faculty ratings of major economics departments by citations the predominant ranking criterion for judging the comparative quality of economics departments has been the faculty publication record in a set of major journals in this tradition is a recent article which generates rankings based on volume of pages published in twenty four top journals during 1974 78 philip graves et al 1982 separate rankings are calculated for total and per capita contributions and credit is accorded to the institution at which the author is employed at the time of publication 2

socio economic characteristics and the effect of taxation as a health policy instrument abstract this paper analyses the quantitative effects of using economic instruments in health policy on the basis of price elasticities calculated from estimated demand systems the nutritional effects of various taxation schemes are compared for households in different age groups and social classes focusing on the consumption of saturated fats fibre and sugar it is generally found that the impact of price instruments is stronger for lower social classes than in other groups of the population with regard to age groups it is mostly the youngest that decrease their demand for saturated fat in response to price changes while it is mostly the middle aged who exhibit price responsiveness in their demand for sugar these groups are however not considered as key target groups for dietary regulation thus tax instruments may be effective in improving diets on average but the design of the instruments and the targeting of vulnerable groups with special needs should be done with care it should be noted that a tax on a single nutrient or food may have undesired effects on the demand for other food components though this may be avoided by introducing taxes subsidies on several food products simultaneously

formulating research policy on expert advice abstract national research assessments represent the principal policy used by countries with public university systems to improve the quality of their universities research they typically employ expert panels of local academics to assess journal quality and use such assessments to reward publications we propose a model of how experts assess quality and test this model using data from the recent australian assessment controlling for objective quality we show that experts cognitive biases dominate their assessments consequently such assessments exaggerate the quality of the experts research and understate that of their colleagues our model can explain 95 of the variation in assessments

the effect of using consumption taxes on foods to promote climate friendly diets the case of denmark abstract agriculture is responsible for 17 35 of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions with livestock production contributing by approximately 18 22 of global emissions due to high monitoring costs and low technical potential for emission reductions a tax on consumption may be a more efficient policy instrument to decrease emissions from agriculture than a tax based directly on emissions from production in this study we look at the effect of internalising the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions through a tax based on co 2 equivalents for 23 different foods furthermore we compare the loss in consumer surplus and the changed dietary composition for different taxation scenarios in the most efficient scenario we find a decrease in the carbon footprint from foods for an average household of 2 3 8 8 at a cost of 0 15 1 73 dkk per kg co 2 equivalent whereas the most effective scenario led to a decrease in the carbon footprint of 10 4 19 4 but at a cost of 3 53 6 90 dkk per kg co 2 equivalent the derived consequences for health show that scenarios where consumers are not compensated for the increase in taxation level lead to a decrease in the total daily amount of kj consumed whereas scenarios where the consumers are compensated lead to an increase most scenarios lead to a decrease in the consumption of saturated fat compensated scenarios leads to an increase in the consumption of added sugar whereas uncompensated scenarios lead to almost no change or a decrease generally the results show a low cost potential for using consumption taxes to promote climate friendly diets

patterns of co authorship among economics departments in the usa given the steady increase in co authored papers in economics journals this paper reports a study of the patterns of co authorship between us universities and colleges a majority of institutions produce more co authored than single authored papers contacts with researchers from the same institution are still an important source of co authored papers even though slightly decreasing in frequency the determinants of co authorship outside the own institution are tested in a gravity model and it is found that distance and other geographical variables do not matter however the quality of co authors institutions measured by rankings of institutions has a significant impact on the number of co authored papers in top economics journals

competition cooperation and innovation organizational arrangements for regimes of rapid technological progress abstract discussions of the link between firm size and innovation are outmoded because the boundaries of the firm have become fuzzy in recent decades strategic alliances constellations of bilateral agreements among firms are increasingly necessary to support innovative activities such alliances can facilitate complex coordination beyond what the price system can accomplish while avoiding the dysfunctional properties sometimes associated with hierarchy antitrust law and competition policy need to recognize that these new organizational forms are often the functional antithesis of cartels though they may have certain structural similarities a more complete understanding of bilateral contracts and agreements ought to reveal when and how cooperation can support rather than impede innovation and competition

habit formation interdependent preferences and demographic effects in the almost ideal demand system the authors model myopic habit formation interdependence of preferences among consumers and demographic effects as taste shifters in a micro consumer demand model of the almost ideal demand variety the model is estimated for dutch micro data the authors investigate the dynamic properties of the model and find that it behaves very differently from models without interdependence of preferences the implications for micro macro modeling are discussed copyright 1991 by royal economic society

weak separability and the estimation of elasticities in multistage demand systems the necessary conditions for multistage budgeting to be at least approximately justified are reviewed and the plausibility of these assumptions i e weak separability and low variability of price indices with utility level are discussed using no further assumptions simple relationships between expenditure and price elasticities in different budgeting levels are derived these results are applied to a three stage model for swedish food consumption and it is shown that the assumptions are not inappropriate restricting the analysis to the last stage of a multistage budgeting process is also shown to lead to considerable errors which could well have policy consequences

effects of food prices and consumer income on nutrient availability economic factors such as food prices and consumer income affect food choices with consequences for the availability of nutrients a new research model is developed to estimate how the availability of 28 nutrients would change as consumers alter their food purchases in response to changes in food prices and income through the interdependent food demand relationships

units of measurement and the stone index in demand system estimation the stone index typically used in estimating linear almost ideal demand systems is not invariant to changes in units of measurement which may seriously affect the approximation properties of the model a modification to the stone index or use of a regular price index instead are both desirable practices in estimating linear ai models

a dynamic auction for multi object procurement under a hard budget constraint this contribution revisits the problem of allocating r d subsidies by government agencies typically the applicants financial constraints are private information the literature has recommended the use of auctions in order to reduce information rents and thus improve the efficiency of how scarce public funds are allocated we propose a new open clock auction for this procurement problem this auction is strategically simple as it exhibits truthtelling in dominant strategies and satisfies ex post rationality while observing the budget constraint we test the auction in monte carlo simulation and discuss its applicability and limitations moreover we highlight connections to recent advances in computer science

ranking economics journals economics departments and economists using teaching focused research productivity author affiliation melody lo college of business university of texas at san antonio san antonio tx 78249 usa melody lo utsa edumc sunny wong department of economics university of san francisco san francisco ca 94117 usa mwong11 usfca edufranklin g mixon jr department of economics auburn university auburn al 36849 usa fmixon comcast net corresponding author acknowledgment the authors thank two anonymous referees of this journal john pepper and charles sawyer for helpful comments we thank helen au yeung subhashish sengupta and augustina pesci gonzalez for collecting the data used in this study the usual caveat applies 1 introductionprevious studies have accurately asserted that rankings of economists research output and economics departments can be just as important to academic economists as the espn football poll is to college football coaches gibbons and fish 1991 mixon and upadhyaya 2001 as a result of this importance economists have produced a substantial amount of research on individual department and journal rankings over the past 30 years much of this literature stream has examined the productivity of traditional forms of economics research in order to rank economists and institutions this study constructs new rankings of economics journals economics departments and economists that are based on i a tabulation of citations to economic education articles published in the economics literature since 1991 and ii a tabulation of the number of economic education articles and pages published since 1991 1 given this methodology our ranking emphasizes teaching focused research thus our construct offers an interesting alternative to economics journal department and faculty rankings that is based on the productivity of traditional types of economics research 2 journal ranking methodology and resultsto construct our teaching focused research ranking of economics journals departments and faculty we examined published articles that list one or more of the economic education classification codes from the journal of economic literature hereafter jel a200 a290 the jel redefined its classification codes for indexing economics research in 1991 so our ranking construct includes all jel classified journal articles in economic education from 1991 through april 2005 overall there are 1535 articles within our time frame table 1 lists the top 20 economics journals with regard to the quantity of production of economic education research of course some journals specialize in this area of economics research e g journal of economic education jee while others publish only an occasional piece in the genre e g economic inquiry ei thus the ranking in table 1 reflects this element at the top of the list with 429 articles since 1991 is the jee the american economic review aer is ranked fifth 54 articles while the journal of economic perspectives jep is 13th 24 articles a few well known regional associations general journals are also in the top 20 among these are the southern economic journal sej in seventh place 34 articles and ei in 16th place 16 articles table 1 teaching focused research productivity based on numbers of articles published top 20 economics journals table omitted see article image to account for the relative importance of economics journals in the field of economic education we first tabulate the number of economic education articles that are contained in the social sciences citation index ssci for each journal a total of 831 of the 1535 articles published since 1991 that list the jel codes for economic education are contained in the ssci next we identified the importance of journals in the field of economic education by examining total citations as well as total citations per article received by a journal s economic education articles published since 1991

keeping organizational secrets protective institutional mechanisms and their costs the notion that firms generate rents from proprietary knowledge is widely accepted however the mechanisms that firms as institutions can differentially deploy to protect their knowledge form appropriation by rivals are not well understood this paper examines three broad classes of protective mechanisms that firms coon deploy to keep their knowledge secret rules compensation schemes and structural isolation the paper concludes that keeping organizational secrets through the deployment of protective mechanisms is both difficult and costly economizing considerations can therefore be expected to bear strongly on this aspect of firm organization copyright 1997 by oxford university press

trends in rankings of economics departments in the u s an update economics departments in the u s are ranked based on 1 the number of pages published in thirty six economics journals 2 publications in five of the top journals 3 output per faculty member and 4 an index of the concentration of research in a department evidence shows that the top twenty departments have generally retained their positions since the 1970s but rather large changes have occurred in departments ranked from 240 to 100 an economists hall of fame is developed listing the top fifty individual producers of research in the thirty six journal set and the top five journals

the danish tax on saturated fat short run effects on consumption substitution patterns and consumer prices of fats abstract denmark introduced a tax on saturated fat in food products with effect from october 2011 the objective of this paper is to make an effect assessment of this tax for some of the product categories most significantly affected by the new tax namely fats such as butter butter blends margarine and oils this assessment is done by conducting an econometric analysis on weekly food purchase data from a large household panel dataset gfk panel services denmark spanning the period from january 2008 until july 2012 the econometric analysis suggest that the introduction of the tax on saturated fat in food products has had some effects on the market for the considered products in that the level of consumption of fats dropped by 10 15 furthermore the analysis points at shifts in demand from high price supermarkets towards low price discount stores at least for some types of oils and fats a shift that seems to have been utilised by discount chains to raise the prices of butter and margarine by more than the pure tax increase due to the relatively short data period with the tax being active interpretation of these findings from a long run perspective should be done with considerable care it is thus recommended to repeat and broaden the analysis at a later stage when data are available for a longer period after the introduction of the fat tax

food and consumer behavior why the details matter a growing body of literature now demonstrates the importance of behavioral factors in individual food consumption however whether addressing hunger nutrition or obesity food policies are often created to target changes at the aggregate level these policies ignore such behavioral tools or effects and their potential heterogeneous effects on consumers in this article we review the most important results examining food consumption and behavioral economics and provide a thorough discussion of how such tools are now being added to the lexicon of effective policy tools in addition we discuss how traditional policy tools that ignore the individual behavioral effects can miss the mark or even backfire the implication is clear a thorough understanding of behavioral economics is necessary to create efficient food policy

individual demands from household aggregates time and age variation in the composition of diet this paper uses non parametric regression with smoothness induced by imposition of a roughness penalty to estimate time dependent relationships between age and intakes of energy total fat and saturated fatty acids employing data on household food acquisitions from a continuous survey covering the period 1975 94 a discrete analogue of the bivariate thin plate spline smoother is used to smooth the estimates across age and time with age and calendar time specific estimated intakes in hand it is possible to track changes with age within cohorts of particular interest in this application are estimates of the change through time and across age in measures of dietary composition which figure in many governments dietary targets such as the proportion of energy derived from fat the method used here can be applied in any situation in which household aggregate data are available on consumption of private goods and there is a need to model the demands of household members or to control for household composition opening the way to the construction of individual pseudo panels from household aggregates 1998 john wiley sons ltd

an updated ranking of academic journals in economics we conduct an update of the ranking of economic journals by kalaitzidakis mamuneas and stengos 2003 however our present study differs methodologically from that earlier study in an important dimension we use a rolling window of years between 2003 and 2008 for each year counting the number of citations of articles published in the previous ten years this allows us to obtain a smoother longer view of the evolution of rankings in the period under consideration and avoid the inherent randomness that may exist at any particular year using this framework we proceed to examine the relative ranking of the canadian journal of economics over time we find the canadian journal managed not only to maintain its relative position but to also improve it over time

maintaining and testing separability in demand systems we derive a general elasticity representation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for direct weak separability of the utility function parametric restrictions required to implement the separability conditions are presented for three common demand systems the almost ideal translog and rotterdam our empirical application uses the rotterdam model to test a few separable structures within a complete u s demand system emphasizing food commodities results based on size corrected likelihood ratio tests provide support for commonly used separability assumptions about food and meat demand

exact and superlative welfare change indicators an exact welfare change indicator is defined to be a known function of the price and quantity data for two periods for a utility maximizing consumer which is exactly equal to the hicksian equivalent variation a welfare change indicator is termed superlative if it is exactly equal to the equivalent variation for an expenditure function which has a second order approximation property the paper exhibits a number of superlative welfare change indicators and also reviews the earlier attempts of hicks and weitzman to obtain equivalent variation measures that had a second order approximation property

the effects of farm commodity and retail food policies on obesity and economic welfare in the united states many commentators claim that farm subsidies have contributed significantly to the obesity epidemic by making fattening foods relatively cheap and abundant and symmetrically that taxing unhealthy commodities or subsidizing healthy commodities would contribute to reducing obesity rates in this article we use an equilibrium displacement model to estimate and compare the economic welfare effects from a range of hypothetical farm commodity and retail food policies as alternative mechanisms for encouraging consumption of healthy food or discouraging consumption of unhealthy food or both we find that compared with retail taxes on fat sugar or all food or subsidies on fruits and vegetables at the farm or retail levels a tax on calories would be the most efficient obesity policy a tax on calories would have the lowest deadweight loss per pound of fat reduction in average adult weight and would yield a net social gain once the impact on public health care expenditures is considered

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

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

the journals of economics we examine the principal journals of economics with particular attention to the communication between journals as reflected by the network of interjournal citations during 1987 90 and the changes over the past century in the characteristics of the authors and the techniques they have used the numerical results and those of the statistical modeling of these results reinforce the importance of economic theory as an exporter of intellectual influence to applied economics the study includes an examination of the degree of specialization among different subfields of economics a statistical model is presented for measuring the flow of intellectual influence as measured by citations in terms of simple univariate scores

assessing the distributional effects of carbon taxes on food inequalities and nutritional insights in france abstract a carbon tax on food could contribute to emissions mitigation and act as a strong signal to economic actors however tax regressivity is a major disadvantage this study addressed equity issues using several means first reallocation proposals in a revenue neutral approach of several emission based carbon taxation scenarios at the consumption level of food are included second these proposals distributional incidence was developed evaluating the role of carbon pricing in policy impacts using a carbon based approach differing emission potentials of food groups highlight the relevance of using proteins as a tax base to redirect animal to plant sources in a diet thus a scenario of taxing foods rich in animal proteins and subsidizing those rich in plant proteins was constructed scanner data of french households in 2010 were analyzed several ghg emission indicators and related nutritional impacts such as diet quality scores and a shift from animal to plant proteins were evaluated using individual changes in food expenditure distributional effects based on continuous distribution and inequality indexes were measured allowing for a discussion of policy options of a targeted vs nontargeted tax and a revenue neutral approach in the food sector

the distributional effects of carbon based food taxes abstract mitigation policies have focused mainly on the energy and transport sectors but recent studies suggest that food related measures can also deliver cost effective emission reductions this paper evaluates the implications of levying consumption taxes on food products in spain based on their carbon footprint specific elasticities are estimated for the food demand system based on a dataset of around 20 000 households using a demand system model the results show that this policy can reduce emissions and at the same time help to change consumption patterns towards healthier diets for the first time in the related literature this paper also explores the distributional implications the results show that carbon based food taxation tends to be slightly regressive and can have more effect on specific social groups however that effect can be ameliorated if exemptions on some basic food products are introduced

a demand systems analysis of food commodities by u s households segmented by income using the 1987 88 nationwide food consumption survey twelve food commodity groups were analyzed according to household poverty status parameter estimates were used to obtain subsistence expenditures own price elasticities expenditure elasticities and income elasticities own price elasticities were similar between the income groups for most commodities however income elasticities were consistently higher for the lower income group the use of average estimates of price and income elasticities for the population as a whole for the projection of individual commodity demands is not likely to be successful if notable changes are evident in income distribution

the impact of tax reforms designed to encourage healthier grain consumption in this paper we simulate the effects of tax reforms aimed at encouraging healthier grain consumption we use a rich data set on household grain consumption in 2003 from the market research institute gfk sweden combined with information on the nutritional content of the consumption we estimate behavioral parameters which are used to simulate the impact on the average household of tax reforms entailing either a subsidy on commodities particularly rich in fiber or a subsidy of the fiber density in grain products our results suggest that to direct the fiber intake towards nutritional recommendations reforms with a substantial impact on consumer prices are required regardless of the type of subsidy implemented the increase in the intake of fiber is accompanied by unwanted increases in nutrients that are often overconsumed fat salt and sugar funding the subsidies by taxing these nutrients or less healthy commodities helps to counteract such developments

modeling physical quantities of food and nutrients consumed from aggregate data with an application to finland anticipating the impact of changes in economic incentives on dietary quality and nutritional health requires knowledge of how physical quantities of food consumed respond to price and income variations a problem arises however because physical quantities are 1 not consistent aggregates in demand models and 2 not measured at final retail level in national statistics the article develops a solution by establishing explicitly the theoretical link between composite demand and physical quantities from which a novel empirical approach to the estimation of nutrient elasticities is derived it is applied to finnish aggregate data from the national accounts and food balance sheets over the 1975 2006 period and the results are used to assess the potential effectiveness of several incentive based nutritional policy instruments jel classifications i10 q11 q18

the influence of voluntarily disclosed qualitative information we examine the voluntary disclosure of qualitative information about actions involving governmental agencies and managerial intentions or beliefs in r d project announcements in the wall street journal our analysis indicates that information regarding government approval and managerial intentions beliefs voluntarily disclosed in r d project announcements interacts with industry firm variables to provide significant incremental explanatory power in both the innovation and commercialization stages of r d projects our data also indicate that the biggest impact is from managerial intentions especially an intent to increase market share when coupled with being a larger firm copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

how do obese people afford to be obese consumption strategies of russian households this article investigates the extent to which russian households that differ in their members weight status adjust their food consumption differently when their economic resources change using household panel data from the russia longitudinal monitoring survey rlms from 1995 to 2005 we estimate total expenditure elasticities of food expenditures food quantities and food quality for normal weight overweight and obese households respectively the expenditure elasticities of quality derived for obese households for meat bread fruits and dairy were found to be 15 20 higher than those of normal households hence a change in economic resources causes obese households to adjust the quality of purchased foods significantly more flexibly than normal weight households only few differences were found for quantity and expenditure reactions our results emphasize that policies aiming to reduce obesity should consider deviations in consumption behavior of normal and obese consumers in terms of quality

distributional impacts of fat taxes and thin subsidies we conducted an experiment to study the fiscal impacts of unhealthy food taxes and healthy food subsidies on very low and medium income women in france the policies tend to be regressive and favour higher income consumers unhealthy food taxes increase prices paid more for lower than higher income women healthy food subsidies reduce the prices paid more for higher than lower income women the effects arise because the pre policy diets of the higher income women tend to be healthier but also because the choices of the higher income women are more responsive to price changes

the dynamics of learning alliances competition cooperation and relative scope we show how the tension between cooperation and competition affects the dynamics of learning alliances private benefits and common benefits differ in the incentives that they create for investment in learning the competitive aspects of alliances are most severe when a firm s ratio of private to common benefits is high we introduce a measure relative scope of a firm in an alliance to show that the opportunity set of each firm outside an alliance crucially impacts its behavior within the alliance finally we suggest why firms might deviate from the theoretically optimal behavior patterns 1998 john wiley sons ltd

aggregation flexible forms and estimation of food consumption parameters reply grouping schemes commodity aggregation and the choice of functional specification significantly influence the results of empirical demand studies this article assesses the importance of these factors for estimating aggregate food consumption parameters a flexible food demand model that nests alternative specifications is estimated using u s data foods are aggregated based on a new grouping scheme adopted from the dietary guidelines for americans nutrient intake elasticities with respect to food prices and expenditure are calculated the influence of socioeconomic variables on consumption and nutrient intake is analyzed price income and demographic effects are found to be highly significant our findings are invariant to the choice of functional form

the relative impacts of economics journals 1970 1990 our data collection and database assembly efforts were assisted by john p sophocleus mark gwartney michele butler and scott ralston we received extremely valuable computer programming assistance from jon brunson and edward novak constructive comments were receivedfrom two anonymous reviewers financial supportfrom the faculty development committee at salisbury state university is gratefully acknowledged

leveraging research and development assessing the impact of the u s advanced technology program this paper examines the factors that affect a firm s chances of winning an award from the advanced technology program atp and the subsequent impact of the award on a firm s success in raising additional funds for its research and development rd the halo effect from the award increases the success of these firms in attracting additional funding from other sources our conclusion is that the atp is leveraging activities that have a strong potential for broad based economic benefit

economic assessment of nutritional recommendations abstract the effect of consumers compliance with nutritional recommendations is uncertain because of potentially complex substitutions to lift this uncertainty we adapt a model of consumer behaviour under rationing to the case of linear nutritional constraints dietary adjustments are derived from information on consumer preferences consumption levels and nutritional contents of foods a calibration exercise simulates for different income groups how the french diet would respond to various nutrition recommendations and those behavioural adjustments are translated into health outcomes through the dietron epidemiological model this allows for the ex ante comparison of the efficiency equity and health effects of ten nutritional recommendations although most recommendations impose significant taste costs on consumers they are highly cost effective with the recommendations targeting salt saturated fat and fruits and vegetables f v ranking highest in terms of efficiency most recommendations are also economically progressive with the exception of that targeting f v

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

the welfare effects of health based food tax policy this paper examines the effects of health oriented food tax reforms on the distribution of tax payments food demand and health outcomes we offer an illustration of how one can take into account the uncertainty related to both demand estimation and health estimates and to produce confidence intervals for the overall health effects instead of only point estimates taxation of sugar could lead to a statistically significant reduction in both the incidence of type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease the health effects appear to be most pronounced for low income individuals and the reforms may therefore reduce health inequality this effect undermines the traditional regressivity argument against the heavy taxation of unhealthy food

does governmental venture capital spur invention and innovation evidence from young european biotech companies this paper explores whether and how governmental venture capital investors gvcs spur invention and innovation in young biotech companies in europe to gauge invention we focus on the simple patent stock at the company level while innovation is proxied by the citation weighted patent stock our findings indicate that gvcs as stand alone investors have no impact on invention and innovation however gvcs boost the impact of independent venture capital investors ivcs on both invention and innovation we conclude that gvcs are an ineffective substitute but an effective complement of ivcs we also distinguish between technology oriented gvcs tvcs and development oriented gvcs dvcs we find that dvcs are better at increasing firm s inventions and that tvcs combined with ivcs support innovations

the evolution of the scientific productivity of highly productive economists this paper studies the evolution of research productivity of a sample of economists working in the best 81 departments in the world in 2007 the main novelty is that in so far as a productivity distribution can be identified with an income distribution we measure productivity mobility in a dynamic context using an indicator inspired in an income mobility index suggested by fields 2010 for a two period world productivity is measured in terms of publications weighted by the citation impact of the journals where each article is published in the periodical literature we study the evolution of average productivity productivity inequality the extent of rank reversals and productivity mobility for seven cohorts as well as the population as a whole we offer new evidence confirming previous results about the heterogeneity of the evolution of productivity for top and other researchers however the major result is that contrary to what was expected for our sample of very highly productive scholars the effect of rank reversals between the two periods on overall productivity mobility offsets the effect of an increase in productivity inequality from the first to the second period in the youngest five out of seven cohorts jel a11 a12 b41 d63 i32

capitalism as an engine of progress economists from marx to schumpeter have touted capitalism as an engine of technical progress but what kind of an engine is it what are its key components how does it work

an analysis of consumer food shopping behavior using supermarket scanner data differences by income and location tionwide food consumption survey nfcs elasticities derived from nfcs data are generally viewed as reasonable measures of consumer behavior because the data are quite comprehensive being collected from thousands of households across the forty eight contiguous united states users of these data sets employ different econometric models e g aids cbs les and rotterdam and often derive elasticities that differ widely in magnitude park et al gao wailes and cramer a few researchers have employed several models within a single study and found own price and expenditure elasticities that differ in magnitude from model to model by as much as three to four times

designing a tax to discourage unhealthy food and beverage purchases the case of chile the global shift towards diets high in sugar sweetened beverages ssbs and energy dense ultra processed foods is linked to higher prevalence of obesity diabetes and most other noncommunicable diseases ncds causing significant health costs chile has the highest ssb consumption in the world very high junk food intake and very rapid increases in these poor components of the diet plus obesity prevalence this study s purpose is to compare the effect of different tax schemes for ssbs and ultra processed foods on nutrient availability utilizing price elasticities which are estimated from a quadratic almost ideal demand system model using the 2011 2012 income and expenditure survey we take into account the high proportion of households not purchasing various food and beverage groups censored nature of data the food groups considered were sweets and desserts salty snacks and chips meat products and fats fruits vegetables and seafood cereals and cereal products ssb ready to drink ssb from concentrate plain water coffee and tea and milk which together represent 90 of food expenditures the simulated taxes were 1 40 price tax on ssbs 22 above the current tax level 2 a 5 cents per gram of sugar tax on products with added sugar and 3 30 price tax on all foods 27 above current tax levels and beverages 12 above the current tax level exceeding thresholds on sodium saturated fat and added sugar and for which marketing is restricted based on a chilean law effective june 16 2016 unhealthy foods are price elastic 1 99 for salty snacks and chips 1 06 for ssbs ready to drink and 1 27 for ssbs from concentrate meaning that the change in consumption is proportionally larger with respect to a change in price results are robust to different model specification and consistent among different socioeconomic sub populations overall the tax on marketing controlled foods and beverages is associated with the largest reduction in household purchases of sodium added sugar saturated fat and calorie purchases chile is unique in currently having instituted a small current ssb tax as well as marketing controls and front of package labeling of unhealthy foods and beverages the design of a larger more comprehensive tax to enhance the overall effect of these policies on healthier diets is a next critical step this study shows that a large tax on the same foods and beverages already delineated as unhealthy by the marketing controls and front of pack labeling should prove to be more effective for promoting a healthier diet

food expenditures and household demographic composition in the us a demand systems approach food expenditures and subsistence quantities of poverty status and non poverty status us households are analysed within a linear expenditure system that postulates subsistence quantities to be linear combinations of demographic variables using the us bureau of labor statistics 1992 consumer expenditure survey and detailed monthly consumer price indices this article obtains expenditure elasticities own price elasticities and subsistence quantities for each income group across nine broadly aggregated food commodity groups elasticity estimates and subsistence quantity estimates differ across income groups supporting the premise that policies targeted at specific income groups should be based on the target group s elasticity estimates rather than average population elasticities parameter estimates are then used to simulate how subsistence quantities and own price elasticities can be expected to vary according to the demographic composition of the household within a specific income group

welfare and sustainability effects of dietary recommendations the paper develops a framework combining a model of rational behaviour under dietary constraints an epidemiological model of diet related mortality and a life cycle analysis model of environmental impact which permits the ex ante assessment of dietary recommendations in multiple sustainability dimensions i e taste cost welfare effect deaths avoided reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and acidification it is applied to compare in a french context the relative effects and efficiency of six popular sustainable diet recommendations the results confirm the synergies between the health and environmental dimensions healthy eating recommendations usually have a positive effect on the environment although some exceptions exist most of the sustainable diet recommendations appear highly cost effective but those most commonly promoted on health grounds e g targeting consumption of salt fruits and vegetables and saturated fat rank highest in terms of overall efficiency moreover the valuation of benefits indicates that in most cases health benefits are significantly larger than environmental benefits overall the analysis reveals some under investment in the promotion of sustainable diet recommendations in france the general lack of enthusiasm in policy circles for informational measures promoting behavioural change may reflect unrealistic expectations about the speed and magnitude of dietary change rather than an objective assessment of the efficiency of those measures

tax incidence with strategic firms in the soft drink market abstract because soft drink sd consumption is considered to be a contributor to the epidemic of obesity there is a growing interest in evaluating the impact on sd consumption of alternative tax policies in this paper we propose a methodology to evaluate the impact of taxation of a food market taking into account the strategic price response of both manufacturers and retailers we apply this methodology to the french sd market and simulate the impacts of ad valorem and excise taxes we find that firms behave differently when facing an ad valorem tax or an excise tax an excise tax is overshifted to consumer prices while an ad valorem tax is undershifted to consumer prices we find that an excise tax based on the sugar content of sd is the most effective at reducing sd consumption our results also indicate that ignoring strategic pricing by firms leads to misestimations of the impact of taxation by between 15 and 40 depending on the products and the tax implemented in the short term that is ignoring positive long term health effects a 9 cents l excise tax has a small negative welfare effect about 1 person year

the demand for food and calories we investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural maharashtra in india we estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0 3 0 5 a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom the elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature in these indian data the calories necessary for a day s activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around

environmental food taxes and inequalities simulation of a meat tax in sweden abstract this paper investigates the distributional effect of an environmental tax on meat in sweden if such a tax was to be introduced welfare effects are measured as compensation variation cv for multiple price changes where hicksian cross price elasticities household expenditures and price changes are included in the calculations results show that taxes on meat are almost neutral over households when expenditures on meat are used as welfare indicators and regressive if income is used this can be explained by the households similar shares of total expenditures on meat the households with the smallest income levels need to be compensated with 904 sek per person and year equivalent to euro 86 6 per year in the year 2009 exchange rate to feel that utility is not lowered if taxes on meat are introduced and the households with the highest income levels need to be compensated with 1141 sek euro 109 3 per person and year for the year 2009 these compensations correspond to 0 74 and 0 78 of total expenditures for the low and high income group respectively when instead comparing the compensation with income levels the effects correspond to 0 99 for the households with the smallest income levels and to 0 51 for the households with the largest income

replication in empirical economics the journal of money credit and banking project this paper examines the role of replication in empirical economic research it presents the findings of a two year study that collected programs and data from authors and attempted to replicate their published results the research provides new and important information about the extent and causes of failures to replicate published results in economics the findings suggest that inadvertent errors in published empirical articles are a commonplace rather than a rare occurence copyright 1986 by american economic association

can targeted food taxes and subsidies improve the diet distributional effects among income groups this paper analyses distributional effects of revenue neutral tax reforms aimed at improving dietary quality and encouraging healthier grain consumption using data on household grain purchases we analyse both the impact on dietary quality and the tax incidence among income groups of vat reforms and excise duty reforms the vat reforms include subsidies of healthy products products labelled with the swedish national food administration s healthy symbol funded by increased vat on less healthy products the excise duty reforms contain a subsidy of fibre content funded by excise duties on either added sugar or saturated fat our results suggest that the vat reforms have a similar impact on dietary quality across all income groups with increases in fibre intake but also unwanted increases in the intake of nutrients frequently overconsumed fat salt and sugar the impact on dietary quality of the vat reforms is therefore difficult to evaluate with the exception of the lowest income group the excise duty reforms seem to have a positive health effect across all other income groups with increases in the intake of fibre and reductions in the intake of saturated fat sugar and added sugar for the lowest income group we find the highest increase in the intake of fibre but generally an increase in the intake of the other nutrients too the excise duty reforms also result in a more energy dense grain diet with increases in the intake of calories for all income groups both the vat reforms and the excise duty reforms appear to be progressive the lowest income group pays less food taxes and generally faces a lower overall post reform price level the income group that increases its tax payments most is the one with the highest income this is also the income group that faces the largest increase in the overall post reform price level

does the academic labor market initially allocate new graduates efficiently it is not surprising that economics graduate students from elite and very good schools find better jobs after completion of their ph d degree on average than do candidates from less prestigious universities yet the job market outcome for candidates from the same university varies quite a lot while the top candidates from the elite schools are often able to find jobs in other elite universities it is unclear how average candidates from elite schools fare compared to the top students from relatively less prestigious schools and how the relative job market outcome relates to future success as a researcher the objective of this paper is to investigate these issues in this paper we compare the career trajectories of candidates coming from three different types of schools elite universities very good universities and good universities we define three types of graduates within each group those who placed best those who had an average placement and those who found jobs at lower levels then for each of these nine groups we look at initial and current affiliations and we compare publication patterns of the graduates more than a decade into their academic careers can we say that the initial allocation was efficient in the sense that those who placed higher were also more productive in research terms and to what extent does the labor market for economists adapt and allow economists to move between schools as the ability of individuals to publish their work manifests itself over time