all pay war we study a model of conflicts and wars in which the outcome is uncertain not because of luck on the battlefield as in standard models but because countries lack information about their opponent in this model expected resource levels and production and military technologies are common knowledge but realized resource levels are private information each country decides how to allocate its resources to production and warfare the country with the stronger military wins and receives aggregate production in equilibrium both comparative and absolute advantages matter a larger resource share is allocated to warfare by the country with a comparative advantage in warfare at relatively low realized resource levels and by the country with an absolute disadvantage in warfare at relatively high realized resource levels from an ex ante perspective the country with a comparative advantage in warfare is more likely to win the war unless its military potential is much lower

identifying the efficiency status in network dea abstract data envelopment analysis dea is commonly employed to evaluate the efficiency performance of a decision making unit dmu that transforms exogenous inputs into final outputs in such a black box dea approach details of an internal production process of the dmu are typically ignored and hence the locations of inefficiency are not adequately provided in view of this dea researchers have recently developed various network approaches by looking into the black box where the inputs that enter the box and the outputs that come out of it are only considered however most of these network approaches evaluate divisional efficiency by using an optimal solution of their respective optimization problem if such an optimal solution is used in the case when there are multiple optima then managerial guidance based on this solution alone may be inappropriate because more appropriate targets from the viewpoint of management may be ignored taking this fact into account therefore we propose a network approach for identifying the efficiency status of each dmu and its divisions this approach provides a practical computational procedure

value creation management competencies and global corporate citizenship an ordonomic approach to business ethics in the age of globalization this article develops an ordonomic approach to business ethics in the age of globalization through the use of a three tiered conceptual framework that distinguishes between the basic game of antagonistic social cooperation the meta game of rule setting and the meta meta game of rule finding discourse we address three questions the answers to which we believe are crucial to fostering effective business leadership and corporate social responsibility first the purpose of business in society is value creation companies have a social mandate to organize mutually advantageous cooperation second business ethics should teach the management competencies necessary to fulfill business s societal mandate these competencies are optimization competence in the basic game of value creation governance competence in the meta game of political rule setting and the three discourse related skills of orientation competence reception competence and communication competence necessary for engaging in the meta meta game third companies can help solve global problems through global corporate citizenship if they participate as political and moral actors in rule setting processes and rule finding discourse aimed at laying the foundation for value creation on a global scale

the specification of the probability functions in tullock s rent seeking contest abstract in his model of a rent seeking contest tullock g 1980 efficient rent seeking in buchanan j m tollison r d tullock g eds toward a theory of the rent seeking society texas a and m university press college station pp 97 112 uses a simple concrete specification for the probability functions which determine the probability that a player wins the contest given the bids made by the players we discuss in general terms a set of conditions that can be imposed on probability functions in this game next we show that the specification chosen by tullock is the unique one that satisfies these conditions

toward a public choice theory of monopoly regulation its many dimensions from the perspective of market economics this new thrust was consolidated in 1976 by s peltzman who developed a formal market model in which regulations were viewed as commodities brokered via political markets in response to bids and counter bids by those who stood to gain or to lose from specific regulation outcomes the subsequent contribution by becker 1983 added insights and institutional flesh to the stigler peltzman embryo confirming regulation as an integral component of mainstream market economics an important implication of such contributions especially those from the chicago perspective is that regulation for the most part confirms resource efficiency within market process that political markets in the absence of entry barriers are just as effective as are competitive commodity markets in achieving economic efficiency defined within a comparative institutions framework nowhere is this complacency more apparent than in the conclusion drawn by becker 1983 from a detailed formal analysis of competition among pressure groups for political influence

a multi winner nested rent seeking contest this paper considers a symmetric imperfectly discriminating rent seeking contest in which there may be several winners we first demonstrate a serious flaw in previous work and then go on to suggest an alternative method for analyzing the contest in contrast to the previous work we show that the value of the rent is fully dissipated in equilibrium as the number of players becomes large

bad loans to good friends money politics and the developmental state in south korea why has the literature on asian development not addressed the issue of money politics in south korea how can we reconcile the view of an efficient developmental state in south korea before 1997 with reports of massive corruption and inefficiency in that same country in 1998 and 1999 politics is central to the answer in this study i make two arguments first money politics was extensive in south korea both during and after the high growth era second political not economic considerations dominated policymaking this study explains both past and present and compares the patterns of money politics in the early post independence era with those that arose after the democratic transition in 1987 while during the park era a balance of power between businessmen and politicians kept corruption from spinning out of control the transition to democracy altered the basic business state relationship allowing business to exert greater influence over policy decisions the political hypothesis advanced in this study suggests a new direction for our research about the developmental state

evaluating the environmental efficiency of a two stage system with undesired outputs by a dea approach an interest preference perspective abstract in this study we propose a new dea model to evaluate the environmental efficiency of a two stage system with undesired outputs the two stage system consists of two parts a production subsystem and a pollution treatment subsystem different choices for allocating resources to each subsystem represent different interest preferences of decision makers with the production subsystem corresponding to short term interests and the pollution treatment subsystem corresponding to long term interests based on a proposed new dea model three theorems are established to show the relationships between the interest preference parameter and the change of efficiency scores an empirical analysis was conducted using the data of 30 provinces and municipalities eight regions of china the empirical results show the effectiveness of the proposed model and the usefulness of the theorems for the real world data optimal efficiency rankings of the eight regions are provided and the efficiency rankings truly reflect the current environmental situations of these eight regions to examine the economic impacts and facilitate sustainable development we also analyze the shadow prices for undesired outputs corresponding implications of the empirical analysis are also discussed

do changes in the fundamentals have symmetric or asymmetric effects on house prices evidence from 52 states of the united states of america abstracttime series studies that have tried to establish the long run relationship between house prices and economic fundamentals have been criticized due to low power of their cointegration tests on the other hand those who have used panel data and panel tests to increase the power have found mixed results both groups have assumed that changes in the fundamentals have symmetric effects on house prices in this article we use nonlinear ardl approach to cointegration and error correction modelling and quarterly data from each of the states in the us to show that changes in the fundamentals have asymmetric effects on house prices in the short run as well as in the long run cointegration between house prices and fundamentals is established in 30 states and in district of columbia

property rights to multi attribute fishery resources abstract the united nations code of conduct for responsible fisheries urges governments to manage multiple yield bycatch and habitat attributes of fishery resources the information and enforcement costs of multi attribute management are high however as a result relatively few attributes generally stock biomass age structure and growth are specified in yield targets exposing others e g localized abundance sex to excessive use in the public domain spillovers caused by fishing gear e g gear conflicts bycatch habitat damage generally are regulated with catch limits and area closures that artificially divide or exclude activities which interact due to attribute jointness total fishery income is compromised because tradeoffs are not evaluated at the margin alternative arrangements that bundle fishery resource attributes are suggested bundled property rights could evolve from a comprehensive assignment of usufruct rights which reduce the transaction costs of gathering information on unspecified attributes and of contracting for spillovers markets for harvest rights could resolve the simpler gear conflict and bycatch problems other interactions e g predation habitat requirements would require corporate or collective property rights and governance arrangements that make harvesters and other interested parties the residual claimants of their harvest decisions subject to government restrictions that protect public goods

gordon tullock and experimental economics gordon tullock s research has substantially influenced the development of economic science in general and experimental economics in particular we present the first comprehensive survey of this significant achievement we show how tullock s research in bioeconomics influenced later developments in neuroeconomics and how his pioneering work on rent seeking generated a literature of laboratory tests of his hypothesis we also describe tullock s own experiments and draw attention to his early insights on trust games

industrial eco efficiency in china a provincial quantification using three stage data envelopment analysis abstract the coordinated development of industrialization and the ecological environment is vital to achieve ecological civilization in china integratively considering the economy energy and resources and environment this study aims to measure the industrial eco efficiency of 30 provinces autonomous regions and municipalities in china between 2005 and 2013 a three stage data envelopment analysis dea modeling approach is adopted to eliminate interference of the external environment and statistical noise with industrial eco efficiency measurement the results show that regional industrial eco efficiency in china is affected by the factors of the environmental regulation technological innovation level of economic development and industrial structure after eliminating the impacts of external environment and statistical noise china s national average industrial eco efficiency declines by 30 between 2005 and 2013 the industrial eco efficiency of the 30 provinces increases but at different rates of growth the variation of overall regional industrial eco efficiency is primarily caused by scale efficiency furthermore all the 30 provinces are classified into four groups to interpret the causes of variation and differences of regional industrial eco efficiency in general the management and technology level and the economy of scale of industries should be improved simultaneously even though specific opportunities for industrial eco efficiency improvement vary across provinces in china

a dynamic model of conflict and appropriation abstract this paper presents an extension of a static model of economic conflict analyzed by hirshleifer 1991 1995 and skaperdas 1992 to an infinite horizon differential game our aim is to highlight the strategic role of appropriation among a smaller group of agents in an intertemporal context the model yields the conclusion that there exists a unique linear nonlinear markov perfect equilibrium strategy even when strategies are defined over the entire state space we demonstrate that partial cooperation can be seen as a long run response to conflict moreover a decrease in the effectiveness of appropriation the depreciation rate of a common pool stock the rate of time preferences or an increase in the degree of noise improves the degree of partial cooperation and thus welfare in an anarchic society

free entry and efficient rent seeking this paper concerns rent seeking and the extent to which rents are dissipated under various circumstances gordon tullock s 1967 insight that expenditures made to capture an artificially created transfer represent a social waste suggested that the cost to the economy of monopoly and regulation is greater than the simple harberger 1954 deadweight loss indeed under tullock s original formulation and in the extensions of his work by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 rents are exactly dissipated at the social level 1 is spent to capture 1 so that the total welfare loss from such activities is equal to the harberger triangle plus the rectangle of monopoly profits

reaganomics and the use of collective rebates the purpose of this article was to demonstrate that a collective rebate can be an effective tool to reduce excessive government the idea is that the general public can be aroused to vote for and support political agendas that reduce government intervention bunching many pro competitive policies in one package a collective rebate offers an opportunity to turn the public against the special interests an attempt was made to extend the collective rebate principle to the fiscal policy employed by the regan administration with all of its faults notwithstanding it was shown that this fiscal policy could be interpreted as a successful application of the collective rebate principle

decomposition weights and overall efficiency in two stage additive network dea abstract data envelopment analysis dea is a technique for performance evaluation of peer decision making units dmus the network dea models study the internal structures of dmus using two stage network structures as an example the current paper examines additive efficiency decomposition where the overall efficiency is defined as a weighted average of stage efficiencies and the weights are used to reflect relative importance of individual stages we show that weights may not affect the calculation of stage efficiency scores and that variation in the overall efficiency resulting from using different weights can be associated with constant stage efficiencies we demonstrate the need to isolate the impact of weights on the overall efficiency we propose to use a new overall efficiency index to address some pitfalls in weighted additive efficiency decomposition our findings are illustrated using two empirical data sets representing two types of two stage network structures

efficiency analysis of major cruise lines three major cruise lines account for 82 of the total market share their financial statements show different results between the operating incomes and net incomes over time to examine the major causes of the differences this study measured the efficiency of the top three cruise lines to develop a network dea model to analyze the cruise operations at two stages namely operating and non operating stages in addition the determinants of the efficiencies were examined using a bootstrapped truncated regression model overall cruise lines were efficient at the operating stage but varied widely in the efficiency of the non operating stage cruise lines attempting high capacity expansion were relatively inefficient because of the heavy interest payments arising from the high debt to capital ratio moreover the neglected hedging policy regarding the financial risks also contributed to the inefficiency

rent seeking at 52 an introduction to a special issue of public choice a half century after he developed it gordon tullock s idea of rent seeking is more relevant than ever though the concept has gained widespread acceptance among academics it has yet to make an impression on public discourse but with favoritism corruption and the power of special interests in the headlines the idea deserves broader attention in this special issue of public choice we commemorate tullock s insight contributors examine the making of this classic piece and its effect on economic theory empirical analysis and economic teaching original papers also develop new insights into questions of development the control of violence corruption culture equity regulation rent extraction the political coase theorem and more

ec trade protection law produmping or antidumping this paper argues that the anticipation of protection can have astimulating effect on exports instead of the commonly claimed effect of harassment if protection serves market cartelization by fixing export quantities or prices exporters may have an incentive to increase their sales abroad in order to secure a large share of the expected rent which is brought about by the anticipated import restriction this may even result in sales below marginal costs or dumping the effect of the protectionist threat may then be the reverse of what is intended it can raise the speed of import penetration and it can provoke dumping a formal model and a supportive institutional analysis of ec trade protection is supplemented by preliminary empirical evidence

deterrence in contests this paper explores the role of deterrence in contests as a general rule we show that for a deterrence strategy to be played by rational agents it is necessary that the contest be destructive we show for a very general class of functions that pure strategy deterrence equilibria where contestants deter one another do not exist a corollary of this finding is that under fairly general conditions agents should always be expected to engage in contests applied to international relations our results imply that war is always a potential outcome despite deterrence attempts

aggregate comparative statics abstract in aggregative games each player s payoff depends on her own actions and an aggregate of the actions of all the players many common games in industrial organization political economy public economics and macroeconomics can be cast as aggregative games this paper provides a general and tractable framework for comparative static results in aggregative games we focus on two classes of games 1 aggregative games with strategic substitutes and 2 nice aggregative games where payoff functions are continuous and concave in own strategies we provide simple sufficient conditions under which positive shocks to individual players increase their own actions and have monotone effects on the aggregate the results are illustrated with applications to public good provision contests cournot competition and technology choices in oligopoly

productivity and customer satisfaction in swedish pharmacies a dea network model this paper presents a data envelopment analysis dea network model that allows inclusion of customer satisfaction in efficiency and productivity measures the network consists of a production node and a consumption node and offers flexibility in modelling the production and consumption process where a firm specific allocation of input resources to production and customer oriented activities is allowed the proposed model is applied on a sample of swedish pharmacies with organizational objectives that necessitates a monitoring of efficiency and productivity as well as customer satisfaction estimation results from the network model and a direct productivity model without customer satisfaction are compared and indicate that the technical efficiency is lower under the network model the productivity results indicate productivity progress under both models albeit with a slower rate of change under the network model

dea like models for efficiency evaluations of specialized and interdependent units abstract the problem of evaluating the efficiency of a set of specialized and interdependent decision making subunits dmsus that make up a larger decision making unit dmu is considered the dmsus are interdependent in the sense that part of the output produced by each of them may be used as an input by the other ones they are also specialized hence non homogeneous as they may have not the same inputs and outputs for this problem some efficiency indexes are introduced and they are shown to satisfy some basic properties

rent seeking and market structure comment if the firms in an industry are to be successful in raising money to influence government two conditions must be met 1 there must be sufficient rents available from government decisions regarding that industry to make such expenditures worthwhile and 2 the industry must be sufficiently concentrated to avoid a free rider problem in fund raising this argument though seemingly intuitively appealing has been under recent empirical attack this paper seeks to restore the parapets

controlling leviathan through tax reduction our paper seeks the strategy that allows the greatest ability to reduce public sector size within a political environment that does not want us to directly set limits on public sector size tax reduction through its quid pro quo effect offers high tangibility to taxpayers and may raise political power of groups that seek both tax reduction and greater opposition to lobbies that seek spending increases for their narrowly defined interests moreover as manage and marlow 1986 argues since the political response to balanced budget rules is likely to raise taxes this political bias of tax hikes suggests that balanced budget rules are offered as a means of changing the funding mix and not the actual budget constraint of government

best performing us mutual fund families from 1993 to 2008 evidence from a novel two stage dea model for efficiency decomposition when analyzing relative performance especially at the institutional level the traditional data envelopment analysis dea models do not recognize vastly different and important activities as separate functions and therefore cannot identify which function may be the main source of inefficiency we propose a novel two stage dea model that decomposes the overall efficiency of a decision making unit into two components and demonstrate its applicability by assessing the relative performance of 66 large mutual fund families in the us over the period 1993 2008 by decomposing the overall efficiency into operational management efficiency and portfolio management efficiency components we reveal the best performers the families that deteriorated in performance and those that improved in their performance over the sample period we also make frontier projections for poorly performing mutual fund families and highlight how the portfolio managers have managed their funds relative to the others during financial crisis periods

information access and contributions a signaling model of lobbying interest groups pay monetary contributions to gain access and provide information to a policymaker if their interests are aligned with those of the policymaker s constituency they have costless access and report their private information truthfully if their interests conflict they are forced to pay a strictly positive contribution in order to enhance the credibility of their reports the policymaker bases her policy decision on the competing reports and the size of the contributions accompanying these reports the interest groups contribution decisions are plagued by a free rider problem i derive the implications of this problem for the size and pattern of contributions and for the degree of information aggregation

rent seeking contest when the prize increases with aggregate efforts the objective of this article is to investigate contests in which efforts are productive tullock s standard rent seeking model is extended by making the rent itself increase with the aggregate efforts a positive externality is thereby introduced into the contest because a contender s private effort in quest of the rent generates a benefit for other contenders coupled with a negative externality presented in the standard rent seeking model the net effect on the social efficiency of the contest is a priori ambiguous it is shown that the extended contest generates socially wasteful excessive aggregate efforts

rent seeking in a market with morality solving a puzzle about corporate social responsibility rent seeking by lobbying for government favors is generally thought to be wasteful in view of this wastefulness it is puzzling that rent seeking by corporations has not been criticized as a failure to be socially responsible or even as an unethical business practice this article examines the compatibility of rent seeking with corporate social responsibility by utilizing thomas dunfee s idea of a marketplace with morality this idea is useful for solving this puzzle because in considering whether rent seeking is compatible with corporate social responsibility it is necessary first to define rent seeking which this article argues is a normative concept and second to find some principled way of identifying rent seeking behavior it also solves the puzzle about rent seeking by revealing that the concept of rent seeking itself is of little use in determining whether certain conduct is or is not socially responsible since rent seeking activity cannot be identified without first evaluating which activity is rent seeking

economists and public policy chicago political economy versus conventional views both conventional welfare economics and public choice analysis suggest that economists have an important educational role to play in the public policy process in improving the decision making process in sharp contrast information and incentive problems related to voting rules the bureaucracy and the legislature do not arise in cpe because these processes are all perfect agents of interest groups consequently the political process is efficient and there is no scope for beneficial economic analysis as it relates to the sugar program or other public policies that is the polity is efficient or it would be reordered by competing interest groups to make it so but as mitchell 1989 290 stresses the important unanswered question in cpe remains if there is no scope for improvement how and why does change occur

the size of the state economic growth and the efficient utilization of national resources the motives of the state in projecting a more than minimal presence in the economy may be conceived of as benevolent or malevolent whatever the characterization of the motivation increases in the size of the government share of the economy adversely affect economic growth and the allocation of resources nations with relatively large government shares in 1960 on the whole grew more slowly than nations with relatively small state sectors interperiod increases in the size of government were associated with lower growth rates over the period the size of the government share coefficients in the regressions were of sufficiently large magnitude to conclude that the rise in the size of the government has had a substantial depressing effect on economic growth these results are consistent with those reported by landau 1983 and marlow 1986 landau did not adjust economic growth for the growth in factor endowment consequently his results overstate the adverse effect of government size

the industrial structure of the california assembly committee assignments economic interests and campaign contributions this paper examines the provision of campaign contributions made by economic interests to incumbents seeking reelection in the 1984 1986 and 1988 california assembly elections the study tests whether the distribution of campaign contributions by specific industrial sectors corresponds to legislator possession of the policy property rights associated with membership on relevant assembly standing committees a non parametric statistical model compares the distribution of campaign contributions from groups within a given industrial sector to members of relevant policy committees with the distribution of contributions from all other contributor classes the empirical analysis confirms that committee assignments significantly affect the allocation of special interest resources in assembly elections substantiating the importance of institutional considerations in influencing special interest activity

asset prices and exchange rates in this paper we study the implications of introducing demand shocks and trade in goods into an otherwise standard international asset pricing model trade in goods gives rise to an additional channel of international propagation through the terms of trade absent in traditional single good asset pricing models the inclusion of demand shocks helps overturn many unrealistic implications of existing international flnance models in which productivity shocks are the sole source of uncertainty our model generates a rich set of implications on how stock bond and foreign exchange markets co move we solve the model in closed form which yields a system of equations that can be readily estimated empirically our estimation validates the main predictions of the theory

on the social costs of rent seeking versus the social costs of production flexibility in this paper an analysis is provided of two alternative methods of defensive behaviour by a firm first rent seeking and second potential adjustment by way of investing in product flexibility from the analysis it emerges that at times rent seeking may be socially superior less socially wasteful to other more traditional means of responding to threats this paper therefore suggests that in circumstances where some type of defensive or aggressive activity by firms is available rent seeking while constituting gross social waste may be a net social gain given the alternative options available to the firm

ideological conviction and persuasion in the rent seeking society abstract the paper develops a model of rent seeking in a democratic political context where voting as well as rent seeking matters in this context the paper demonstrates that voter ideology is a constraint on the rent seeking game as well as a possible avenue of rent seeking in a setting where there are both rent seeking and ideological interest groups rent seekers can free ride on the efforts of ideologues which tends to reduce rent seeking effort in a setting where complementary economic and ideological interest groups coordinate their efforts both rent seeking and ideological conflict tend to increase

collective rent dissipation the theory of rent seeking was initiated by tullock 1967 1980 followed by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 and more recently extended in various directions by allard 1988 appelbaum and katz 1986a b c gradstein and nitzan 1989 hillman and katz 1984 1987 hillman and samet 1987 hillman and riley 1989 katz et al 1990 long and vousden 1987 ursprung 1990 and varian 1989 the purpose of this paper is to extend this theory by introducing the possibility of collective group rent seeking with voluntary individual decisions regarding their extent of participation in the collective rent seeking efforts

participation in deterministic contests abstract this paper considers participation in deterministic contests for m 1 identical prizes which employ an auction like rule to determine the winners in most papers that investigate such models participation by precisely m 1 players is associated with players having complete information about their opponents characteristics and participation by more than m 1 players is associated with players having incomplete information about their opponents characteristics i show that incomplete information is in fact neither sufficient nor necessary for participation by more than m 1 players

rent seeking with regretful agents theory and experiment abstract we investigate both theoretically and experimentally the role that information disclosure has on behavior in all pay environments in which all agents must exert costly effort but only the winner is rewarded through the lens of all pay auctions we show that bidders who have regret concerns when they lose an auction may alter their bids whether or not information about the winning bid is disclosed all losing bidders regret not bidding 0 however when feedback on the winning bid is provided those bidders who lost at an affordable price may regret not bidding more we show that the former effect causes bidders to lower their bids while the latter effect causes bidders to raise their bids our experimental results indicate overbidding whether or not the winning bid is disclosed to losing bidders however disclosing the winning bid leads to even more aggressive bidding increases revenues decreases the frequency of dropouts and also leads to more efficient allocations thus our results show that information disclosure is a powerful tool that mechanism designers may wish to exploit to extract more rents in all pay environments

asymmetric responses of house prices to changes in the mortgage interest rate evidence from the australian capital cities we examine the dynamic and asymmetric responses of house prices to changes in mortgage interest rates in australia from january 1995 to november 2017 we propose a threshold intervention model to d

a generalized model of rent seeking behavior in this paper i present a formal analysis of rent seeking games in which the players valuations for the prize are represented as vectors the players in this game are risk neutral and may not be indifferent to who wins the contestable rent if it is someone else both tullock s original rent seeking model and the public goods rent seeking model by katz et al turn out to be special cases of this more general model

a note on globalization and urban residential rents abstract we present evidence on the impact of international economic openness upon residential real estate consistent with the well known balassa samuelson effect which suggests that increasing openness raises relative prices of non tradable goods and services using a data set for 46 cities in different countries we find that urban rents are positively affected by the openness of the economy and by city size

influencing factors on hydrogen energy r d projects an ex post performance evaluation abstract to enhance its energy security korea made a significant r d investment in developing hydrogen energy technology over a period of 10 years the hydrogen energy r d center was established in 2003 with a 100 billion korean won krw government investment that would fund the initiative through 2012 this paper is a meaningful attempt to evaluate the ex post performance of completed hydrogen energy r d projects using data envelopment analysis dea through empirical analysis we focus mainly on measuring ex post performance and uncovering the influencing factors on that performance the results of our empirical analysis reveal several interesting findings first overall the ex post performance of completed projects is relatively low however there are major performance gaps among projects second r d type technology type and private sector investment are factors influencing project performance more specifically projects identified as basic research storage technology or without private sector investment had the highest performance with an acceptable level of statistical significance third dea can provide unique information such as results of returns to scale and slack analysis which cannot be gleaned from parametric methods as time went on the decreasing returns to scale drs ratio increased and the increasing returns to scale irs ratio decreased this means that the r d budget was used less and less effectively as time passed moreover among the three year project period the second year s r d budget was used most efficiently in each r d project this study can provide meaningful information to policy makers to enhance the performance of future r d projects and to promote hydrogen r d projects as well as advance the hydrogen economy

productivity and intermediate products a frontier approach abstract in recent years it has become popular to measure productivity using non parametric approaches however this has been done while ignoring intermediate products here we develop a non parametric productivity measure that explicitly incorporates such products

the impact of income economic openness and interest rates on housing prices in china evidence from dynamic panel quantile regression the rapid growth of housing prices has attracted the attention of the whole of society in china this article adopts the dynamic panel quantile regression to investigate the impact of income econo

real estate prices and bank stability abstract real estate prices can deviate from their fundamental value due to rigid supply heterogeneity in quality and various market imperfections which have two contrasting effects on bank stability higher prices increase the value of collateral and net wealth of borrowers and thus reduce the likelihood of credit defaults in contrast persistent deviations from fundamentals may foster the adverse selection of increasingly risky creditors by banks seeking to expand their loan portfolios which increases bank distress probabilities we test these hypotheses using unique data on real estate markets and banks in germany house price deviations contribute to bank instability but nominal house price developments do not this finding corroborates the importance of deviations from the fundamental value of real estate rather than just price levels or changes alone when assessing bank stability

reexamining efficient rent seeking in laboratory markets given millner and pratt s 1989 finding of behavior inconsistent with theory we reexamine efficient rent seeking in experimental markets we show that a when r 3 no nash equilibrium exists and therefore behavior has no theoretical benchmark to judge consistency and b when r 1 with a new experimental design utilizing an explicit expected payoff matrix rent seeking behavior is consistent with both nash equilibrium and dissipation hypotheses

illegal markets and the social costs of rent seeking this paper argues that making goods or services illegal results in an increase in the social costs associated with rent seeking the increased social cost is in the form of negative externalities that result from market participants use of coercion and violence in attempts to control trade in the illegal good consequently the social costs of rent seeking will exceed the value of resources dissipated in rent seeking competition and where the external costs exceed the undissipated portion of the tullock cost the social cost of rent seeking is greater than the sum of tullock and harberger costs

decision by sortition a means to reduce rent seeking this essay gives an overview of how arandomized decision mechanism sortition can be expected to reduce the intensity ofself interested activity by rent seekingfactions within democracies the socialcosts of rent seeking are briefly reviewed i then make the case that randomization ofcollective decision making proceduresattenuates rent seeking expenditures iillustrate the argument by reference to thehighly contested presidential election of2000 finally i buttress that argument bycomparing plurality voting and sortitionwithin the context of tullock s efficient rent seeking model 1980

deriving the dea frontier for two stage processes data envelopment analysis dea is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units dmus recently dea has been extended to examine the efficiency of two stage processes where all the outputs from the first stage are intermediate measures that make up the inputs to the second stage the resulting two stage dea model provides not only an overall efficiency score for the entire process but as well yields an efficiency score for each of the individual stages due to the existence of intermediate measures the usual procedure of adjusting the inputs or outputs by the efficiency scores as in the standard dea approach does not necessarily yield a frontier projection the current paper develops an approach for determining the frontier points for inefficient dmus within the framework of two stage dea

efficient rents 1 rent seeking behavior in the long run we have analyzed long run behavior in rent seeking under several conditions and behavioral hypotheses the question of interest is whether or not the long run expenditures will exactly equal the value of the rents our results depend on the type of competitive response which is assumed to exist in the long run and on the r value governing the probability of winning

electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization despite common perception existing theoretical literature lacks a complete for mal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization in this paper we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard downsian electoral competition setup with mainly but not necessarily purely policy motivated parties we first show that in equilibrium platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality we then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms this effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used dalton index constructing a dataset covering more than 300 elections our main theoretical findings are empirically supported pointing towards the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization

the design of rent seeking competitions committees preliminary and final contests the paper examines the common practice in multi contest rent seeking competitions where finalists are selected based on rent seekers efforts in a preliminary contest we find that for any single contest design rent seeking expenditures could be reduced by introducing a preliminary contest if the marginal returns to rent seeking effort in the preliminary contest is sufficiently low in addition to other reasons the paper argues that this may explain why such multi contest designs are common we argue that rent seeking expenditure in the preliminary stage represents the cost of reducing the number of contestants we also find that the practice of setting a higher quality standard in the final contest than the quality standard in the preliminary contest reduces rent seeking waste we derive an expression for the optimal number of finalists under certain conditions we find that the optimal number of finalists is directly proportional or equal to the square root of the number of potential contestants finally we show that whether rent seeking expenditures rise or fall when the rent is awarded by a committee instead of a single administrator depends on the sensitivity of the committee relative to that of the single administrator

fiscal restraint and the political economy of emu while the principle of delegation has become well established on the national level for monetary policy fiscal policies remain in the hands of policy makers depending on rent seeking interest groups we argue that the maastricht treaty provides a unique international commitment that enables governments to follow restrictive fiscal policies by attributing their negative side effects to europe and to implement austerity measures despite rising unemployment or a decline in growth hence the popularity of the european idea is instrumented to enforce fiscal discipline the paper outlines the political economy framework and presents new econometric evidence

competitive procurement with corruption we study competitive procurement administered by a corrupt agent who is willing to manipulate his evaluation of contract proposals in exchange for bribes with complete information and no corruption the efficient firm will win the contract for sure if the agent is corrupt and has large manipulation power however bribery makes it costly for the efficient firm to secure a sure win so in equilibrium the efficient firm loses the contract with positive probability the optimal scoring rule for the buyer deemphasizes quality relative to price and does not fully handicap and may even favor the efficient firm

assessment of china transit and economic efficiencies in a modified value chains dea model abstract this study incorporates the concepts of undesirable intermediate intermediate input uncontrollable input and undesirable output to the value chains model chen and zhu 2004 thereby creating a modified value chains model to compute transit and economic efficiencies in 30 regions of china the modified value chains model forms a more general formulation to the value added chains in the utilization of the above concepts it also provides an optimal intermediate measure which differs from the independent two stage measure empirical evaluations indicate that large scale transit development in china s coastal area does not necessarily represent higher transit efficiency because in the coastal area there is a lack of significant positive relationships between transit and economic efficiency high economic efficiency does not contribute to greater transit efficiency the finding also suggests that by simultaneously decreasing the quantity in passenger and freight transport transit and economic efficiencies have greatly improved in most regions of china

when are stable rights to rents bad stable enforceable property rights over resources normally furthers economic efficiency i argue that stable rights to government created rents and wealth transfers by contrast generate inefficiency secure rights to receive transfers increases rent seekers incentive to make political investments creating new transfers i demonstrate the point using a two period rent seeking game contestable transfers reduce the probability of establishing a transfer program and aggregate rent seeking expenditures strengthening transfer recipients rights increases the difficulty of eliminating a transfer program

cost and learning efficiency drivers in australian schools a two stage network dea approach this article explore performance issues in australian public schools using a two stage dea network model which accounts simultaneously for both cost and learning efficiency levels in the cost efficiency stage different types of expenses and investments are employed to support a given number of students teachers and administrative staff in the learning efficiency stage these groups of individuals help to produce important outputs related to performance in student tests and school rankings results indicate that australian public schools are heterogeneous policy implications are also discussed

structure of public support for national agricultural research systems a political economy perspective abstract this paper initiates development of a set of stylized facts concerning the structure of public support for national agricultural research systems nars within a neoclassical political economy framework the aim is to place public funding of nars in the broader context of the overall level of direct government assistance to agriculture using a newly constructed data set on nars expenditures over the 1970 1985 period we observe a growing disparity in agricultural research intensity ratios which measure the level of public support for nars in relation to agricultural gross domestic production aggdp between low and high income countries this growing disparity appears to be driven by much larger increases in support for agricultural research by high income countries coupled with a significantly slower growth in the size of their agricultural sector despite the propensity of low and middle income countries to increase real support to agricultural research as per capita incomes rise the public agricultural expenditure ratio which measures public expenditures on agriculture relative to the size of the agricultural sector aggdp increases substantially public expenditures on agriculture were indexed on agricultural and non agricultural populations to give a rough indication of the increasing incentives for rural distributional coalitions to seek a redistribution of public expenditures in their favor a relative research expenditure rre ratio is developed which measures the proportion of total public expenditure on agriculture spent on agricultural research it provides an indication of the relative importance given to research on agriculture within the constraints imposed by overall public spending on agriculture in contrast to the agricultural research intensity ratios the rre ratios suggest that agricultural research appears to command as large a share of the public purse devoted to agriculture in low and middle income countries as it does in high income countries expectations derived from the neoclassical political economy literature that research may have fared relatively better in high compared with low income countries were not supported by the data

incentive contracts and elections for politicians with multi task problems abstract we consider a model with a politician facing a multi task problem while in office the reelection mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favor of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others we show that a combination of elections and incentive contracts can alleviate this inefficiency the incentive contract does not require direct information about the performance of the politician and is self financing across terms

the implementation process of comparable worth winners and losers this paper provides a unique opportunity to observe how a public policy affected the earnings of various interest groups at different stages of implementation specifically we examine how the earnings of women union members and supervisory and professional staff were affected by various proposed and implemented comparable worth pay plans in iowa we find that large relative gains to women in the original proposed plans were reduced as the process evolved as a result some of the original gains to women were redistributed to union members supervisors and professionals

risk aversion heterogeneity and contests we introduce a novel method of modellingcontests that avoids the complexitiesencountered by the best response function approach we analyse contests in which i there are many risk averse players ii attitudes to risk may differ acrossindividuals and iii the technology thattransforms rent seeking effort intoprobability of winning may also differacross individuals we establish that ifevery player has a constant degree ofabsolute risk aversion a uniqueequilibrium exists we also establishcomparative static results and examine howthe level of rent dissipation is affectedby the heterogeneity of attitudes towardsrisk and the precise nature of the technology

group contests with internal conflict and power asymmetry we investigate simultaneous inter and intra group conflict in the shadow of within group power asymmetry and complementarity in members group conflict efforts a more symmetric group faces a higher degree of internal conflict and might expend more effort in external conflict when the group conflict effort technology is highly complementary depending on the degree of complementarity the stronger player s relative contribution to external conflict might be higher in a more asymmetric group and as a result it is possible for the weaker player to earn a higher payoff in the absence of any complementarity the rent dissipation is non monotonic with the within group power asymmetry

contest efforts in light of behavioural considerations this study shows that distortion of probabilities is a possible reason for rent under dissipation incontests with relatively small number of participants such distortion may also result however inover dissipation of the contested rent focusing on contests with homogeneous contestants and thecommonly studied contest success function our main results clarify under what circumstances i rents are more under dissipated relative to the standard situation where probabilities are notdistorted ii rents are under dissipated yet less intensely relative to the standard situation whereprobabilities are not distorted iii rents are over dissipated and iv the contest does not possess asymmetric interior equilibrium in pure strategies

interprovincial two stage water resource utilization efficiency under environmental constraint and spatial spillover effects in china although existing studies have paid much attention to the measurement model of water resource utilization efficiency they have failed to consider the spatial spillover effect of some influencing factors of water resource utilization efficiency causing biased results this study measures the water resource utilization efficiency of 31 provincial administrative regions in china from 2001 to 2014 and the efficiency of each stage by adopting a slack based efficiency evaluation model based on the relaxation of two stages to consider undesirable output then this study employs a spatial durbin econometric model by considering spatial effect to analyze the influencing factors of the overall efficiency of water resource utilization by per capita water resources industrial water living water consumption per capita gross domestic product degree of opening to the outside world industrial structure technological progress and other aspects by comparison existing studies do not consider the spatial spillover effect this study estimates the direct and indirect effects of the influencing factors of water resource utilization efficiency to distinguish local and neighbors impacts of influencing factors of water resource utilization efficiency the results are as follows 1 first stage overall efficiency is significantly higher than second stage water resource utilization efficiency overall efficiency is close to second stage efficiency and second stage efficiency determines the overall effectiveness of water resource utilization 2 the spatial autocorrelation intensity of water resource utilization overall efficiency is significantly greater than zero and water resource utilization overall efficiency presents concentration distribution in the space for which the eastern coastal regions are high high type and the central and western regions are low low type 3 the overall efficiency of water resource utilization has spatial spillover effects and the region s overall efficiency is influenced by both region and neighborhood region 4 the direct and indirect effects of domestic water consumption degree of opening up and industrial structure are the primary significant influencing factors of overall efficiency of water resources in china the spatial spillover effects of domestic water consumption and industrial structure have a significant impact to improve water resource utilization efficiency the government and citizens should focus on such solutions as pollution reduction domestic water savings and transforming the industrial structure moreover china should consider the spatial effects of these influencing factors when government policies are designed

the movement from real to abstract value theory 1817 1959 general value theory has become a nonagenda item for orthodox economics determination of exchange value is the only value questio n asked value theory is synonymous with price theory bounded by representative classical works of david ricardo and gerard debreu this involved a process wherein the inclusive real value base of classical political economy is replaced by reductionis t abstract value the thesis is grounded on three classical value questions the determinants the measure and the source s of value it is developed in discussion of classical real value the half way house of neoclassicism and post neoclassical closure of the abstract equilibrium based value system copyright 1988 by oxford university press

development and application of the hicks moorsteen productivity index for the total factor productivity assessment of wastewater treatment plants abstract the assessment of the productivity change in wastewater treatment plants is essential to improve performance and reduce operational costs several indices are available to compute unit productivity however some assessments are more reliable than others in the absence of price data the malmquist productivity index is the most commonly applied but it does not maintain total factor productivity properties under variable returns to scale technology hence malmquist productivity index is not a suitable index to compute total factor productivity change in wastewater treatment plants the present study served to overcome such limitations by calculating for the first time total factor productivity changes in a sample of 204 spanish wastewater treatment plants using the hicks moorsteen productivity index it is a multiplicatively complete index which can be decomposed as several sub indices representing technical and efficiency changes therefore this study also investigated the drivers of total factor productivity change in wastewater treatment plants results showed a 5 4 total factor productivity decline per year from 2003 to 2008 in the plants analysed the primary driver in the reduction was efficiency change alternatively technical change improved during the five years of study the results of this study provide support for policymakers and managers in decision making processes and contribute to the improvement of technical and economic wastewater treatment plants performance in addition it is evidenced that wastewater treatment plants current dependence on external energy sources should be reduced to improve productivity and reduce costs to citizens who pay for wastewater treatment services

lottery versus all pay auction models of lobbying i first provide a complete characterization of the unique equilibrium of the lottery game by n lobbyists with asymmetric valuations and then compare the lottery and the all pay auction models of lobbying i show that the exclusion principle discovered by baye kovenock and de vries 1993 for all pay auction does not apply to lottery i also show that the perverse effect that an exogenous cap may increase the total lobbying expenditure in a two bidder all pay auction discovered by che and gale 1998 does not apply to lottery

do lower mortgage rates mean higher housing prices much research has shown that mortgage rates exert a negative influence on housing prices this study analyses the long and short run relationships between housing prices and mortgage rates using advanced nonstructural estimation methods as expected a bivariate specification and a four variable housing demand specification both show that these variables have a long run relationship and that there is a rather inelastic response of housing prices to changes in mortgage rates however contrary to previous research the results from granger non causality tests impulse response functions and variance decompositions reveal that there is virtually no short run influence from mortgage rates to housing prices

ambiguous political power and contest efforts when there is incomplete information on the source of power in a contest the contestants may divide their lobbying efforts between the potential centers of power only one of which determines the contests winning probabilities our analysis focuses on the effect of ambiguity regarding the source of power on the contestants aggregate effort in a symmetric simple lottery contest with two potential centers of power specifically we examine the effects of varying the informativeness of the contestants private signals i e the probability that a signal is correct and the degree of correlation between them our benchmark case is the standard tullock s model in which the source of power is known i e the contestants signals are perfectly informative we show that the level of aggregate effort in this case is reached also when the signals are perfectly uninformative however in any intermediate case the contestants aggregate effort is lower provided that the signals are not perfectly correlated in other words there is a u shape relationship between the informativeness of the signals and the aggregate effort in the contest the lowest level of effort is spent when the signals are independent and the probability that a signal is true is about 0 85 in this case efforts are reduced by about one fifth in comparison with the benchmark case from a rent dissipation of 50 to slightly over 40

can interest rates really control house prices effectiveness and implications for macroprudential policy this paper investigates how changes in the central bank policy and retail mortgage rates affected real housing prices in new zealand during the period 1999 2009 we find that real interest rates are significantly and positively related to real housing prices indicating that increases in the policy rate may not be effective in depressing real housing prices by testing interest rates we also find some evidence of housing price bubbles our findings suggest that the central bank could have limited housing price bubbles if it had started to intervene in the housing market prior to 2003 our results set international exemplars for using policy rates or macroprudential tools to cool the housing market where the extent of policy rate adjustments is limited by internal or external economic factors

rent seeking spillovers and the benefits of decentralization abstract in the presence of spillovers decentralized provision of local public goods may lead to a higher surplus than centralized provision even though localities have identical preferences indeed free riding costs associated to decentralization can be lower than the costs of rent seeking and influence activities under centralization actually centralization yields a higher level of regional surplus only if both the spillover effect from local public spending is sufficiently large and the elasticity of the influence function is sufficiently small

distributional coalitions and the politics of economic reform in latin america for much of the discipline of economics a closed economy is seen as the result of efforts of distributional coalitions and rent seekers to maintain sector specific protections accordingly economic liberalization is explained by the policy consistency of uncompromising reform elites students of the politics of economic adjustment in the developing world in turn have argued that reform programs concentrate costs in the present and disperse benefits in the future hence losers are prepared to engage in collective action whereas prospective winners facing uncertainty about payoffs remain disorganized they thus posit the cohesiveness and insularity of policymakers as the main variable for explaining successful reform both economists and political scientists therefore adopt a collective action approach that overlooks how groups organize in support of liberalization in the recent latin american experience however these reforms have preserved market reserves for firms that provided vital political support to and often colluded with policymaking elites this setting has thus reproduced incentives for rent seeking behavior even in the presence of comprehensive liberalization this evidence supports two interrelated theoretical claims first distributional coalitions may proliferate when the state withdraws from the economy not only when it intervenes second interest based variables retain explanatory power in political economy which state autonomy arguments disregard irrespective of whether the economy is closed or open which neoclassical perspectives overlook to highlight the centrality of interest groups favoring marketization therefore the article suggests modifications to the dominant theories of collective action and the literature on the politics of economic adjustment

measuring the efficiency of china s regional innovation systems application of network data envelopment analysis dea chen k and guan j measuring the efficiency of china s regional innovation systems application of network data envelopment analysis dea regional studies this study applies a relational network data analysis envelopment to the systematic evaluation of the innovation efficiency of china s regional innovation systems by decomposing the innovation process into the two connecting sub processes technological development and subsequent technological commercialization the results show that only one fifth of china s regional innovation systems are operating on the empirical best practice frontier during the whole process from technological development to commercialization furthermore it is found that substantial inconsistencies exist between technological development capacity and commercialization capacity in most regional innovation systems and that downstream commercialization capacity plays a more important role in the innovation performance of regional innovation systems chen k et guan j evaluer

cultural institutions and value formation on the art market a rent seeking approach the formation of value in the artistic market can be specifically affected by the behavior of cultural institutions acting on it as monopolistic quality certifiers the rent maximizing strategy limits quantities to sub optimum levels and keeps prices and costs higher this can be worsened by institutional rent seeking the establishment s strategies cannot always be matched through public policies because this can result in an increase of monopoly social losses and of the establishment s lobbying efforts

rent seeking and its implications for pollution taxation one of the fundamental insights gained from the study of economics comes from an understanding of how market prices arising from private property and exchange can motivate efficient responses to the problem of scarcity not surprisingly when private property rights and market exchange are deemed not to be feasible for either technological or political reasons economists have overwhelmingly recommended that politically imposed prices be employed as surrogates for market prices the most extensively discussed example of this in the literature is the use of pollution taxation as a means of motivating polluters to take the full cost of their polluting activities into account 1

efficient rents 2 free entry and efficient rent seeking in the competition for a monopoly right in which the number of bidders is fixed tullock and others have found the value of the resources spent in the aggregate to capture the transfer to be sometimes less than and sometimes greater than the value of the monopoly we think this approach to be incomplete since it leaves unanswered the question of what determines the number of individuals who will vie for the right to be the monopolist it is unsatisfactory to imagine for example that the franchisor sets the number of contestants one could then foresee that rent seeking would arise to influence the permissible number of bidders and this merely moves the rent seeking dissipation question one step back