intertemporally consistent shadow prices in an open economy estimates for cyprus abstract in the practical estimation of shadow prices the assumption that the economy is on a steady state growth path is often invoked usually implicitly most developing countries are far from this trajectory we derive shadow prices where the dynamic evolution of the economy is endogenously determined important influences being initial conditions and the constraints on foreign borrowing hence the resulting dated shadow prices of tradeables nontradeables labor and the accounting rate of interest ari are mutually consistent estimates for the republic of cyprus show that derivations from steady state growth can be significant leading to large fluctuations in the ari and thereby making the timing of investment projects crucial

sequential bargaining as a noncooperative foundation for walrasian equilibrium allocation are weakly preferred to those obtainable from the initial endowments by means of the given set of net trades these conditions are similar to ones studied by schmeidler and vind 1972 and vind 1978 but here they are thought of as characterizing the set of net trades available in steady state equilibria of market games like those studied by douglas gale 1984 1985 1986a 1986b and 1986c the characterization result is used as a key step in the proof of results like gale s the allocations induced by steady state equilibria are walrasian for the economy given by the constant flow of new agents into the market our approach generalizes the one followed in gale 1986c and allows us to dispense with assumptions made in previous treatments for example gale s 1986a assumption of dispersed characteristics is dropped we also demonstrate that such a result depends on the assumption that agents cannot observe the past behavior of agents with whom they trade

project evaluation by potential tax reform abstract shadow prices are derived for small open economies with several production sectors experiencing constant returns to scale small projects affect the balance of trade domestic prices of non traded goods and factors and sector scales only domestic prices affect welfare and only if there is not domestic price equalization generally a project s net benefits depend upon the potential tax and tariff reform made possible or necessary through the balance of trade effect border prices are right for traded goods but domestic good shadow pricing requires knowing the direction of at least one reversible available tax reform and presuming optimality with respect to available reforms

the shadow wage rate theory and application abstract this paper investigates the relationship between recent theoretical work on the shadow wage rate in a tax distorted economy and the border price equivalent methods recommended by little and mirrlees and widely used in project appraisal manuals and empirical applications

limit theorems for markets with sequential bargaining this paper models trade as a non coopertative strategic game played at an inlinite sequence of dates a single indivisible commodity is traded buyers and sellers have transferable utility and are characterized by their reservation utilities they meet at random and bargain over the price at which a single unit of the good will be exchanged under a variety of circumstances it is shown that as the costs of search and bargaining become negligible the outcome of the game converges to the competitve flow equilibrium even when there is complete information journal of economic literature classification numbers 022 19x7

foreign exchange equivalence and project appraisal procedures this paper investigates the implications of different adjustment mechanisms for shadow pricing traded and nontraded goods in a flexible price model a foreign exchange equivalent rule that can be readily adapted whatever the adjustment mechanism is derived it is shown that traded commodities are always valued at border prices and nontraded commodities can always be shadow priced in terms of changes in production and consumption of traded goods valued at border prices the role of the shadow exchange rate and the implications for measuring the balance of payments effect when no tax adjustment policy is assumed are also discussed copyright 1990 by royal economic society

shadow pricing with suboptimal policy rules abstract this paper aims to clarify different views on the validity of the little mirrlees border price rule for project evaluation in a context where the government chooses its controls suboptimally in a systematic fashion the rule is shown to be valid quite generally for small public sector projects when the government s response restores market clearing in nontradeables and foreign exchange it can be invalid in contexts of a non market clearing or b private sector projects that generate profits distributed to households in the latter case special treatment of profit effects is required along the lines described by little and mirrlees 1974

existence of steady state equilibria in matching models with search frictions we prove existence of steady state equilibrium in a class of matching models with search frictions

shadow prices and substitution in trade distorted economies abstract this paper derives simple and operational shadow pricing rules in a three sector three factor general equilibrium model incorporating nontraded goods under the little mirrlees method if a single simple and empirically plausible condition is satisfied the accounting ratio for land will exceed unity and those for capital and labor will lie below unity if this condition is not satisfied or cannot be verified it is still possible to fix some accounting ratios above or below unity just from knowledge of the signs of substitution patterns in consumption and factor intensity patterns in production guidelines are also derived for setting the shadow prices of nontraded goods or quota restricted imports it is shown that the alternative domestic price method generally yields less useful guidelines than the little mirrlees method

the role of business subsidies in job creation of start ups gazelles and incumbents this study contributes to the empirical literature concerning the role of business subsidies in job creation our empirical analysis using an extensive firm level data suggests that the impact of business subsidies on employment growth differs more between high growth start ups and other firms than between start ups and incumbents on average all subsidies relate positively to the contemporary employment growth for both start ups and incumbents furthermore after subsidy reception the employment of both start ups and older incumbents receiving employment or other subsidies grows more than that of non subsidized firms however we find that business subsidies do not provide a significant additional boost to either contemporary or after subsidy growth for young high growth companies there are apparently some other factors that promote growth in young high growth firms these factors help foster strong growth in many cases with or without subsidies

the theory of taxation for developing countries tax policy has far reaching implications for economic development and public administration this book which presents a modern theory of public finance brings together many of the most distinguished economists who have written on the subject they provide coherent principles for tax design and a systematic framework for the analysis of practical questions of tax reform and pricing policy in developing countries the book is especially timely as countries experience increasing shortages of government revenue and the distortions brought about by poorly designed tax systems it pays particular attention to the special problems of developing countries such as the taxation of agriculture the aim throughout is to develop techniques that can be quantitatively applied given the data available and empirical case studies illustrate the methods in action the authors analyze the links between tax theory social cost benefit analysis and the pricing of publicly supplied goods and services they also explore the empirical and econometric problems of identifying the tradeoffs between equity and efficiency other topics treated include the analysis of labor markets the taxation of foreign private investment and of fuel and the pricing of education although the models used concentrate on developing countries most of the methods and discussion apply as well to the problems of more affluent countries

the politician and his banker should the european union grant state aid through an institution like the european investment bank this paper evaluates the efficiency of different measures for granting state aid we use a theoretical model with firms that differ in their creditworthiness and compare different types of subsidies with indirect subsidization through public banks we find that in a large parameter range the politician prefers public banks to direct subsidies because they avoid windfall gains to entrepreneurs and they economize on screening costs for similar reasons they may increase social welfare relative to subsidies one important prerequisite for this result is that public banks must not be allowed to fully compete with private banks however from a welfare perspective a politician uses public banks inefficiently often

r d support programs in developing countries the turkish experience in this study the determinants of private r d investment are examined at the level of firms in the turkish manufacturing industry we focus our attention on the effect of public r d support programs our findings indicate that public r d support significantly and positively affects private r d investment there seems to be even an acceleration effect on firm financed r d expenditures smaller r d performers benefit more from r d support and perform more r d in addition technology transfer from abroad and domestic r d activity show up as complementary processes given the scarcity of studies on r d support in technologically weaker economies our hope is that the less developed countries can exploit these findings in constructing socially beneficial technology policies

housing crowding in developing countries and willingness to pay for additional space the case of korea the very rapid rate of urban population growth in developing countries is placing great strain on their housing stock housing policies which aim at reducing or eliminating crowding are generally based on notions of needs and standards of adequacy which are more often based on arbitrarily selected criteria than on domestic economic conditions this paper attempts to evaluate the willingness to pay for additional housing space by households and the validity of target housing standards the paper uses three different estimation procedures each with its own strengths and conceptual limitations to determine whether they yield consistent estimates of household willingness to pay for space they show consistently that the willingness to pay for additional space is less than 25 percent of the value of an extra unit of space everything else being equal

the economic environment and public enterprise behaviour belgian railroads 1950 86 the purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of variations in the economic environment on allocatively inefficient behaviour by public enterprises and to measure the implications of both allocative and technical inefficiency for the firm s costs and factor use empirical results for the belgian railroad company suggest the importance of unemployment and the pressure experienced by managers to reduce the deficit as explanatory variables of allocative inefficiency the implications of inefficiencies for factor use are found to be substantial although the associated costs are quite small

efficiency and voluntary implementation in markets with repeated pairwise bargaining we examine a simple bargaining setting where heterogeneous buyers and sellers are repeatedly matched with each other we begin by characterizing efficiency in such a dynamic setting and discuss how it differs from efficiency in a centralized static setting we then study the allocations which can result in equilibrium when the matched buyers and sellers bargain through some extensive game form we take an implementation approach characterizing the possible allocation rules which result as the extensive game form is varied we are particularly concerned with the impact of making trade voluntary imposing individual rationality on and off the equilibrium path no buyer or seller consummates an agreement which leaves them worse off than the discounted expected value of their future rematching in the market finally we compare and contrast the efficient allocations with those that could ever arise as the equilibria of some voluntary negotiation procedure

assortative matching with explicit search costs in this paper i analyze a decentralized search and matching economy with transferable utility composed of heterogeneous agents i explore whether becker s assortative matching result generalizes to an economy where agents engage in costly search in an economy with explicit additive search costs complementarities in joint production supermodularity of the joint production function lead to assortative matching this is in contrast to previous literature which had shown that in a search economy with discounting assortative matching may fail even when the joint production function is supermodular

dynamic matching and bargaining games a general approach this paper presents a new characterization result for competitive allocations in quasilinear economies this result is informed by the analysis of non cooperative dynamic search and bargaining games such games provide models of decentralized markets with trading frictions a central objective of this literature is to investigate how equilibrium outcomes depend on the level of the frictions in particular does the trading outcome become walrasian when frictions become small existing specifications of such games provide divergent answers the characterization result is used to investigate what causes these differences and to generalize insights from the analysis of specific search and bargaining games

the effects of public r d subsidies on firms innovation activities the case of eastern germany this study analyzes the effects of public r d policy schemes on the innovation activities of firms in eastern germany the main question in this context is whether public funds stimulate r d activities or simply crowd out privately financed r d empirically we investigate the average causal effects of all public r d schemes in eastern germany using a nonparametric matching approach compared to the case in which no public financial means are provided it turns out that firms increase their innovation activities by about four percentage points

bargaining in dynamic markets abstract we study non stationary markets in which traders are randomly matched to bargain over the price of a heterogeneous good or the terms of a partnership the economy consists of a continuum of players drawn from a finite set of types players exogenously enter the market over time and exit upon trading at every date matching probabilities for each pair of types are determined by the endogenous distribution of trader types in the market the balance of bargaining power at any stage depends on variations in potential gains from trade the inflows of new traders the structure of agreements at future dates and the induced frequency of trading opportunities we establish that an equilibrium always exists moreover all equilibria that lead to the same evolution of the economy are payoff equivalent however we show that multiple self fulfilling expectations about the trajectory of the economy generating distinct equilibrium dynamics and payoffs may coexist

do financial constraints hold back innovation and growth evidence on the role of public policy abstract this paper provides evidence that capital market imperfections hold back innovation and growth and that public policy can complement capital markets we deliver the evidence by studying the effects of government funding on the behavior of smes in finland by adapting the methodology recently proposed by rajan and zingales rajan r g zingales l 1998 financial dependence and growth american economic review 88 pp 559 587 to firm level data we show that government funding disproportionately helps firms from industries that are dependent on external finance we demonstrate that the result is economically significant and robust to a variety of tests

is public r d a complement or substitute for private r d a review of the econometric evidence is public r d spending complementary and thus additional to private r d spending or does it substitute for and tend to crowd out private r d conflicting answers are given to this question we survey the body of available econometric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years a framework for analysis of the problem is developed to help organize and summarize the findings of econometric studies based on time series and cross section data from various levels of aggregation laboratory firm industry country the findings overall are ambivalent and the existing literature as a whole is subject to the criticism that the nature of the experiment s that the investigators envisage is not adequately specified we conclude by offering suggestions for improving future empirical research on this issue

dynamic matching two sided incomplete information and participation costs existence and convergence to perfect competition consider a decentralized dynamic market with an infinite horizon and participation costs in which both buyers and sellers have private information concerning their values for the indivisible traded good time is discrete each period has length and each unit of time continuums of new buyers and sellers consider entry traders whose expected utility is negative choose not to enter within a period each buyer is matched anonymously with a seller and each seller is matched with zero one or more buyers every seller runs a first price auction with a reservation price and if trade occurs both the seller and the winning buyer exit the market with their realized utility traders who fail to trade continue in the market to be rematched we characterize the steady state equilibria that are perfect bayesian we show that as converges to zero equilibrium prices at which trades occur converge to the walrasian price and the realized allocations converge to the competitive allocation we also show the existence of equilibria for sufficiently small provided the discount rate is small relative to the participation

the pre programme earnings dip and the determinants of participation in a social programme implications for simple programme evaluation strategies the key to estimating the impact of a programme is constructing the counterfactual outcome representing what would have happened in its absence this problem becomes more complicated when agents such as individuals firms or local governments self select into the programme rather than being exogenously assigned to it this paper uses data from a major social experiment to identify what would have happened to the earnings of self selected participants in a job training programme had they not participated in it we investigate the implications of these earnings patterns for the validity of widely used before after and difference in differences estimators

relative shadow prices and the shadow exchange rate abstract the divergent conclusions that have been reached in the literature as to the role of the shadow exchange rate in project appraisal are reconciled in this paper it is shown that the shadow exchange rate is not needed to assess the relative shadow prices of either traded or nontraded goods

equilibrium in a market with sequential bargaining this paper considers a market where pairs of agents who are interested in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process and upon meeting initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction the basic bargaining problem is treated with the strategic approach the paper derives the steady state equilibrium agreements analyzes their dependence on market conditions such as the relative numbers of agents of different types and discusses their relations with the competitive equilibrium outcome and other results in the search equilibrium literature this paper considers a market that operates in the following way pairs of agents who have mutual interest in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process when two agents meet they initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction if two agents reach an agreement a transaction takes place and they leave the market of course the bargaining positions and hence the agreement reached in any particular meeting will be affected by the conditions prevailing in the market these will include the chances that each of the negotiating parties have of meeting other partners in the event that the agreement in the current negotiations is delayed also the expected length of time required to achieve an alternative transaction and the expected behavior of alternative partners the study of such a market mechanism is of interest for two reasons firstly it captures some realistic aspects of the trade in certain specific markets e g asset markets such as housing and some labor markets secondly it contributes to an understanding of the micro mechanisms of price formation and their role in shaping market outcomes in both cases the features studied are largely neglected in the traditional market equilibrium analyses the related literature includes the articles by diamond 4 5 diamond and maskin 6 mortensen 8 9 and zusman and bell 13 these articles consider markets of the type described above in which transactions are concluded at pairwise meetings of agents the major difference between our work and these articles is in the approach to the basic bargaining problem in the cited articles it is assumed that a meeting is concluded with an instantaneous agreement which divides the associated surplus in an arbitrary predetermined way when the surplus is assumed to be divided equally the division rule is in fact nash s axiomatic bargaining solution in contrast the present paper treats the basic bargaining problem with the strategic approach see rubinstein 19 which constitutes an attempt to look into the bargaining black box this approach explicitly models the time dimension of the bargaining process describes in detail the bargaining procedure and justifies the agreement as a perfect equilibrium in

r d and subsidies at the firm level an application of parametric and semi parametric two step selection models this paper analyzes the effects of public r d subsidies on r d expenditure in the german manufacturing sector the focus is on the question whether public r d funding stimulates or crowds out private investment cross sectional data at the firm level is used by apllying parametric and semiparametric selection models it turns out that public funding increases firms r d expenditure altough the magnitude of the treatment effect depends on the assumpions imposed by the particular selection model

project appraisal procedures and the evaluation of foreign exchange different procedures for evaluating foreign exchange have been suggested in the project appraisal manuals of unido and little and mirrlees while it is widely agreed that the manuals differ in their practical procedures there has been disagreement as to whether they are equivalent in principle using a model due to boadway we show that the manuals differ in principle the little mirrlees procedure can be given an interpretation which correctly values traded and non traded goods in project appraisal while the unido formula for the shadow exchange rate is not required when the balance of payments constraint is binding

r d in smes a paradox this paper has three objectives 1 to survey the relevant literature addressing the apparent paradox of research development investments carried out within small and medium enterprises 2 to provide focused summaries of the articles in this special issue 3 to draw some general conclusions in terms of policy implications

price dispersion in stationary networked markets abstract different sellers often sell the same good at different prices using a strategic bargaining model i characterize how the equilibrium prices of a good depend on the interaction between its sellers costs its buyers values and a network capturing various frictions associated with trading it in contrast to the standard random matching model of bargaining in stationary markets i allow agents to strategically choose whom to make offers to which qualitatively changes how the network shapes prices as in the random matching model the market decomposes into different submarkets and in the limit as bargaining frictions vanish the law of one price holds within but not across them but strategic choice of partners changes both how the market decomposes into different submarkets and the determinants of each submarket s price

a walrasian rubinstein and wolinsky model we provide a full dynamic analysis of a continuous time variant of rubinstein and wolinsky 1985 matching and bargaining model with unbalanced flows of buyers and sellers the focus is on the price limit as the frictions of search are removed it is found that a necessary and sufficient condition for the limit price to be walrasian at all times is the alignment of the initial buyer and seller stocks with the flows

project appraisal and foreign exchange constraints a comment a paper in this journal by blitzer dasgupta and stiglitz i98i hereinafter bds entitled project appraisal and foreign exchange constraints examines the implications of various non optimal macroeconomic adjustment policies for project evaluation the discussion is presented in terms of a simple two good one consumer economy with price distortions which lead the ratio of the domestic price of the exported good e to the domestic price of the imported good i to be greater than the internati onal price ratio it is argued that the resulting trade gap will force the government to pursue an adjustment policy which may take the form of taxation of income or commodities rationing or foreign borrowing and it is shown that the choice of policy will determine the appropriate shadow price formulae to be used in project appraisal the view that world prices provide shadow prices for traded goods is argued to be correct for some but not all of the macroeconomic policies considered this comment argues that the bds analysis fails to specify how tax revenue is to be incorporated in the model as a result the various policy options open to the government are not clearly brought out we set out below in section i an amplified version of the bds general equilibrium model which includes tax revenue and use it to show how the different adjustment mechanisms have to be related to the public sector budget constraint in section ii we reconsider their analysis and show that if either an income or a commodity tax on the importable is used to ensure public sector balance then world prices remain shadow prices for traded goods in section iii we make the point that the presence of import tariffs does not imply in the context of a real general equilibrium model that the balance of payments constraint will be violated the conclusion is drawn that endogenous foreign borrowing cannot be analysed without respecifying the basic bds model our comment is confined to the problem of shadow pricing traded goods in the bds model we do not consider rationing as a means of macroeconomic adjustment policy nor do we comment on their section iii where they analyse the additional problems which follow from introducing a non traded commodity into the model

the relationship between r d collaboration subsidies and r d performance empirical evidence from finland and germany this study focuses on the impact of innovation policies and r d collaboration in germany and finland we consider collaboration and subsidies as heterogeneous treatments and perform an econometric matching to analyze r d and patent activity at the firm level in general we find that collaboration has positive effects in germany subsidies for individual research do neither exhibit a significant impact on r d nor on patenting but the innovative performance could be improved by additional incentives for collaboration for finnish companies public funding is an important source of finance for r d without subsidies recipients would show less r d and patenting activity whilst those firms not receiving subsidies would perform significantly better if they were publicly funded copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

r d subsidies and productivity in smes this paper examines the effect of r d subsidies on labour productivity we use firm level data on finnish smes from 2000 to 2012 and apply a combined matching and difference in differences method to control for selection bias we find no significant positive effect on labour productivity over the five year period after a subsidy is granted however the results vary over time and indicate a 2 4 negative effect on smes annual productivity growth one to 2 years after the subsidy year nevertheless subsidies generate a positive employment effect and enhance firm survival additional scrutiny reveals that subsidies positively affect the human capital level of low skill firms

marriage and class here we consider a matching model where agents are heterogeneous and utilities nontransferable we utilize this framework to study how equilibrium sorting takes place in marriage markets we impose conditions that guarantee the existence of a steady state equilibrium and then characterize it several examples are developed to illustrate the richness of equilibria the model reveals an interesting sorting externality that can support multiple steady state equilibria even with constant returns to matching excerpt

how does probability of innovation change with firm age this paper looks at the probability of introducing innovations by manufacturing firms at different stages of their lives once differences related to activity and size are controlled for we examine how the probability of innovation varies over entry post entry ages and advanced ages of mature firms we also measure the association between exit from the market and pre exit innovation results show that the probability of innovating widely varies by activity and that small size per se broadly reduces the probability of innovation but also that entrant firms tend to present the highest probability of innovation while the oldest firms tend to show lower innovative probabilities some sets of firms with intermediate ages also present a high probability of innovation and exiting firms are clearly associated to lower levels of introducing process innovations

the theory of reform and indian indirect taxes abstract given a set of value judgements an initial state and a model of the economy one can ask whether some feasible tax change would increase welfare we do this by defining the marginal cost in terms of welfare of raising an extra rupee from the i th good the inverse optimum problem is the calculation of non negative welfare weights on households which imply that the initial state is optimum if no such welfare weights exist then a pareto improvement is possible we illustrate the concepts and results using data from the indian economy for 1979 1980 directions of tax reform for a number of specific social welfare functions and for pareto improvements are presented

tax reform from the gradient projection viewpoint abstract this paper examines the problems of gradual tax reform desirable small moves of the tax system are determined using the principles of the well known gradient projection algorithm three classical models of public finance are considered for each of them a continuous time dynamic process is exhibited along which the social welfare function increases until convergence to local second best extrema although the selection of trajectories according to the gradient projection method has some arbitrariness it leads to intuitively and economically appealing rules such as a tax reform analog of the classical optimal taxation result on production efficiency

regional heterogeneity migration and shadow prices abstract this paper deals with some spatial influences on social scarcities first the existence of regional goods which usually implies differences in consumer prices second differences in preferences across locations and third a rigid wage in one region which may result in ex post inequalities among migrants who were identical ex ante it is shown that in general the shadow wage depends on regional differences in the cost of living and preferences and that the effect of a shift from ex ante to ex post social welfare on the shadow wage is unclear in this connection the assumption that the marginal product of labor is locally constant proves to be much stronger than is commonly recognized

shadow pricing of labor and capital in an economy with unemployed labor abstract this paper derives the shadow prices of labour and capital to be used in the public sector in a situation of unemployment the setting considered is that of a three good two period general equilibrium model then shadow prices are compared to their corresponding market prices and shown to closely depend on own and cross elasticities of supply and demand for labour and investment in the first part a rigid wage rate is the sole source of distortion then a tax on capital income is introduced so that our formula for the social rate of discount can be contrasted with that of harberger sandmo and dreze

when bureaucrats meet entrepreneurs the design of effective public venture capital programmes recently public efforts to finance small high technology firms have proliferated we review the motivations for these efforts and make some preliminary observations about their design we explore the underlying challenges that the financing of young growth firms poses the ways that specialised financial intermediaries address them and the rationales for public efforts to finance these companies the final section makes a set of observations about the ways in which the structure of these efforts can most effectively complement private sector activity a frequent fault in programme design is the presumption that technological criteria can be divorced from business considerations when evaluating firms the federal government has played an active role in financing new firms particularly in high technology industries since the soviet union s launch of the sputnik satellite in recent years european and asian nations and many us states have adopted similar initiatives while these programmes precise structures have differed the efforts have been predicated on two shared assumptions i that the private sector provides insufficient capital to new firms and ii that the government either can identify investments which will ultimately yield high social and or private returns or can encourage financial intermediaries to do so in contrast to other government interventions designed to boost economic growth such as privatisation programmes these claims have received little scrutiny by economists the neglect of these questions is unfortunate while the sums of money involved are modest relative to public expenditures on defence procurement or retiree benefits these programmes are very substantial when compared to contemporaneous private investments in new firms government programmes in this arena have been divided between those efforts that directly fund entrepreneurial firms and those that encourage or subsidise the development of outside investors in this paper i will focus on public venture capital initiatives programmes that make equity or equity like investments in young firms or encourage other intermediaries to make such investments in some such programmes such as the advanced technology program and the small business innovation research programmes discussed below the funds are provided as a contract or outright grant while these efforts have proliferated a consensus as to how to structure these programmes remains elusive while the design of regulatory agencies has been extensively studied from a theoretical and empirical perspective little work has

bargaining in stationary networks we study an infinite horizon game in which pairs of players con nected in a network are randomly matched to bargain players who reach agreement are replaced by new players at the same positions in the network we show that all equilibria are payoff equivalent the payoffs and the set of agreement links converge as players become patient several new concepts mutually estranged sets partners and shortage ratios provide insights into the relative strengths of the positions in the network we develop a procedure to deter mine the limit equilibrium payoffs for all players characterizations of equitable and nondiscriminatory networks are also obtained jel c78 d85 competitive equilibrium theory assumes large and anonymous markets in which every buyer can trade with every seller underlying these assumptions are standard goods and services that may be traded at low transaction costs by agents who are not in specific relationships with one another however in many markets goods and services are heterogeneous e g cars apartments or need to be tailored to particular needs e g manufacturing inputs technical support furthermore trad ing opportunities may depend on transportation costs social relationships infor mation advertising trust technological compatibility joint business opportunities free trade agreements etc in such cases it is natural to model the market using a network where only pairs of connected agents may engage in exchange new theories are needed to explore the influence of the network structure on market outcomes many questions arise how does an agent s position in the net work determine his bargaining power and the local prices he faces who trades with whom and on what terms when are prices uniform in the network one possible conjecture is that an agent s bargaining power is determined by his relative number of connections in the network however this simple theory is implausible consider the network of four sellers located at the top nodes and nine buyers located at the bottom nodes depicted in figure 1 assume that each seller supplies one unit of a homogeneous indivisible good each buyer demands one unit of the good and all buyers have identical values for the good the buyer located in the middle has the largest number of links in the network as he is connected to each

work incentive effects of taxing unemployment benefits before 1979 unemployment insurance ui benefits were not treated as taxable income in the united states several economists criticized this policy on the ground that not taxing ui benefits while taxing earned income allegedly encourages unemployed persons to conduct longer than socially optimal job searches since 1979 however ui benefits received by persons in higher income families have been subject to income tax this paper investigates whether the introduction of benefit taxation has had the predicted effect of reducing unemployment duration the study uses data on a sample of persons that filed for ui in 1978 or 1979 to examine whether high income claimants collected benefits for shorter periods after the tax change than they did before benefits became taxable as part of the empirical analysis the paper develops a generalization of the weibull distribution and applies a limited dependentvariable technique for this distribution similar to the tobit technique for the normal distribution despite some variation in the results from different model specifications the analysis presents persuasive evidence of a tax effect on unemployment duration the 1979 policy change is estimated to have reduced average compensated unemployment duration among the sampled high income claimants by about one week

do subsidies to private capital boost firms growth a multiple regression discontinuity design approach there is still little consensus among economists on the effectiveness of business support policies the evaluation of such policies requires a reliable identification procedure that is hardly achieved in empirical studies we analyse the impact of a policy instrument law 488 92 l488 the main italian regional policy that allocates subsidies to private firms by a multiple ranking system thanks to the peculiar l488 selection process that creates the conditions for a local random experiment we are able to assess the effectiveness of these types of incentives for a relevant subgroup of firms we propose a nonparametric multiple rankings regression discontinuity design that exploits the sharp discontinuities in the l488 rankings and extends the regression discontinuity design rdd approach to a context where the treatment is assigned by multiple rankings with different cut off points we find that the impact of the subsidies on employment investment and turnover is positive and statistically significant while the effect on productivity is mostly negligible the new subsidised capital is additional but non complementary with the owner financed investment the results are robust to different specifications and not due to intertemporal substitution

project appraisal and foreign exchange constraints a rejoinder in their comment on blitzer dasgupta and stiglitz i98i bds dinwiddy and teal i987 dt state that many of the points made in this note apply to bell and devarajan i983 however for clarity we confine ourselves to commenting on only bds the purpose of this note is to point out that none of dt s criticisms of the bds piece applies to our i 983 paper in fact we make essentially the same points using a somewhat more general model than dt our results are consistent with but not subsumed by those of dt and are therefore sometimes at variance with those of bds dt s main claim is that bds s assertion that the border price rule fails to hold when commodity taxation is used as the equilibrating device is false this stricture does not apply to our i 983 paper for in every single case we consider the relative shadow prices of the two tradeable goods are shown to be their relative border prices see our equations 22 and 23 28 and 29 and 33 and 34 dt show that when commodity taxation is the equilibrating device shadow prices are proportional to world prices in contrast to bds s claim we derive the same result in the case when the tariff on one of the tradeable goods is the equilibrating device p 474 moreover dt s specific criticisms of bds s treatment of the public sector s budget do not carry over to our model unlike bds we do specify how tax revenues are incorporated in the system see our equation i4 nor did we overlook the accounting relationship between the public sector budget deficit and the current account deficit 1 we state t he government s budget deficit or surplus registers an equal change in the government s net foreign assets through foreign borrowing or lending p 46i hence endogenous foreign borrowing in our model arises precisely in the case when the public sector s budget constraint is not satisfied due to tax rates and public expenditures being exogenously given to conclude while dt make several valid criticisms about the bds paper their attempt to tar our i983 paper with the same brush is unwarranted

steady states in matching and bargaining abstract we establish the existence of steady states in two classic matching and bargaining models with general trader asymmetries search processes and production functions

shadow prices for project evaluation under alternative macroeconomic specifications for purposes of social cost benefit analysis a project may be viewed as a disturbance to the economy displacing it from some initial equilibrium to a new one but the new configuration will depend on which particular variables adjust to restore equilibrium this paper examines the shadow prices for project evaluation under alternative assumptions about how equilibrium is restored when the government reacts by altering its foreign exchange reserves the shadow prices coincide with those advocated in the manuals on social cost benefit analysis however if the government adjusts its domestic expenditures or tariff rates the shadow prices will differ from those of the manuals except insofar as the relative shadow prices of tradeables remain their relative border prices the paper first presents the model followed by two cases in which domestic prices and wage rates do not vary because ad valorem tariffs are fixed and one case in which they are endogenous

employment innovation and productivity evidence from italian microdata italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their european competitors this paper presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor performance we use firm level data from the last three surveys on italian manufacturing firms conducted by mediocredito capitalia which cover the period 1995 2003 using a modified version of the model proposed by harrison jaumandreu mairesse and peters 2005 which separates employment growth rates into those associated with old and new products we provide robust evidence that there is no employment displacement effect stemming from process innovation the sources of employment growth during the period are split equally between the net contribution of product innovation and the net contribution from sales growth of old products however the contribution of product innovation is somewhat lower than that for the four comparison european countries considered by harrison et al

project appraisal procedures and the evaluation of foreign exchange a comment in 1986 dinwiddy and teal analyzed the shadow exchange rate ser in a tariff distorted small economy containing two traded and one non traded good contrary to their claim i maintain a ser is inherent to their model even if the balance of payments constraint is binding it equals the value of the marginal consumption basket at market prices divided by its value at world or foreign exchange equivalent fee prices shadow prices defined in welfare terms equal the products of the ser and 1 the world or fee prices of goods or 2 marginal products of factors at world prices copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

optimal taxes and the structure of preferences if optimal tax theory is to be the basis for calculating tax rates a close understanding is required of the relationship between the structure of preferences and the configuration of optimal tax rates otherwise hypotheses chosen by the econometrician for practical convenience may completely determine the results independently of measurement this paper explores the relationship between various types of separability particularly weak and implicit separability and optimal tax rates in the various models discussed in the literature the use of distance functions and the antonelli matrix provides a significant unification of previously disparate results in the final analysis optimal tax theory should be the basis for actual calculation of tax rates although recently there have been great advances in theoretical results and in our understanding of their meaning we are still some way from a working knowledge of whether uniform commodity taxes are in practice optimal or if not which commodities should be discriminated against present theoretical formulae do not yield clear cut results except in special cases and it has recently become clear that optimal rates depend crucially on the detailed structure of consumer preferences for example atkinson and stiglitz 3 show that with an optimal nonlinear income tax discriminatory commodity taxes are only necessary to the extent that individual commodities are not weakly separable from leisure more recently deaton 6 has shown that a similar result holds for what is perhaps the most interesting of the standard models that where there are many consumers and only a linear income tax and proportional commodity taxes are allowed in this case separability between goods and leisure together with linear engel curves for goods removes the need for differential commodity taxation in consequence nothing can be learned about commodity taxes from consumer demand studies in which commodity demands are explained conditionally on total expenditure and commodity prices and which assume linear engel curves all such studies require separability from leisure as a maintained hypothesis and so are consistent with uniform commodity taxation these results suggest that the prospects for meaningful empirical calculations of tax rates are bleak econometricians estimating commodity demand and labor supply equations make generous use of separability assumptions to enable estimation at all in consequence it is likely that empirically calculated tax rates based on econometric estimates of parameters will be determined in structure not by the measurements actually made but by arbitrary untested and even unconscious hypotheses chosen by the econometrician for practical convenience to remedy this situation and as a prelude to fruitful empirical work it is necessary to have a more explicit understanding of how preference structure affects optimal tax rates such is the object of this paper three different

evaluating projects and assessing sustainable development in imperfect economies we are interested in three related questions 1 how should accounting prices be estimated 2 how should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy 3 how can we check whether intergenerational well being will be sustained along a projected economic programme we do not presume that the economy is convex nor do we assume that the government optimizes on behalf of its citizens we show that the same set of accounting prices should be used both for policy evaluation and for assessing whether or not intergenerational welfare along a given economic path will be sustained we also show that a comprehensive measure of wealth computed in terms of the accounting prices can be used as an index for problems 2 and 3 above the remainder of the paper is concerned with rules for estimating the accounting prices of several specific environmental natural resources transacted in a few well known economic institutions

are firms that received r d subsidies more innovative this paper looks at the effectiveness of r d grants for canadian plants that already benefit from r d tax credits using a non parametric matching estimator we find that firms that benefited from both policy measures introduced more new products than their counterparts that only benefited from r d tax incentives they also made more world first product innovations and were more successful in commercializing their innovations

the social cost of labor and project evaluation a general approach abstract this paper presents a general framework for analyzing shadow wages in ldcs we focus on i the differences between the domestic and international prices ii the equilibrating mechanisms in the economy iii the endogeneity of earnings in industry and agriculture iv the consequences of industrial employment creation on agriculture and v the nature of migration and unemployment we identify those reduced form relationships which are central in determining the shadow wage and use them to obtain general formulae for the shadow wage these formulae can be specialized to alternative technological behavioral and institutional settings this yields many new results concerning the relationship between the shadow wage and the market wage also earlier results on shadow wages are derived as special cases of our formulae

the foreign exchange constraint suppression of the trade deficit and the shadow price of foreign exchange in a fix price economy abstract the foreign exchange gap is analysed as a possible feature of a fix price economy the implications of closing the gap by means of import rationing are then discussed finally a set of shadow rates of exchange is derived these shadow prices are conditional on the prevailing regimes and include the paradoxical possibility of a negative shadow rate of exchange

assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm r d investment a survey this survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public r d subsidies and private r d investment over the past five decades the survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues we aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity in particular we emphasise a set of issues that in our view are critical to understanding the potential effect of public r d subsidies on private r d spending special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm r d the constraints faced by the firm such as financial constraints and the amount and source of public subsidies none of these issues have been investigated in depth we formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field

is subsidizing entry an optimal policy public subsidies in support of new firm foundation are among the most frequently used instruments of industrial policy in the euro zone this paper analyses their effectiveness and efficiency vis a vis some features of the overall process of industry dynamics in italian manufacturing to this end the survival and growth patterns of new small firms are investigated using a unique dataset on electrical and electronic engineering in italy as regards survival our results confirm the findings of other studies namely that the hazard rates are particularly high in the early stages of firm s life cycle as far as growth is concerned the study s main finding is that gibrat s law fails to hold in the years immediately following start up when smaller firms must rush in order to achieve a size large enough to enhance their likelihood of survival conversely in later stages of firm s life cycle the law cannot be rejected these results radically question the use of subsidies as an optimal policy for the support of new entries since the subsidy brings about a major bias in the process of market selection including substitution and deadweight effects and hampers the post entry scale adjustment of newborn firms

r d investment of start up firms does founders human capital matter this article examines whether founders human capital affects not only actual investment but also required investment in research and development r d using the original data of japanese start up firms the estimation results indicate that higher levels of founders human capital especially their education levels increase both actual and required investment in r d and thus do not necessarily contribute to reducing the funding gap for r d

the politician and his banker how to efficiently grant state aid abstract politicians should spend money as efficiently as possible but what is the best method of granting state aid to firms we use a theoretical model with firms that differ in their success probabilities and compare different types of direct subsidies with indirect subsidies through bank loans we find that for a large range of parameters subsidies through banks entail higher social welfare than direct subsidies avoiding windfall gains to entrepreneurs and economizing on screening costs for selfish politicians subsidizing a bank has the additional advantage that part of the screening costs are born by private banks consequently from a welfare perspective politicians use subsidized banks inefficiently often

optimal investment choice for developing countries rational theory and rational decision making abstract this paper analyzes a key feature of the conceptual process that governments use for making major investment choices in the developing countries both through their direct investment activities and through the special incentives e g credit foreign exchanage and tax subsidies they provide governments typically play a large role in the allocation of investment resources in ldc s consequently the public investment choice process has significant effects on the efficiency of capital formation and on economic growth in developing countries although the feature of the investment choice process on which we focus has important theoretical and practical implications it has so far received little analytical attention

tax reform and temporary inefficiency abstract if any type of direct income redistribution is permitted a very weak condition ensures that it will not be desirable or necessary to permit production inefficiency in the process of a pareto improving tax reform inefficiency arises in models which make an implausible set of assumptions about the range of policies available to the government

estimating the benefits of targeted r d subsidies we study the expected welfare effects of targeted r d subsi dies using project level data from finland we model the application and r d investment decisions of firms and the subsidy granting decision of the public agency in charge of the program our model and institutional environment allow us to identify different benefits and costs of the r d subsidy program we find that expected effects of subsidies are very het erogeneous and estimated application costs low on average the social rate of return on targeted subsidies is 30 to 50 but spillover effects of subsidies are smaller than effects on firm profits

external sector closing rules in applied general equilibrium models abstract this paper examines formulations of external sector behavior adopted in some of the recent applied general equilibrium models in many cases these models are constructed for single economies and the model builder attempts to use a convenient external sector specification to close the model issues and difficulties with export demand and import supply functions for foreigners which satisfy trade balance and the modeling of small economy price taking behavior are explored

r d innovation and productivity new evidence from italian manufacturing microdata italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their european competitors this article presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor performance we use firm level data from the last three surveys on italian manufacturing firms conducted by mediocredito capitalia which cover the period 1995 2003 using a slightly modified version of the model proposed by harrison jaumandreu mairesse and peters harrison et al 2005 which separates employment growth rates into those associated with old and new products we find no evidence of significant employment displacement effects stemming from process innovation the sources of employment growth during the period are split equally between the net contribution of product innovation and the net contribution from sales growth of old products however the contribution of product innovation to employment growth is somewhat lower than in the four european countries considered in harrison et al 2005 and the contribution of innovation in general to productivity growth is almost nil in italy during this period

complementarities in innovation policy this paper develops a framework for testing discrete complementarities in innovation policy using european data on obstacles to innovation we propose a discrete test of supermodularity in innovation policy leading to a number of inequality constraints we apply our test to two types of innovation decisions to innovate or not and if so by how much we find that the evidence regarding the existence of complementarity in innovation policies depends on the phase of innovation that is targeted getting firms innovative or increasing their innovation intensity as well as on the particular pair of policies that is being considered the two phases of the innovation process i e the probability of becoming an innovator and the intensity of innovation are subject to different constraints interestingly there seems to be a need to adopt a package of policies to make firms innovate while a more targeted choice among policies is necessary to make them more innovative

high tech r d subsidies estimating the effects of sematech abstract sparked by concerns about their shrinking market share 14 leading u s semiconductor producers with the financial assistance of the u s government in the form of 100 million in annual subsidies formed a joint r d consortium sematech in 1987 using compustat data on all u s semiconductor firms we estimate the effects of sematech on members r d spending profitability investment and productivity in so doing we examine two hypotheses the commitment hypothesis that sematech obligates member firms to spend more on high spillover r d and the sharing hypothesis that sematech reduces duplication of member r d spending whereas the commitment hypothesis provides a rationale for the government subsidies the sharing hypothesis does not we find that sematech induced members to cut their overall r d spending on the order of 300 million per year providing support for the sharing hypothesis

markov equilibria in a model of bargaining in networks abstract we study the markov perfect equilibria mpes of an infinite horizon game in which pairs of players connected in a network are randomly matched to bargain players who reach agreement are removed from the network without replacement we establish the existence of mpes and show that mpe payoffs are not necessarily unique a method for constructing pure strategy mpes for high discount factors is developed for some networks we find that all mpes are asymptotically inefficient as players become patient