altruistic egoistic and biospheric values in willingness to pay wtp for wildlife abstract we attempt to measure general attitudes and ethical beliefs towards preservation as well as the importance of each of the three considered value orientations biospheric egoistic and altruistic in wtp estimates in the present study we apply the gac scale to a contingent valuation exercise for the recovery of the common murre uria aalge in galicia spain up to now only a few studies in the field of environmental and ecological economics have analyzed value orientations under the environmental concern ec framework obtaining mixed results in the present work we conclude that ethical aspects affect the individuals decision making process and that value orientations play an important role in the pro environmental attitude formation these value orientations affect willingness to pay wtp estimates for environmental goods

market fundamentals competition and natural gas prices after the liberalisation of the gas industry trading hubs have emerged in europe although these hubs appear to be liquid market places fostering gas to gas competition the efficiency of the gas market remains a topic of interest as a fair share of gas is still traded through long term contracts with prices linked to the oil price while the number of gas suppliers to the european market is limited in order to assess the efficiency of the gas market we analyse the day ahead spot price at the dutch gas hub over the period 2011 2014 we find that the oil price had a small positive impact on the gas price changes in the concentration on the supply side did not affect the movement in gas prices the availability of gas in storages and the outside temperature negatively influenced the gas price we also find that the gas price was related to the production of wind electricity overall we conclude that the day ahead gas prices are predominantly determined by gas market fundamentals policies to further integrate gas markets within europe may extend this gas to gas competition to a larger region

lessons from strange cases democracy development and the resource curse in the u s states the work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under development suffers from several shortcomings in this article the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting using a new data set for the u s states spanning 73 years and case studies of texas and louisiana the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature and comparative legs of the resource curse hypothesis than previous research has they provide evidence that natural resource dependence contributes to slower economic growth poorer developmental performance and less competitive politics using this empirical setting they also begin parsing the mechanisms that might explain the negative association between resource wealth and political and economic development they draw implications from intranational findings for resource abundant countries across the world and suggest directions for future cross national and cross state work

the growth and distributional consequences of international trade in natural resources and capital goods a neo austrian analysis abstract the problem explored is the role of natural resources in economic growth a neo austrian model is constructed which can represent either a single autarchic country or a pair of trading countries one of which can export natural resources and the other can export manufactured capital it is shown that under autarchy the price of the natural resource has no effect on economic growth while under conditions of trade it has a significant influence falling natural resource prices slow the growth in the resource exporting country and stimulate it in the capital exporting country some policy implications of this finding are explored

economy environment interactions in the long run a neo austrian approach abstract this paper describes a neo austrian approach to the long run interactions between invention innovation and technical progress on the one hand and resource use and pollution on the other this approach is used to construct a formal model which simulates output capital accumulation pollution emission pollution abatement etc for a simple model economy we begin by reviewing the role and conceptualisation of time in economic modelling we then move on to outline neo austrian capital theory as an alternative to the conventional approach we note the implications of the neo austrian approach for modelling resource use and pollution and a simulation model is constructed embodying the neo austrian approach to the time structure of production the two possible ways the model can be interpreted are then explored results from the simulation model are presented and assessed finally plans for future work with this approach are described

frontiers and sustainable economic development exploiting new resource frontiers such as agricultural land and mineral reserves is a fundamental feature of economic development in poor economies yet frontier based development is symptomatic of a pattern of economy wide resource exploitation in developing economies that a generates little additional economic rents and b what rents are generated are not being reinvested in other sectors such development is inherently unsustainable the following paper explains this phenomenon and provides evidence that long run expansion of agricultural land and oil and natural gas proved reserves across poor economies is associated with lower levels of real income per capita the paper proposes a frontier expansion hypothesis to explain why the structural economic dependence of these economies on frontier land expansion and resource exploitation is not conducive to sustained long run growth the key to sustainable economic development in poor economies will be improving the economic integration between frontier and other sectors of the economy targeting policies to improved resource management in frontier areas and overcoming problems of corruption and rent seeking in resource sectors

the long term consequences of resource based specialisation using geological variation in oil abundance in the southern us i examine the long term effects of resource based specialisation through economic channels in 1890 oil abundant counties were similar to other nearby counties but after oil was discovered they began to specialise in its production from 1940 90 oil abundance increased local employment per square kilometre especially in mining but also in manufacturing oil abundant counties had higher population growth higher per capita income and better infrastructure 2010 the author s the economic journal 2010 royal economic society

natural resource rents economic dynamics and structural change a capital theoretic approach abstract this paper concerns the effects of natural resource rents on the dynamics and structural change of an economy which is accumulating capital the concept of rent is developed and the determinants of natural resource rents in the real world are discussed to examine the long run effects of rents on the price system and economic structural change a neo austrian capital theoretic model is developed this is presented in input output form and the corresponding prices for the model are derived so that a consistent set of national accounts for the model can be found natural resource use is introduced into the model with natural resource rents forming a further element of value added the model is then further generalised with the dynamics of capital accumulation being determined through a savings function which itself varies with the rate of return on capital this model is used to simulate the effect on economic dynamics and structural change of two natural resource rent profiles both of which follow the hotelling rule the effects of these two cases on the model are examined through the corresponding sets of national accounts

teacher testing teacher education and teacher characteristics school officials and legislators have long been concerned with the possibility of declining teacher quality see e g sean corcoran et al 2002 beginning in the 1960 s states began testing prospective teachers in a direct effort to ensure that teachers meet minimum standards for basic skills and subject knowledge by 1999 41 states required applicants to pass some sort of standardized certification test as a theoretical matter however the impact of such testing is ambiguous test requirements may establish a minimum achievement standard as their proponents hope on the other hand testing and other certification requirements may deter some qualified applicants from teaching if these requirements are perceived as costly this is the barriers to entry story first noted in the occupational licensing context by milton f friedman and simon kuznets 1945 another concern with job applicant testing is the possibility of an adverse impact on minority candidates who usually do worse on tests see david autor and david scarborough 2003 for a recent study paralleling increased state involvement in teacher certification is the increase in teachers educational credentials especially in public schools for example in 1971 over two thirds of public school teachers had a b a while only 27 percent had a master s or education specialist s degree by 1991 however over half of public school teachers 52 6 percent had a master s or education specialist s degree in contrast the proportion of private school teachers

improving the process of valuing non market benefits combining citizens juries with choice modelling we attempt a first combination of the participatory technique known as the citizens jury with choice modelling a stated preference technique increasingly favored by environmental economists our application is conducted in the context of water quality improvements under the water framework directive the most significant reform in water legislation in the european union for many years we compare results with those of a conventional choice experiment we find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a jury setting and that moving from an individual to a collective choice setting produces a change in both values and preferences

benefit transfer a comparison of wtp for air quality between france and germany a contingent valuation study was carried out under similar conditions on two sites simultaneously strasbourg france and kehl germany in order to test the reliability of the benefit transfer method on average the air quality is approximately the same in the two cities using a transfer of the benefit function we compared the direct estimated benefits from improved air quality with the transferred benefits in the same city the originality of this test is that the valued good is the same in both cities which means that the transfer is an intra site transfer however our findings show that the method of benefit transfer was not generally valid indeed inhabitants of kehl declared a higher price for their state of health and air quality than inhabitants in strasbourg this result could be explained by a stronger sensitivity to environmental problems in germany

input trade and the location of production stanley engerman has been a presence in the department of economics at the university of rochester for over 37 years he was an early and eminent participant in the cliometric revolution that swept throughout the economichistory profession in the 1960 s and 1970 s we doubt that anyone could have anticipated the gathering storm that greeted the publication of time on the cross co authored with robert fogel in 1974 since that time stan has become the world s leading authority on slavery in the americas and the caribbean as well as an important contributor to a set of issues ranging from the 19th century american iron industry to the economics of british imperialism his own human capital as extensive as we know it to be is complemented by capital of the physical variety an enormous library of research material spilling over into bookshelves and floors in several offices in rochester and attracting a yearly stream of itinerant scholars anxious to pick his books as well as his brains in this short note we intend to honor stan by applying the tools of international trade theory to illustrate several episodes in the development of industries both in the united states and in world markets a colleague of stan s at rochester lionel mckenzie once commented that in 19th century britain lancashire would have been unlikely to produce cotton cloth if the cotton had to be grown in england mckenzie 1954 this remark expresses in utter brevity the importance to production and trading patterns of the domain of tradability of raw materials or intermediate products for example it is difficult to envisage the patterns of production and trade in modern day japan should it be denied access to world supplies of oil coal and iron ore local production of each of these items being negligible transport costs as well as man made impediments to trade are mainly responsible for variations in the degree of access countries possess to the inputs available in the markets of other countries simple competitive generalequilibrium models of production of the type intensively utilized in the theory of international trade can usefully be harnessed to shed light on several episodes in 19th century american economic history in which the nature of trading possibilities for raw materials heavily influenced the extent to which local american production of final commodities could withstand the pressures in world markets without the aid of protective devices the simplest model setting in which to investigate the importance of trade in raw materials is a ricardian model augmented by the necessity of using a produced input in addition to labor in at least one commodity denote the pair of final commodities by x and y where in order to produce y a certain quantity of intermediate good z is required the competitive profit conditions for the two final commodities are shown in equation 1

a combinatorial optimization approach to nonmarket environmental benefit aggregation via simulated populations this paper considers the use of a combinatorial optimization technique in the aggregation of environmental benefit values combinatorial optimization is used to statistically match population census data to a contingent valuation survey the matched survey and census information is then used to produce regional and national total willingness to pay figures these figures are then compared to figures derived using more standard approaches to calculating aggregate environment benefit values the choice of aggregation approach is shown to have a major impact upon estimates of total benefits at a regional level especially when the target population displays considerable heterogeneity across space

the evolution of the industrial organisation of the production of knowledge this work elaborates the notion of localised technological knowledge based upon the distinction between information competence and knowledge and analyses the emergence of the new knowledge industry the evolution of the organisation of knowledge production is analysed through four stylised modes scientific entrepreneurship institutional variety vertical integration and technological cooperation the new trends towards the growth of knowledge intensive business service industries are detected and underlined they are considered as the outcome of the institutional formation of a market for knowledge based upon a process of increasing appropriability of localised knowledge based on the blending of generic scientific information and competence and growing scope of applicability via computercommunication systems deverticalisation of research activities from the boundaries of corporations the specification of a demand for technological competence and the specialising of independent firms in the production of technological competence and knowledge

linking economic and ecological models for a marine ecosystem increasingly economists and ecologists have begun to recognize the value to public policy of combining information and results from each discipline into multidisciplinary studies here we present a methodological approach that links economic and ecological analyses we develop an economic ecological model by merging an input output model of a coastal economy with a model of a marine food web we describe distinct linear system sub models of the economy and the ecosystem and we develop a method for linking the two our method extends the work of earlier researchers by incorporating an ecosystem matrix into resource multipliers and by showing how these multipliers may be calculated we present a numerical example for the new england region using coastal economic and marine ecological data from the region for a restricted set of industry sectors and food web trophic levels we calculate resource multipliers for the example and we simulate the economic impacts of changes in primary production in the ecosystem on final demands for fishery products the results illustrate the effects of incorporating the impacts of habitat destruction and ecosystem structure on resource multipliers our approach can be extended to incorporate the full range of sectors in the economy and trophic levels in a linked ecosystem 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

decomposition of warm glow for multiple stakeholders stated choice valuation of shellfishery policy a monetary valuation study of marine management in the dutch wadden sea the largest natural area of the netherlands is presented the study is motivated by a conflict between shellfisheries and large populations of birds that forage on cockles different management scenarios are valued using multiple stakeholders namely dutch citizens local residents tourists policy makers and natural scientists a considerable difference in willingness to pay wtp between these groups is found in addition the influence of motivational profiles is examined estimates confirm the presence of two such motivations namely material and moral warm glow these allow for decomposition and correction of the wtp estimates

the supply of non renewable resources there exists no formal treatment of non renewable resource nrr supply systematically deriving quantity as function of price we establish instantaneous restricted fixed reserves and unrestricted nrr supply functions the supply of a nrr at any date and location not only depends on the local contemporary price of the resource but also on prices at all other dates and locations besides the usual law of supply which characterizes the own price effect cross price effects have their own law they can be decomposed into a substitution effect and a stock compensation effect we show that the substitution effect always dominates a price increase at some point in space and time causes nrr supply to decrease at all other points this new but orthodox supply setting extends to nrrs the partial equilibrium analysis of demand and supply policies thereby it provides a generalization of many results about policy induced changes on nrr markets the properties of restricted and unrestricted supply functions are characterized for hotelling homogeneous as well as ricardian non homogeneous reserves for a single deposit as well as for several deposits that endogenously come into production or cease to be active

choosing a functional form for an international benefit transfer evidence from a nine country valuation experiment abstract this paper investigates the performance of common approaches in international benefit transfer using data from identical and simultaneous contingent valuation studies on marine water quality in nine european countries the environmental good is shared by the study countries but the countries differ substantially in their income levels and other characteristics we compare the performance of value transfers with or without income elasticity of willingness to pay adjustments and function transfers that include only core variables supported by economic theory our results point to a new source of uncertainty associated with function transfer choosing a particular functional form even if only theoretically relevant explanatory variables are used the theory offers no insights with respect to a functional relationship of the dependence e g linear log linear exponential polynomial we show that while different functional forms may offer improvements in model fit this does not necessarily translate to improvements in transfer errors or minimum tolerance levels in our case the value transfer with constant unit income elasticity adjustment corresponding to the log log functional relationship between willingness to pay and income performs the best including additional explanatory variables or using other functional forms worsens the quality of transfers overall our study questions the rationale for using more complicated function transfers in international benefit transfers as the relationships observed within a country or a group of countries does not necessarily translate to dependencies between countries

would higher salaries keep teachers in high poverty schools evidence from a policy intervention in north carolina abstract for a three year time period beginning in 2001 north carolina awarded an annual bonus of 1800 to certified math science and special education teachers working in public secondary schools with either high poverty rates or low test scores using longitudinal data on teachers we estimate hazard models that identify the impact of this differential pay by comparing turnover patterns before and after the program s implementation across eligible and ineligible categories of teachers and across eligible and barely ineligible schools results suggest that this bonus payment was sufficient to reduce mean turnover rates of the targeted teachers by 17 experienced teachers exhibited the strongest response to the program finally the effect of the program may have been at least partly undermined by the state s failure to fully educate teachers regarding the eligibility criteria our estimates most likely underpredict the potential outcome of a program of permanent salary differentials operating under complete information

the aggregation of environmental benefit values welfare measures distance decay and total wtp abstract we review the literature regarding the aggregation of benefit value estimates for non market goods two case studies are presented through which we develop an approach to aggregation which applies the spatial analytic capabilities of a geographical information system to combine geo referenced physical census and survey data to estimate a spatially sensitive valuation function these case studies show that the common reliance upon political rather than economic jurisdictions and the use of sample mean values within the aggregation process are liable to lead to significant errors in resultant values we also highlight the fact that for resources with use values then we should expect overall values to reduce with increasing distance from such sites but that changes in the choice of welfare measure will determine whether such distance decay is to be expected within values stated by those who are presently non users the paper concludes by providing recommendations for future improvements to the methodology

factor price convergence in the late nineteenth century the authors examine a dramatic historical episode of factor price convergence in the late nineteenth century their focus is convergence between old world and new and the analysis centers on land and labor wage rental ratios boomed in the old world and collapsed in the new moving the resource rich labor scarce new world closer to the resource scarce labor abundant old world the authors use econometrics and simulations to identify proconvergence forces which include commodity price convergence factor accumulation and factor saving biases the results confirm that open economy characteristics and international market integration are important sources of convergence copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a neo austrian five process model with resource extraction and pollution abatement abstract this paper describes a neo austrian approach to analyse long run economy environment interactions the modelling framework incorporates resource use and pollution as integral components of production processes we start our study by reviewing the neo austrian capital theoretic approach a neo austrian model is developed and presented in input output form and the corresponding accounting prices are derived by using this representation an intertemporal simulation approach is embodied by establishing the optimization of an intertemporal social welfare function results from the optimization approach are discussed and also discount rate variations are assessed in terms of their effects on the model economy

transferring environmental value estimates issues and alternatives abstract environmental value transfer needs to be understood in the context of scientific information use in general this provides a different perspective upon the reasons why benefit transfer in particular appears so controversial and raises concerns over the limited types of validity testing being undertaken by those supporting such applications as ecosystem services valuation another key issue which we emphasise is the unintentional challenge to standard economic theory raised by the models used to conduct value transfers existing value transfer practice reveals the need for a more inclusive approach if environmental values are to be addressed we argue that there are robust alternative means for including multiple environmental values in decision processes these cannot be dismissed out of hand and analysts should be expanding their understanding of the available approaches which include attitude and norm measures multi criteria analysis and participatory deliberative institutions

the impact of remanufacturing in the economy very few durable goods are recovered at the end of their useful lives however this situation could reverse with the development of a stronger remanufacturing industry in the economy this paper evaluates the impact of remanufacturing in a hypothetical situation where remanufacturing holds a significant share of the economy presently dominated by the original manufacturing industries it would have direct impacts on the demand for several inputs we adapt the inter industry input output framework with the development of a methodology to consider these changes subsequently we apply the model to the 30 sector aggregation of the french input output national data to illustrate the nethod and to evaluate the impact that remanufacturing may have on the economy the analysis assumes that remanufacturing sectors substitute labor and transport services for the usual inputs such as raw materials and semi finished goods we find that remanufacturing may satisfy the same final demand from all sectors requiring fewer intermediate resources with proportionally higher demand of labor

export sectors and rural development the export base hypothesis is that a region s growth is led by export demand given perfectly elastic factor supplies it is a rationale for sector based rural development policies and it is formalized by input output models but it is contested by modern trade migration and growth theories and there is little research about its empirical relevance we investigate the hypothesis for contemporary u s rural development by estimating the influence of export sector employment on subsequent rural development outcomes the results reject the hypothesis that emphasizing traditional export employment results in rural growth reject the assumption of perfectly elastic factor supply and support alternative explanations copyright 2009 oxford university press

a test of the theory of exhaustible resources an empirical test of the theory of exhaustible resources requires an estimate of the time path of the shadow price of the unextracted resource that generally is not observable because of the prevalence of vertical integration in natural resource industries in this paper we use duality theory to derive an econometric model that provides a statistical test of the theory of exhaustible resources a restricted cost function is used to obtain estimates of the shadow prices of unextracted resources the procedure is illustrated with data for the canadian metal mining industry for this industry the empirical implications of the theory of exhaustible resources are strongly rejected

international trade and the sustainability footprint a practical criterion for its assessment a simple and minimal criterion for sustainability is that the value of natural capital plus manufactured capital be not decreasing on the basis of any individual country or region the above simple comparison may be misleading as it does not take account of the production of goods for consumption in other countries regions via international trade in other terms the full environmental footprint of a country may not be properly assessed a method of calculating a weak sustainability criterion has been established for both a closed economy approach and an open economy approach there are significant differences between the open and closed economies measures for several regions particularly the middle east overall global sustainability on this criterion has been positive and increasing using a difference equation approach a further analysis has been made of the average proportional rate of change of global sustainability between 1980 and 1990 and its various regional and structural components have been determined these indicate that most of global sustainability growth can be attributed to western europe other asia and japan particularly through high savings ratios the usa on the other hand has made a very small net contribution to the growth in global sustainability

immigrants and the making of america we study the effects of european immigration to the u s during the age of mass migration 1850 1920 on economic prosperity exploiting cross county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income less poverty less unemployment higher rates of urbanization and greater educational attainment today the long run effects seem to capture the persistence of short run benefits including greater industrialization increased agricultural productivity and more innovation

the cost of doing business in africa evidence from enterprise survey data summary data from the world bank enterprise surveys show that indirect costs related to infrastructure and services account for a relatively high share of firms costs in poor african countries and pose a competitive burden on african firms we estimate firm level revenue and value added functions for six industries in 17 developing countries demonstrating that firm performance is sensitive to the cost of indirect inputs as indirect inputs are not usually included in estimations of value added we argue that existing estimates understate the relative performance of african manufacturing firms

using performance on the job to inform teacher tenure decisions the notion that some high stakes need to be attached to direct measures of teachers class room performance as a control for quality in the work force is an idea gaining traction in public education one such proposal prescribes low ering the barriers to entry into teaching while simultaneously being more selective about which teachers are retained when they become eligible for tenure robert gordon thomas j kane and douglas o staiger 2006 eric a hanushek 2009

searching for effective teachers with imperfect information teaching may be the most scrutinized occupation in the economy over the eaching may be the most scrutinized occupation in the economy over the past four decades empirical researchers many of them economists have past four decades empirical researchers many of them economists have accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers the heteroaccumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers the heterogeneity in teacher productivity the rise in productivity associated with teaching geneity in teacher productivity the rise in productivity associated with teaching credentials and on the job experience rates of turnover the costs of recruitment credentials and on the job experience rates of turnover the costs of recruitment the relationship between supply and quality the effect of class size and the monetary the relationship between supply and quality the effect of class size and the monetary value of academic achievement gains over a student s lifetime since the passage value of academic achievement gains over a student s lifetime since the passage of the no child left behind act along with a number of state level educational of the no child left behind act along with a number of state level educational initiatives the data needed to estimate individual teacher performance based on initiatives the data needed to estimate individual teacher performance based on student achievement gains have become more widely available however there have student achievement gains have become more widely available however there have been relatively few efforts to examine the implications of this voluminous literature been relatively few efforts to examine the implications of this voluminous literature on teacher performance in this paper we ask what the existing evidence implies on teacher performance in this paper we ask what the existing evidence implies for how school leaders might recruit evaluate and retain teachers for how school leaders might recruit evaluate and retain teachers we begin by summarizing the evidence on fi ve key points referring to existing we begin by summarizing the evidence on fi ve key points referring to existing work and to evidence we have accumulated from our research with the nation s work and to evidence we have accumulated from our research with the nation s two largest school districts los angeles and new york city first teachers display two largest school districts los angeles and new york city first teachers display considerable heterogeneity in their effects on student achievement gains the stanconsiderable heterogeneity in their effects on student achievement gains the standard deviation across teachers in their impact on student achievement gains is on dard deviation across teachers in their impact on student achievement gains is on the order of 0 1 to 0 2 student level standard deviations which would improve the the order of 0 1 to 0 2 student level standard deviations which would improve the

growth theory and industrial revolutions in britain and america abstract long run economic growth has again become a major focus of economic theory a perception of technological change as an economic process with externalities has motivated the development of aggregate models that generate different steady state growth paths economic history has also long been interested in long run economic growth here a dialogue is presented between growth theory and the historical literature on the industrial revolution in britain and america s surge to international economic leadership in the late nineteenth century in conclusion economists recent thinking about the microeconomics of technological change has provided fruitful material for the economic historian of growth unfortunately the models of endogenous growth on the other hand present too aggregated a view of the economy to prove helpful when confronted with the details of economic history jel classification n0 n1 1 theorie de la croissance et revolutions industrielles en grande bretagne et en amerique la croissance economique a long terme est redevenue un point d interet majeur pour la theorie economique une perception du changement technologique comme processus economique porteur d externalites a engendre le developpement de modeles agreges qui generent differents sentiers de croissance en regime permanent l histoire economique s interesse depuis longtemps a la croissance economique a long terme ce texte engage le dialogue entre la theorie de la croissance et la litterature historique a propos de la revolution industrielle en grande bretagne et de l emergence de l amerique au statut de leader international a la fin du dix neuvieme siecle on en arrive a la conclusion que les recents developpements dans la pensee economique a propos de la micro economie du changement technologique ont produit des resultats utiles pour l histoire economique de la croissance malheureusement d autre part les modeles de croissance endogene presente une vue trop agregee de l economie pour s averer utile dans l examen des details de l histoire economique

the citizen versus consumer distinction an exploration of individuals preferences in contingent valuation studies abstract contingent valuation has been used extensively in estimating the value of environmental goods one criticism of this approach however is that respondents in referendum style contingent valuation surveys may express citizen assessments that take into account benefits to others rather than benefits that accrue purely to the respondent themselves within this context the aim of this paper is to examine to what extent individuals express different preferences when adopting a personal or a social citizen perspective while this paper provides some support for the hypothesis that individuals express different preferences when adopting collective as opposed to personal choices reported willingness to pay wtp was found to be insensitive to whether or not the respondents were asked the wtp question from a personal or social perspective

scarcity resource price uncertainty and economic growth over the course of the past decade significant steps have been taken to empirically link indicators of resource scarcity to changes in economic growth this paper extends this previous literature in two ways first rather than concentrating exclusively on energy we focus on the technological change embodied in the prices of an array of complementary natural resource inputs second we investigate using g arch methods the importance of resource price uncertainty as well as resource price levels on aggregate economic growth we find that output growth is significantly influenced by both resource price levels and resource price uncertainty

variable costs and the visible hand the re regulation of electricity supply 1932 37 national transmission grid and rationalize uk electricity generation a constrained cost model estimates the gains from this re regulation of the electricity generating industry the new regime reduced costs by one third radically improving the utilization of capital and boosting the average scale of operations it did so by persuading private and municipal enterprises to accept central direction of the extent and timing of their electricity generation this voluntarism saved on enforcement costs but perhaps one half of the industry cost reduction the ceb actually achieved by 1937 was apparently forgone

modelling the energy output ratio abstract the elasticity of energy use with respect to national output has been estimated by various methods with sometimes seemingly contradictory results this study attempts to reconcile these various estimates by modelling the energy output ratio and deriving the corresponding cross section and time series elasticities from this model

pulled away or pushed out explaining the decline of teacher aptitude in the united states logic suggests that a teacher s value added is related to her academic aptitude it is therefore troubling that teachers aptitude has declined significantly in the united states since 1960 as demonstrated by sean corcoran et al 2002 combining longitudinal surveys they find a marked fall in teachers propensity to be in the top achievement quartile there are two main hypotheses for the decline in teacher aptitude first greater pay parity with males in nonteaching occupations may have drawn able women out of teaching second unionization may have compressed pay benefits and nonmonetary returns to aptitude in teaching and thereby pushed out high aptitude people in short there is a pull hypothesis pay parity in alternative opportunities and a push hypothesis pay compression in teaching the hypotheses are not mutually exclusive we need not choose between them instead we try to apportion blame to do this we need variation in the timing and size of the pull and push factors fortunately such variation exists among u s states our econometric identification relies on variation in labor markets and unionization laws among states at a point in time and within each state over time

how do patent laws influence innovation evidence from nineteenth century world fairs studies of innovation have focused on the effects of patent laws on the number of innovations but have ignored effects on the direction of technological change this paper introduces a new dataset of close to fifteen thousand innovations at the crystal palace world s fair in 1851 and at the centennial exhibition in 1876 to examine the effects of patent laws on the direction of innovation the paper tests the following argument if innovative activity is motivated by expected profits and if the effectiveness of patent protection varies across industries then innovation in countries without patent laws should focus on industries where alternative mechanisms to protect intellectual property are effective analyses of exhibition data for 12 countries in 1851 and 10 countries in 1876 indicate that inventors in countries without patent laws focused on a small set of industries where patents were less important while innovation in countries with patent laws appears to be much more diversified these findings suggest that patents help to determine the direction of technical change and that the adoption of patent laws in countries without such laws may alter existing patterns of comparative advantage across countries jel d2 k11 l51 no 014

on monopoly power in extractive resource markets abstract potential monopoly power in extractive resource markets is reduced by the depletability of reserves this paper examines the dependence of monopoly power on resource rent and on uncertainty over future reserve levels a model is developed that treats reserves as inventories that fluctuate stochastically over time as a result of exploration development and production activities solutions of the model illustrate how output and monopoly power vary with the elasticity of demand rent as a fraction of price and the variance of reserve fluctuations it is shown that uncertainty over future reserves can speed up production and by reducing resource rent restore part of the monopoly power otherwise lost because of depletion antitrust implications are discussed with reference to several resources

exploring the present through the past claudia goldin is one of the world s leading economists and economic historians and has made a series of outstanding and original contributions particularly to the cliometric or the new economic history literature in this interview professor goldin discusses with brian snowdon who first provides a background introduction several important issues relating to her research on economic history and cliometrics the economics of slavery us economic history corruption in america the role of human capital and education in us economic development wage inequality female labour force participation and the quiet revolution the influence of the contraceptive pill women s surnames the reversal of the college gender gap and women in the economics profession

production and environmental resources a prelude to an evolutionary framework the paper advances a framework to study the evolution of technology and institutions it is based on two simple tenets first the quality and quantity of environmental resources are defined and constrained by the regime of technology and institutions second the character and extent of innovations are informed and limited by the regime as well the framework is contrasted with neoclassical and ecological economics while the framework assimilates ideas from both paradigms it departs from them by stressing the importance of the technological institutional regime tir the two views ignore in different ways the significance of tir 46 the neoclassical program conceives the flow of innovations as tir independent while the ecological agenda regards the fund of resources as tir independent 1 consequently both camps fail to provide an endogenous account of the observed punctuated character of the evolution of tir neoclassical economists maintain that as a resource depletes its price rises which induces switching to a cheaper one encourages exploration or spurs invention harold barnett and chandler morse 7 11 state that nature imposes particular scarcities not an inescapable general scarcity the responses to environmental resource limitation are supposedly singular activities stripped from any underpinning regime the neoclassical disregard of tir heuristically resembles the fable of marie antoinette s folly in response to the scarcity of bread at the eve of the french revolution she advised according to legend buying cake instead ecological economists offer a different view of resource limits 48 for herman daly 21 8 nature really does impose an inescapable general scarcity while neoclassical economists emphasize relative limitation scarcity pricing ecological economists stress malthusian general limitation for ecological economists substitution can solve relative allocation but cannot solve general limitation general limitation can be avoided only if economic activity proceeded within certain boundaries or as put by martin o connor 69 within appropriate cyclical structure of resource transformations under the motto sustainable development a low pace production activity supposedly enables a population to replicate indefinitely ecological economists conceive

in search of homo economicus behavioral experiments in 15 small scale societies we can summarize our results as follows first the canonical model is not supported in any society studied second there is considerably more behavioral variability across groups than had been found in previous cross cultural research and the canonical model fails in a wider variety of ways than in previous experiments third group level differences in economic organization and the degree of market integration explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation the greater the level of cooperation in experimental games fourth individual level economic and demographic variables do not explain behavior either within or across groups fifth behavior in the experiments is generally consistent with economic patterns of everyday life in these societies

asking for individual or household willingness to pay for environmental goods implication for aggregate welfare measures the aggregate welfare measure for a change in the provision of a public good derived from a contingent valuation cv survey will be higher if the same elicited mean willingness to pay wtp is added up over individuals rather than households a trivial fact however once respondents are part of multi person households it becomes almost impossible to elicit an uncontaminated wtp measure that with some degree of confidence can be aggregated over one or the other response unit the literature is mostly silent about which response unit to use in wtp questions and in some cv studies it is even unclear which type has actually been applied we test for differences between individual and household wtp in a novel web administered split sample cv survey asking wtp for preserving biodiversity in old growth forests in norway two samples are asked both types of questions but in reverse order followed by a question with an item battery trying to reveal why wtp may differ we find in a test between samples that the wtp respondents state on behalf of their households is not significantly different from their individual wtp however within the same sample household wtp is significantly higher than individual wtp in particular if respondents are asked to state individual before household wtp our results suggest that using individual wtp as the response unit may overestimate aggregate wtp thus the choice of response format needs to be explicitly and carefully addressed in cv questionnaire design and further research in order to avoid the risk of unprofitable projects passing the benefit cost test

the theorems of international trade with factor mobility abstract this paper addresses the relation between goods trade and international factor mobility in general terms the basic theorems of international trade suitably interpreted are shown to hold in their strong versions if the number of international markets for goods and factors is at least as large as the number of factors the crucial dimensionality issue is hence not the relative number of goods and factors per se but the number of international markets relative to the number of factors only the price version of the heckscher ohlin theorem fails to be essentially preserved by this condition

forced coexistence and economic development evidence from native american reservations there are large differences in economic development across native american reservations today this paper asks whether these differences can be in part explained by the forced integration of historically autonomous sub tribal bands in the 19th century to measure forced integration i combine anthropological data on intra tribal political integration in pre reservation times with historical information on the constituent bands of each reservation exploring variation in how politically integrated tribes were before reservations and variation in how politically integrated reservations were at the time of their formation i find that forced integration lowers per capita incomes today by about 30 percent to account for potential selection into forced integration i exploit historical mining rushes as a source of exogenous variation in the government s incentive to combine bands onto reservations the iv strategy confirms the baseline results i also provide quantitative evidence on the channels through which forced integration affects incomes today

forging ahead and falling behind the rise and relative decline of the first industrial nation this paper considers britain s failure to maintain its lead in economic growth in the face of overtaking by the united states recent cliometric research is reviewed and it is argued that early nineteenth century britain had a low growth potential by twentieth century standards and that the american growth of the early twentieth century was of a quite different kind neither traditional nor new growth theories can encompass this experience and it is suggested that natural resource endowments location specific learning processes and the international migration of factors of production were central aspects of american overtaking of britain

ecosystems contingent valuation and ethics the case of wetland re creation this paper addresses a current issue in environmental valuation namely the extent to which environmental preferences depart from the usual economic paradigm to incorporate some lexicographic elements after a theoretical discussion the paper reviews attempts to explore this question empirically by supplementing contingent valuation analyses with an exploration of the motives behind willingness to pay responses including zero bids and refusals to answer this is followed by the presentation of new evidence investigating respondents willingness to pay for the creation of a wetland taken from 713 personal interviews of the british public 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

teacher accountability reforms and the supply and quality of new teachers abstract in recent years states have sought to increase accountability for public school teachers by implementing a package of reforms centered on high stakes evaluation systems we examine the effect of these reforms on the supply and quality of new teachers leveraging variation across states and time we find that accountability reforms reduced the number of newly licensed teacher candidates and increased the likelihood of unfilled teaching positions particularly in hard to staff schools evidence also suggests that reforms increased the quality of newly hired teachers by reducing the likelihood new teachers attended unselective undergraduate institutions decreases in job security satisfaction and autonomy are likely mechanisms for these effects

valuing the non use benefits of marine conservation zones an application to the uk marine bill abstract this paper presents the results of a stated preference choice experiment designed to estimate the non market benefits derived by uk residents from the conservation of ecosystem goods and services resulting from implementation of proposed marine conservation zones under the uk marine and coastal access bill 2008 the results inform an impact assessment that compares benefits to projected policy costs as demonstrated in a paper by hussain et al 2010 ex ante benefit estimation is complicated by the scientific uncertainty and data gaps that hinder the development of a bottom up valuation of the ecosystem goods and services provisioned by the policy a choice experiment approach provides an alternative top down valuation by approximating policy outcomes which are spatially remote from beneficiaries and therefore arguably only appreciated passively or in terms of non use or existence value for broadly defined attributes of the policy the choice experiment shows preferences for both halting the loss of or increasing marine biodiversity and the provision of other environmental services relative to current trajectories of decline survey respondents were indifferent to the levels of restrictions on activities needed to achieve these outcomes as a top down estimate of policy benefits the study suggests that welfare improvements from the marine bill significantly outweigh projected regulatory costs

teacher pay and school productivity exploiting wage regulation abstract the impact of teacher pay on school productivity is a central concern for governments worldwide yet evidence is mixed in this paper we exploit a feature of teacher labour markets to determine the impact of teacher wages teacher wages are commonly set in a manner that results in flat wages across heterogeneous labour markets this creates an exogenous gap between the outside labour market and inside regulated wage for teachers we use the centralised wage regulation of teachers in england to examine the effect of pay on school performance we use data on over 3000 schools containing around 200 000 teachers who educate around half a million children per year we find that teachers respond to pay a ten percent shock to the wage gap between local labour market and teacher wages results in an average loss of around 2 in average school performance in the key exams taken at the end of compulsory schooling in england

comparative advantage in uk manufacturing trade 1910 1935 this paper uses a maintained hypothesis of comparative advantage based on relative factor endowments to investigate uk manufacturing trade prior to world war ii the results from several independent tests indicate that britain exported goods intensive in the use of unskilled labour and had a comparative disadvantage in goods intensive in the use of human capital right up to the mid 1930s this is consistent with the views of contemporaries but somewhat at odds with recent optimistic assessments of structural change in pre war britain this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

adjusting for cultural differences in international benefit transfer values for non market goods can be expected to be sensitive to variations in the cultural contexts of beneficiaries however little progress has been made to date in adapting benefit transfer bt procedures for cultural variations using information from a study that ranked 62 societies with respect to nine attributes of their cultures we develop an index that is then used to re weight multiple coastal ecosystem service value estimates we examine whether these culturally adjusted bt estimates are statistically different than simply transferring the income adjusted mean transfer estimates for each coastal ecosystem service from international study sites to the policy site we find that once differences in income levels have been accounted for the differences in cultural dimensions between study and policy sites actually have little impact on the magnitude of our transfer estimates this is not a surprising result given that the majority of the study site estimates are derived from countries that share many ethnic linguistic and other cultural similarities to the policy site however benefit adjustments based on cultural factors could have a much higher impacts in settings different to that investigated here

explaining america s surge in manufactured exports 1880 1913 the united states became a net exporter of manufactured goods around 1910 after a dramatic surge in iron and steel exports began in the mid 1890s this paper argues that natural resource abundance fueled the expansion of iron and steel exports in part by enabling a sharp reduction in the price of u s exports relative to other competitors the commercial exploitation of the mesabi iron ore range for example reduced domestic ore prices by 50 in the mid 1890s and was equivalent to over a decade s worth of industry productivity improvement in its effect on iron and steel export prices the nontradability of american ore resulted in its distinctive impact on the pattern of u s trade the results are consistent with wright s 1990 finding that u s manufactured exports were natural resource intensive at this time

trends in natural resource commodity prices an analysis of the time domain abstract this paper attempts to reconcile the theoretical predictions of increasing real prices for nonrenewable natural resource commodities obtained from hotelling style models with the empirical findings of falling prices for these commodities a theoretical model for relative price movements is derived for the case of exogenous technical change and endogenous change in the grade of ores mined the model suggests a u shaped time path for relative prices the implied price movements are tested for all the major metals and fuels and the model parameters are found to be statistically significant for 11 out of the 12 commodities tested

the dynamics of resource based economic development evidence from australia and norway australia and norway have achieved modern levels of development as resource based economies thus avoiding the so called resource curse their ability to achieve this rested heavily on repeated diversification into new resource products and industries these processes relied largely on innovation confirming the close ties that have existed between resource based industries and knowledge producing and disseminating sectors of society we develop a resource based diversification model that analyses the interaction between enabling sectors and resource industries and apply it to the historical experience of the two countries

benefit transfer in europe how reliable are transfers between countries the benefits for specific health impacts related to air and water quality were measured in simultaneous contingent valuation surveys conducted in five different european countries consistent inter country differences in willingness to pay to avoid ill health episodes could not be explained by measurable differences in individual characteristics international transfer of unit values resulted in an average transfer error of 38 accounting for measurable differences among countries in health status income and other demographic measures either through ad hoc adjustments to the transferred values or through value function transfer did not improve transfer performance

on comparing monopoly and competition in exhaustible resource exploitation abstract it is widely believed that exhaustible resource monopolies do not enjoy as much market power as standard non resource monopolies and may even produce in a socially optimal way we argue that this paradoxical result arises from an inappropriate comparison methodology when similar assumptions are applied to the resource and the conventional cases we show that the resource monopoly behaves as expected i e restricts supply

a generalized input output model of an economy with environmental protection i nput output analysis can be extended to an economic system with antipollution measures to describe interdependency among economic sectors and antipollution sectors in the economy such a model was formulated by professor leontief 1970 as a system of equations extending his original input output framework this extended model has been extensively discussed by leontief and ford 1972 chen 1973 and leontief 1973 a linear programming problem of the extended model with substitutions was presented by lowe 1979 however counter examples with unrealistic solutions to the extended model were presented by flick 1974 and lee 1975 validity of flick s counter example was questioned by leontief 1974 and steenge 1978 there seems to be an unresolved question concerning the existence of a unique nonnegative set of output levels in the extended model for any given nonnegative levels of final demand and tolerated pollution the structural matrix of leontief s original input output model possesses two important properties 1 off diagonal elements are nonpositive 2 all principal minors are positive these two properties known as leontief properties guarantee the existence of a unique nonnegative solution to leontief s original model for any given nonnegative final demand the above mentioned problem of feasibility arises when the original model is extended to endogenize antipollution sectors and to set the total amount of pollution generated equal to the antipollution output level plus the tolerable pollution level in this paper we present a complementarity formulation of the economic system with antipollution measures that overcomes the problem of determining the existence and uniqueness of a feasible solution under leontief properties and derive conditions under which the present formulation guarantees these desirable properties when the structural matrix has some positive offdiagonal elements we apply the model to solve examples with different final demands and tolerated pollution levels including flick s counterexample to obtain realistic solutions

the resource curse and its potential reversal several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough we try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure using alternative measures of both resources and institutions and by studying different time periods while an institutional reversal is present in many specifications only ores and metals interacted with the icrg measure of institutional quality consistently have a negative growth effect but a positive interaction that turns the curse around when institutions are good enough

the origins of american industrial success 1879 1940 the united states became the world s preeminent manufacturing nation at the turn of the twentieth century this study considers the bases for this success by examining the factor content of trade in manufactured goods surprisingly the most distinctive characteristic of u s manufacturing exports was intensity in nonreproducible natural resources furthermnore this relative intensity was increasing between 1880 and 1920 the study then asks whether resource abundance reflected geological endowment or greater exploitation of geological potential it was mainly the latter jel 042 recent thinking about american economic performance has been marked by alarm over the country s loss of its competitive edge most of this discussion is not rooted in an understanding of the historical origins of the economic leadership now thought to be in jeopardy modern economists tend to assume that the american advantage has been technological and

a century of missing trade in contemporary data the measured factor content of trade is far smaller than its predicted magnitude in the pure heckscher ohlin vanek framework the so called missing trade mystery authors wonder if this problem has been there from the beginning that is authors ask if the heckscher ohlin theory was so much at odds with reality at its time of conception authors apply contemporary tests to historical data focusing on the major trading zone that inspired the factor abundance theory the old and new worlds of the pre 1914 greater atlantic economy this places autor s analysis in a very different context than contemporary studies an era with lower trade barriers higher transport costs a more skewed global distribution of the relevant factors especially land and comparably large productivity divergence these conditions might seem more favorable to the theory but the results are still very poor

from microscopic to macroscopic theories entropic aspects of ecological and economic processes abstract the paper discusses the relevance of thermodynamics and related theories to ecological economics it is argued that it is not useful to apply the entropy term directly to economic processes physical entropy terms defined on a microscopic level for isolated systems are quite far from economic and ecological reality only theories that deal with the development of open systems far from thermodynamics equilibrium provide the important link between entropy and evolution towards higher complexity major new impulses for ecological economics come especially from evolutionary ecological theories these quite recent theoretical approaches incorporate the knowledge of far from equilibrium thermodynamics and explain dynamic changes in ecosystems on a macroscopic level from a thermodynamic perspective thermodynamic approaches provide a heuristic base for the analysis of economy environment interactions important implications of these approaches concern time irreversibility ecological efficiency and the interdependencies of environmental problems and evolution

twenty thousand sterling under the sea estimating the value of protecting deep sea biodiversity the deep sea includes over 90 of the world s oceans and is thought to be one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world it supplies society with valuable ecosystem services including the provision of food the regeneration of nutrients and the sequestration of carbon technological advancements in the second half of the 20th century made large scale exploitation of mineral hydrocarbon and fish resources possible these economic activities combined with climate change impacts constitute a considerable threat to deep sea biodiversity many governments including that of the uk have therefore decided to implement additional protected areas in their waters of national jurisdiction to support the decision process and to improve our understanding for the acceptance of marine conservation plans across the general public a choice experiment survey asked scottish households for their willingness to pay for additional marine protected areas in the scottish deep sea this study is one of the first to use valuation methodologies to investigate public preferences for the protection of deep sea ecosystems the experiment focused on the elicitation of economic values for two aspects of marine biodiversity i the existence value for deep sea species and ii the option value of deep sea organisms as a source for future medicinal products