the choice between market failures and corruption because government intervention transfers resources from one party to another it creates room for corruption as corruption often undermines the purpose of the intervention governments will try to prevent it they may create rents for bureaucrats induce a misallocation of resources and increase the size of the bureaucracy since preventing all corruption is excessively costly second best intervention may involve a certain fraction of bureaucrats accepting bribes when corruption is harder to prevent there may be both more bureaucrats and higher public sector wages also the optimal degree of government intervention may be nonmonotonic in the level of income

a generalization of the endogenous grid method abstract this paper extends carroll s 2005 the method of endogenous gridpoints for solving dynamic stochastic optimization problems national bureau of economic research technical working paper 309 endogenous grid method to perform value function iteration in models with more than one control variable we propose to mix the endogenous grid method with standard value function iteration to achieve higher efficiency we illustrate the method using the stochastic neoclassical growth model with and without labor leisure choice we report important gains in efficiency that make value function iteration an attractive computational method in terms of both computing time and accuracy

elasticity of demand and behaviour based price discrimination behaviour based price discrimination bbpd is typically analysed in a framework characterised by perfectly inelastic demand this paper provides a first assessment of the role of demand elasticity on the profit consumer and welfare effects of bbpd we show that the demand expansion effect that is obviously overlooked by the standard framework with unit demand plays a relevant role in comparison to uniform pricing we show that firms are worse off under bbpd however as demand elasticity increases the negative impact of bbpd on profits gets smaller despite a possible slight increase in the average prices charged over the two periods in comparison to uniform pricing we show that bbpd boosts consumer surplus and that this benefit is independent of elasticity in contrast to the welfare results derived under the unit demand assumption where bbpd is always bad for welfare the paper shows that bbpd can be welfare enhancing if demand elasticity is sufficiently high

corruption a review as is increasingly recognised in academic literature and by international organisations corruption acts as a major deterrent to growth and development the aim of this survey is to organise and summarise existing theoretical and empirical work on corruption with a view to identifying opportunities for further research the paper begins with a brief overview of key definitions of corruption and then turns to a review of the factors that favour or deter the growth of corruption together with a brief look at related models this is followed by an examination of the consequences of corruption for society and the consideration of measures that might help to reduce corruption the paper ends with suggestions for future research and includes summaries of data sources and key variables for use in this research

pricing risk in economies with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets habit formation has been proposed as a possible solution to the equity premium puzzle this paper extends the class of models that support the habits explanation in order to account for heterogeneity in earnings wealth habits and consumption i find that habit formation does indeed increase the equity premium however contrary to earlier results the habit hypothesis does not imply a price for risk as largeas the one measured in the data there are three reasons for this first households in a habits economy modify their consumption savings decision second they modify their portfolio choice these two changes in behavior diminish the consumption fluctuations faced by households third the composition of the set of agents pricing risk in the economy changes so that relatively better self insured households end up pricing risk jel d52 g12 e21 c68

why don t poor countries catch up a cross national test of an institutional explanation early neoclassical analyses predicted that poor countries would grow faster than wealthy countries because of technological advances and diminishing returns to capital in the latter the reverse has occurred poor countries are falling back rather than catching up we suggest here that deficient institutions underlie this divergence employing various indicators of institutional quality including the rule of law the pervasiveness of corruption and the risk of expropriation and contract repudiation we show that the ability of poor countries to catch up is determined in large part by the institutional environment in which economic activity in these countries takes place jel o00 o10

endogenous corruption in a neoclassical growth model abstract the following paper presents a simple neoclassical growth model where corruption is an endogenous result of competition between a public agent and a private agent the model provides a simple theoretical framework in which the level of corruption as well as the effects of corruption on income consumption and growth are identifiable bureaucratic red tape is then added to the model the results suggest that a priori corruption is neither efficiency enhancing nor efficiency detracting with respect to growth but always results in some income redistribution

corruption inflation and growth abstract we present a model in which the embezzlement of tax revenues by public officials leads the government to rely more on seigniorage to finance its expenditures this raises inflation which depresses investment and growth via a cash in advance constraint

a theory of collective reputations with applications to the persistence of corruption and to firm quality the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by his past behaviour and because his track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper thus studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality 1 collective reputations collective reputations play an important role in economics and the social sciences countries ethnic racial or religious groups are known to be hard working honest corrupt hospitable or belligerent some firms enjoy substantial rents from their reputations for producing high quality products some departments are reported to treat their faculty or students fairly the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by her past behaviour and because her track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations in a model in which current generations are progressively replaced by new ones and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature see section 2 for a detailed comparison with the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality let us spell out the building blocks of our theory in more detail a a group s reputation is only as good as that of its members each member is characterized by individual traits such as talent diligence or honesty past individual behaviour conveys information about these traits and generates individual reputations

an equilibrium queuing model of bribery it is sometimes argued that bribery is inefficient because bureaucrats may cause delays for attracting more bribes this hypothesis is examined in the context of a queue where customers having different values of time are ranked by their bribe payments to the queue s server the nash equilibrium strategies of the customers are derived it is shown that the server is unlikely to slow down the allocation process when bribery is allowed the model does not have stringent informational requirements and the equilibrium outcome minimizes the average value of time costs of the queue it also suggests a useful auctioning procedure

domestic uk retrofit challenge barriers incentives and current performance leading into the green deal copyright 2012 elsevier the official published version can be accessed from the link below

dynamic targeted pricing with strategic consumers abstract we investigate in this paper whether dynamic targeted pricing based on consumer purchase history could benefit a practicing firm even when consumers are strategic in that they actively seek to avail themselves of a low price in the future such strategic behavior on the part of consumers has been shown in the literature to render such dynamic targeted pricing unprofitable even for a monopoly firm we show that dynamic targeted pricing can benefit competing firms when they actively pursue customer recognition based on consumer purchase history this is because in order to pursue customer recognition competing firms need to price high to screen out price sensitive consumers and hence price competition is moderated as a result all competing firms can become better off with targeted pricing than without even when consumers behave strategically interestingly because of this competition moderation effect the paradoxical outcome occurs where dynamic targeted pricing may not benefit a monopolist but it may benefit competing firms we also show that dynamic targeted pricing can expand the market such that social welfare unambiguously improves

corruption fertility and human capital abstract we build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity child quality trade off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital by integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth corruption and fertility choices we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption

the incidence and persistence of corruption in economic development abstract economic development and bureaucratic corruption are determined jointly in a dynamic general equilibrium model of growth bribery and tax evasion corruption arises from the incentives of public and private agents to conspire in the concealment of information from the government these incentives depend on aggregate economic activity which in turn depends on the incidence of corruption the model produces multiple development regimes transition between which may or may not occur in accordance with recent empirical evidence the relationship between corruption and development is predicted to be negative

trade as a threshold variable for multiple regimes abstract this paper employs the data sorting method developed by hansen econometrica 68 2000 575 which allows the data to endogenously select regimes using different variables it is shown that openness as measured by the trade share to gdp is a threshold variable that can cluster middle income countries into two distinct regimes that obey different statistical models our result suggests that openness may not be as crucial in the growth process of low and high income countries but it is instrumental in identifying middle income countries into high and low growth groups

wealth culture and corruption this paper examines the impact of national wealth income distribution government size and four cultural variables on the perceived level of corruption in a country the study finds that corruption is significantly correlated to gnp per capita power distance masculinity and uncertainty avoidance significant interaction effects occur in collectivistic and high power distance countries suggestions for future research are developed

strategic loyalty reward in dynamic price discrimination in a dynamic model with overlapping generations of consumers we study duopolistic competition when firms can price discriminate at each period between their previous customers and the consumers that they have never served long term contracts are not enforceable in markov perfect equilibrium one firm charges higher prices to its past customers than to its new customers as past customers have revealed their strong preferences for the firm the other firm however rewards its previous customers by charging lower prices to them than to its new customers this loyalty reward strategy comes from the interplay between the firms usual incentive to extract surplus from consumers with revealed strong preferences and their incentives to acquire information and to recognize their young loyal customers the result also relies on the firms inability a priori to tell different generations apart it is the outcome of the unique equilibrium of a simplified two period or t period version of the game and holds with forward looking consumers who are impatient enough

bureaucratic structure and bureaucratic performance in less developed countries abstract we argue that several easily identifiable structural features constitute the key ingredients of effective state bureaucracies and should help to predict ratings of bureaucratic performance competitive salaries internal promotion and career stability and meritocratic recruitment we collect a new dataset on these features for bureaucracies of 35 less developed countries controlling for country income level of education and ethnolinguistic diversity we find that our measure of meritocratic recruitment is a statistically significant determinant of ratings supplied by two of three country risk agencies the importance of competitive salaries and internal promotion and career stability could not be clearly established

environmental performance corruption and economic growth global evidence using a new data set abstractthis study investigates the relationship between environmental performance corruption and economic growth using panel data of 87 countries covering the period from 2002 to 2012 the environmental performance index is used for the first time to evaluate the environmental quality on economic growth by employing both static and dynamic panel models we find that environmental performance is positively related to economic growth and is more significant in non organization for economic cooperation development oecd countries moreover when corruption is incorporated the empirical estimation results indicate that although lower corruption helps economic growth in non oecd countries the negative coefficients of the three interactive terms show that the positive effect of environment performance on economic growth will drop while greater environmental performance combined with natural resource abundance inevitably leads to inefficient bureaucracies and hence disadvantageous economic growth as

customer information sharing among rival firms abstract the recent rapid growth of the internet as a medium of communication and commerce combined with the development of sophisticated software tools are to a large extent responsible for producing a new kind of information databases with detailed records about consumers preferences these databases have become part of a firm s assets and as such they can be sold to third parties this possibility has raised numerous concerns from consumer privacy advocates and regulators who have entered into a heated debate with business groups and industry associations about whether the practice of customer information sharing should be banned regulated or left unchecked this paper investigates the incentives of rival firms to share their customer specific information and evaluates the welfare implications if such exchanges are banned in the context of a perfect price discrimination model

corruption and development a review of issues in this paper we start with a discussion of some of the different denotations of the problem of corruption we then consider the ways in which the damaging consequences of corruption operate in a developing economy while not ignoring its possible redeeming features in some cases we pursue the question of why corruption is perceptibly so different in different societies and also persistent finally we examine the feasible policy issues that arise in this context

leading bureaucracies to the tipping point an alternative model of multiple stable equilibrium levels of corruption we present a novel model of corruption dynamics in the form of a nonlinear optimal dynamic control problem it has a tipping point but one whose origins and character are distinct from that in the classic schelling 1978 model the decision maker choosing a level of corruption is the chief or some other kind of authority figure who presides over a bureaucracy whose state of corruption is influenced by the authority figure s actions and whose state in turn influences the pay off for the authority figure the policy interpretation is somewhat more optimistic than in other tipping models and there are some surprising implications notably that reforming the bureaucracy may be of limited value if the bureaucracy takes its cues from a corrupt leader

dynamic pricing when to entice brand switching and when to reward consumer loyalty this article develops a theory of dynamic pricing in which firms may offer separate prices to different consumers based on their past purchases brand preferences over two periods are described by a copula admitting various degrees of positive dependence when commitment to future prices is infeasible each firm offers lower prices to its rival s customers when firms can commit to future prices consumer loyalty is rewarded if preference dependence is low but enticing brand switching occurs if preference dependence is high our theory provides a unified treatment of the two pricing policies and sheds light on observed practices across industries

corruption as a gamble abstract in the following model of corruption a simple game is set up whose players are a government official granting a permit conditional on a test and a candidate requesting the permit the game is solved under different assumptions as to the information sets of the players perfect information asymmetric information and imperfect information on both sides in the latter case after characterizing the solution and presenting some important comparative statics results the paper moves on to show the emergence of multiple equilibria in corruption illustrating the interaction of corruption at different hierarchical levels of an administration

history based price discrimination and entry in markets with switching costs a welfare analysis abstract we analyze history based price discrimination in an asymmetric industry where an incumbent protected by switching costs faces an entrant who does not have access to information about consumers purchase histories we demonstrate that consumer surplus is higher with uniform pricing than with history based price discrimination we find that the entry decision is invariant to whether the incumbent implements history based pricing or uniform pricing this implies that the potential abuse of market dominance imposed by history based price discrimination is exploitation not exclusion finally we establish that the profit gain to the incumbent from history based pricing exceeds the associated loss to consumers

third degree price discrimination in oligopoly all out competition and strategic commitment price discrimination by imperfectly competitive firms may intensify competition leading to lower prices for all consumers the tradeoff of consumer groups welfare that is characteristic of monopolistic discrimination need not arise this escalation of competition may make firms worse off and as a result firms may wish to avoid the discriminatory outcome under conditions similar to those in which unambiguous price and welfare effects may arise unilateral commitments not to price discriminate including the adoption of everyday low pricing or no haggle policies may raise firm profits by softening price competition

customer poaching and advertising this paper is a first look at the dynamic effects of customer poaching in homogeneous product markets where firms need to invest in advertising to generate awareness when a firm is able to recognize customers with different purchasing histories it may send them targeted advertisements with different prices it is shown that only the firm which advertises the highest price in the first period will engage in price discrimination a practice that clearly benefits the discriminating firm this poaching gives rise to the race for discrimination effect through which price discrimination may act actually to soften price competition rather than intensify it as a result all firms may become better off even when only one of them can engage in price discrimination this paper offers a first attempt to evaluate the effects of price discrimination on the efficiency properties of advertising in markets with low or no advertising costs allowing firms to price discriminate leads them to provide too little advertising which is not good for consumers and overall welfare only in markets with high advertising costs might firms overadvertise regarding the welfare effects price discrimination is generally bad for welfare and consumer surplus though good for firms

competitive promotional strategies this article analyzes the equilibrium pricing strategies of brands engaged in a pricing game each brand has a monopoly market loyal consumers and competes with others in a common market called brand switchers in the case of a duopoly it is shown that the behavior of the brand switchers characterizes the equilibrium behavior of the duopolists this article focuses on two key comparative statics namely the depth of discounts away from a regular high price and the probability of giving a deal or the frequency of deals how these properties vary with the size of the loyal markets and the behavior of the brand switching population is discussed copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

government expenditure corruption and total factor productivity abstract this paper classifies government expenditures into three types and constructs a theoretical framework to explore the influences of government expenditures and corruption on total factor productivity it then establishes a dynamic spatial autoregressive model and a panel threshold model to test the theoretical hypotheses based on provincial panel data from 2007 to 2014 the results illustrate that u shape curve relationships exist between government expenditures of administrative service investment development safeguard governance and total factor productivity and that the relationship between the government expenditure structure and total factor productivity follows an inverted u shape curve in addition the findings suggest that increased corruption levels can directly reduce regional total factor productivity and that the effects of the proportions of administrative service expenditures investment development expenditures and safeguard governance expenditures on total factor productivity have a single corruption threshold increasing the proportions of government expenditures could improve the total factor productivity up until the threshold value

price discrimination with private and imperfect information in this paper i investigate the competitive and welfare effects of the improvements in information accuracy in markets where firms can price discriminate after observing a private and noisy signal about a consumer s brand preference i show that when firms believe that consumers have a brand preference for them then they charge more to these consumers and this price has an inverse u shaped relationship with the signal s accuracy in contrast the price charged after a disloyal signal has been observed falls as the signal s accuracy rises while industry profit and overall welfare fall monotonically when price discrimination is based on increasingly more accurate information the reverse happens to consumer surplus

the solow model with ces technology nonlinearities and parameter heterogeneity this paper examines whether nonlinearities in the aggregate production function can explain parameter heterogeneity in the solow growth regressions nonlinearities in the production technology are introduced by replacing the commonly used cobb douglas cd aggregated production specification with the more general constant elasticity of substitution ces specification we first justify our choice of production function by showing that cross country regressions favour the ces over the cd technology then by using an endogenous threshold methodology we show that the solow model with ces technology is consistent with the existence of multiple regimes copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

a theory of misgovernance this paper tries to explain why government bureaucracies are often associated with red tape corruption and lack of incentives the paper identifies two specific ingredients that together can provide an explanation the fact that governments often act precisely in situations where markets fail and the presence of agency problems within the government we show that these problems are exacerbated at low levels of development and in bureaucracies dealing with poor people we also argue that we need to posit the existence of a welfare oriented constituency within the government in order to explain red tape and corruption

individual marketing with imperfect targetability our research investigates the competitive ramifications of individual marketing and information management in today s information intensive marketing environments the specific managerial issues we address are as follows first what kinds of incentive environments do competing firms face when they can only target individual customers imperfectly second does the improvement in an industry s targetability intensify price competition in the industry such that all competing firms become worse off third should a firm share its customer knowledge so as to improve its rival s targetability fourth how should an information vendor sell its information that can improve a firm s targetability finally do competing firms have the same incentives to invest in their own targetability to answer those questions we develop a simple model a la narasimhan 1988 in which each of the two competing firms have their own loyal customers and compete for common switchers we assume that each firm can classify its own loyal customers and switchers correctly only with a less than perfect probability this means that each firm s perceived customer segmentation differs from the actual customer segmentation based on their perceived reality these two competing firms engage in price competition as an extension we also allow the competing firms to make their investment decisions to acquire targetability we show that when individual marketing is feasible but imperfect improvements in targetability by either or both competing firms can lead to win win competition for both even if both players behave noncooperatively and the market does not expand win win competition results from the fact that as a firm becomes better at distinguishing its price insensitive loyal customers from the switchers it is motivated to charge a higher price to the former however due to imperfect targetability each firm mistakenly perceives some price sensitive switchers as price insensitive loyal customers and charges them all a higher price these misperceptions thus allow its competitors to acquire those mistargeted customers without lowering their prices and hence reduce the rival firm s incentive to cut prices this effect softens price competition in the market and qualitatively changes the incentive environment for competing firms engaged in individual marketing a prisoner s dilemma occurs only when targetability in a market reaches a sufficiently high level this win win perspective on individual marketing has many managerial implications first we show that superior knowledge of individual customers can be a competitive advantage however this does not mean that a firm should always protect its customer information from its competitors to the contrary we find that competing firms can all benefit from exchanging individual customer information with each other at the nascent stage of individual marketing when firms targetability is low indeed under certain circumstances a firm may even find it profitable to give away this information unilaterally however as individual marketing matures as firms targetability becomes sufficiently high further improvements in targetability will intensify price competition and lead to prisoner s dilemma therefore it is not only prudent politics but also a business imperative for an industry to seize the initiative on the issue of protecting customer privacy so as to ensure win win competition in the industry second we show that the firm with a larger number of loyal customers tends to invest more in targetability when the cost of acquiring targetability is high however the firm with a smaller loyal base can through information investment acquire a higher level of targetability than the firm with a larger loyal base as long as the cost of acquiring targetability is not too high as the cost further decreases competing firms will all have more incentives to increase their investments in targetability until they achieve the highest feasible level third an information vendor should make its information available nonexclusively exclusively when its information is associated with a low high level of targetability when the vendor does sell its information exclusively it should target a firm with a small loyal following if it can impart a high level of targetability to that firm finally our analysis shows that an information intensive environment does not doom small firms in fact individual marketing may provide a good opportunity for a small firm to leapfrog a large firm the key to leapfrogging is a high level of targetability or customer knowledge

how corruption may corrupt abstract the incidence of corruption appears to vary strongly across societies even for comparable activities the model highlights how the profitability of bureaucratic corruption may be related to its frequency and points toward a few mechanisms that can be used in explaining the stylized facts of varying incidence of corruption there might be multiple self fulfilling equilibria levels of corruption even when both supply and demand of corrupt acts are considered

decentralization and corruption evidence across countries the relationship between decentralization of government activities and the extent of rent extraction by private parties is an important element in the recent debate on institutional design the theoretical literature makes ambiguous predictions about this relationship and it has remained virtually unexamined by empiricists the authors make a first attempt at examining the issue empirically by looking at the cross country relationship between fiscal decentralization and corruption as measured by a number of different indices their estimates suggest that fiscal decentralization in government spending is significantly associated with lower corruption moreover they find that the origin of a country s legal system for example civil versus common legal code performs extremely well as an instrument for decentralization the estimated relationship between decentralization when so instrumented and corruption is even stronger the evidence suggests a number of interesting areas for future work including investigating whether there are specific services for which decentralized provision has a particularly strong impact on political rent extraction and understanding the channels through which decentralization succeeds in keeping corruption in check

do we see convergence in institutional quality a cross country analysis abstractdifferences in the quality of institutions may explain differences in per capita income yet we know relatively little on how institutions evolve this paper contributes to such knowledge by testing for convergence in legal bureaucratic and administrative institutional quality using cross section and panel methods on a large sample of countries from the 1970s to 2010 we find that countries with initially poor institutions tended to slowly catch up both when they shared the same initial conditions and when they did not however the convergence process seems to be a temporary effect following the end of the cold war

the market for public office why the indian state is not better at development abstract how and why officials are transferred from one post to another can in india does have far reaching consequences for the effectiveness of public service organizations such as irrigation agriculture forestry and soil conservation departments the transfer mechanism used in many departments of indian states involves a kind of internal labor market a truer market than in the way that term is often used by labor market economists it allows pressures for corrupt behavior to bear down on the incumbents of certain posts and itself amplifies those pressures frequently the pressures on officials to be corrupt cause them to behave in ways contrary to the ostensible objectives of their departments why is the indian state not better at promoting development to an important degree because of the corruption transfer mechanism and its effects on bureaucratic initiatives

distribution and development in a model of misgovernance abstract this paper presents an analysis of bureaucratic corruption income inequality and economic development the analysis is based on a dynamic general equilibrium model in which bureaucrats are appointed by the government to implement a redistributive programme of taxes and subsidies designed to benefit the poor corruption is reflected in bribery and tax evasion as bureaucrats conspire with the rich in providing false information to the government in accordance with empirical evidence the model predicts a positive relationship between corruption and inequality and a negative relationship between corruption and development

property rights corruption and the allocation of talent a general equilibrium approach we consider an economy where contracts are necessary to encourage investments contract enforcement requires that a fraction of the agents work in the public sector and do not accept bribes we find that 1 it may be optimal to allow some corruption and not enforce property rights fully 2 less developed economies may choose lower levels of property right enforcement and more corruption 3 there may exist a free lunch such that over a certain range it is possible simultaneously to reduce corruption increase investment and achieve a better allocation of talent bureaucratic corruption is widespread in many societies casual empiricism and case studies suggest that corruption distorts the allocation of resources and discourages investment and the creation of new firms e g mydral 1968 desoto 1989 cross country studies also find that countries with high corruption or long bureaucratic delays suffer lower growth e g mauro 1996 sartre 1997 it is therefore tempting to conclude that government policies and bureaucratic corruption are at least partly responsible for the lack of development or slow growth of many economies e g shleifer and vishny 1993 nevertheless governments and bureaucracies do not exist only to seek rents they perform a number of useful functions including provision of public goods correction of market failures and redistribution without understanding why the state exists it is difficult to assess why corruption arises what its consequences are and whether and how it should be prevented in this paper we analyse how the employees of the state bureaucrats can misuse their power to enforce property rights the protection of property rights is commonly viewed as one of the most important roles of the state by political philosophers as diverse as david hume karl marx and robert nozick while a number of social scientists including north and thomas 1973 and rosenberg and bridzell 1989 emphasise the importance of secure property rights in the development of western societies for the state to have a role in enforcing property rights some contractual problems must exist between private parties in our economy these contractual problems are between entrepreneurs in particular production requires two agents and one of the entrepreneurs needs to undertake an investment but the returns accrue to the other one this can be thought as a partnership with the first agent as an upstream supplier providing an input of variable

informality and rent seeking bureaucracies in a model of long run growth abstract this paper explores the links among growth the informal economy and rent seeking bureaucracies the presence of congestion associated with the enforcement of property rights implies that informality can be useful whether bureaucratic rent seeking is detrimental to growth then depends on how good a substitute informality is to production in the formal sector in order to create profits which can be appropriated rent seeking bureaucrats limit entry into the formal economy as a result firms operate in the informal sector even when the cost of informality is high in which case lower growth emerges however when the cost of informality is low a large number of firms choose to operate informally irrespective of entry conditions in the latter case growth is unaffected by a rent seeking bureaucracy as entry restrictions in the formal economy do not bind

the yield curve and the macro economy across time and frequencies this paper assesses the relation between the yield curve and the main macroeconomic variables in the u s between early 1960s and 2009 across time and frequencies using wavelet analyses the shape of the yield curve is modelled by latent factors corresponding to its level slope and curvature estimated by maximum likelihood with the kalman filter the macroeconomic variables measure economic activity unemployment inflation and the fed funds rate the cross wavelet tools employed coherency and phase difference the set of variables and the length of the sample allow for a thorough appraisal of the timevariation and structural breaks in the direction intensity synchronization and periodicity of the relation between the yield curve and the macro economy our evidence establishes a number of new stylized facts on the yield curve macro relation and sheds light on several results found in the literature which could not have been achieved with analyses conducted strictly in the time domain as most of the literature or purely in the frequency domain

taxes and bribery the role of wage incentives this paper presents a simple model to evaluate alternative payment schemes for tax inspectors in the presence of corruption we consider problems of both moral hazard which arises because taking bribes cannot be observed without costly monitoring and adverse selection since not all potential tax inspectors can be identified as being honest or dishonest we identify three wage regimes first one could pay the same wage that a tax inspector could earn elsewhere his reservation wage second one could pay a wage which solves the moral hazard problem i e deters bribery this we call an efficiency wage by analogy with recent models examined i n macro economics third the government could pay a wage below the reservation wage at which only the dishonest become tax inspectors the capitulation wage we make precise the conditions under which each yields the greatest amount o f tax revenues net o f administrative costs many countries in the developing world are undergoing structural adjustment programmes which require fundamental fiscal changes outside agencies advise restoration of budget balance a task which involves expenditure cuts and tax increases the treatment of public employee pay scales often poses a particular dilemma i n this process wages and salaries are a significant component of government expenditures and one important question concerns the extent to which wages rather than employment cuts should be used to save money there is sometimes a reluctance to advocate wage cuts stemming in part from a feeling that this might impair the performance of the public sector hence tanzi 1990 argues that a policy of wage cutting is likely to increase the inefficiency of public sector employees especially at a time when the public sector is expected to play a larger role in restructuring the economy p 16 in the context of tax collection the issue is particularly pressing given the need to raise more tax revenues a reduction in efficiency in this branch of the government i s likely t o mean that fewer returns are processed and when individuals living standards are squeezed their incentive to accept bribes in lieu o f collecting taxes i s increased o n this count i t i s even sometimes suggested that wages of tax inspectors should be increased to aid the effort to the comments of henry bienen john hey and two anonymous referees have been helpful in revising this paper the authors are also grateful t o the john m olin program for the study o f economic organization and public policy at princeton university and the pew charitable trusts for financial support mclaren also acknowledges support from the international finance section of princeton university none of the above should be implicated in any way see for example goode 1984 chapter 1 3 and gould and amaro reyes 1983

should mobile marketers collect data other than geo location we take today s mobile marketing data landscape as a starting point and consider a duopoly model of third degree price discrimination in which firms can complement geo location information with data on consumer flexibility of varying quality we show that depending on consumer heterogeneity higher quality flexibility data affect profits according to three different patterns in equilibrium both firms tend to acquire data if the data are of high quality while only one acquires data if the data quality is low firms are likely to gain from additional data if consumers have similar preferences and or when data are precise although social welfare weakly improves consumers can be harmed

on the strategic choice of spatial price policy the strategic incentives with respect to the choice of price policy in spatial competition are analyzed in a duopoly model price discrimination emerges as the unique equilibriu m outcome in games with either simultaneous choice of policy and pric e or sequential choice where firms may commit first to uniform mill p ricing before the actual market stage nevertheless profits may be h igher with uniform pricing the authors models are applied to analyz e some common business practices that arise in geographical pricing like the basing point system and in the pricing of varieties or opti ons from a base product in a product differentiation context copyright 1988 by american economic association

pricing with customer recognition abstract this article studies the dynamic effects of behaviour based price discrimination and customer recognition in a duopolistic market where the distribution of consumers preferences is discrete consumers are myopic and firms are forward looking in the static and first period equilibrium firms choose prices with mixed strategies when price discrimination is allowed forward looking firms have an incentive to avoid customer recognition thus the probability that both will have positive first period sales decreases as they become more patient furthermore an asymmetric equilibrium sometimes exists yielding a 100 0 division of the first period sales as a whole price discrimination is bad for profits but good for consumer surplus and welfare

bureaucratic corruption and endogenous economic growth there appears to be significant diversity in the incidence of bureaucratic corruption across countries at different stages of economic development and under different political and economic regimes little theoretical or empirical analysis has been offered however on the link between corruption government and growth the paper attempts to fill the void through equilibrium models of endogenous growth balanced growth is derived as a balancing act between accumulating human capital which engenders growth and accumulating political capital which mainly assures bureaucratic power the analysis focuses on the interplay between investment in these two types of capital and its implications for long term growth under alternative political regimes some propositions are tested and confirmed empirically

relationships between corruption political orientation and income inequality evidence from latin america abstractthis research sheds light on the analysis of the impact of corruption and political orientation on income distribution in latin america although it has been theoretically demonstrated that corruption worsens the income distribution the empirical evidence has yielded ambiguous results based on biased estimates not considering a measurement error in the estimation of inequality this article fills this gap by correcting the previous measurement error bias in the fixed effects estimation additionally political orientation and its relationship with income inequality are also investigated the sample covers 18 latin american countries between 1996 and 2012 results reveal that corruption increases income inequality