the impact of exports on economic growth it s the market form abstarct this paper unites explanations about the growth effects from various trade characteristics proposing the market form into which a country exports as the main driver exporting into concentrated world markets oligopolies or monopolies leads to higher profit margins similar to fundamental microeconomic logic the paper develops an index measuring the average market form of a country s exports this index produces a positive and statistically significant coefficient in conventional growth regressions a one standard deviation increase is suggested to raise growth by 0 885 percentage points this result holds for numerous extensions and seems particularly important for developing economics

smallholder market participation concepts and evidence from eastern and southern africa abstract this paper reviews the evidence on smallholder market participation with a focus on staple foodgrains i e cereals in eastern and southern africa in an effort to help better identify what interventions are most likely to break smallholders out of the semi subsistence poverty trap that appears to ensnare much of rural africa the conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating smallholder organization at reducing the costs of intermarket commerce and perhaps especially at improving poorer households access to improved technologies and productive assets are central to stimulating smallholder market participation and escape from semi subsistence poverty traps macroeconomic and trade policy tools appear less useful in inducing market participation by poor smallholders in the region

do faculty salaries rise with job seniority abstract previous research suggests that academic salaries fall with greater job seniority using a 1988 national survey we find that the return to seniority is positive over a lengthy employment period tenure status and academic rank also affect the return to seniority

the economics of the internet infrastructure and regulation the purpose of this article is to inform users regulators and economists about the basic economics of the internet focusing on regulation of its infrastructure it defines the internet and describes its development and organization it analyses the regulatory and competition issues associated with conveyance on the internet it then discusses three current puzzles of economic interest while the article reaches several conclusions the overall message is that much more work is needed in this area

learning wage dynamics and firm specific human capital we introduce a dynamic and fully strategic model of wage determination in the presence of firm specific human capital in this model human capital is interpreted as information we show that equilibrium exists and is efficient and that it gives rise to a unique distribution of the social surplus we show further that the equilibrium wage is determined by three factors consideration of these factors allows us to determine when and how the market mechanism enables the worker to capture some of the returns to firm specific human capital we relate our findings to the ongoing empirical debate concerning the return to tenure

crisis of the tax state this paper presents a simple model of the tax state where a progressive income tax is used to finance publicly supplied goods that are distributed free of charge the individual citizens may be dissatisfied with such a fiscal system if more than 50 are dissatisfied we speak of a crisis of the tax state

an economic theory of avant garde and popular art or high and low culture artists face choices between the pecuniary benefits of selling to the market and the nonpecuniary benefits of creating to please their own tastes we examine how changes in wages lumpsum income and capital labor ratios affect the artist s pursuit of self satisfaction versus market sales using our model of labor supply we consider the economic forces behind the high low culture split why some artistic media offer greater scope for the avant garde than others why so many artists dislike the market and how economic growth and taxation affect the quantity and form of different kinds of art

structure and performance the task of economic history jhe cliometric revolution in ecoknomic history wedded neoclassical economics and quantitative methods in order to describe and explain the performance of economies in the past economic history gained in rigor and scientific pretension but at the expense of exploring a much more fundamental set of questions about the evolving structure of economies that underlies performance 2 cliometricians have turned their backs on a long tradition stretching back from joseph schumpeter to karl marx to adam smith these scholars regarded economic history as essential because it added a dimension to economics its purpose was to analyze the parameters held constant by the economist if economics is a theory of choice subject to specified constraints a task of economic history was to theorize about those evolving constraints the failure of economic historians to provide their colleagues with a historical dimension to their perspective has reduced the effectiveness of economists in dealing with contemporary problems failure of economists to appreciate the transitory character of the assumed constraints and to understand the source and direction of these changing constraints is a fundamental handicap to further development of economic theory the challenge to the economic historian which has equally compelling implications for the economic theorist is to explain the transformation of the structure of the american economy in the past century 3 in the rest of this essay i shall explore this issue in order to specify some of the dimensions of the economic historian s task

an evolutionary approach to norms iorms provide a powerful mechanism for regulating conflict in groups even when there are more than two people and no central authority this paper investigates the emergence and stability of behavioral norms in the context of a game played by people of limited rationality the dynamics of this new norms game are analyzed with a computer simulation based upon the evolutionary principle that strategies shown to be relatively effective will be used more in the future than less effective strategies the results show the conditions under which norms can evolve and prove stable one interesting possibility is the employment of metanorms the willingness to punish someone who did not enforce a norm many historical examples of domestic and international norms are used to illustrate the wide variety of mechanisms that can support norms including metanorms dominance internalization deterrence social proof membership in groups law and reputation

desirability of compatibility in the absence of network externalities i compare the incentives firms have to produce individual components compatible with components of other manufacturers instead of systems composed of components that are incompatible with components of competing manufacturers i show that even in the absence of positive consumption externalities network externalities prices and profits will be higher in the regime of compatibility equilibrium total surplus could be higher in either regime both regimes overprovide variety compared to the surplus maximizing solution in today s environment many products are complex specified by a long array of characteristics part of the decision of the firm is to choose if it should break this long array of features into two or more smaller parts and produce the products corresponding to the smaller arrays instead of the product that embodies the full array we will call the products that correspond to these smaller arrays components and the product that corresponds to the full array a system note that components are by their definition complements components produced by different manufacturers are compatible if it is feasible for the consumers to combine them costlessly into a working system in this paper we will assume that there are two components which make up a system we will discuss competition under full compatibility when components produced by all firms are compatible with each other and under incompatibility when no components produced by different firms are compatible and no hybrid systems can exist 2 assuming availability of the same

rewards to academia the remuneration of vice chancellors and principals this paper models the financial remuneration to vice chancellors and principals at uk higher education institutions after describing the alternative theoretical underpinnings for the determination of pay an earnings function is estimated utilizing institutional and personal characteristics the model suggests only a partial linkage of managerial and performance related indicators to remuneration levels this suggests substantial scope for reorientation of rewards towards such indicators rather than relying on an efficiency wage this would appear particularly appropriate given the present and continued disclosure of this information together with the increased focus on performance indicators relating to teaching and research within the uk higher education sector

capture and ideology in the economic theory of politics the economic theory of regulation long ago put public interest theories of politics to rest these theories have correctly been viewed as normative wishings rather than explanations of real world phenomena they have been replaced by models of political behavior that are consistent with the rest of microeconomics anthony downs 1957 james buchanan and gordon tullock 1965 george stigler 1971 sam peltzman 1976 recently however debate has arisen over whether some version of a public interest theory of regulation will have to be readmitted to our thinking about actions and results in the political arena what is at issue is the empirical importance of the altruistic publicly interested goals of rational actors in determining legislative and regulatory outcomes james kau and paul rubin 1979 kalt 1981 peltzman 1982 this study assesses the nature and significance of publicly interested objectives in a particular instance of economic policymaking u s senate voting on coal strip mining regulations the existence of such objectives is of course no contradiction of the economic view of human behavior kenneth arrow 1972 gary becker 1974 and may well be rooted in genetic biological history becker 1976 jack hirshleifer 1978 generally however individuals altruistic publicly interested goals have been given little attention this reflects the judgment that such goals are so empirically unimportant as to allow the use of occam s razor in positive models or well founded apprehensions that these goals are unusually difficult to identify measure and analyze notwithstanding the latter problem we find that approaches which confine themselves to a view of political actors as narrowly egocentric maximizers explain and predict legislative outcomes poorly the tracking and dissecting of the determinants of voting on coal strip mining policy suggest that the economic theory of politics has been prematurely closed to a broader conception of political behavior

do economics departments with lower tenure probabilities pay higher faculty salaries the simplest competitive labor market model asserts that if tenure is a desirable job characteristic for professors they should be willing to pay for it by accepting lower salaries conversely if an institution unilaterally reduces the probability that its assistant professors receive tenure it will have to pay higher salaries to attract new faculty our paper tests this theory using data on salary offers accepted by new assistant professors at economics departments in the united states during the 1974 75 to 1980 81 period along with data on the proportion of new ph d s hired by each department between 1970 and 1980 that received tenure in the department or at a comparable or higher quality department within the first eight years of receipt of their ph d s we find evidence that supports the hypothesis that a tradeoff existed equally importantly departments that offered low tenure probabilities to assistant professors also paid higher salaries to their tenured faculty we attribute this to low tenur

monetary policy and regional availability of debt financing the relative availability of bond and bank financing should affect the firm s external financing and investment decisions we define a measure that proxies for the regional borrowing inflexibility to substitute between bank and bond financing debt inflexibility debt inflexibility tilts the firm s financial structure towards equity and reduces investment the impact is stronger during the period of tight monetary policy particularly for smaller firms and firms without banking relationships debt inflexibility increases the sensitivity of cash holdings to cash flows reduces the likelihood of dividend payment and makes the firm more likely to pay equity in mergers and acquisitions

democracy and national economic performance the preference for stability appear to arise because democracies ameliorate the effects of social cleavages another mechanism that might explain democratic stability when growth and volatility are jointly examined democracies reveal highly favorable economic results oes democracy affect national economic performance and if so how no question is more central to the study of political economics almost all previous work on democracy and economic performance has focused exclusively on growth rates with contradictory and confusing results in this article we argue that to reveal the impact of democratic institutions on economic performance scholars must consider two dimensions of economic performance growth rate and volatility we begin with a novel hypothesis economic policy in democracy is risk avoiding relative to policy in nondemocracies 1 because voters are riskaverse they penalize incumbent governments for economic volatility and democratic governments respond accordingly in nondemocracies we posit that elites are more likely to seek risk that voters would reject consequently autocracies produce systematically more economic volatility than

competitive price discrimination we model firms as supplying utility directly to consumers the equilibrium outcome of competition in utility space depends on the relationship u between profit and average utility per consumer public policy constraints on the deals firms may offer affect equilibrium outcomes via their effect on u f rom this perspective we examine the profit utility and welfare implications of price discrimination policies in an oligopolistic framework we also show that an equilibrium outcome of competitive nonlinear pricing when consumers have private information about their tastes is for firms to offer efficient two part tariffs

rough and lonely road to prosperity a reexamination of the sources of growth in africa using bayesian model averaging this paper takes a fresh look at africa s growth experience by using the bayesian model averaging bma methodology bma enables us to consider a large number of potential explanatory variables and sort out which of these variable can effectively explain africa s growth experience posterior coefficient estimates reveal that key engines of growth in africa are substantially different from those in the rest of the world more precisely it is shown that mining primary exports and initial primary education exerted differential effect on african growth these results are examined in relation to the existing literature copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

sex discrimination and competition in product and labour markets theoritical explanations for wage discrimination collapse in the long run because competition should drive discriminations firms out of the market in product markets with imperfect competition em

negative returns to seniority new evidence in academic markets recent research has suggested that the long observed negative association between seniority and pay among college faculty largely reflects below average research productivity of senior faculty a possibility that most earlier studies did not examine overlooked in both waves of studies however is match quality because the higher quality of the faculty institutional match implied by higher seniority should all else equal result in higher salaries failure to account for match quality inflates the estimated returns to seniority indeed that positive bias the authors find is roughly equal in magnitude to the negative bias caused by failure to account for research quantity and quality when they account for both match quality and faculty research productivity in an analysis of data on economics faculty at five research universities over a 21 year period the authors estimate that holding experience and other factors constant the penalty for twenty years of seniority is 16 of salary

the paradox of plenty a meta analysis since sachs and warner s seminal article in 1995 numerous studies have addressed the link between natural resources and economic growth although the resource curse effect was commonly accepted at first many articles have challenged its existence and the results found in the literature are ambiguous in this paper we aim to quantitatively review this literature in order to i identify the sources of heterogeneity and ii assess the impact of natural resources on economic growth a meta analysis is performed on 69 empirical studies on the resource curse totaling 1 419 estimates our findings show that i only developing countries suffer from the resource curse although it is soft ii the way natural resources are taken into account is crucial to understand the heterogeneity found in the literature iii the negative impact of the volatility of the terms of trade on growth should be qualified an additional mra performed on indirect effects size also indicate that when institutions are at their best level the resource curse disappears and may be turned into a blessing

a theory of wage dynamics a dynamic equilibrium model of long term implicit labour contracts under incomplete but symmetric information is developed workers are assumed to be risk averse and of unknown ability or productivity risk neutral firms learn as do workers about each worker s productivity by observing the worker s output over time it is shown that equilibrium contracts provide for wages which never decline with age and increase only when the worker s market value increases above his current wage in addition to characterizing the equilibrium wage contract we also derive some of its implications for the behaviour of aggregate wages across various groups of workers these implications explain some findings in the recent empirical literature on ageearnings profiles in particular our model can explain why earnings may be positively related to experience even after controlling for productivity as some empirical studies have indicated

testing market integration new approaches with case material from the west bengal food economy given the inferential dangers of received methods a new methodology is introduced to provide a sequence of tests using weekly spot prices to examine the dynamic relationship of market commodity prices in three locations in west bengal tests suggest that the markets are integrated but a lower degree of integration of paddy and rice prices is identified the hypothesis of full market integration is rejected structural and institutional factors which affect the specifics of performance are identified physical isolation the institutional complexity of marketing systems and contractual forms the polarisation of assets assets specificity the institutional control of information and price formation the underdevelopment of linked markets and the idiosyncratic implementation of state regulatory policy and auto regulatory responses enter the explanation

from institutions to financial development and growth what are the links this paper presents an integrated overview of the literature linking institutions financial development and economic growth from the large body of research on institutional development the paper first selects those contributions that make it possible to study the role of institutional arrangements in ameliorating worsening the information frictions and transaction costs that characterize the development of financial markets the paper then investigates the theoretical mechanisms by which these specific frictions affect economic growth and presents the stock of empirical evidence quantifying the impact of institutions on growth through financial development

how do journal quality co authorship and author order affect agricultural economists salaries utilizing an original data set containing annual salaries and peer reviewed publication histories for 326 faculty members from top ranked ph d granting programs we examine the labor market for academic agricultural economists the results suggest that higher quality publications have a greater impact on annual earnings that sole authored articles have a higher return than multi authored articles and that no wage premium exists for being the lead author of a non alphabetic article

simple competitive internet pricing abstract it is widely recognised that pricing is required to control congestion on the internet one lesson that has emerged from many proposals is that any price system should be simple and robust to competition this is highlighted in the question currently under debate in the market for internet services should usage prices should be employed at all in a duopoly model with overall positive network effects it is shown that flat rate pricing can occur in equilibrium even when the costs of measuring variable demand are very small

reputation and earnings the roles of quality and quantity in academe we examine the determinants of professional reputation does quantity of exposures raise reputation independent of quality does quality of the most important exposure have extra effects on reputation in a very large sample of academic economists there is little evidence that a scholar s most influential work provides any extra enhancement of reputation quality rankings matter more than absolute quality quantity has a zero or even negative effect on proxies for reputation data on salaries however show positive effects of quantity independent of quality we test explanations for the differences between the determinants of reputation and salary jel l14 j31

wage competition with heterogeneous workers and firms we study imperfect competition in the labor market when both workers and firms are heterogeneous when firms cannot observe workers skill firms pay workers equal wages but workers absorb training costs when firms can identify worker types firms pay different net wages to different workers voters select the level of general education that is financed by a lump sum tax workers are on average better off when firms can observe workers skill for a given level of general human capital but the median voter prefers a higher level of general human capital when firms cannot observe worker types

mix and match compatibility with vertical product dimensions this article considers a duopoly in which each firm produces two components of a system if the components are compatible consumers may mix and match the firms components the system components and consumer tastes are assumed to differ with regard to vertical characteristics in the model one firm may be the quality leader in one or both characteristics moreover a consumer s taste for the quality of one component may be perfectly correlated with or independent of his taste for the quality of the other component it is shown that in all cases the sum of each producer s component prices is weakly higher if the components are compatible the same is true of producer profits

openness country size and government size additional evidence from a large cross country panel abstract a body of influential research has suggested that there is a negative association between country size and government size and between country size and openness and these may account for the positive association between openness and government size estimation of several models from 41 year panel data for over 150 countries indicates that while pooled ols estimates support the foregoing scenario when cross country heterogeneity is taken into consideration through the fixed effects format there is little evidence of a negative association of country size with either government size or openness therefore it does not seem likely that positive association between openness and government size arises due to the mediating role of country size

the gender salary gap in british academia this paper considers salary determination and the gender salary gap in the academic labour market utilizing a particularly detailed data set of academics from five old established universities results reveal an aggregate gender salary differential for academic staff of 15 most of this differential can however be explained by our model evidence suggests a limited opportunity for female academics to combine career and family despite the flexibility of an academic job and emphasizes the importance of mobility to the male career publication record is found to be an important determinant of salary

reputational capital and academic pay geoffrey k turnbull i introduction economists continue to have a strong interest in academic labor markets as the steady stream of earnings studies over the past several decades readily attests the academic labor market draws the attention of economists not only because it is a topic of direct personal interest but also because it presents an opportunity to examine general theories of labor markets in a context with which the researcher has intimate experience nonetheless important questions about how the market values research teaching and service remain unanswered to what extent does the market reward quality versus quantity of published research or team production in the form of co authorship furthermore how durable is reputational capital for individuals whose research productivity diminishes during their career ultimately these questions relate in one way or another to the nature of the incentive structure faced by academic economists we provide new evidence concerning the role of research quality co authorship administrative service and teaching performance in the production of reputational capital in addition we explore the question of the durability of reputational capital once some of these activities cease we assume that the quantity and quality of published research largely determines an individual s reputational capital in the external market to help us sort out the separate effects on reputational capital of both the quality and quantity of research activity we measure research quality by both journal quality and career citations employing an interactive quantity quality term a related question concerns the role of team production in building an individual s reputational capital do individuals receive differential returns to publishing single authored versus co authored research papers this is an interesting question in light of the substantial increase in co authorship over the last few decades 1 one explanation of this trend is that the academic market has presented scholars with increasing opportunities for specialization in the production of knowledge and that team production involves the combination of complementary skilled researchers if team production reflects complementarities in the production of research we should observe little difference in the returns to single versus co authored work another explanation is that co authorship involves the combination of substitute skilled researchers so that co authorship presents a way for individuals to reduce their research efforts without reducing their individual measured research output to the extent that co authorshi p represents such substitution the market should fully discount the returns to multiple authored papers in this article we also move beyond identifying the factors that enhance an individual s reputation in the market to study the question of the durability of reputational capital some individuals quit publishing once they are tenured or promoted while others experience lengthy but temporary breaks in their flow of research output we examine the potential penalties associated with gaps in research output providing the first empirical evidence concerning the durability of reputational capital for academic economists in order to ensure that our analysis deals with these issues in a way that is most relevant to a large portion of the market for academic economists we use data from several research universities but restrict the sample frame to a single discipline economics much of the previous work estimating how publications or other factors affect academic salaries typically use data from a single university with earnings equations estimated across disciplines restricting the sample to a single discipline has the additional advantage of reducing potential heterogeneity problems associated with measuring productivity across disciplines in addition our data enable us more thoroughly to explore the empirical issues in the debate since they permit more precise measures of the past and current productivity of individuals engaged in comparable work

the effect of collective bargaining on salaries in higher education using data from a 1977 survey of faculty from 158 u s colleges and universities the author estimates that the proportional salary advantage to unionized faculty members was typically less than two percent that differential varied considerably however with the length of time the institution had been organized in addition unionization increased the return to seniority and decreased the return to several measures of merit including number of publications and general post degree experience

job duration seniority and earnings an important stylized fact about labor markets is that workers with longer seniority with their current employer have higher earnings than other workers with the same total labor market experience this study shows that workers in longer jobs earn more throughout than workers in a series of shorter jobs and that the measured positive cross sectional return seniority is largely a statistical artifact due to the correlation of seniority with an omitted variable representing the quality of the worker the job or the worker employer match the implication is tha t earnings do not in fact rise very much with seniority copyright 1987 by american economic association

gender and racial earnings differentials in academic labor markets this study estimates earnings differentials across racial and gender groups among college faculty and decomposes these differentials into the components attributable to differences in individual and institutional characteristics and that which remains unexplained we find that white females earn approximately 4 percent less than white males black males earn 7 4 percent more black females earn one percent more hispanic males earn 2 7 percent more hispanic females earn 1 7 percent less and asian males earn 7 7 percent more than comparable white males we also find a significant earnings penalty for being a naturalized citizen or noncitizen versus an u s born citizen

specific investment and wage profiles in labour markets wage contracts like all civil contracts can be renegotiated by mutual consent this is not just a theoretical possibility but one that happens all the time annual wage increases for example are typically the result of genuine renegotiation not the result of formal cost of living escalator clauses this has implications for the effect of wage contracts on specitic investment the possibility of renegotiation reverses a number of the widely accepted arguments about the form wage contracts should take some of the results we show here are

does raiding explain the negative returns to faculty seniority i introduction economists have studied various aspects of faculty mobility research shows that turnover is greater among nonunion faculty rees 1994 female faculty average slightly more employers than male faculty barbezat and hughes 2001 ginther and kahn 2004 1 the responsiveness of turnover to relative pay diminishes with rank ehrenberg kasper and rees 1991 and research productivity enhances prospects for upward mobility ault rutman and stevenson 1979 1982 coupe smeets and warzynski 2005 still questions remain unanswered where do faculty go when they leave a university how does faculty turnover vary with time at a university what percentage of faculty move upward and what percentage move downward because of tenure denials or the prospect of being turned down for tenure the present article contributes to our understanding of these issues but its primary objective was to use data on faculty mobility to provide insights on another issue returns to academic seniority the negative returns to seniority that many studies find are commonly attributed to one of two factors 2 the first view is that negative returns reflect monopsony power on the part of universities faculty with high mobility costs acquire high seniority and because they are unlikely to move they are paid less than equally productive faculty that employers view as more likely to leave a competing explanation is that highly productive faculty are raided according to this story returns to seniority are biased negatively because faculty with high seniority tend to have low unmeasured productivity the best faculty are bid away moving on to better jobs those who remain are the faculty without outside offers and the negative returns estimated for senior faculty actually reflect a penalty for low unmeasured productivity rather than a true penalty for seniority the raiding story has several implications first estimated returns to seniority should become less negative the more fully the productivity is measured second estimated returns should be less negative once we control for faculty who are bid away finally and of particular importance estimated returns to seniority should not be negative for faculty who are bid away the faculty for whom unmeasured productivity is presumably high with the right data set these hypotheses can be tested rejection of the raiding hypothesis would provide tacit evidence of monoposony in academic markets 3 this article contributes to the literature in several ways it is the first research to directly test the raiding hypothesis it provides a detailed look at faculty mobility in one segment of the academic labor market it extends and improves bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 in the following ways it expands the sample to cover three decades of faculty pay records it includes additional controls for productivity number and types of books recent and prospective articles and so forth resulting in the most complete specification of research productivity to date and it allows for heterogeneity in the seniority penalty via phd pedigree and direction of move finally it tests for the possibility that the academic job market does a better job of matching faculty and universities in recent years as might be expected because of the information revolution the sample consists of five public phd granting universities in the midwest we track all tenure track economics faculty employed in these universities over a 30 yr period we measure their productivity their pay and their mobility as such the study provides a rich and detailed investigation of one subset of economics programs it is possible that mobility may be greater in urban areas where faculty can more readily obtain alternative employment without relocating and prior research indicates that pay structures depend on the university s stature and its relative emphasis on research and teaching

institutions and economic growth an historical introduction abstract in this essay the interdependence of political and economic institutions is examined against premises in neoclassical theories of economies which maintain that population and savings are the principal determinants of economic growth that institutions matter in the development of economies is the difference in assumptions i examine i look at the institutional frameworks that preceded adoption of the united states constitution and the northwest ordinance in early america i then trace the precedents of these american institutions to the evolution of common law in england where interests unconcerned with the crown coalesced to form competing political units i then contrast england s institutional development with the comparatively centralized enforcement mechanisms of spain to examine the hypothesis that institutional differences produce economic consequences

debt relief and governance quality in developing countries summary in this paper we empirically discuss whether or not debt relief has been economically rational in the past 15 years from analyzing the determinants of debt relief our results suggest that governance quality did not play a role in the decision of creditor countries to forgive debt in the 1990s furthermore even the actual debt burden of highly indebted poor countries was not crucial in deciding whether or not debt forgiveness was granted rather debt relief followed a strong path dependence those countries whose debt had been forgiven in the first half of the 1990s were also granted debt forgiveness in the second half of the decade however this allocation pattern changed at the beginning of the 21st century when path dependence diminished and some dimensions of governance quality were taken into account by donor countries

stages of diversification this paper studies the evolution of sectoral concentration in relation to the level of per capita income we show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a u shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources countries first diversify in the sense that economic activity is spread more equally across sectors but there exists relatively late in the development process a point at which they start specializing again we discuss this finding in light of existing theories of trade and growth which generally predict a monotonic relationship between income and diversification

what matters most teaching or research empirical evidence on the remuneration of british academics this paper examines the impact of productivity on pay within academia drawing upon a detailed dataset of academics from five old established universities results outline the importance of publication grant receipt and teaching quality in the determination of pay a large financial penalty to time out of the profession is revealed which with productivity variables explains away the gender salary gap the relationship between teaching and research is investigated and we find some evidence in support of the hypothesis that productive researchers are successful teachers results on reservation salary suggest that the best academics are willing to stay within the profession

efficient and competitive rationing abstract the contracts that interest us here are called priority service contracts the salient feature of such contracts is that they specify each customer s priority in obtaining service that is they specify the tank order in which a customer is served out of the available supply until all customers are served or supply is exhausted such contracts essentially establish queues for customers in section 1 the author provides some background about priority service section 2 formulates a basic model and offer several illustrations also describes two main examples that motivate the theoretical development section 3 derives some key results that show how the prices of priority service contracts are designed to induce customers to self select efficient service orders in section 4 the author discusses various ways that state enterprises can organize markets that implement priority service efficiently in section 5 we study the operation of competitive markets for priority service section 6 concludes with some summary remarks two themes are emphasized one is that a state enterprise can promote substantial efficiency gains by substituting priority service for absent spot markets the other is that oligopolistic firms may have insufficient incentives to offer efficient product diversity consequently allocative efficiency depends on entry of numerous firms even so dispersal of supplies among many firms can prevent productive efficiency when there are advantages from pooling supplies

are there gender differences in the job mobility patterns of academic economists labor economic theory posits that job mobil ity should affect worker salaries the degree to which this holds for academic faculty has received considerable attention prior empirical studies have estimated log wage regressions that control for both years of total work experience and years of seniority at the current institution in an effort to determine whether negative returns to seniority exist in academic labor markets for example bernt bratsberg james ragan and jim warren 2003 and william moore robert turnbull and geoffrey newman 1998 for aca demic economists michael ransom 1993 kevin hallock 1995 and emily hoffman 1976 for specific institutions debra a barbezat and michael r donihue 1998 and barbezat 1989 for

cyclicality of credit supply firm level evidence abstract we quantify fluctuations in bank loan supply in the time series by studying firms substitution between loans and bonds using firm level data any firm that raises new debt must have a positive demand for external funds conditional on the issuance of new debt we interpret firms switching from loans to bonds as a contraction in bank credit supply we find strong evidence of this substitution at times that are characterized by tight lending standards depressed aggregate lending poor bank performance and tight monetary policy we show that this substitution behavior has strong predictive power for bank borrowing and investments by small firms

revisiting the seniority wage effect for faculty abstract this study uses 1999 national data to derive estimates of the effect of seniority on faculty salaries seniority has a positive effect on salary but varies by union status rank job mobility and inclusion of faculty productivity measures

negative returns to seniority and job mobility across the program quality distribution are top public phd granting programs different we analyze a unique data set containing annual salary and detailed job and publication histories for a sample of 1 009 faculty members drawn from 53 public ph d granting economics departments empirical results suggest that all else equal 1 statistically significant negative returns to seniority exist within lower ranked but not top 15 programs 2 more frequent movers observe statistically higher annual salaries in lower ranked but not top 15 programs and 3 for each level of seniority faculty in top 15 programs are more likely to move at any point in the career than faculty in lower ranked programs

do wages rise with job seniority many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority tenure on wages this paper re examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage we use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure the variation in tenure over the job is uncorrelated by construction with the fixed individual and job match specific components of the error term of the wage equation our main finding is that the partial effect of tenure on wages is small and that general labour market experience and job shopping account for most wage growth over a career the strong cross section relationship between tenure and wages is due primarily to heterogeneity bias prior researchers see mincer and jovanovic 1981 bartel and borjas 1981 borjas 1981 cline 1979 and mellow 1981 and many others have established that job seniority has a strong positive relationship with wage rates in a cross section or a cross section time series of individuals in this paper we re evaluate the evidence concerning the partial effects on wages of job seniority tenure and total labour market experience the extent to which wages rise with tenure is important for several reasons first and foremost the wage tenure profile is a fundamental question about the structure of earnings over careers second the wage tenure profile is a key determinant of the extent to which the earnings power of individuals is tied to specific jobs and it is important for assessment of the losses suffered by displaced workers hamermesh 1984 third evidence that wages rise with job tenure has been used to explain the decline in quits with tenure since the wage growth on the current job lowers the probability that the worker will locate a superior alternative a growing theoretical literature surveyed in parsons 1984 has taken the evidence of a strong wage tenure profile at face value and sought to provide an explanation for the relationship the most prominent explanation is the theory of specific human capital oi 1962 becker 1962 mincer 1974 parsons 1972 kuratani 1973 and hashimoto 1980 in which the growth of wages with tenure holding experience constant is attributed to the worker s share of investments in firm specific skills more recently lazear 1981 has presented a supervision model of wage growth in which firms defer compensation as a means of inducing workers not to shirk freeman 1977 and harris and holmstrom 1982 provide an explanation for wage growth based on an insurance motive salop and salop 1976 nickell 1976 and guasch and weiss 1982 present adverse selection models of wage growth in which firms use a wage tenure profile as a

contrasting models of the effect of inflation on growth the paper formulates a nesting model for studying the theoretical literature on inflation and endogenous growth it analyses different classes of endogenous growth models with different usage of physical and human capital with different exchange technologies first the paper shows that a broad array of models can all generate significant negative effects of inflation on growth second it shows that these models can be differentiated primarily by the fact whether there is a tobin type effect of inflation and also whether the inflation growth effect becomes weaker as the inflation rate rises a non linearity or stays essentially constant over the range of inflation rates the paper compares these features of the models to empirical evidence as a way to summarize the efficacy of the models

fame and the fortune of academic economists how the market rewards influential research in economics we analyze the pay and position of 1 009 faculty members who teach in doctoral granting economics departments at fifty three large public universities in the united states using the web of science we have identified the journal articles published by these scholars and the number of times each of these articles has been subsequently cited in published research articles we find that research influence as measured by various measures of total citations is a surprisingly strong predictor of the salary and the prestige of the department in which professors are employed we also examine how coauthorship is rewarded by the market

the optimal product mix for a monopolist in the presence of congestion effects a model and some results the paper develops a model of product differentiation in which the quality of a product may be negatively affected by the number of consumers buying it as it is the case for any good affected by congestion it is shown that for any positive degree of heterogeneity among the consumers a monopolist will always find it more profitable to differentiate i e to sell more than one quality of the product at different prices

the internal economics of a university evidence from personnel data using a rich personnel data set of a large european university we find strong evidence for the existence of an internal labor market first there is a strong port of entry at the lowest academic rank and in fact even prior to entering professorship resulting in very long internal careers second wages do not follow external wage developments we subsequently consider various incentive theories regarding the dynamics of promotions as organized through annual tournaments as expected a rigid set of research and teaching criteria determine the speed of promotions at the same time administrative rigidities play an important role

state capacity and military conflict powerful centralized states controlling a large share of national income only begin to appear in europe after 1500 we build a model that explains their emergence in response to the increasing importance of money for military success when fiscal resources are not crucial for winning wars the threat of external conflict stifles state building as finance becomes critical internally cohesive states invest in state capacity while divided states rationally drop out of the competition causing divergence we emphasize the role of the military revolution a sequence of technological innovations that transformed armed conflict using data from 374 battles we investigate empirically both the importance of money for military success and patterns of state building in early modern europe the evidence is consistent with the predictions of our model

monarchy monopoly and mercantilism brazil versus the united states in the 1800s gdp was 738 per capita in brazil and 807 in the united states in 1800 but was 4 854 in the latter in 1900 and actually fell from 738 inbrazil by 1913 relative factor endowments and institutions broadlyconsidered are twin traditional explanations for the extremely diversegrowth rates in this paper we offer a complementary analysis of specificpolitical and economic structures to help explain the success andpersistence of monopoly restrictions in brazil and the failure of internalmercantilism in the u s we conclude that brazilian institutions provideda ripe and efficient environment for rent seeking such conditions did notexist in the u s a fact that helped produce the vast difference ingrowth in the 1800s

sources of growth a reconsideration and general equilibrium application to indonesia abstract a computable general equilibrium cge model of indonesia is developed in which total factor productivity growth in manufacturing is endogenously determined productivity growth is conceptualized as human and social capital accumulation mediated by learning and institutional development stimulated by the trade regime these factors are modeled as externalities determined by export growth and capital equipment imports the model is used to analyze the gains deriving from the externalities and subsidies that amplify their effects leading indonesia to acquire korea like institutions sooner the growth and fiscal implications of such counterfactual simulations are analyzed in a realistic general equilibrium framework with a fully articulated public sector

academic pay in the united kingdom and the united states the differential returns to productivity and the lifetime earnings gap this paper estimates earnings functions for two samples of u k and u s academic economists despite significant differences in compensation schemes a comparably specified human capital earnings model does a good job explaining earnings variations for academic economists in both countries our estimates suggest that rewards for research are more immediate and direct in the united states because of the national salary scale the payoffs to experience and seniority are greater and the payoffs to research are lower in the united kingdom than in the united states after adjusting for productivity and demographic factors we find that u s economists are paid approximately 40 more than otherwise equivalent economists in the united kingdom simulating career age earnings profiles for both markets we find that the earnings gap widens with experience for relatively productive research economists and may even narrow with age for relatively less productive research economists nevertheless the cumulative lifetime earnings foregone are substantial for research and nonresearch economists in the united kingdom

citations or journal quality which is rewarded more in the academic labor market research quality can be evaluated from citations or from the prestige of journals publishing the research we relate salary of tenured university of california uc economists to their lifetime publications of 5 500 articles and to the 140 000 citations to these articles citations hardly affect salary especially in top ranked uc departments where impacts of citations are less than one tenth those of journals in lower ranked departments and when journal quality is less comprehensively measured effects of citations on salary increase if journal quality is just measured by counting articles in journal tiers apparent effects of citations are overstated jel a14 j44

which journal rankings best explain academic salaries evidence from the university of california the ranking of an academic journal is important to authors universities journal publishers and research funders rankings are gaining prominence as countries adopt regular research assessment exercises that especially reward publication in high impact journals yet even within a rankings oriented discipline like economics there is no agreement on how aggressively lower ranked journals are down weighted and in how wide is the universe of journals considered moreover since it is typically less costly for authors to cite superfluous references whether of their own volition or prompted by editors than it is to ignore relevant ones rankings based on citations may be easily manipulated in contrast when the merits of publication in one journal or another are debated during hiring promotion and salary decisions the evaluators are choosing over actions with costly consequences we therefore look to the academic labor market using data on economists in the university of california system to relate their lifetime publications in 700 different academic journals to salary we test amongst various sets of journal rankings and publication discount rates to see which are most congruent with the returns implied by the academic labor market jel a14 i23 j44

competition in communication networks pricing and regulation by any measure the communication sector is important it is no surprise then that the communication sector has attracted the attention of both policy makers and economists in this paper we argue that four characteristics of the networks that deliver communication services make this area of particular interest we analyse the implications of networks cost structures the strong complementarity between their components the demand side externalities that arise from consumption of their services and the social obligations attached to them despite the attention that the communication sector has received many aspects of competition between networks are still poorly understood we identify some of the key issues that will continue to trouble regulators and interest academics

seniority and monopsony in the academic labor market workers with high seniority usually have higher wages than workers with low seniority and the same total labor marke t experience in contrast the results of this paper indicate that higher seniority is associated with lower salaries for university professors the author documents this finding for national surveys a nd individual institutions and explains it as due to monopsonistic discrimination by employers copyright 1993 by american economic association

institutions transaction costs and economic growth this essay develops a theoretical framework which explores the historical obstacles to economic growth these obstacles are examined in the context of the political economic institutional framework of economies in history and consequent transaction costs that determine economic performance and growth the essay concludes with specific suggestions for the study of economic growth

a theory of price control price or rent control is but one of many forms of legislative action which interfere with private contracting in the market place to delimit the scope of my analysis i shall use the term price control to refer only to any set of regulations which satisfies the following three conditions first the control must fix the price or income terms of private contracts this categorically excludes any laws which regulate the distribution of income among the contracting parties on a share or percentage basis 2 second the control must involve no appropriation of proceeds to or from the government taxation and subsidization are thus excluded finally the fixing of price must not be associated with direct government sales purchases or manipulation of resources so as to maintain the regulated price 3 by this stipulation price support is also excluded even on such terms legal regulations to control price are still many and varied to evaluate our understanding of the class of phenomena which we seek to explain it is essential that we discover implications refutable by facts by this criterion the available body of economic theory pertaining to price control is deficient indeed the massive literature on the subject offers few such implications 4 an alternative approach to analyzing the observable effects of price control is presented here

monopsony in the labor market this paper surveys recent theoretical and empirical research on monopsony in labor markets broadly defined as upward sloping labor supply to an employer we compare older monopsony models based on small numbers of employers with newer models based on labor market frictions such as moving costs and search we also compare older econometric approaches that focus on static wage concentration relationships with newer approaches that focus on dynamics our review of empirical estimates suggests that monopsony power based on small numbers of employers is probably rare but occasionally large while monopsony power based on frictions is probably widespread but small on average

endogenous emergence of credit markets contracting in response to a new technology in ghana abstract access to credit is important for the productivity and overall welfare of farmers in developing countries we present a theoretical framework which shows that a change in the mode of shipping from air to sea in the ghanaian pineapple industry made it profitable for pineapple exporters to provide myopic farmers with both in kind loans to improve productivity and cash loans for consumption smoothing despite being unable to monitor farmers or enforce repayment the innovative theoretical result is that providing farmers with additional cash loans can enforce greater input use without compromising repayment we provide evidence in the form of a case study documenting the dramatic rise of informal credit through contract farming after the switch to sea freight between 1996 and 2001 using this anecdote we argue that credit arrangements can arise spontaneously absent non market interventions to meet market needs even in the absence of proper legal protections for creditors

seniority and monopsony in the academic labor market comments this paper further explores the work of both michael ransom and emily hoffman who have written on monopsony in the academic labor market using data from university of massachusetts at amherst umass from 1989 this comment has three principal findings i the return to seniority at umass is positive at least for low levels of seniority which is contrary to ransom s results ii faculty hired with tenure have significantly higher salaries which supports the ransom monopsony hypothesis and iii sex discrimination as described by hoffman is much lower in 1989 than it was 15 years prior

strategic investments with spillovers vertical integration and foreclosure in the broadband access market abstract we analyse competition between two retailers of broadband access when they differ in their ability to offer value added services one retailer is vertically integrated and controls the input market for local access this firm invests to increase the input quality upgrading to broadband before an access price regulation is set we first show that access price regulation may lower consumer surplus and welfare if retailers do not differ too much second if the integrated firm s ability to offer value added services is much higher than that of the rival the integrated firm uses overinvestment as an alternative foreclosure tool

specific training sometimes cuts wages and always cuts turnover turnover falls with tenure but wages do not always rise and sometimes fall with tenure we reconcile these findings by revisiting an old issue how gains from firm specific training are split between workers and firms the division is determined by a stationary distribution of outside offers the lower the wage a firm pays to a specifically trained worker the more profit it makes but the more likely the employee is to leave the optimal time paths of wages and turnover show that if marginal product is increasing wages need not be increasing but it always implies a falling turnover rate

government size and growth a survey and interpretation of the evidence the literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings this conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and the countries studied an alternative approach of limiting the focus to studies of the relationship in rich countries measuring government size as total taxes or total expenditure relative to gdp and relying on panel data estimations with variation over time reveals a more consistent picture the most recent studies find a significant negative correlation an increase in government size by 10 percentage points is associated with a 0 5 to 1 percent lower annual growth rate we discuss efforts to make sense of this correlation and note several pitfalls involved in giving it a causal interpretation against this background we discuss two explanations of why several countries with high taxes seem able to enjoy above average growth one hypothesis is that countries with higher social trust levels are able to develop larger government sectors without harming the economy another explanation is that countries with large governments compensate for high taxes and spending by implementing market friendly policies in other areas both explanations are supported by ongoing research

where are they now tracking the ph d class of 1997 we report early career outcomes of economics ph d s by tracking the u s class of 1996 1997 we examine employment outcomes work activities salaries and graduates attitudes toward their jobs by 2003 all of the respondents were employed although almost half changed employers during the six years salaries of the cohort increased at an average annual rate of 8 2 from 1997 through 2003 academic year salaries rose about 5 7 per year whereas private sector salaries skyrocketed at 15 per year finally the median salaries of first year full time permanent 9 to 10 month academic economists hired in 2002 2003 actually exceed the median 2003 salaries of their counterparts initially hired in 1997 1998 some of this apparent salary inversion reflects a different mix of employers and departments between the two cohorts with the younger group securing relatively more jobs at higher paying institutions

institutions economics and the development quest institutions crucial for the analysis of how agents deal with uncertainty have been gaining increasing relevance on the economic research agenda in this paper we analyze the institutional literature aiming to explain why this perspective obtains better results than others in development economics in particular we stress the relevance of new institutional economics as an adequate framework for a broad understanding of development issues

do academic salaries decline with seniority this article reexamines the negative seniority earnings relationship for academic economists the empirical results show that the anomalous negative seniority effect found in earlier academic market studies holds in the absence of direct measures of research productivity the negative effect however eventually disappears as more comprehensive measures of publishing citations and other productivity measures are included in the wage equation to control for the quantity and quality of faculty productivity faculty with greater seniority appear to be rewarded relatively less simply because many have been relatively less productive than their colleagues with less seniority at similar stages in their careers