policies resources and environmental and rural affairs is discussed within this context emergence of the subdisciplines and some of the major individual contributions are noted the final section argues that members of the profession are well positioned to continue contributing research that will help society achieve its goals and notes six challenges that provide such opportunities

organic interdependence uncertainty and economic analysis this paper examines the effect of john maynard keynes s organic view of interdependence on his treatment of induction probability and expectations it argues that while organic interdependence is compatible with rational induction and prediction in some circumstances as it must be if there is to be a foundation for economic analysis it is not normally compatible with the existence of a rational foundation for expectation of future yield from capital assets this is not destructive of economic analysis however because keynes assumes most agents respond irrationally and conventionally rather than rationally and capriciously to fundamental uncertainty copyright 1989 by royal economic society

the when the how and the why of mathematical expression in the history of economic analysis when one reads about the history of the use of mathematical expression in economics one gets the impression of a few brave but lonely innovators like daniel bernoulli 1738 achille isnard 1781 n f canard 1801 johann von thunen 1826 and antoine augustin cournot 1838 present at the creation of economic thought and later a feisty band of visionaries associated with the marginalist revolution at the turn of the century who had the right tools in their rucksacks and then finally the full flowering of activity in the postwar period through it all there is the unmistakable conviction that this movement was cumulative inevitable and indeed natural

the theoretical developments initiated by haberler but named for pigou do not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting keynes s key theoretical proposition this paper examines a claim made in the introduction to milton friedman s presidential address to the american economic association and that is now taken for granted in orthodox economics according to friedman the theoretical developments initiated by haberler but named for pigou provide sufficient grounds for rejecting keynes s key theoretical proposition and the economics of keynes in its entirety the problem with this claim is that it turns out given the scrutiny that it clearly deserves to be false the theoretical developments initiated by haberler but named for pigou do not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting keynes s key theoretical proposition and thus the economics of keynes as a whole there is no legitimate rationale for believing in other words even in a world of flexible prices that the system will tend naturally toward a position of equilibrium at full employment

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

estimating earnings poverty in 1939 a comparison of orshansky method and price indexed definitions of poverty official poverty lines do not exist for the united states for years prior to 1959 in this paper a poverty line comparable to the seminal line is constructed for 1939 using the orshansky method poverty rates are then calculated using the earnings data of the 1940 public use microdata sample of the u s census a comparison with similar work by ross et al 1987 demonstrates the degree to which continual price indexing of the poverty line results in inappropriate estimates a trend of increasing incidence of poverty among female headed households prior to 1960 is also revealed

economic theory in the mathematical mode iif a symbolic date were to be chosen for the birth of mathematical economics our profession in rare unanimous agreement would select 1838 the year in which augustin cournot published his recherches sur les principes mathematiques de la thetorie des richesses students of the history of economic analysis could point out contributions made to mathematical economics as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century they could also point out johann heinrich von thunen s der isolierte staat 1826 a prototypical example of the use of mathematical reasoning in economic theory with little mathematical formalism but cournot stands out as the first great builder of mathematical models explaining economic phenomena among his successors in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the highest prominence will be given in this lecture to leon walras 1834 1910 the founder of the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium to francis y edgeworth 1845 1926 and to vilfredo pareto 1848 1923 all three lived long enough into the twentieth century to have increased for all nobel laureates the value of the economics prize had it like the other prizes been initiated in 1901 if 1838 is the symbolic birthdate of mathematical economics 1944 is the symbolic beginning of its contemporary period in that year john von neumann and oskar morgenstern published the first edition of the theory of games and economic behavior an event that announced a profound and extensive transformation of economic theory in the following decade powerful intellectual stimuli also came from many other directions in addition to von neumann and morgenstern s book wassily leontiefs input output analysis paul samuelson s foundations of economic analysis tjalling koopmans activity analysis of production and george dant

energy poverty in china an index based comprehensive evaluation abstract energy poverty has got increasing attention during the latest three decades measuring energy poverty is the premise of policy making to alleviate energy poverty there is no unified energy poverty measurement that has been widely accepted this paper reviews the commonly used energy poverty measurements through classifying them into three categories energy service availability energy service quality and satisfaction of energy demand for human s survival and development this paper also analyzes the suitability of the commonly used energy poverty measurement for china from the prospective of data availability and index applicability furthermore we construct a new energy poverty comprehensive evaluation index in this study and the index is illustrated to evaluate regional energy poverty in china the evaluation results indicate that china s energy poverty showed an alleviating trend from 2000 to 2011 and during this period china s energy service availability improved slightly energy consumption cleanliness showed no significant change energy management completeness decreased with fluctuations and household energy affordability and energy efficiency improved continually in addition china s regions show different characteristics of energy poverty for example middle reaches of yangtze river region showed the worst energy availability and eastern coastal region showed the worst energy management completeness several policy implications for energy poverty alleviation are also proposed in this study including for instance increasing investment on energy infrastructure and spreading energy management organization in rural area decreasing relative cost on household commercial energy consumption and encourage the utilization of modern clean and efficient household energy consumption equipment

financialised internationalisation and structural hierarchies a mixed method study of exchange rate determination in emerging economies this paper conducts an extensive mixed method study of exchange rate determination in the brazilian foreign exchange market it combines semi structured interviews with foreign exchange market participants in brazil and london and advanced time series econometrics in line with post keynesian theory and critical realist ontology the interviews uncover the context specific expectations and underlying processes and structures that condition exchange rate dynamics in brazil and emerging economies more generally the results point to important structural changes in brazil s financial integration in the form of currency internationalisation and financialisation moreover they show that this internationalisation has been mediated through a structured and hierarchic international monetary system which fundamentally distinguishes exchange rate drivers in emerging economies from those in developed ones

beyond publication bias abstract this review considers several meta regression and graphical methods that can differentiate genuine empirical effect from publication bias publication selection exists when editors reviewers or researchers have a preference for statistically significant results because all areas of empirical research are susceptible to publication selection any average or tally of significant insignificant studies is likely to be biased and potentially misleading meta regression analysis can see through the murk of random sampling error and selected misspecification bias to identify the underlying statistical structures that characterize genuine empirical effect meta significance testing and precision effect testing pet are offered as a means to identify empirical effect beyond publication bias and are applied to four areas of empirical economics research minimum wage effects union productivity effects price elasticities and tests of the natural rate hypothesis

ambiguity and uncertainty in ellsberg and shackle this paper argues that the similarities between ellsberg s and shackle s frameworks for discussing the limits of the probabilistic approach to decision theory are more important than usually admitted the paper discusses the grounds on which the ambiguity surrounding the decision maker in ellsberg s urn experiments can be deemed analogous to the uncertainty faced by shackle s entrepreneur taking crucial decisions the two authors insights are assessed and special attention is paid to the criteria for decision under uncertainty they put forward the paper establishes a link between ellsberg s and shackle s perspectives and the non additive probability approach of gilboa and schmeidler an approach that offers an alternative to standard probability calculus which can be of use to analyse both ambiguity and uncertainty the comparison between ellsberg and shackle draws on an interpretation of keynes s treatise on probability emphasising keynes s rejection of both well defined probability functions and maximisation as a guide to human conduct it is shown that keynes s viewpoint implies a reconsideration of the boundaries of probability theory that is in the same vein of ellsberg s and shackle s concern in the years of the consolidation of savage s new probabilistic mainstream copyright the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

g e moore and j m keynes a missing chapter in the history of the expected utility model in his posthumous essay my early beliefs john maynard keynes outlined his mental history in the dozen years before the war and asserted their importance to his later life yet despite keynes s assertion of the importance of this part of his mental history to who he was and what he did in 1938 the year the essay was written and two years after he published the general theory there is virtually no treatment in the history of economic thought of this period of his life or of its impact on his economic theory the purpose of this essay is to treat an episode of that period of his life which has particular analytical importance and to suggest some ways in which it might contribute to a clearer understanding of his later work in economics the episode in keynes s early life which the essay examines is his role in g e moore s changing opinion about the importance of rules in ethics in his classic principia ethica 1903 moore had originally asserted that obeying certain rules is a necessary part of ethically correct behavior but in his ethics 1912 he makes exactly the opposite argument saying that individuals are always justified in judging a case for themselves and are under no obligation to follow general rules of conduct in the parlance of modern philosophy moore switched from a rule utilitarian argument to an act utilitarian argument the first four sections of the essay detail the role which keynes played in moore s change of heart the final section discusses how the episode affects our understanding of keynes s work in economics

meta analysis of economics research reporting guidelines meta regression analysis mra can provide objective and comprehensive summaries of economics research their use has grown rapidly over the last few decades to improve transparency and to raise the quality of mra the meta analysis of economics research network maer net has created the below reporting guidelines future meta analyses in economics will be expected to follow these guidelines or give valid reasons why a meta analysis must deviate from them

is there redemption for conventions this article explores the concept of convention in the social sciences it presents the two major neo humean philosophical approaches to convention and challenges their intuitive appeal and research implications the weaknesses of these approaches are examined and a new direction is suggested for the study of convention the paper goes on to develop a framework for the analysis of conventions using the notion of the exemplar introduced by thomas kuhn an illustration of this alternative approach is provided using the example of the wage relation copyright 2005 oxford university press

theories of choice under ignorance and uncertainty abstract in this paper knight s distinction between risk and uncertainty and its significance for economic analysis are examined the paper consists of a survey of some recent developments on the theory of choice under uncertainty and some applications of these theories to problems for which bayesian decision theory has not proved entirely satisfactory two problems are examined in detail the first is that of finance and insurance and the second is that of risktaking behaviour with special emphasis on lotteries

the uncertain foundations of the welfare state abstract the welfare state is often portrayed as provider of insurance against uncertainties in knight s 1921 sense of the term which would be refused or underinsured on private markets this image conflicts with the standard economic model of risk exchange founded on the subjective interpretation of probability which predicts that all individual uncertainties will be insured by private markets our aim in this paper is to explain why this prediction fails and building on contributions to decision theory that take seriously the idea of knightian uncertainty to show why social insurance may be justified

meta regression analysis a quantitative method of literature surveys abstract pedagogically literature reviews are instrumental they summarize the large literature written on a particular topic give coherence to the complex often disparate views expressed about an issue and serve as a springboard for new ideas however literature surveys rarely establish anything approximating unanimous consensus ironically this is just as true for the empirical economic literature to harmonize this dissonance we offer a quantitative methodology for reviewing the empirical economic literature meta regression analysis mra is the regression analysis of regression analyses mra tends to objectify the review process it studies the processes that produce empirical economic results as though they were any other social scientific phenomenon mra provides a framework for replication and offers a sensitivity analysis for model specification in this brief essay we propose a new method of reviewing economic literature mra and discuss its potential

poverty measurement with contaminated data a robust approach we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function and demonstrate that an important commonly used subclass of poverty measures will be robust under data contamination this is illustrated using simulations in this respect poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties we investigate both the case where the poverty line is exogenously fixed and where it must be estimated from the data

the source of optimality in action it is well known that the nature of the information set and the axioms of rational choice are critical in determining the type of ranking on which agents are held to act in economic theory this paper argues that the concept of the optimising agent is also sensitive to the conception of the relation between a ranking of options facing an agent and concrete action what is termed the realisation process three conceptions of the realisation process are examined which are seen to lead to three quite distinct views on the role of agency the enabling conditions under which the concept of the optimising agent may be legitimately applied and the resulting domain of application of optimisation

keynes s critiques of moore philosophical foundations of keynes s economics this paper analyzes three of john maynard keynes s unpublished apostles papers ethics in relation to conduct miscellanea ethica and egoism and the philosophical discussion in the first chapters of the treatise on probability it argues that keynes s philosophical development before and in the treatise can be understood as an effort to make sense of the concept of intuition specifically it is argued that keynes abandoned a two fold view of intuition in the early papers for a two tier epistimology of acquaintance and knowledge in the treatise only to return to the two fold view later in the general theory copyright 1991 by oxford university press

behind methodological individualism methodological individualism has become a more fashionable slogan for economistsin recent years in specific terms we are being urged to accept a doctrine within whichall explanations of social phenomena have to be couched in terms of statements aboutindividuals however the term has a wide and sometimes ambiguous usage and is beingemployed as a packaging for all kinds of methodological and theoretical prescriptions forexample it has been regarded as a commandment that thou shalt where possible placemacroeconomic statements on firm microeconomic foundations e g blaug 1980 or aninjunction against reckless aggregation particularly in regard to welfare criteria orsocial welfare functions e g kirzner 1980 littlechild 1978 or as an inspiration forrecent theoretical developments in economics with pro market policy conclusions e g furubotn and pejovich 1974 one of the further problems in discussing this topic is that often the term methodo logical individualism carries an ideological charge indeed by both advocates and itsopponents it is too frequently confused with individualism of a political variety however the connection between political and methodological individualism is merely assumed bythese supporters or critics or supported by cursory argument it is never demonstratedwith any rigour although there is a lack of uniformity in the use of the label it is argued here that the keyelement in the classic statements of methodological individualism is a refusal to examinethe institutional or other forces which are involved in the moulding of individual pref erences and purposes we are thus confronted with a remarkable optimism about thepossibility of explanation of social phenomena in terms of individuals but an extremereluctance to give even partial explanations of individual behaviour in social or evenpsychological terms this refusal is both dogmatic and as will be argued below unaccept able on analytical grounds this reduction of explanation and thereby causality solely to individuals has a furtherimplication the explanation of social phenomena proceeds even by a circuitous route

concepts of poverty and the poverty line abstract various approaches adopted in developed economies to distinguishing between the poor and non poor to setting a poverty line are reviewed these include the budget standard food ratio official subjective and relative poverty line methods as well as the analysis of indicators of deprivation there has been significant progress in recent years in the degree of sophistication involved and a movement away from approaches with a quasi absolute background however all the methods face formidable problems at conceptual and empirical levels and no single approach is likely to dominate

the income elasticity of money demand a meta analysis of empirical results abstract in this paper we use meta analytic methods to investigate possible sources for the large variation in empirical findings about the income elasticity of money demand our results suggest that the broadness of the monetary aggregate the inclusion of wealth and the consideration of financial innovation exert a significant influence on estimated income elasticities furthermore we find substantial cross country differences in particular between the us and other countries these differences can to some extent be explained by the macrofeconomic environment and the dissemination of payment cards

welfare approaches to the measurement of poverty a set of poverty indices is constructed which is based on an explicit view of the loss of social welfare which results from the existence of poverty in comparison t o a society in which poverty has been eliminated the indices are based on the entire distribution of income rather than only the incomes of the poor and thus embody the concept of relative deprivation formal properties of the indices are developed together with their relationship to welfare based inequality indices both are seen as subsets of a wider choice of measures dependent on a particular choice of reference distribution copyright 1987 by royal economic society

shared quality uncertainty and the introduction of indeterminate goods the purpose of this paper is to introduce a new category of goods indeterminate goods which will be compared with the classical framework of experience search and credence goods nelson 1970 darby and karni 1973 this concept sheds new light on the nature and status of quality uncertainty through the following hypothesis uncertainty about the product s quality can be shared by all agents of the market and this uncertainty can be non neutral and disrupt the market we identify three types of shared uncertainty about the product s characteristics and the corresponding problems that can arise shared uncertainty due to the emergence of a product hirschman 1974 shared uncertainty concerning the past of a product basing ourselves on the art market and finally shared uncertainty regarding the future impacts of a product through empirical data on product safety

econometric models of asymmetric price transmission abstract in this paper we review the existing empirical literature on price asymmetries in commodities providing a way to classify and compare different studies that are highly heterogeneous in terms of econometric models type of asymmetries and empirical findings relative to the previous literature this paper is novel in several respects first it presents a detailed and updated survey of the existing empirical contributions on price asymmetries in the transmission mechanism linking input prices to output prices second this paper presents an extension of the traditional distinction between long run and short run asymmetries to new categories of asymmetries such as contemporaneous impact distributed lag effect cumulated impact reaction time equilibrium and momentum equilibrium adjustment path regime effect regime equilibrium adjustment path each empirical study is then critically discussed in the light of this new classification of asymmetries third this paper evaluates the relative merits of the most popular econometric models for price asymmetries namely autoregressive distributed lags partial adjustments error correction models regime switching and vector autoregressive models finally we use the meta regression analysis to investigate whether the results of asymmetry tests are not model invariant and find which additional factors systematically influence the rejection of the null hypothesis of symmetric price adjustment the main results of our survey can be summarized as follows i each econometric model is specialized to capture a subset of asymmetries ii each asymmetry is better investigated by a subset of econometric models iii the general significance of the f test for asymmetric price transmission depends mainly on characteristics of the data dynamic specification of the econometric model and market characteristics overall our empirical findings confirm that asymmetry in all its forms is very likely to occur in a wide range of markets and econometric models

publication bias in the economic freedom and economic growth literature abstract the impact of institutions on economic performance has attracted significant attention from researchers as well as from policy reformers a rapidly growing area in this literature is the impact of economic freedom on economic growth the aim of this paper was to explore publication bias in this literature by means of traditional funnel plots meta significance testing as well as by bootstrapping these meta significance tests when all the available estimates are combined and averaged there seems to be evidence of a genuine and positive economic freedom economic growth effect however it is also shown that the economic freedom economic growth literature is tainted strongly with publication bias the existence of publication bias makes it difficult to identify the magnitude of the genuine effect of economic freedom on economic growth the paper explores the differences between aggregate and disaggregate measures of economic freedom and shows that selection effects are stronger when aggregate measures are used

das maynard keynes problem one of the classic questions in the history of ideas first arose one hundred years ago in germany reading adam smith s two great works the theory of moral sentiments and the wealth of nations late 19th century german economists were struck by an apparent puzzle how could the theorist who made sympathy the mainspring of human action in the first book argue in the second that calculating self interest was the primary motive force thus arose das adam smith problem how could one reconcile the advocate of sympathy with the advocate of self interest the history of the attempts to answer this question is instructive in many ways it is instructive in part as a lesson in the fertility of the history of economic thought as a source of ideas a o hirschman is an outstanding example of an original and creative theorist who has come to fresh insights on the basis of his research on the question see hirschman 1977 1986 the history is also instructive in pointing out the indeterminate nature of the solution to the problem despite the stature of the scholars who have worked in the field and the high quality of their work one must ultimately accept that we shall never know the true answer to the question smith left few papers and the context of his thought is itself a puzzle for us careful reconstruction of the unfolding social cultural and philosophical worlds that smith inhabited would certainly be hallmarks of any acceptable answer to the question but authorities on each of these background areas themselves disagree about what was happening in the worlds in which smith lived reasonable persons must agree to disagree about the answer to the question

revenue sharing in movie exhibition and the arrival of sound i introduction at least since adam smith economists have been intrigued by share contracts there has been a proliferation of models most of which tend to explain the share contract as resulting from some mix of optimal risk bearing and optimal effort motivation 1 a large number of researchers have attempted to test these models empirically sharecropping contracts not surprisingly are the most intensively examined the bibliography in knoeber 2000 but similar studies have been conducted in many other areas for example martin 1988 and lafontaine 1992 examine franchise arrangements hallagan 1978 investigates contracts used to lease gold claims leffler and rucker 1991 analyze a sample of private timber sale contracts goldberg and erickson 1987 study long term contracts for the sale of petroleum coke aggarwal and samwick 1999 investigate incentive contracts between firms and their executives and chisholm 1997 goldberg 1997 and weinstein 1998 all examine profit sharing contracts between fi lm companies and the talent this article differs in an important respect from most previous studies which analyze a cross section of contracts in an attempt to determine how or whether they vary according to the attributes of the contracting parties or the products being contracted for instead it investigates an area where a sudden technology shock led to the rapid and widespread replacement of one form of contracting by another the industry is the motion picture business and the shock was the arrival of sound during the silent film era the vast majority of first run feature films were rented to cinemas for flat daily or weekly payments within two years of the release of the first sound picture revenue sharing contracts were the norm and they remain the norm to this day 2 my goal is to investigate the degree to which the standard economic concerns moral hazard risk sharing and measurement problems can explain this change because the contracting parties remained the same the question becomes what was altered in the nature of the product or in its provision so as to have altered correspondingly the incentives faced i conclude the following first the advent of sound fundamentally changed the inputs live music and other acts supplied by the exhibitor and central to the show were replaced by a soundtrack and short sound films supplied by the film company the benefit of deterring exhibitor shirking through the use of flat rental fees which made the exhibitor full residual claimant declined accordingly the party whose effort makes the largest contribution to marginal product generally receives the largest proportion of the residual claims and in the decades following the arrival of sound the proportion of residual claims collected by film companies rose steadily in addition average revenue per film increased with sound whereas the cost of ensuring that exhibitors reported attendance revenue honestly done by locating a film company s representative in the theater remained the same the ex post division of revenue necessary for revenue sharing thus became cheaper on a per film basis finally uncertainty ab out the value in terms of expected attendance revenue of the early sound films appears to have raised the cost of negotiating lump sum rental fees and thus promoted experiments with revenue sharing however although this may have contributed initially it cannot explain the practice s persistence uncertainty about film values declined as talking films became better known ii the nature of the problem a film company contracts with an exhibitor so that they may jointly produce the final good a movie presentation 3 to that end each supplies essential inputs the film company provides the movie itself assembled from a variety of inputs and some sort of national advertising support the exhibitor provides the theater which consists of seating projection equipment a refreshment stand and other support activities and some form of local advertising

deficient foresight a troublesome theme in keynesian economics the fact that john maynard keynes had made a distinguished contribution to the theory of probability 1921 no doubt predisposed many of his readers to imbue with great significance his subsequent remarks on the related topic of uncertainty in economic decision making among those who have provided commentaries on his work there are those who have singled out this uncertainty theme not only for its special importance but also for its potential for analytical subversion the purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the ideas involved in this particular aspect of keynes work together with the lines of argument that have emerged from those commentators who have pursued it the result of this scrutiny will be to call into question the idea that there is anything peculiarly subversive in the analytical consequences of broaching problems of uncertainty in economic decision making i shall argue rather that as an analytical issue it is depending on how it is handled either innocuous or else quite indiscriminately destructive

a meta analytic assessment of the effect of immigration on wages in our increasingly interconnected and open world international migration is becoming an important socio economic phenomenon for many countries since the early 1980s many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets borjas 2003 noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to study and sometimes even within the same study in addition these effects cluster around zero such a small effect is a rather surprising outcome given that in a closed competitive labour market an increase in labour supply may be expected to exert a downward pressure on wages we revisit this issue by applying meta analytic techniques to a set of eighteen papers which altogether generated 348 estimates of the percentage change in the wage of a native worker with respect to a one percentage point increase in the ratio of immigrants over native workers while many studies in our database employ us data estimates are also obtained from germany the netherlands france norway austria israel and australia our analysis shows that results vary across countries and are inter alia related to the type of modelling approach technical issues such as publication bias and quality of the estimates are addressed as well

a technical definition of uncertainty and the long run non neutrality of money ever since knight s 1921 seminal work some economists have drawn a distinction between uncertainty and risk in order to demonstrate that this difference has important implications for understanding the operations of an entrepreneurial economy lawson 1985 is the latest to discuss the need for the analysis of societal interaction 1 in an economic world where uncertainty as opposed to mathematical risk is a pervasive fact of life p 909 lawson correctly associates the concept of uncertainty with the situation where there is no basis whatever upon which to form any calculable probability uncertainty in this account arises when the probability relation is numerically indeterminate and non comparable to other probability relations 1985 p 914

the relative absolute nature of knowledge and economic analysis central to economic analysis are assumptions and hypotheses concerning the extent and nature of the knowledge held by individuals in this respect it is a noticeable feature of realist accounts that they tend to focus upon the pervasiveness of uncertainty as an undeniable fact of economic life nonrealist or instrumentalist accounts in contrast tend to assume that agents have perfect information correct foresight rational expectations and so on it is also apparent that this realist focus upon uncertainty tends to give rise to a concentration of attention upon those situations in which possibly numerically measurable probabilistic knowledge is thought to be available clearly such accounts are important nevertheless i wish to suggest that such a restricted choice of focus for the realist is not entirely satisfactory since in particular it tends to lead to a neglect of the widespread observation that feelings of certainty and claims to truth are also pervasive in human society i want to suggest moreover that if we are to account for the latter observation and economists concerned with realism of analysis surely need to then various arguments and conclusions have to be taken on board which in turn appear to bear consequentially upon the nature and conduct of economic analysis in general section i below discusses such possible limitations of existing realist accounts of agent knowledge in some detail the suggested route for responding to and resolving apparent problems which involves the argument that aspects of knowledge can have a relative as well as an absolute character is described in sections ii and iii and the various analytical consequences of the account there set out are discussed in section iv section v contains concluding comments and touches upon ways in which the proposed account might be appraised and rnade operational

beyond rational expectations a constructive interpretation of keynes s analysis of behaviour under uncertainty this paper suggests that behavior under uncertainty depends not only on rational expectations but also the agent s evaluation of the adequacy of the available evidence on which the expectations are based it is argued that behavioral functions need to be augmented by a credence variable this proposition is derived from keynes s argument in the general theory that investment depends on both the most probable forecast and the state of confidence reflecting the distinction between probability and weight in his a treatise on probability the research implications of the proposed model are indicated copyright 1994 by royal economic society

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

some remarks on uncertainty and economic analysis in an important paper lawson i 985 a discusses the conditions under which it is possible to carry out a coherent economic analysis of a system which is subject to fundamental uncertainty as opposed to mathematical risk the issue is crucial for although the fact of uncertainty can hardly be denied it seems to have been extraordinarily difficult to take this into account in formal economic theory it remains in coddington s i982 phrase a troublesome theme since the subject of uncertainty was broached by keynes and by knight in the interwar period the response by economists has fallen into two main categories those whose major interest has been pushing on with the technical analysis have simply ignored it apparently on operational grounds for example a remarkably frank modern statement of the position is to be found in lucas i98i as quoted by lawson i985a p gog on the other hand those economists who have wished to emphasise uncertainty notably shackle and the post keynesians have been rightly or wrongly accused of analytical nihilism coddington i983 p 6i and have certainly not yet provided an alternative theoretical framework which would be persuasive to the majority of the profession against this background lawson seeks to establish the view as he puts it i 985 a p 9 i o that economic analysis can be constructive whilst admitting that we know less about the future than is typically assumed lawson begins his discussion with a re examination of j m keynes early work on probability theory in the treatise on probability i973 b and on the perceived links 1 985 a p 914 between the treatise and keynes later treatment of uncertainty in the context of economics i973a pp 147 64 1973 d pp 109 23 1 given keynes seminal contributions to the literature we would agree that this focus is appropriate but we wish to argue in the present note that the discussion can be usefully extended by consideration of certain issues raised by keynes which are not emphasised in lawson s treatment particularly important in this context is the position which keynes reached on the basic difference in subject matter between the natural sciences and the so called moral sciences and hence on the appropriateness of what he had described in the treatise i973b pp 276 8 as the atomic and organic assumptions as applied to each this is an issue which has attracted the

keynes on atomism and organicism this paper examines john maynard keynes s early unpublished paper miscellanea ethica and concludes that keynes developed an atomist view of economic agents based on the assumption that the individual mind is an organic unity the paper argues this view was part of keynes s subjectivist critique of the realist tenets of g e moore s principia ethica and that keynes retained this view of the agent in the treatise on probability the biography of f y edgeworth the critique of j tinbergen and the general theory the paper concludes that the recent literature arguing that keynes adopted an organicist view of agents in the economy lacks foundation copyright 1989 by royal economic society

defining poverty lines as a fraction of central tendency we show under lognormality that when the gini coefficient is stable over time defining the poverty line as a fraction of a central tendency of the living standard distribution restricts the evolution of the poverty measures to be stable that is poverty does not change if the gini coefficient does not change moreover when the gini coefficient slightly changes most of the poverty change can be considered a change in inequality then the consequences of using different poverty lines are analysed thus important features in studies of poverty change based on these lines may result from methodological choices rather than from economic mechanisms