occupation and the political economy of trade job routineness offshorability and protectionist sentiment the recent backlash against globalization in many advanced economies raises questions about the source of this protectionist sentiment traditional accounts generally attribute the welfare consequences of trade to skill level or industry characteristics or instead emphasize the nonmaterial determinants of support for openness consequently we know little about how a major labor market characteristic occupation shapes both the distributional consequences of and preferences toward trade openness we propose and test a new theory of trade policy preferences based on occupation characteristics drawing from the tasks literature in economics we argue that occupation characteristics are a key determinant of how trade affects workers and thus individuals trade preferences our theory suggests that in advanced economies individuals in routine task intensive occupations will be negatively affected by trade and thus more protectionist this relationship will increase in the degree to which occupation job tasks can be provided from a distance i e offshorable we find support for our theory using data from the 2003 and 2013 international social survey programme in high income democracies our results suggest that the occupational characteristics of routineness and offshorability are important determinants of trade preferences offering additional understanding of the sources of protectionist sentiment even after controlling for labor market characteristics suggested by conventional wisdom

a model of intraurban employment location an application to bogota colombia this report which examines the location behaviour of manufacturing firms in urban areas is part of a world bank urban study project a theoretical model of employment location is formulated and extended to an empirical specification in the multinomial logit framework a bid rent function is derived from the profit function and captures the firms locational equilibrium situations survey data from bogota colombia provides information on i attributes of the establishment such as plant space and ii attributes of the plant site such as access to markets the estimated model is capable of predicting the location choices of different types of firms separate regression results using the same data set indicate a strong relationship between the intensity of input use and land price supporting the hypothesis that the firms respond to the substitutability of land with respect to other inputs over space the patterns of employment location in bogota are by no means random they are quite similar to those observed for large cities in the united states

the demand for industrial sites in a metropolitan area theory empirical evidence and policy implications abstract a model of urban manufacturing location is developed in order to explain the demand for industrial sites in a metropolitan area within the theory of qualitative choice behavior firms identified by a set of eight characteristics are viewed as selecting sites possessing two attributes of varying degrees of importance to different kinds of firms using a multinomial logit specification the model is estimated for the cincinnati smsa the results lend support to the firm specific nature of the site selection process information concerning the determination of the spatial distribution of the firm types in cincinnati is derived from the analysis implications for the possible effectiveness of a policy initiative designed to alter existing patterns of urban industrial location conclude the paper

habit formation in consumer preferences evidence from panel data this paper tests for the presence of habit formation using household data a simple model of habit formation implies a condition relating the strength of habits to the evolution of consumption over time when the condition is estimated with food consumption data from the panel study on income dynamics the results yield no evidence of habit formation at the annual frequency this finding is robust to a number of changes in the specification it also holds for several proxies for nondurables and services consumption created by combining psid variables with weights estimated from consumer expenditure survey data

provoking preferences unionization trade policy and the ilwu puzzle if any group of american blue collar workers has benefited from the growth of trade it is the unionized dockworkers along the us west coast nevertheless the international longshore and warehouse union ilwu representing these workers is vocally opposed to trade liberalization we examine several competing explanations for this puzzle and evaluate them by tracing the union s stance on trade over several decades we also use an original survey to compare ilwu affiliates attitudes on trade with those of nonmembers with otherwise similar characteristics consistent with a model of organizational socialization the data support the hypothesis that ilwu membership affects the members revealed political opinions the data are difficult to reconcile with standard theories of international trade our findings indicate that the political support for trade depends not just on voters structural positions in the economy but also on the organizations and networks in which they are embedded

iceland on the rocks the mass political economy of sovereign debt resettlement we undertake an individual level analysis of mass political behavior toward sovereign debt resettlement by leveraging the unique circumstances of a 2011 referendum on debt repayment in iceland this allows us to engage broader questions about mass international political economy against the recent thrust of a growing literature we find evidence of material economic pocketbook effects self interest on voting behavior operating alongside symbolic sociotropic and partisan political logics contrary to expectations these self interest effects are not conditional on voter sophistication we conclude that conventional sampling frames may be inappropriate for understanding contemporary democratic contestation over international economic policy

testing a model of intraurban firm relocation abstract a neoclassical model of firm behavior analogous to muth s household analysis in a monocentric urban environment yields comparative static predictions concerning radial direction of relocation knowledge of plant production and demand conditions and economic characteristics of the urban environment is needed to make relocation predictions expected and unexpected relations between the technology economic environment and comparative static results on input demands and location are derived a small detailed data set from cincinnati is used to test a probit model of the relocation decision the results are consistent with theoretical expectations demand changes initial plant size and the relative magnitude of transport costs are the most important determinants of the propensity to decentralize traditional measures of agglomeration economies lack explanatory power

locational patterns and dynamics of industrial activity in the modern metropolis this paper attempts to review and re structure a mass of published ideas on the geography of industrial activity in the modern metropolis the argument proceeds in a series of stages first some basic locational factors in the city are examined second a critical discussion of the literature on economies of agglomeration and scale in cities is undertaken third a brief description of manufacturing activity in nineteenth century cities is provided by way of motivating and orientating the succeeding discussion fourth the phenomenon of industrial decentralisation in twentieth century cities is described fifth an attempt is made to construct a composite theory of intra metropolitan industrial location on the basis of the historical process of the substitution of capital for labour in capitalist commodity production sixth a schematic re statement of the theory is presented and its implications for the spatial cum organisational evolution of modern industry are elucidated seventh some of the main po

through a glass and darkly attitudes toward international trade and the curious effects of issue framing are most voters opposed to globalization a growing body of empiri cal research using data from available surveys of public opinion suggests that anti globalization sentiments are strong especially among blue collar workers this article reports the findings from a survey experiment aimed at measuring the impact of issue framing on individuals stated attitudes toward international trade respondents given an antitrade introduction to the survey question linking trade to the possibility of job losses were 17 percent less likely to favor increasing trade with other countries than were those asked the same question without any introduction at all curiously respondents who were given a protrade introduction to the question suggesting that trade can lead to lower prices for consumers were not more likely to express sup port for trade than those who received no introduction in addition the responses of less educated individuals were more sensitive to framing effects than those of highly educated individuals without measuring and taking these types of framing effects into account opinion surveys offer unreliable guides to gauging the extent and dis tribution of opposition to trade among voters results from a second experiment reveal that knowledge of the endorsement of trade openness by economists mitigates framing effects and raises overall support for trade liberalization by a substantial degree

promises or policies an experimental analysis of international agreements and audience reactions a key assumption of audience costs theories of crisis bargaining and international cooperation is that audience members have strong preferences for consistency between their leader s commitments and actual policy choices however audiences also have strong preferences over the policy choices themselves regardless of their consistency with past commitments i conducted a randomized survey experiment to evaluate the magnitude of consistency and policy effects in the context of international agreements over trade policy respondents with expressed policy preferences whether supporting or opposing free trade have muted reactions to learning that their leader has broken an agreement only respondents with no opinion on trade policy are affected by learning that their leader s policy is inconsistent with prior commitments this suggests that constituents underlying preferences limit the degree to which audience costs influence policymakers calculations

habit formation in consumption and its implications for monetary policy models this paper explores a monetary policy model with habit formation for consumers in which consumers utility depends in part on current consumption relative to past consumption the empirical tests developed in the paper show that one can reject the hypothesis of no habit formation with tremendous condence largely because the habit formation model captures the gradual hump shaped response of real spending to various shocks the paper then embeds the habit consumption specication in a monetary policy model and nds that the responses of both spending and inflation to monetary policy actions are signicantly improved by this modication jel d12 e52 e43

habit formation in a monetary growth model abstract this paper introduces the hypothesis of habit formation in consumption in the sidrauski am econ rev papers proc 57 1967 534 model a number of results are derived 1 as in the sidrauski model money is superneutral and the friedman rule still provides the optimal quantity of money 2 the demand for money in this model is greater than in the sidrauski model 3 the money demand reflects the habit persistence related to past consumption and the rate of time preference and it is more sensitive to changes in inflation and nominal interest rates than the sidrauski model

the performance of the heckscher ohlin vanek model in predicting endogenous policy forces at the individual level this study tests the hypothesis that agents base their opinions about trade liberalization on the distribution effects as predicted by the heckscher ohlin vanek hov model the hov model is utilized to derive the probable effect of a liberalization move on the returns to different canadian occupations the predicted effect is then compared with the opinions that canadians with known occupations held about the proposed canadian u s free trade agreement of 1988 it is found that these agents took positions that were generally consistent with the prediction from the hov model

trade policy preferences and factor abundance abstract this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of public opinion towards free trade investigating cleavages both between and within countries we study the distributional effects of trade policy in a neoclassical heckscher ohlin economy with not just two but many input factors in production we demonstrate that the factor price changes induced by trade policy are negatively associated with the factor content of free trade and therefore factor abundance using large scale international survey data we test whether these predicted distributional effects are reflected in the trade policy preferences of workers with different labor market skills in order to isolate the effects of factor abundance from other skill related confounding factors we employ a within skill group estimator that exploits the cross country variation in factor abundance in line with theory the data show that individuals whose skills are in more abundant domestic supply have significantly more positive attitudes towards trade

outsourcing r d and the pattern of intra metropolitan location the electronics industries of madrid the relationship between intra metropolitan location research and development r d and the outsourcing of production is analysed to determine differences in and the supportive character of intra metropolitan areas for high technology production madrid s electronics industries have shown a remarkable resilience in the face of extensive economic restructuring and the change in trade regimes that has accompanied continental integration much of the strength of the electronics sector may have been due to the metropolitan area s support for outsourcing and the creative specialisation that it facilitated the distribution of manufacturing establishments their local sourcing characteristics industrial district or agglomeration effects and the role of r d are evaluated to determine the intra metropolitan context of production extensive statistical analyses of the relationship between r d and productive performance with various indicators of capital costs revenues and scale are undertaken with estab

explaining mass support for agricultural protectionism evidence from a survey experiment during the global recession why are citizens in advanced industrialized countries willing to accept high prices for agricultural products conventional wisdom suggests that agricul tural interests secure government protection because producers are concentrated and better politically organized than diffused consumers due to its focus on pro ducer capacity for collective action however the literature fails to account for the high levels of mass support for agricultural protectionism in advanced industrial ized nations this article presents new evidence from a survey experiment in japan conducted during the recent global recession december 2008 that accounts for this puzzle using randomly assigned visual stimuli the experiment activates respon dents identification with either producer or consumer interests and proceeds to ask attitudinal questions regarding food imports the results suggest that consumer priming has no reductive or additive effects on the respondents support for liberal izing food imports surprisingly producer priming increases respondents opposi tion to food import particularly among those who fear future job insecurity we further disentangle the puzzling finding that consumers think like producers on the issue of food import along two mechanisms sympathy for farmers and projec tion of their own job insecurity the results lend strong support to the projection hypothesis

the rent gradient for manufacturing abstract rent gradients for manufacturing are estimated using actual rent and value figures for cincinnati distance to the city center is found to be of no importance in explaining rent or value variations

the transition to a new inflation rate in models with habit formation abstract the money in utility model is re considered to allow for habit forming preferences in which habits develop over instantaneous utility from consumption and real money holdings an increase in the inflation rate does not affect the steady state level of capital or consumption but reduces the steady state levels of real money holdings and habits the model has important off steady state dynamics

long run scale adjustments of a perfectly competitive firm and industry an alternative approach the purpose of this note is to use the cost function technique to derive the results of the recent article in this review by c e ferguson and thomas saving hereafter f s our interest lies not so much in the results as in the simplicity and power of the technique itself in contrast to the rather cumbersome conventional apparatus of comparative statics micro theory 1 we shall not therefore discuss in detail the f s interpretations of their results although the technique should give the reader a more intuitive grasp of what is going on following f s we assume that the production function f x is increasing in each input strictly concave and twice continuously differentiable on the positive orthant all equilibrium input vectors are assumed strictly positive we start from the duality between production and cost functions demonstrated by shephard uzawa and mcfadden under our assumptions the production function may be uniquely characterized by its minimum total cost function defined for all p 0 by2 c min ptixi f x q

a referendum on trade theory voting on free trade in costa rica research on mass opinion in international political economy overwhelmingly relies on survey data this poses problems of external validity especially for a frequently low salience issue such as trade policy to examine whether survey findings about attitudes toward economic openness apply outside of surveys this note considers patterns of voting in the 2007 costa rican plebiscite about joining the central american free trade area several extant theories appear to explain voting patterns but the results are less in line with traditional economic models based on locally important economic sectors

the impact of in group favoritism on trade preferences using a population based survey experiment this study evaluates the role of in group favoritism in influencing american attitudes toward international trade by systematically altering which countries gain or lose from a given trade policy americans and or people in trading partner countries we vary the role that in group favoritism should play in influencing preferences our results provide evidence of two distinct forms of in group favoritism the first and least surprising is that americans value the well being of other americans more than that of people outside their own country rather than maximize total gains americans choose policies that maximize in group well being this tendency is exacerbated by a sense of national superiority americans favor their national in group to a greater extent if they perceive americans to be more deserving second high levels of perceived intergroup competition lead some americans to prefer trade policies that benefit the in group and hurt the out group over policies that help both their own country and the trading partner country for a policy to elicit support it is important not only that the us benefits but also that the trading partner country loses so that the us achieves a greater relative advantage we discuss the implications of these findings for understanding bipartisan public opposition to trade

anticipation of future consumption a monetary perspective we adapt the monetary model sidrauski 1967 to study the hypothesis of anticipation of future consumption we assume that anticipation of future consumption affects an agent s instantaneous utility and that all effects of future consumption on current well being are captured by the stock of future consumption monetary policy effectiveness is thereby reduced and a zero nominal lower interest rate and thus the friedman rule is destabilizing given this we can derive a just stable equilibrium nominal interest rate with matching definitions for inflation and monetary growth we demonstrate that these implied lower bounds match their historical analogues well

the ecological fallacy revisited aggregate versus individual level findings on economics and elections and sociotropic voting several aggregate level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes operating in intuitively plausible directions more recent survey based studies however have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual voter level this persistent discrepancy is puzzling one recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or sociotropic fashion responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare rather than in terms of self interested pocketbook considerations it is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro and micro level studies are a statistical artifact arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components a government induced and politically relevant component and an exogenous component caused by life cycle and other politically irrelevant factors it is shown that because of this individual level cross sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign an aggregate level time series analysis on the other hand will often yield reasonably good if somewhat attenuated estimates of the underlying individual level effects of interest thus in this case individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate rather than individual level data it is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self interested pocketbook voting

why are some people and countries more protectionist than others we analyze two cross country data sets that contain information on attitudes toward trade as well as a broad range of socio demographic and other indicators we nd that pro trade preferences are signi cantly and robustly correlated with an individual s level of human capital in the manner predicted by the factor endowments model preferences over trade are also correlated with the trade exposure of the sector in which an individual is employed individuals in non traded sectors tend to be the most pro trade while individuals in sectors with a revealed comparative disadvantage are the most protectionist third an individual s relative economic status has a very strong positive association withpro trade attitudes finally non economic determinants in the form of values identities and attachments play an important role in explaining the variation in preferences over trade high degrees of neighborhood attachment and nationalism patriotism are associated withprotectionist tendencies c

support for free trade self interest sociotropic politics and out group anxiety although it is widely acknowledged that an understanding of mass attitudes about trade is crucial to the political economy of foreign commerce only a handful of studies have addressed this topic these studies have focused largely on testing two models both of which emphasize that trade preferences are shaped by how trade affects an individual s income the factor endowments or heckscher ohlin model posits that these preferences are affected primarily by a person s skills the specific factors or ricardo viner model posits that trade preferences depend on the industry in which a person works we find little support for either of these models using two representative national surveys of americans the only potential exception involves the effects of education initial tests indicate that educational attainment and support for open trade are directly related which is often interpreted as support for the heckscher ohlin model however further analysis reveals that education s effects are less representative of skill than of individuals anxieties about involvement with out groups in their own country and beyond furthermore we find strong evidence that trade attitudes are guided less by material self interest than by perceptions of how the u s economy as a whole is affected by trade

how can economic interests influence support for free trade recent research on the sources of individual attitudes toward trade policy comes to very different conclusions about the role of economic self interest the skeptical view suggests that long standing symbolic predispositions and sociotropic perceptions shape trade policy opinions more than one s own material well being we believe this conclusion is premature for two reasons first the practice of using one attitude to predict another raises questions about direction of causation that cannot be answered with the data at hand this problem is most obvious when questions about the expected impact of trade are used to predict opinions about trade policy second the understanding of self interest employed in most studies of trade policy attitudes is unrealistically narrow in reality the close relationship between individual economic interests and the interests of the groups in which individuals are embedded creates indirect pathways through which one s position in the economy can shape individual trade policy preferences we use the data employed by mansfield and mutz to support our argument that a more complete account of trade attitude formation is needed and that in such an account economic interests may yet play an important role 1