evolution of population resource dynamics models abstract this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of brander and taylor s 1998 model and its descendants from the following perspectives population growth substitutability innovation capital accumulation property rights and institutional designs and modeling approach this survey aims to contribute to a better understanding of population and resource dynamics models in general and facilitate further application of the model framework to relevant circumstances although often treated as exogenous in optimal growth models making population growth an endogenous function allows us to analyze broader effects of economic activities on population the issues of substitutability innovation and capital accumulation are intertwined allowing a model to address the effect of an endogenous technological change on substitutability between natural and man made capital facilitates our analyses of sustainability issues to address internalizing inter generational externalities in resource use incorporating property right changes and institutional designs to this type of model is a useful exercise but careful attention is needed for the consistency between such an arrangement and the mathematical representation of the depicted economy finally although the common criticism regarding convenient mathematical assumptions applies to the existing bt type models the use of computer simulation can relax such assumptions to better represent the intended relationships between the relevant variables

the intergenerational earnings and income mobility of canadian men evidence from longitudinal income tax data our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in canada we use income tax information on about 400 000 father son pairs and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0 2 earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than income mobility but nonparametric techniques uncover significant nonlinearities in both of these relationships intergenerational earnings mobility is greater at the lower end of the income distribution than at the upper end and displays an inverted v shape elsewhere intergenerational income mobility follows roughly the same pattern but is much lower at the very top of the income distribution

the fate of easter island the limits of resource management institutions abstract malthus malthus thomas 1798 1970 an essay on the principle of population penguin new york believed that population growth will eventually lead to natural resource depletion economic and social collapse and population decline brander and taylor brander james a taylor m scott 1998 the simple economics of easter island a ricardo malthus model of renewable resource use american economic review 88 119 138 use a predator prey model with an assumption of an open access resource they show that the collapse of easter island could be explained by a malthusian trap combined with technical characteristics of the resources they suggest that institutional change such as assignment of property rights could potentially have averted the collapse of easter island in this paper we show that even if the islanders had complete assignment of property rights and implemented optimal resource management with infinite horizon or equivalently had a social planner that implemented such an optimal plan as in neoclassical welfare economics a similar boom bust cycle would have occurred

viewpoint sustainability malthus revisited the sustainability debate concerns whether the world will experience stable or improving living standards for the foreseeable future or whether the current trajectory will overtax the natural environment leading to a crash in living standards this paper selec tively reviews relevant research focusing on both ecological concerns and technological progress and asks whether sustainability would be problematic without rapid population growth i suggest that continued demographic transition to lower fertility is the primary requirement for achieving sustainable development this is effectively a modern transla tion of malthus 1798 the paper also discusses the role of the malthusian cycle in human evolution jel classification q56 j10

the influence of economics on antitrust law economists today play prominent roles in formulating antitrust policy and litigating antitrust cases this paper explains why economics influences antitrust law and describes how economic theories enter and shape the antitrust system antitrust policy and doctrine change over time in response to developments in economic theory and the decentralization of the antitrust adjudication system and the wide latitude accorded judges in interpreting antitrust statutes ensure that legal rules will reflect advances in the economic literature concerning the appropriate content of standards governing business conduct i introduction twenty five years ago george stigler 1976 asked whether economists matter in the formulation of public policy a century of experience with the federal antitrust laws indicates that they do whereas assessments of their impact vary most observers regard economists as important participants in the antitrust system eisner 1991 emphasizes the modern imprint of chicago school economic perspectives upon antitrust enforcement and litigation rowe 1984 and hovenkamp 1989 show that economists and economic theory have influenced antitrust doctrine and policy throughout the period since the passage of the sherman act as a rough contemporary market test one can simply note the expanding number of economic consulting firms for whom antitrust counselling and litigation are staples of the practice 1 this allocation of society s resources is a reliable sign that economic analysis is significant in the prosecution and adjudication of antitrust cases this paper suggests why economists and economic learning matter to antitrust policy and describes how the work of economists affects antitrust litigation the discussion is divided into four parts the first identifies features of the antitrust system that permit or require economic ideas to be taken seriously the second part considers how antitrust relevant economic ideas are generated and absorbed into the antitrust system the third part examines factors that determine how deeply economic ideas influence antitrust adjudication the paper concludes by discussing how economics will influence the antitrust system in the sherman act s second century ii the openness of the antitrust system to economic ideas economic analysis influences antitrust litigation because the federal antitrust system is unusually permeable this permeability is the result of three important features of the antitrust system the first is the wide range of analytical criteria that courts are permitted to consider in resolving antitrust disputes federal judges play a central role in determining the content of the antitrust statutes outcomes under the sherman act depend crucially upon the construction of ambiguous terms such as conspiracy in restraint of trade and monopolize as salop and white 1988 37 point out the decision to cast the statutes in general terms has given judges substantial discretion to determine litigation outcomes by defining the content of the statutes operative terms in conferring this interpretive role upon the federal courts congress has allowed judges to devise standards of conduct at least in part by reference to the likely economic effects of various forms of business behavior despite sharp disagreement over the weight congress meant to accord productive and allocative efficiency as judicial decision making criteria 2 few scholars seriously argue that congress intended that courts treat such concerns as irrelevant economists would play a far less important part in antitrust adjudication if congress had precluded judicial consideration of efficiency in implementing statutory commands the open ended language and indeterminate goals of the antitrust statutes allow economists to affect adjudication and rule formulation to a degree unattainable under most other federal regulatory schemes

human capital inequality and growth a local perspective abstract a recent body of work has demonstrated the crucial role played by local human capital externalities and local school funding in generating socio economic segregation persistent poverty and low aggregate income or productivity growth we present a simple model which captures the main insights from this literature and prove three general propositions first minor differences in education technologies preferences wealth or minor imperfections in capital markets can lead to a high degree of stratification second stratification makes inequality in education and income more persistent across generations the same is true for total wealth provided the rich succeed in capturing the rents created by their secession finally this polarization or urban areas can be very inefficient especially in the long run

intergenerational correlations in labor market status a comparison of the united states and germany this paper uses data from the panel study of income dynamics and the german socioeconomic panel to calculate comparable measures of the intergenerational correlations of earnings hours and education in the us and germany the results indicate that there is remarkable similarity across the two countries in the correlations of earnings and of annual work hours of fathers and sons all of the correlations which involve women appear to be weaker in germany than the us perhaps due to the greater integration of women in the us into the labor market they find weak correlations in earnings and work hours for parent child pairs of different sexes in both countries they also find that intergenerational correlations in educational attainment are considerably stronger in the us authors

regression toward mediocrity in economic stature this paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons intergenerational data from the national longitudinal survey are used earlier studies conducted for the united states report elasticities of children s earnings with respect to parent s earnings of 0 2 or less suggesting extensive integenerational mobility these estimates however are biased downward by error contaminated measures of lifetime economic status estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0 4 this suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed jel j62

gender and the consulting academic economist we surveyed academic economists on their experiences and perceptions of legal consulting nearly two thirds have consulting experience and 40 have consulted within the last 5 years base hourly rates average 244 with a median of 200 women are less likely than men to have served as consultants and charge lower rates than comparable men but there are few differences by gender in willingness to consult women report substantially more negative bias and are less likely to consult in complex cases or to have a high profile role in litigation jel j44 j71 k41

economic and mechanical models of intergenerational transmission the author critically examines gary beckers attempt to integrate the theory of income distribution intragenerational differences with the theory of mobility intergenerational differences in an economic model of the family he assesses beckers claims of distinctiveness integration explanatory power and surprise and arrives at a rather skeptical view of the contribution that the core of microeconomics has made to this study of the family a reply by becker is included pp 514 8 excerpt

anarchy and its breakdown anarchy defined as a system in which participants can seize and defend resources without regulation from above is not chaos but rather a spontaneous order however anarchy is fragile and may dissolve either into formless amorphy or into a more organized system such as hierarchy under anarchy each contestant balances between productive exploitation of the current resource base and fighting to acquire or defend resources anarchy is sustainable only when there are strongly diminishing returns to fighting effort the decisiveness parameter is sufficiently low and incomes exceed the viability minimum these considerations explain many features of animal and human conflict

a theory of intergenerational mobility we study the link between market forces cross sectional inequality and intergenerational mobility emphasizing complementarities in the production of human capital we show that wealthy parents i

are there limits to growth a simple theoretical model of pollution is developed that generates an inverted u shape relationship between per capita income and environmental quality this model is then used to study long run growth the same inverted u shape is shown to appear in time series and the prospects for sustained growth are shown to hinge on whether increasingly strict environmental regulation is compatible with a constant rate of return on capital implementation is also studied tax and voucher schemes are shown to have an advantage over direct regulation because they provide the correct incentives for capital accumulation copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

coupled societies are more robust against collapse a hypothetical look at easter island inspired by the challenges of environmental change and the resource limitations experienced by modern society recent decades have seen an increased interest in understanding the collapse of past societies modelling efforts so far have focused on single isolated societies while multi patch dynamical models representing networks of coupled socio environmental systems have received limited attention we propose a model of societal evolution that describes the dynamics of a population that harvests renewable resources and manufactures products that have positive effects on population growth collapse is driven by a critical transition that occurs when the rate of natural resource extraction passes beyond a certain point for which we present numerical and analytical results applying the model to easter island gives a good fit to the archaeological record subsequently we investigate what effects emerge from the movement of people goods and resources between two societies that share the characteristics of easter island we analyse how diffusive coupling and wealth driven coupling change the population levels and their distribution across the two societies compared to non interacting societies we find that the region of parameter space in which societies can stably survive in the long term is significantly enlarged when coupling occurs in both social and environmental variables

intergenerational persistence of earnings the role of early and college education recent empirical evidence from the united states indicates a high degree of persistence in earnings across generations designing effective public policies to increase social mobility requires identifying and measuring the major sources of persistence and inequality in earnings we provide a quantitative model of intergenerational human capital transmission that focuses on three sources innate ability early education and college education we find that approximately one half of the intergenerational correlation in earnings is accounted for by parental investment in education in particular early education we show that these results have important implications for education policy

making sense of institutions as a factor shaping economic performance abstract there has recently been a resurgence of interest in how institutions affect economic performance a review of this literature reveals that the concept of an institution means different things to different scholars both within economics and across the social sciences we discuss what factors unify the different definitions of institutions and develop a concept of institutions useful for the analysis of economic performance and economic growth in particular specifically we develop the notion of institutions as standard social technologies economic growth results from the co evolution of physical and social technologies

intergenerational mobility in britain in this paper we use longitudinal data on children and their parents to assess the extent of intergenerational mobility in britain based on data from the national child development survey a cohort of all individuals born in a week of march 1958 we find that the extent of intergenerational mobility is limited we report an intergenerational correlation of the order 40 to 60 for fathers and sons and 45 to 70 for fathers and daughters in terms of labour market earnings and years of schooling an examination of quartile transition matrices between parental and child earnings outcomes reveals a similar pattern finally it seems on the basis of these transition matrices that there is an important asymmetry in intergenerational earnings mobility with upward mobility from the bottom of the earnings distribution being more likely than downward mobility from the top

toward a theory of induced institutional innovation in this paper we elaborate a theory of institutional innovation in which changes in the demand for institutional innovation are induced by changes in relative resource endowments and by technical change we illustrate from agricultural history how changes in resource endowments and technical change have induced changes in private property rights and in the development of non market institutions we also consider the impact of advances in social science knowledge and of cultural endowments on the supply of institutional change in a final section we present the elements of a model of institutional innovation that maps the relationships among resource endowments cultural endowments technology and institutions

patterns of intergenerational mobility in income and earnings this paper characterizes the patterns of intergenerational mobility in the united states using data for matched parent child pairs from the national longitudinal surveys in general what is found is far from the extremes of either perfect mobility or perfect immobility parents log income explains only about 9 percent to 11 percent of the variation in children s log incomes earnings exhibit more mobility than does total income and the difference is most striking for daughters the paper also identifies the influence of family background characteristics on mobility the addition of these background variables adds another 3 to 5 percent age points to the r2 in the intergenerational earnings and income regressions copyright 1992 by mit press

the theory of the firm as governance structure from choice to contract the propositions that organization matters and that it is susceptible to analysis were long greeted by skepticism by economists one reason why this message took a long time to register is that it is much easier to say that organization matters than it is to show how and why the prevalence of the science of choice approach to economics has also been an obstacle as developed herein the lessons of organization theory for economics are both different and more consequential when examined through the lens of contract this paper examines economic organization from a science of contract perspective with special emphasis on the theory of the firm

perspectives on positive political economy this volume serves as an introduction to the field of positive political economy and the economic and political processes with which it is concerned this new research tradition is distinct from both normative and historical approaches to political economy grounded in the rational actor methodology of microeconomics positive political economy is the study of rational decisions in a context of political and economic institutions more analytical than traditional approaches it is concerned with the derivation of principles and propositions against which real world experience may be compared its focus is on empirical regularities and its goal is theoretical explanation the field has focused on three main areas of research models of collective action constraints on competitive market processes and the analysis of transaction costs developments in all of these areas are covered in the book the first part of the volume surveys the field while the second part displays positive political economy at work examining a variety of subjects the final part contains essays by leading political economists on the theoretical foundations of the field

the approach of institutional economics this paper assesses the old institutional economics it emphasizes the importance of key old institutionalist themes concerning the necessity of habits and rules and the role of institutions a problem in the alternative theoretical program of the new institutionalism is the untenability of its assumption of an original institution free market or state of nature even optimizing behavior requires the prior existence of habits and rules although it still lacks a complete and systematic theory the evolutionary approach of the old institutionalists tackles the problem of the interactive relationship of actor to structure without analytical reduction to one or the other

the intergenerational effects of worker displacement this article uses variation induced by firm closures to explore the intergenerational effects of worker displacement using a canadian panel of administrative data that follows more than 39 000 father son pairs from 1978 to 1999 we find that children whose fathers were displaced have annual earnings about 9 lower than similar children whose fathers did not experience an employment shock they are also more likely to receive unemployment insurance and social assistance the estimates are driven by the experiences of children whose family income was at the bottom of the income distribution

games economists play a noncooperative view for some thirty years following world war ii most bright young economists did not go into industrial organization it was not hard to see why this was so the quick big payoffs in economics tend to go to theorists and industrial organization was a subject in which theory was not only unsatisfactory but moribund the promise of the chamberlin robinson revolution of the early 1930s had not been fulfilled and while institutional and verbaltheoretic writings on the subject were sometimes illuminating there was no hard analytic theory formalizing the structure conduct performance paradigm oligopoly in particular showed no signs of analytic tractability today the atmosphere is altogether different the profession is full of young theorists whose principal occupation is industrial organization indeed industrial organization has become the hot topic for microtheorists journals meetings and seminars abound in research on oligopoly and judging by the market this is a booming industry of course the principal reason for the change is the rise of game theory and its applications in these areas von neumann and morgenstern s great work was published in 1944 and hailed immediately by theorists von neumann and morgenstern 1944 jacob marschak indeed stated in reviewing it marschak 1946 p 1 15 ten more such books and the progress of economics is assured nevertheless it was not until the last decade that game theory came to the ascendant as the premier fashionable tool of microtheorists that ascendancy appears fairly complete bright young theorists today tend to think of every problem in game theoretic terms including problems that are easier to deal with in other forms every department feels it needs at least one game theorist or at least one theorist who thinks in game theoretic terms oligopoly theory in particular is totally dominated by the game theoretic approach the field appears to be in an exciting stage of ferment to understand why i believe that such excitement is not warranted it is necessary to step back briefly review the history of oligopoly theory before the game theory revolution and consider what it is that one wants theory to deliver

on the collapse of historical civilizations to explain the collapse of historical civilizations scholars typically point to suboptimal behaviors including misunderstanding the natural environment shortsightedness or a lack of institutions we examine the collapse of four historical societies with a model of endogenous population growth and renewable resources employing components of optimal resource management economic growth theory and the moral philosophy of social welfare function choice we find that these collapses may have been socially optimal further we show that the transient behavior of the system is more sensitive to assumptions than the equilibrium behavior and that focusing solely on equilibria may miss key insights copyright 2009 oxford university press