north south trade export led growth with abundant labour abstract a north south model is developed in which the south is represented as a neo classical dual economy conditions are imposed which make temporary equilibrium unique and walrasian stable and long run balanced growth paths globally asymptotically stable in the short run an expansion of northern demand for southern products always improves the terms of trade in the long run however an increase in the growth rate of northern demand can turn the terms of trade against the south reduce real wages and lower living standards

the role of ignorance in the emergence of redistribution abstract our study investigates the emergence of redistribution societies when individuals vote on distribution rules with their feet the choice of a distribution rule is a strategic decision since individuals differ in the productivity of their investments and hence total income depends on the types of individuals who have chosen the same distribution rule in our laboratory experiment we find that compared to full information the amount of redistribution increases if individuals face uncertainty about their productivity at the time they choose a distribution rule moreover we find a coexistence of libertarian and redistributive societies as well as imperfect segregation for all degrees of uncertainty so that heterogeneous redistribution societies turn out to be sustainable throughout

term premia on euro rates there are at least two statistically firm results regarding international money and capital markets the first is the theory of interest rate parity is empirically valid for euro interest rates 8 the second is forward exchange rates are poor very likely biased predictors of future spot exchange rates 1 3 10 12 13 the former is a comforting finding in that it assures there are no unexploited arbitrage profits the latter is troubling to some because it might be a symptom of an inefficient market that interest rate parity holds suggests international exchange and money market arbitrageurs are fully exploiting all profit opportunities they are behaving rationally that forward exchange rates fail to predict future spot rates at least unbiasedly suggests the existence of some unknown mechanism which robs predictive ability in a naive rational expectations view of the world the failure of forward rates to be unbiased predictors of future spot rates implies either that there is some difference between interest rate pairs other than inflationary expectations or that forward rates do not capture expected inflation differences in any simple way see 9 this paper addresses the first issue if there are differences in interest rate pairs which do not solely reflect expected inflation divergences this must show up as a difference in real interest rates such could be the result of actual instantaneous real rates of identical risk being unequal in magnitude or what is more likely differences in term premia between interest rate pairs when periods greater than say one day are used in interest rate parity and forward rate prediction tests if there are differential term premia in interest rate pairs of say one month or longer then forward exchange rates will mispredict the future spot exchange rate by that margin

the proportional solution for economies with both private and public ownership abstract we ask how should a planner whose job is to respect public ownership of some productive assets in conjunction with private ownership of some inputs allocate resources we call our proposal the proportional solution it is characterized by the requirement that the final allocation be pareto efficient and by the condition of equal returns to the use of privately owned inputs we discuss this idea in a publicly owned firm a cooperative and a common pool resource our main result is the existence of proportional solutions in general convex economies journal of economic literature classification numbers d50 d51 d62 l32 h23 h82 p13

constitutional rules of exclusion in jurisdiction formation the rules under which jurisdictions nations provinces can deny immigration or expel residents are generally governed by a constitution but there do not exist either positive or normative analyses to suggest what types of exclusion rules are best we stylize this problem by suggesting four constitutional rules of admission free mobility admission by majority vote admission by unanimous consent admission by a demand threshold for public goods in a simple model we characterize the equilibria that result from these rules and provide a positive theory for which constitutional rules will be chosen

a model of international asset pricing under imperfect commodity arbitrage abstract this paper examines the effect of imperfect international commodity arbitrage i e violation of the law of one price modeled as the existence of non traded goods on the structure of purchasing power risk optimal portfolio rules of the risk averse investors and the equilibrium yield relationship among assets the major results of the paper include i there are two separate sources of purchasing power risk i e relative price risk and inflation risk relative price risk is specific to the country in which the investor resides ii in a world of n countries investors may hold n 1 hedge portfolios as vehicles to hedge against purchasing power risk facing different relative prices investors residing in different countries display divergent portfolio behavior iii in equilibrium investors are compensated in terms of excess return for bearing not only the systematic world market risk but also the systematic inflation and relative price risks

deviations from purchasing power parity and capital flows abstract this article examines the implications of deviations from purchasing power parity ppp for an investor s portfolio decision and the consequent capital flows in a two country intertemporal model with complete financial markets in the presence of deviations form ppp investors from different nations hold disparate portfolios and the equilibrium that results is not a pooling one we solve eplicitly for asset demands and derive the relationship between the direction of capital flows and deviations from ppp in contrast to the small country assumption in the existing literature the world interest rate in this model is determined endogenously

the collapse of purchasing power parities during the 1970 s one of the striking facts concerning the relationship beiveen prices and exchange rates during the 1970 s has been the dismal performance of the predictions of the simple versions of the purchasing power parity doctrine ppp that doctrine in its absolute version states that the equilibrium exchange rate between domestic and foreign currencies equals the ratio of domestic to foreign price levels the relative version of the doctrine relates equilibrium changes in exchange rates to changes in the ratio of domestic to foreign prices during the 1970 s short run changes in exchange rates bore little relationship to short run differentials in national inflation rates and frequently divergences from purchasing power parities have been cumulative this paper reviews and analyzes the empirical record of exchange rates and prices during the 1970 s and the analysis is based on the experience of the dollar pound the dollar frecch franc and the dollar dm exchange rates section 2 presents the evidence on ppp during the 1970 s and contrasts it with the evidence from the 1920 s a period during which the doctrine held up reasonably well this analysis is relevant for assessing whether the flexible exchange rate system was successful in providing national economies with an added degree of insulation from foreign shocks and whether it provided policymakers with an added instrument for the conduct of macroeconomic policy the evidence regarding devia tions from purchasing power parities is also relevant for determining whether there is a case for managed float section 3 attempts to explain what went wrong with

an efficient and almost budget balanced cost sharing method for a convex technology c we characterize cost sharing games where the nash equilibrium demands maximize total surplus budget balance is possible if and only if c is polynomial of degree n 1 or less for general c the residual cost shares are balanced if at least one demand is null a characteristic property if the cost function is totally monotone a null demand receives cash and total payments may exceed actual cost the ratio of excess payment to efficient surplus is at most min 2logn 1 for power cost functions c a ap p 1 the ratio of budget imbalance to efficient surplus vanishes as 1np 1 for analytic cost functions the ratio converges to zero exponentially along a given sequence of users all asymptotic properties are lost if the cost function is not smooth

a progress report on marxian economic theory on the controversies in exploitation theory since okishio 1963 a progress report on marxian economic theory

real exchange rate behavior abstract using random simulations with artificial data with identical sample characteristics to the long sample exchange rate data employed by lothian and taylor lothian j r and taylor m p 1996 the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries journal of political economy 104 488 509 we show that standard unit root tests have extremely low power over sample sizes corresponding to the recent float the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false is extremely low with 20 years or even 50 years of data and only reaches an acceptable level over much longer spans

unequal societies income distribution and the social contract this paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political fundamentals can sustain such different systems of social insurance fiscal redistribution and education finance as those of the united states and western europe with imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can improve ex ante welfare and this implies that their political support tends to decrease with inequality conversely with credit constraints lower redistribution translates into more persistent inequality hence the potential for multiple steady states with mutually reinforcing high inequality and low redistribution or vice versa

fair allocation of disputed properties we model problems of allocating disputed properties as generalized exchange economies in which agents have preferences and claims over multiple goods and the social endowment of each good may not be sufficient to satisfy all individual claims in this context we investigate procedural and end state principles of fairness their implications and relations to do so we explore procedural allocation rules represented by a composition of a rights assignment mechanism to assign each profile of claims individual property rights over the endowment and walrasian or other individually rational exchange rule using variants of fairness based on no envy as end state principles we provide axiomatic characterizations of the three focal egalitarian mechanisms known in the literature on rationing problems as constrained equal awards constrained equal losses and proportional mechanisms our results are connected to focal contributions in political philosophy and also provide rationale for market based environ mental policy instruments such as cap and trade schemes and personal carbon trading and moral foundation for the three proposals to allocate ghg emission rights known as the equal per capita sharing the polluter pays principle and the equal burden sharing the victims pay principle

surplus sharing with a two stage mechanism in this article we consider environments where agents jointly produce a private output good by contributing privately owned resources an efficient outcome may not be realized due to strategic behavior and conflicting interests of the agents we construct a two stage mechanism building on a varian mechanism the modified mechanism ensures an equilibrium for a large class of preferences and guarantees the feasibility of outcomes

terms of trade and domestic distribution export led growth with abundant labour abstract a general equilibrium macro model is constructed to explore effects of export led growth policies on the terms of trade and the domestic distribution of a developing region with abundant labour this region the south trades with another the north they have different technologies and supplies of factors it is shown that under certain conditions of dualism in the production of goods and of abundant labour supply in the south an increase in the volume of exports from the south may bring about a sustained worsening of the south s terms of trade with the north even if this increase in exports is due to a positive shift in demand from the north this change in the terms of trade is accompanied by a sustained loss of purchasing power of wages within the south these results take place in a walrasian stable market when technologies are more homogenous and labour less abundant the results are reversed increased exports will take place together with improvements in terms of trade and a tendency to equalise factor prices between the regions the results argue for coordination of domestic and international policies with special attention to technologies and labour markets

incentive mechanism design for production economies with both private and public ownerships in this paper we dealwith the probl em of incentive mechanism design which yields efficient allocations for general mixed ownership economies when preferences individual endowments and coalition patterns among individuals are unknown to the planner we do so by doubly implementing the proportional solution for economies with any number of private sector and public sector commodities and any number of individuals as well as the coexistence of privately and publicly owned firms with general convex production possibility sets furthermore the mechanisms work not only for three or more agents but also for two agent economies journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d61 d71 d82 2000 academic press

public ownership of the external world and private ownership of self liberal political philosophy represented classically by john locke and today by libertarians defends great inequality of economic outcome on the basis that people own themselves and are entitled to establish private property in the external world by virtue of that self ownership contemporary nonlibertarian political philosophers such as john rawls and ronald dworkin achieve their relatively egalitarian conclusion by effectively denying self ownership as a premise an alternative challenge to liberalism which does not take the radical starting point of denying self ownership is to declare that while certain rights to benefit by virtue of superior skill should be protected a degree of self ownership productive assets in the external world be viewed as publicly owned and not privately appropriable what allocation mechanisms on a space of possible economies satisfy axioms that are necessary to guarantee both private ownership of self and public or joint ownership of the external world we propose a

is the sticky price assumption reasonable for exchange rate models abstract the testable implications of sticky price exchange rate models are discussed the empirical examples suggest that the predetermined or sticky price assumption employed in recent asset models of exchange rate determination appears to be appropriate for germany japan the united states and the united kingdom

a quantitative reassessment of the purchasing power parity hypothesis evidence from norway and the united kingdom summary annual data from norway and the united kingdom from 1874 to 1971 are used to reassess the empirical performance of the purchasing power parity ppp doctrine the simple version of the ppp relationship is supported by the data only if different short run dynamics during a floating rate period 1914 1928 is allowed for two sets of factors were found to be important in amending the simple ppp model these were short run cyclical variables affecting the adjustment towards the ppp equilibrium relationship and long run structural factors such as productivity and terms of trade within this expanded model the proportionality between the exchange rate and relative price levels could not be rejected

international capital transfers and the choice of production technique a simple two country model abstract a two country two factor two good world with incomplete specialization is explored in the context of international capital transfers where the techniques of production of the same good differ across sectors of the world economy it is shown that the terms of trade for the south will worsen with a capital transfer to the south under a wide range of assumptions about the nature of the technology used in the north owned sector of the south the implied redistribution of world income as well as the implications of a change in the production technique of the foreign owned sector of the south are then examined

the tragedy of the commons revisited identifying behavioral principles abstract the theme of hardin s renowned the tragedy of the commons is that the common pool resource is dissipated to the level where the average value of extraction equals the wage rate in the long run when the number of appropriators is unlimited yet experimental results and rapid deforestation in tropical countries follow a contrasting pattern even though the number of appropriators is limited the common pool resource is dissipated more than the nash equilibrium predicts first given these market or experimental observations we identify two behavioral principles share maximization and difference maximization second we characterize these principles at nash equilibrium

terms of trade and domestic distribution a comment abstract in a recent issue of this journal chichilnisky 1981 develops a north south two good static model to explore the implications of export led growth policies for the south s terms of trade and income distribution it is my contention that most of the results of this paper are invalid as stated furthermore i claim that the problems with these results are due in good part to mistakes when dealing with the elementary properties of the model namely existence uniqueness and stability of equilibria the first part of this note reviews these properties and the main results of chichilnisky 1981 are discussed in the final part

mobility and redistribution the ability of individuals to move freely from one jurisdiction to another is generally seen as a constraint on the amount of redistribution that each jurisdiction within a system of governments can undertake in this paper we look at this proposition by developing a positive analysis of income redistribution by local governments in a federal system we ask how much redistribution occurs when only local governments can have tax transfer instruments individuals can move freely among jurisdictions and voters in each jurisdiction are fully aware of the migration effects of redistributive policies local redistribution is shown to induce sorting of the population with the poorest households located in the communities that provide the most redistribution while the threat of out migration affects the potential for redistribution our results suggest that significant local redistribution is nonetheless feasible numerical computations indicate that the proportion of residents who are renters is a major factor affecting the local choice of level of redistribution

belief in a just world and redistributive politics international surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate at the same time social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate individuals recurrent struggle with cognitive dissonance as they seek to maintain and pass on to their children a view of the world where effort ultimately pays off and everyone gets their just deserts this paper offers a model that helps explain i why most people feel such a need to believe in a just world ii why this need and therefore the prevalence of the belief varies considerably across countries iii the implications of this phenomenon for international differences in political ideology levels of redistribution labor supply aggregate income and popular perceptions of the poor the model shows in particular how complementarities arise endogenously between individuals desired beliefs or ideological choices resulting in two equilibria a first american equilibrium is characterized by a high prevalence of just world beliefs among the population and relatively laissez faire policies the other european equilibrium is characterized by more pessimism about the role of effort in economic outcomes and a more extensive welfare state more generally the paper develops a theory of collective beliefs and motivated cognitions including those concerning money consumption and happiness as well as religion

on exchange rates nominal and real abstract the paper first develops an australian commodity currency exchange rate model which is extended to deal with real exchange rates as well the nominal and real exchange rate versions are then tested on swiss data for the post bretton woods period while the model tracks the swiss franc nominal exchange rate vis a vis the dollar and the major european currencies very well swiss ppp real exchange rates are found to be heavily contaminated with measurement error as that error explains the large co movements in nominal and ppp real exchange rates those co movements are largely irrelevant to the ppp debate

implementation of balanced linear cost share equilibrium solution in nash and strong nash equilibria abstract this paper considers the incentive aspect of the balanced linear cost share equilibrium blcse which yields an endogenous theory of profit distribution for public goods economies with convex production technologies we do so by presenting an incentive compatible mechanism which doubly implements the blcse solution in nash and strong nash equilibria so that nash allocations and strong nash allocations coincide with blcse allocations the mechanism presented here allows not only preferences and initial endowments but also coalition patterns to be privately observed in addition it works not only for three or more agents but also for two agent economies

reward patterns of fair solutions abstract the solutions proposed in the literature on fair allocations are sensitive to the preference profiles of the agents as a consequence each of them displays a specific distribution pattern which may be interpreted as rewarding certain kinds of preferences at the expense of others in the basic models with private goods and decreasing returns the equal income competitive equilibrium tends to favor the eccentric preferences whereas most egalitarian equivalent solutions tend to reward the agents who like particular resources the identification of the rewarding pattern of each mechanism sheds light on its ethical content and may help select the adequate solution in concrete applications in this analysis a preference monotonicity property turns out to be satisfied by many solutions

real versus nominal forecast errors in the prediction of foreign exchange rates abstract imposing a small number of common but strong assumptions allows the varianve of the ex post forecast error in forward exchange rates to be decomposed into its parts that part due to errors in forecasting relative inflation the nominal error and that part due to real shocks for a sample of large and small industrial countries we show that real shocks have been predominant in the post bretton woods world this result implies that models of exchange rate determination which do not explicitly incorporate real shocks are inappropriate for explaining recent exchange rate volatility

joint ownership of a convex technology comparison of three solutions a given set of agents jointly own and operate a decreasing returns to scale technology with a single input and a single output they all contribute some input and receive some of the output what first best allocation is equitable we discuss three allocation mechanisms the equal benefits solution gives every agent the same benefit computed at the supporting price the equal returns solution equalizes returns output shares input contributions across agents the constant returns equivalent solution gives every agent his indirect utility level at some common price of output relative to input a lower and an upper bound on individual welfares play a key role in these axiomatic characterisation results

individual rationality and voting in cooperative production abstract suppose that a group of individuals owns collectively a technology which produces a consumption good from an input a sharing rule associates input contributions with a vector of consumption we consider sharing rules that are a convex combination of the proportional the equal share and the equal benefit rules we characterize the subset of sharing rules that satisfy pareto efficiency and individual rationality we also study the outcome of majority voting on this subselection of sharing rules

on the endogenous determination of the degree of meritocracy in large cooperatives abstract we consider a cooperative formed by a large number of workers differentiated by their initial endowment of wealth which is both primary input labor and consumption leisure the cooperative is characterized by its wealth distribution and produces a consumption good from labor which allocates among workers according to a convex combination of the proportional and the egalitarian rule in the first stage workers decide this combination by simple majority in a second stage they choose how much labor to provide to the cooperative we find that when in the cooperative s wealth distribution the median wealth is lower higher than the average the degree of meritocracy chosen by workers is lower higher than that of the optimum and coincides with it when both statistics coincide this choice has similar consequences on the cooperative s labor output since it increases with respect to the degree of meritocracy

meritocracy egalitarianism and the stability of majoritarian organizations we gratefully acknowledge support from the severo ochoa programme for centres of excellence in r d sev 2011 0075 barbera and bevia acknowledge support from grants consolidated group c eco2008 04756 and feder and sgr2014 515 ponsati acknowledges support from grants eco2012 37065 and sgr2009 1142

elasticity of substitution and the perverse export supply response abstract this paper re examines the possibility of perverse export supply response in the south in a 2 2 2 trade model we find that such perverse response is impossible if the elasticity of substitution in the production of the basic good in the south is greater than or equal to unity

flexible exchange rates prices and the role of news lessons from the 1970s recent experience with flexible exchange rate systems has led to renewed interest in the operation of foreign exchange markets as reflected in many recent studies of the principal determinants of exchange rates the 1970s witnessed the dramatic alteration of the international monetary system from a regime of pegged exchange rates which prevailed for about a quarter of a century since the bretton woods conference into a regime of flexible though managed rates as a consequence of the emergence of the new legal and economic system traders national governments and international organisations were confronted with new economic problems choices and instruments during the 1970s ex change rates fluctuated widely and inflation rates accelerated the international monetary system had to accommodate extraordinarily large oil related shocks which affected trade flows in goods and assets huge oil payments had to be recycled uncertainties concerning future developments in international politics reached new heights and the prospects for the world economy got gloomier these developments placed unprecedented pressures on the markets for foreign exchange as well as on other asset markets they were associated with a large slide in the value of the us dollar and resulted in speeding up the creation of new institutions like the european monetary system which provided the formal framework for the management of exchange rates among members

graciela chichilnisky s model of north south trade abstract the model of the effects of north south trade set out by chichilnisky in the april 1981 issue of the journal of development economics is shown to contain a number of errors the model is presented anew in this note after corrections are made one can still obtain results similar in spirit to some of those chichilnisky tried to derive although the interpretation of the cause of the results must be substantially altered in particular it is shown that for appropriate parameter values in this model one will find that it is possible for an increase in the demand for the good the north exports to lead to 1 a worsening of the terms of trade for the south 2 a worsening of the distribution of factor incomes in the north and in the south 3 a reduction in the total export revenues of the south and 4 at the same time an increase in the physical volume of the south s exports the cause is in essence a shift in world demand from the good the south exports to the good the north exports which leads to a terms of trade loss for the south income effects following from the terms of trade loss then lead to a situation where the south s own demand for its export good falls by more than its supply thus leading to the preverse effect of an increase in the volume of its exports the paper also considers the model of chichilnisky and cole 1978 this model is similar to that of chichilnisky 1981 and is used to examine the same issues but is closed in a different way it is shown that this second model may give similar results as the first but that also a quite different set of results is now possible closure is therefore shown to play a key role

kantian optimization a microfoundation for cooperation abstract although evidence accrues in biology anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner as in nash and walrasian equilibrium i here postulate a cooperative kind of optimizing behavior called kantian it is shown that in simple economic models when there are negative externalities such as congestion effects from use of a commonly owned resource or positive externalities such as a social ethos reflected in individuals preferences kantian equilibria dominate the nash walras equilibria in terms of efficiency while economists schooled in nash equilibrium may view the kantian behavior as utopian there is some perhaps much evidence that it exists if cultures evolve through group selection the hypothesis that kantian behavior is more prevalent than we may think is supported by the efficiency results here demonstrated

competition among institutions abstract economic theory offers two different approaches to the analysis of group formation and the role of institutions general equilibrium approach explores the influence of the economic environment on formation of coalitions game theory explores the influence of institutional rules on equilibrium outcomes we introduce an integrative approach an institution s policy depends on its membership while its membership depends on the policies of all the institutions we present three distinct mathematical approaches to these models highlighting the algebraic nature of the question of existence of equilibrium our apparatus cover many economic and political environments including cases with multiple dimensions and multiple institutions journal of economic literature classification numbers c62 d50 d71 d72 h11 h40 r13 r53

some properties of egalitarian economies abstract it is argued that in strictly egalitarian economies there is an equilibrium in which social well being is maximized and that this is so whatever the nature of returns to scale and whether or not the economy is characterized by elements of monopoly externalities of consumption or production commodity taxes or subsidies or the private provision of public goods as a corollary the implications of distortions and increasing returns can be effectively studied only in a context of inequality

migration and optimal income taxes abstract the issue addressed in this paper is the optimal taxation of incomes earned in the home economy and of incomes earned abroad when people can migrate as a preliminary the optimal taxation of home incomes when there is migration and no taxation of foreign incomes is discussed then in a more general setting we deal with optimal taxation of different kinds of labour when another kind of labour is not taxable and show how this bears on the taxation of foreign incomes the last sections of the paper analyse a simple model in which people choose between taxable labour at home taxable labour abroad and untaxable labour a condition is found implying that the optimal tax on foreign income is higher than on the home income of a person of equal utility

clubs and the market this paper defines a general equilibrium model with exchange and club formation agents trade multiple private goods widely in the market can belong to several clubs and care about the characteristics of the other members of their clubs the space of agents is a continuum but clubs are finite it is shown that i competitive equilibria exist and ii the core coincides with the set of equilibrium states the central subtlety is in modeling club memberships and expressing the notion that membership choices are consistent across the population

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

allocation rules for a commonly owned technology the average cost lower bound assume that a set of individuals commonly own a one input one output technology at an average cost pricing equilibrium allocation the consumption contribution ratio is identical among agents and each agent maximizes her welfare given this ratio the following requirement is introduced every agent must be as well off at a selected allocation as at the average cost equilibrium that all agents prefer the paper establishes compatibilities and incompatibilities between this requirement and some traditional requirements finally the new lower bound is combined with properties such as technological monotonicity or contraction independence to characterize mas colell s constant returns equivalent allocation rule

the stability of hedonic coalition structures we consider the partitioning of a society into coalitions in purely hedonic settings i e where each player s payoff is completely determined by the identity of other members of her coalition we first discuss how hedonic and nonhedonic settings differ and some sufficient conditions for the existence of core stable coalition partitions in hedonic settings we then focus on a weaker stability condition individual stability where no player can benefit from moving to another coalition while not hurting the members of that new coalition we show that if coalitions can be ordered according to some characteristic over which players have single peaked preferences or where players have symmetric and additively separable preferences then there exists an individually stable coalition partition examples show that without these conditions individually stable coalition partitions may not exist we also discuss some other stability concepts and the incompatibility of stability with other normative properties journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 a14 d20

north south trade and exported led policies abstract an earlier paper in this journal chichilnisky 1981 formulated a model of north south trade where the south exports a labor intensive commodity in exchange for industrial goods the paper studied moves to new equilibria with higher levels of exports of the south and of industrial demand in the north it was established that with abundant labor and technological dualism such moves lead to more exports but no lower terms of trade consumption and real wages in the south this occurs within walrasian stable and perfectly competitive markets sufficient conditions were also given for the south to improve its terms of trade real wages and consumption through an export expansion this paper comments on several other papers written on these results generalizes the earlier propositions and extends them to a larger class of economies which export labor intensive products but need not have abundant labor it gives a generalization of the earlier results on uniqueness and stability of the equilibria and reports also on recent econometric tests for sri lanka and the u k and numerical simulations of the model

strategic nonlinear income tax competition with perfect labor mobility abstract tax competition between two governments who choose nonlinear income tax schedules to maximize the average utility of their residents when skills are unobservable and labor is perfectly mobile is examined we show that there are no equilibria in which there is a skill type that pays positive taxes to one country and whose utility is larger than the average utility in the other country or in which the lowest skilled are subsidized we also show that it is possible for the most highly skilled to receive a net transfer funded by taxes on lower skilled individuals in equilibrium these findings confirm the race to the bottom thesis in this setting

a ricardian model of the tragedy of the commons abstract this paper revisits the tragedy of the commons when agents have different capabilities in both production and encroachment activities and can allocate their time between them under fairly general assumptions on production and encroachment technologies an individual s expected income is convex with respect to his actions so that individuals specialize consequently in equilibrium the economy is divided into at most two homogenous groups encroachers and producers the partition obeys a relative advantage criterion several equilibria may exist the tragedy of the commons equilibrium without production always does the pareto optimal allocation of activities may not be an equilibrium we show that minute changes in property right enforcement may lead to drastic improvements for society we argue that in convex games such as this paper s role choice game bounded rationality is a natural assumption and the concept of local nash equilibrium is the natural analytical tool to handle it

a progress report on marxian economic theory on the controversies in exploitation theory since okishio 1963 this report explores the development of exploitation theory in mathematical marxian economics by reviewing the main controversies surrounding the proper definition of exploitation since the contribution of okishio the report first examines the debates on the fundamental marxian theorem and class exploitation correspondence principle developed mainly in the 1970s and 1980s followed by the property relation theory of exploitation by roemer then the more recent exploitation theory proposed by vrousalis and wright is introduced finally the report introduces and comments on recent axiomatic studies of exploitation by focusing on the work of veneziani and yoshihara

a proposal to unify some concepts in the theory of fairness so far the theory of distributive justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of justice in our opinion we live in a world in which different people hold conflicting ideas about justice we propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions by means of what we call aspiration functions and we present in this paper three different ways of aggregating such opposing opinions into a socially acceptable judgement furthermore we show that many well known concepts are special cases of our approach we study under a restriction on the form of the aspiration functions the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for a social choice correspondence to be generated from any of our concepts

the dynamics of inequalities and unequal exchange of labor in intertemporal linear economies abstract introducing a concept of fairness of economic allocations namely exploitation as the unequal exchange of labor henceforth ue exploitation by generalizing roemer s 1981 1982a seminal models this paper aims to answer the following two questions in the context of an intertemporal economy with linear technology how is income and wealth inequality related or unrelated to the existence and persistence of ue exploitation what are the mechanisms driving the persistent existence of ue exploitation in growing economies agents are ue exploited resp exploiters if the amount of labor that they contribute to the economy is bigger resp smaller than the amount of labor received by them via their income it is proved first that ue exploitation is monotonically correlated to functional income inequality second it is shown that unless agents discount the future asset inequalities are necessary but not sufficient for the persistence of ue exploitation and capital accumulation leading to the disappearance of ue exploitation cannot be ruled out in equilibrium third it is shown that regardless of whether agents discount the future labor saving technical progress may yield sustained growth with persistent ue exploitation by keeping labor abundant relative to capital which restrains wages from rising unlike in models with differentiable production functions this mechanism does not rely on changes in the marginal productivity of inputs and it is entirely driven by the interaction between innovation and labor markets

the political geography of tax h e avens and tax hells worldwide many governments rely on personal income taxation as one of their major sources of tax revenue casual empirical evidence suggests that although most developed countries levy substantial taxes particularly on higher incomes there also exist a few countries that are characterized by no or very low income taxation a distinguishing feature of the countries in the latter group is that they are geographically very small as can be seen from table 1 which presents international income tax policies and geographical dimensions of some selected countries in the present paper we investigate whether the geography of a country is related to its pattern of taxation central to our argument is the ongoing international integration in the last decades in some cases e g in the european union the process has advanced to the point at which all formal constraints to mobility have been abandoned this development has also greatly improved the mobility of households across states or national borders in contrast to the mobility of production factors however the effects of household mobility migration are not confined to budgetary consequences as taxpayers immigrate or emigrate the inand outflow of citizens also alters policy objectives by changing the composition of the electorate in a jurisdiction at the same time migration decisions especially those of wealthy individuals are based on local tax policies consequently the migration of households determines fiscal policies through the interplay of two basic effects 1 residential choices determine tax rates through a process in which a jurisdiction s inhabitants select their local policies and 2 tax and welfare policies in each jurisdiction influence residential decisions as we argue in this paper this interdependency of residential and political decisions may provide an explanation for the stylized facts illustrated in table 1 we consider a simple framework in which households differ in incomes and national tax policies are democratically determined as a natural implication of their earning characteristics high income households ceteris paribus prefer to live in countries with low taxation for ease of exposition we refer to those countries as tax h e avens in a slight perturbation of popular nomenclature low income households in contrast are more interested in generous public spending than in low income tax rates ceteris paribus they prefer to reside in countries with large welfare programs financed by substantial taxation which we call tax hells for obvious reasons thus individual preferences imply a self selection process which leads to the segregation of households across countries according to income classes 1 if this segregation is in turn supported by a national vote for low taxes in countries where high income earners live and high taxes in countries where lower income earners live an equilibrium with tax heavens populated by wealthy residents and tax hells populated by the less affluent evolves yet the geographical size of countries plays a crucial role in this development first it affects the number of a country s inhabitants the population size because households sort hansen apax partners company possartstr 11 81679 miinchen germany kessler department of economics university of bonn adenauerallee 24 42 53113 bonn germany kessler wipol uni bonn de we thank two anonymous referees marcus berliant dennis epple christian ewerhart gerhard glomm david pines urs schweizer and participants in presentations at the university of munich the 1997 site meeting stanford the 1997 american econometric society summer meeting pasadena and the 1996 iipf congress tel aviv for helpful suggestions and discussions both authors gratefully acknowledge financial support by the deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft sfb 303 at the university of bonn remaining errors are our own the views expressed in this paper should not be attributed to apax partners company 1 the sorting of individuals by preferences across jurisdictions goes back to the famous contribution of charles m tiebout 1956 on migration as a means to reveal preferences over public goods

cooperative production a comparison of welfare bounds in the production model with a one input one output technology we study welfare lower bounds that give a guarantee of welfare to each agent independent of the others preferences we obtain characterizations of egalitarian equivalent allocation rules on the basis of two weak lower bounds in striking contrast with moulin s characterization of the equal budget walrasian solution on a slightly smaller domain with a more demanding lower bound