inflation and the informativeness of prices this paper studies the welfare effects of the relative price variability arising from inflation if customers and suppliers form long term relationships prices have an informational role a potential customer uses current prices as signals of future prices inflation reduces the informativeness of current prices causing customers to make costly mistakes about which relationships to enter in addition the reduced informativeness of prices makes demand less price elastic thereby increasing markups both effects can be quantitatively significant at moderate inflation rates

structural change in an open economy we study the importance of international trade in structural change our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks and allows for non unitary income and substitution elasticities we calibrate our model to investigate south korea s structural change between 1971 and 2005 we nd that the shock processes propagated through the model s two main transmission mechanisms non homothetic preferences and the open economy explain virtually all of the evolution of agriculture and services labor shares and the rising part of the hump shape in manufacturing counterfactual exercises show that the role of the open economy is quantitatively important for explaining south korea s structural change

the behavior of prices and inflation an empirical analysis of disaggregat price data this paper analyzes the effects of inflation on the dispersion of prices as well as other aspects of price behavior using disaggregated data on prices of foodstuffs in israel during 1978 84 we find that the effect of expected inflation on intramarket price variability is stronger than the effect of unexpected inflation we show that even in times of high inflation price quotations are not trivially short and price changes are not synchronized across firms these facts taken together confirm that there is some staggering in the setting of prices we find that the distribution of real prices is far from being uniform as many menu cost based models assume or conclude in fact as inflation increases to very high levels this distribution is not even symmetric when the annual inflation rate reaches 130 percent there are equal chances of finding real prices above or below the market average but upward deviations in the real price are further away from zero than downward ones furthermore as the annu

learning by doing and the introduction of new goods a dynamic general equilibrium model is developed in which goods are valued according to the characteristics they contain the set of goods produced in any period is endogenously determined and learning by doing is the force behind sustained growth it is shown that the set of produced goods changes in a systematic way over time with goods of higher quality entering each period and those of lower quality dropping out the model is then used to study the effect of introducing a traditional sector in which there is no learning

separation of powers and political accountability political constitutions are incomplete contracts and therefore leave room for abuse of power in democracies elections are the primary mechanism for disciplining public officials but they are not sufficient separation of powers between executive and legislative bodies also helps to prevent the abuse of power but only with appropriate checks and balances checks and balances work by creating a conflict of interest between the executive and the legislature yet requiring both bodies to agree on public policy in this way the two bodies discipline each other to the voters advantage under appropriate checks and balances separation of powers also helps the voters elicit information

on high inflation and the allocation of resources abstract this paper formalizes some of the disruptive effects of inflation on the organization of markets rapid inflation induces buyers to speed up purchases which thus inhibits the selection of more adequate trading partners through search this blurs distinctions across firms of different productivities and leads to resource misallocations as inflation causes efficient and inefficient firms to be less distinguishable the incentives to engage in cost reduction are dampened and lower growth results the model could provide a rationale for the large number of bankruptcies and large turnover rates following successful inflation stabilization programs like those of israel bolivia and argentina

assessing the variability of inflation although there has been much argument over the impact of variable inflation rates upon economic performance there has been surprisingly little attempt to define the term variability of inflation carefully or to test proposed hypotheses connecting variability and the level of inflation precise definitions are given in the paper and a model is constructed showing that the level variability hypothesis may be formulated in terms of the presence of heteroscedasticity in a regression model this theoretical model is used to criticize existing studies while an empirical study with australian data illustrates the application of the approach

search sticky prices and inflation this paper examines equilibrium in a deflationary environment in a market with free entry where consumers search and firms set prices on individual units of the commodity prices attached to newly produced goods are continuously adjusted prices attached to previously produced goods can only be changed at a cost deflation cuts into the market power created by the need to search for the good thus consumers welfare is inverse u shaped in deflation

the relationship between relative prices and the general price level it is very nearly a truismi amaong neoclassical economists that the public is wont to confuse changes in the general price level with relative price changes correspondingl y one might speak of the independence between the two as one of the central postulates of the neoclassical tradition william stanley jevons was aml ong the first to identify this basic dichotomin economic life as well as to attempt to explain the ordinary citizen s seenming incapacity to understand it

the food problem and the evolution of international income levels in most poor countries large fractions of land labor and other productive resources are devoted to producing food for subsistence needs we show that a model incorporating the food problem can provide new and useful insights into the evolution of international income levels in particular we find that the food problem can explain why some countries started to realize increases in per capita output more than 250 years later in history than others we also show that the food problem has important implications for growth miracles and the speed at which a country converges to its balanced growth path

price dispersion and inflation evidence from israel the paper considers the question whether observed price differentials reflect perceived differences in quality service agreements or location or whether information imperfections can explain this phenomenon it sets out theoretical arguments linking inflation to reductions in the information stock held by agents and thus to greater price dispersion the hypothesis is tested using monthly price data for 13 uniquely defined goods sold in israel between 1971 and 1984 price dispersion is shown to be positively related to the rate of market price inflation since inflation is an unlikely proxy for changes in perceived characteristics the findings support price dispersion theories based on optimally imperfect decision making

the economic effects of constitutions replicating and extending persson and tabellini persson and tabellini the economic effects of constitutions the mit press cambridge 2003 show that presidential regimes and majoritarian election systems have important economic effects here the number of countries is expanded and more recent data is used in replicating and extending their analyses we find that the effect of presidential regimes vanishes almost entirely with regard to electoral systems the original results are largely confirmed majoritarian as opposed to proportional electoral systems lead to lower government expenditure lower levels of rent seeking but also lower output per worker the institutional details such as the proportion of candidates that are not elected on party lists and district size are particularly important

entry exit and investment specific technical change using european data this paper finds that i industry entry and exit rates are positively related to industry rates of investment specific technical change istc and ii the sensitivity of industry entry and exit rates to cross country differences in entry costs depends on industry rates of istc the paper con structs a general equilibrium model in which the rate of istc varies across industries and new investment specific technologies can be introduced by entrants or by incumbents in the calibrated model equilibrium behavior is consistent with stylized facts i and ii provided the cost of technology adop tion is increasing in the rate of istc jel g31 li 1 031 033 entry and exit rates differ significantly across industries over the period 1963 1982 timothy dunne mark j roberts and larry samuelson 1988 find that five year entry rates in us manu facturing data range from 21 percent in tobacco to 60 percent in scientific instruments high entry industries are high exit industries suggesting that entry and exit are largely due to the same industry specific factors at the same time little is known about what these factors might be this paper finds a strong positive link between industry entry and exit rates and the pace of technical progress in the capital goods that the industry uses the rate of investment specific technical change istc a significant fraction of entry and exit thus represents the introduction and replacement of capital embodied technologies istc is also positively related to the proportion of enterprises in each industry that displays large investment outlays in a given year that investment often occurs in spikes has been known since at least mark doms and dunne 1998 and the results link this pattern to the replacement of new capital embodied technologies by incumbents furthermore the decision of whether or when to exit appears sensitive to policy in countries in which the cost of entry is high rates of entry and exit are disproportionately suppressed in industries with high rates of istc to analyze these findings the paper develops a general equilibrium model in which chang ing the vintage of capital used by a particular enterprise is costly in the model this vintage is termed a technology and an enterprise is a technology manager pair the manager accumu lates expertise with a given technology over time and at any date may choose to upgrade to a newer technology at the expense of accumulated expertise as in boyan jovanovic and yaw

the relationship between regional industrial organizing levels and ecological economic efficiency abstract this paper investigated the roles of industrial organizing levels economic resource endowments and natural resource endowments in the development of ecological economic efficiency using data from china during the past decade besides an original assessing method for industrial organizing levels was developed this paper investigated resource usage efficiency and pollution emission efficiency to determine the ecological economic efficiency and this relationship was defined by the artificial neural network based regression method in general china s industrial organizational levels and ecological economic efficiency increased in the past decade and had a positive relationship between them however resource endowments had a negative correlation with the ecological economic efficiency moreover no obvious quantitative relationship was found between the organizational levels and the efficiency of water usage after a deep discussion policy suggestions were offered such as enhancing the marketization of waste dealing businesses more publicity regarding preserving resource rich regions and increasing industrial organizing levels

the effect of taxation on human capital this study finds a significant negative effect of proportional income taxation on human capital of the few earlier studies to address this issue most suggested a negligible effect of taxation on investment in human capital this earlier conclusion is shown to be incorrect by using a model that is more general in several respects than the models used previously

vintage human capital growth and the diffusion of new technology we develop a model of vintage human capital in which each technology requires vintage specific skills we examine the properties of a stationary equilibrium for our economy the stationary equilibrium is characterized by an endogenous distribution of skilled workers across vintages the distribution is shown to be single peaked under general conditions there is a lag between the appearance of a technology and its peak usage a phenomenon known as diffusion an increase in the rate of exogenous technological change shifts the distribution of human capital to more recent vintages thereby increasing the diffusion rate

protection of property rights and growth as political equilibria abstract this paper presents a survey of the literature on property rights and economic growth different theoretical mechanisms that relate property rights to economic development are discussed lack of protection of property rights can result in slow economic growth through different channels expropriation of private wealth corruption of civil servants excessive taxation and barriers to adoption of new technologies the origins of property rights are also considered different theories are illustrated but more attention is paid to the social conflict view and its success and limitations the second part of the paper illustrates relevant empirical works on property rights and growth

learning matching and growth we examine an endogenous growth model in which market frictions are an integral part of the economic environment workers invest in education when young which raises their productivity onice employed the level of schooling also acts as a key determinant of the rate of economic growth by influencing workers ability to accumulate additional human capital on the job once schooling is completed workers search for employment the division of the surplus between vacancies and searching workers is characterized as is the optimal level of education the economy may display multiple steady state growth paths

constitutions and economic policy at the rare moments in history when a nation debates constitutional reform the key issues often concern how the reforms might affect economic policy and economic performance for example italy abandoned a system of pure proportional representation where legislators were elected according to the proportions of the popular national vote received by their parties and moved toward including ingredients of plurality rule where legislators are elected in each district according to who receives the highest number of votes key italian political leaders are now considering proposals to introduce elements of presidentialism where the head of government is elected by direct popular vote rather than the current parliamentary regime a common argument in italy was that the electoral reform would help stifle political corruption and reduce the propensity of italian governments to run budget deficits in the 1990s constitutional reforms have been debated and implemented in a number of other countries too for instance new zealand moved away from a pure system of plurality rule in single member districts to a system mixing elements of proportional representation japan also renounced its special form of plurality rule the so called single nontransferable vote in favor of a system that mixes elements of proportional and plurality representation similar proposals have been debated in the united kingdom in latin america questions have been raised as to whether the poor and volatile economic performance of many countries can be traced to their presidential form of government

structural change and economic growth this paper presents a model in which a country s measured average propensity to save endogenously rises when its economy industrializes the model has agricultural and manufacturing sectors only agriculture uses land if at early dates income per capita is low agricultural consumption is important land is valuable and capital gains on land may constitute most wealth accumulation leaving the country s nipa aps low if exogenous technological progress raises incomes over time engel s law shifts demand to manufactured goods then land s portfolio importance relative to reproducible capital diminishes and the national income and products account saving rate can rise this paper presents a model illustrating that structural change due to the operation of engel s law can systematically affect an economy s measured saving rate according to the model a country s national income and product account average propensity to save will rise naturally if and when technological progress sufficiently lifts its income per capita this suggests a new interpretation of time series evidence while saving rates historically tend to be higher after industrialization than before one cannot automatically infer that changing wealth accumulation behaviour led to modernization rather structural change accompanying growth may have caused the rise in saving rates this paper also warns that international trade could lead to a contrasting pattern in cross sectional data highincome nations might contemporaneously have lower measured saving rates than poor countries recent work by mankiw romer and weil 1992 islam 1995 mankiw 1995 and others investigates long run patterns the analyses assume that each economy has attained or is moving toward a steady state equilibrium as in solow 1956 a country s steady state level of per capita gdp depends on its average propensity to save aps its rate of population growth the efficiency of its production sector etc regression outcomes seem consistent with the solow model s prediction that a higher aps will ceteris paribus lead to a higher level of income per capita the idea is that heterogeneity of exogenous preferences leads to international differences in aps s and in turn to long run differences

information technology and the changing workplace in canada firm level evidence recent advances in information and communication technology ict have had dramatic effects on both individual and workplace performance use of computers and the internet as general purpose technologies has spread rapidly across all sectors of the economy transforming business organization increasing competition and fostering innovation understanding the influence of ict on the dynamics of the workplace requires information on both demand and supply sides of the labor market but it is only recently that the study of both sides of the market has become feasible using linked employer employee data in this article we investigate the effects of new technology on firm productivity using the rich canadian workplace and employee survey for the period 1999 2003 we apply a mixed regression model which includes both firm and employee characteristics as well as their interactions with computer use our model allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity at higher levels along many dimensions our findings indicate that computer use by employees has a positive and significant effect on the productivity of firms that the effect has not lost its momentum and that spillover effects are not significant moreover human capital enhances the effect of computer use on productivity but organizational changes do not interact with computer use in our sample period copyright 2011 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

human capital accumulation and endogenous public expenditures in this paper we present an overlapping generations model where individuals accu mulate human capital through formal schooling we model the role of the public sector in schooling as one of collecting taxes from households and providing inputs to the learning technology public expenditures on schools are determined endogenously under plausible restrictions our model s predictions qualitatively match the observations on schooling pub lic expenditures on education and student teacher ratios jel classification el 3 e62 accumulation de capital humain et depenses publiques endogenes dans ce memoire les auteurs presentent un modele de generations qui se chevauchent ofu les individus accumulent du capital humain via l education formelle le r6le du secteur public dans l education est defini comme celui de collecteur d imp6ts aupres des menages et de fournisseur d intrants dans la technologie d apprentissage les depenses publiques en education sont determinees de maniere endogene a partir de restrictions plausibles les predictions du modele s arriment qualitativement aux observations sur le monde scolaire aux depenses publiques en educa tion et aux ratios 6leves enseignants

economic exchange during hyperinflation historical evidence indicates that hyperinflations can disrupt individuals normal trading patterns and impede the orderly functioning of markets to explore these issues we construct a theoretical model of hyperinflation that focuses on individuals and their process of economic exchange in our model buyers must carry cash while shopping and some transactions take place in a decentralized setting in which buyer and seller negotiate over the terms of trade of an indivisible good since buyers face the constant threat of incoming younger hence richer customers their bargaining position is weakened by inflation allowing sellers to extract a higher real price however we show that higher inflation also reduces buyers search increasing sellers wait for customers as a result the volume of transactions concluded in the decentralized sector falls at high enough rates of inflation all agents suffer a welfare loss

the role of the structural transformation in aggregate productivity we investigate the role of sectoral differences in labor productivity in explaining the process of structural transformation the secular reallocation of labor across sectors and the time path of aggregate productivity across countries using a simple model of the structural transformation that is calibrated to the growth experience of the united states we measure sectoral labor productivity differences across countries productivity differences between rich and poor countries are large in agriculture and services and smaller in manufacturing moreover over time productivity gaps have been substantially reduced in agriculture and industry but not nearly as much in services in the model these sectoral productivity patterns generate implications that are broadly consistent with the cross country evidence on the structural transformation aggregate productivity paths and relative prices we show that productivity catch up in industry explains about 50 percent of the gains in aggregate productivity across countries while low relative productivity in services and the lack of catch up explains all the experiences of slowdown stagnation and decline observed across countries

the economic effects of direct democracy a first global assessment this is the first study that assesses the economic effects of direct democratic institutions on a cross country basis we find that total spending as well as spending on welfare is lower in countries with mandatory referendums consistent with the previous literature but we also find that countries with national initiatives appear to spend more and be more corrupt finally budget deficits government effectiveness productivity and happiness appear unrelated to direct democracy institutional detail thus matters a great deal in general the effects of direct democratic institutions become stronger if the frequency of their actual use is taken into account effects are usually stronger in countries with weak democracies

returns to scale productive efficiency and optimal firm size evidence from taiwan s firm data by using taiwan s census firm data this paper estimates and tests the variable returns to scale hypothesis for aggregate manufacturing and two digit industries an efficiency measure is constructed to further examine the size efficiency relations among two digit industries analysis indicates that increasing returns exist at the aggregate manufacturing level and its magnitude is higher for exporting firms than for non exporting firms moreover trade is beneficial only for small firms however the property of increasing returns diminishes for most of the industries at the two digit level particularly for the exporting firms this sharp comparison between aggregate and two digit level results suggests that trade is conducive to productivity and provides an indication of the specific form of technology spillovers among firms and across industries further investigation of the relationship between productive efficiency and firm size renders the result that optimal firm size is small for exporting firms i

the production life cycle tasks in production have different dynamics in comparison with individual products we build a general equilibrium model where three forces offshoring learning and wage interact to determine how production fragmentation evolves over time we show that the production process follows a life cycle its fragmentation emerges deepens and converges our model is stylized and versatile which can be used to tractably characterize the loci of global output productivity welfare and value added distribution as production fragmentation progresses this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

the rise of mass consumption societies this paper studies mechanisms behind the rise of mass consumption societies the development process depicted follows the flying geese pattern in which a series of industries take off one after another as productivity improves in these industries each consumer good becomes affordable to an increasingly large number of households which constantly expand the range of goods they consume this in turn generates larger markets for consumer goods which leads to further improvement in productivity for such virtuous cycles of productivity gains and expanding markets to occur income distribution should be neither too equal nor too unequal with too much equality the economy stagnates in a poverty trap with too much inequality the development stops prematurely

equilibrium bias of technology this paper presents three sets of results about equilibrium bias of technology first i show that when the menu of technological possibilities only allows for factor augmenting technologies the increase in the supply of a factor induces technological change relatively biased toward that factor meaning that the induced technological change increases the relative marginal product of the factor becoming more abundant moreover this induced bias can be strong enough to make the relative marginal product of a factor increasing in response to an increase in its supply thus leading to an upward sloping relative demand curve i also show that these results about relative bias do not generalize when more general menus of technological possibilities are considered second i prove that under mild assumptions the increase in the supply of a factor induces technological change that is absolutely biased toward that factor meaning that it increases its marginal product at given factor proportions the third and most important result in the paper establishes the possibility of and conditions for strong absolute equilibrium bias whereby the price marginal product of a factor increases in response to an increase in its supply i prove that under some regularity conditions there will be strong absolute equilibrium bias if and only if the aggregate production function of the economy fails to be jointly concave in factors and technology this type of failure of joint concavity is possible in economies where equilibrium factor demands and technologies result from the decisions of different agents

endowment structures industrial dynamics and economic growth this paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to explore industrial evolution and economic growth in a closed developing economy the authors show that industries will endogenously upgrade toward the more capital intensive ones as the capital endowment becomes more abundant the model features a continuous inverse v shaped pattern of industrial evolution driven by capital accumulation as the capital endowment reaches a certain threshold a new industry appears prospers then declines and finally disappears while the industry is declining a more capital intensive industry appears and booms ad infinitum explicit solutions are obtained to fully characterize the whole dynamics of perpetual structural change and economic growth implications for industrial policies are discussed

structural change in a multisector model of growth we study a multi sector model of growth with differences in tfp growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of structural change characterized by sectoral labour reallocation and constant aggregate growth path the conditions are weak restrictions on the utility and production functions commonly applied by macroeconomists we present evidence from us two digit industries that is consistent with our predictions about structural change and successfully calibrate the historical shift from agriculture to manufacturing and services we show quantitatively that reasonable deviations from our conditions do not have a big impact on the properties of the model

transitional dynamics in two sector models of endogenous growth the steady state and transitional dynamics of two sector models of endogenous growth are analyzed in this paper we describe necessary conditions for endogenous growth the conditions allow us to reduce the dynamics of the solution to a system with one state like and two control like variables we analyze the determinants of the long run growth rate we use the time elimination method to analyze the transitional dynamics of the models we find that there are transitions in real time if the point in time production possibility frontier is strictly concave which occurs for example if the two production functions are different or if there are decreasing point in time returns in any of the sectors we also show that if the models have a transition in real time the models are globally saddle path stable we find that the wealth or consumption smoothing effect tends to dominate the substitution or real wage effect so that the transition from relatively low levels of physical capital is carried over through high work effort rather than high savings we develop some empirical implications we show that the models predict conditional convergence in that in a cross section the growth rate is predicted to be negatively related to initial income but only after some measure of human capital is held constant thus the models are consistent with existing empirical cross country evidence authors

catch up in turn in a multi country international trade model with learning by doing and invention abstract we consider how the world income distribution evolves over time when both learning by doing and invention are the engines of economic growth and when countries interact with each other through international trade the main findings are i catch up is possible ii in the three country model transitional dynamics are much richer than in the two country model in particular catch up may occur in turn there may be a first stage in which the middle income country grows fastest closing the gap with the richest country but increasing the income difference with the poorest followed by a second stage where the poorest country catches up

the economics of product variety a survey demand for variety may arise from a taste for diversity in individual consumption and or from diversity in tastes even when each consumer chooses a single variant the full degree of variety potentially demanded will not in general be supplied because scale economies even to a small degree mean that the potential welfare or revenue gain from greater variety must be balanced against the lower unit production costs with fewer variants the economics of product variety consists essentially in analysing the effect of this balance in different situations and comparing the degree of product variety for different market structures with each other and with the optimum the survey commences with the work on market structures with single product firms generalized monopolistic competition tracing modern developments in both the chamberlinian and hotelling traditions the latter has been particularly fruitful due to the expansion of the original locational ideas into virtual spaces in product characteristics the emphasis in recent work on product variety has been on multiproduct firms in both monopolistic and oligopolistic structures including strategic market preemption although most work has been in a full information context there have been advances in product variety under imperfect information either by consumers to properties of the firms products or firms as to consumers demands

beyond balanced growth balanced growth models are commonly used in macroeconomics because they are consistent with the well known kaldor facts regarding economic growth these models however are inconsistent with one of the most striking regularities of the growth process the massive reallocation of labour from agriculture into manufacturing and services this paper presents a simple model consistent with both the kaldor facts and the dynamics of sectoral labour reallocation

quality ladders and product cycles we develop a two country model of endogenous innovation and imitation in order to study the interactions between these two processes firms in the north race to bring out the next generation of a set of technology intensive products each product potentially can be improved a countably infinite number of times but quality improvements require the investment of resources and entail uncertain prospects of success in the south entrepreneurs invest resources in order to learn the production processes that have been developed in the north all r d investment decisions are made by forward looking profit maximizing entrepreneurs the steady state equilibrium is characterized by constant aggregate rates of innovation and imitation we study how these rates respond to changes in the sizes of the two regions and to policies in each region to promote learning

the consequences of price instability on search markets toward understanding the effects of inflation real price variability depreciates the information about future prices contained in current ones repeat purchase customers have then less incentive to acquire price information the fact that consumers are less well informed allows firms to increase their markups and permits inefficient producers to increase their sales production gets reallocated toward higher cost firms given the well documented correlation between inflation and relative price variability these results help explain some of the costs of inflation copyright 1994 by american economic association

price dispersion inflation and welfare we examine the implications of inflation for both price dispersion and welfare in a monetary search economy in our economy if the degree of buyers incomplete information about prices is fixed both price dispersion and real prices are increasing in inflation as the inflation rate approaches the friedman rule both price dispersion and welfare losses vanish if households choose the number of prices to observe then the optimal inflation rate may exceed the friedman rule as inflation induces search and up to a point raises welfare by eroding market power

constitutions politics and economics a review essay on persson and tabellini s the economic effects of constitutions in this essay i review the new book by torsten persson and guido tabellini the economic effects of constitutions which investigates the policy and economic consequences of different forms of government and electoral rules i also take advantage of this opportunity to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a number of popular empirical strategies in the newly emerging field of comparative political economy

r d in a model of search and growth just how important a determinant of economic growth is the efficacy with which markets are organized it is clear that in order to answer this question it is necessary to have both a well articulated theory of economic growth and a precise notion of what it means for one market to be better organized than another the newly developed theory of endogenous growth pioneered by among others paul m romer 1986 robert e lucas 1988 nancy stokey 1988 and gene grossman and elhanan helpman 1991 has equipped economists with a rigorous microeconomic foundation of the growth process since its original inception research in this area has bifurcated one strand of work has continued to emphasize the importance of capital accumulation both physical and human in environments in which agents are competitive price takers the other strand has a distinctly neo schumpeterian flavor in which firms are price setters and purposive innovative activity leads to technological advancement but what of the role played by market organization the growth literature has remained relatively silent on this issue the reason is that the canonical growth model is one in which trade either competitive or monopolisticly competitive is coordinated by the walrasian auctioneer given that ex hypothesi trade is frictionless it is meaningless to use this framework to discuss issues pertaining to improvements in market organization however beginning with the seminal contributions of peter diamond 1982 dale t mortensen 1982 and christopher pissarides 1985 economists have begun to construct models that dispense with the auctioneer s coordinating function in this setting it is possible to make precise the notion of an improvement in market efficacy since search and bargaining frictions are explicitly incorporated as an integral part of the trading environment yet it is only very recently that this literature has begun to explore the consequences for perpetual economic growth

learning by doing and the choice of technology the role of patience if agents learn by doing and are myopic less advanced firms might adopt new technologies while more advanced firms would stick with the old technology this kind of overtaking can also occur if agents are forward looking and have high discount rates however overtaking never occurs if agents are sufficiently patient a finite discount rate increases the set of states at which agents adopt new technologies so more patient agents tend to upgrade their technology more frequently journal of economic literature classification numbers d92 o14 o33

inflation and efficiency in a search economy we present a model in which purely monetary inflation systematically affects efficiency welfare and relative prices the model focuses on the microeconomics of trade in search markets under inflation inflation by increasing the cost of holding money undermines the market s ability to sustain long term customer relationships because those relationships generate the most efficient transactions patterns overall welfare unambiguously declines

empirical constitutional economics onward and upward abstract empirical constitutional economics has made a huge leap forward over the last decade interesting insights into the effects of constitutions have been discovered rather than summarizing the state of the art this paper identifies some of the current shortcomings and proposes a number of extensions it calls for recognizing additional constitutional institutions as explanatory variables as well as the incorporation of additional dependent variables its major emphasis is however on calling for the next logical step in this field namely to endogenize constitutions

search price setting and inflation a model of monopolistic competition in an inflationary environment is developed which embodies optimal sequential search price dynamics and entry on the part of consumers and firms respectively equilibrium price strategies are s s these bounds increase continuously with consumer search costs and so does price dispersion indeed the whole equilibrium varies smoothly from the competitive bertrand to the monopolistic diamond 1971 end of the spectrum the latter s paradoxical result is explained as a limiting case where frictions on firms side of the market price adjustment costs but not on buyers search costs tend to zero a positive relationship between smooth and perfectly anticipated inflation and price dispersion or uncertainty is established

structural change in an interdependent world a global view of manufacturing decline this paper presents a simple model of the world economy in which productivity gains in manufacturing are responsible for the global trend of manufacturing decline and yet in a cross section of countries faster productivity gains in manufacturing do not necessarily imply faster declines in manufacturing in doing so it aims to draw attention to the common pitfall of using the cross country evidence to test a closed economy model and argues for a global perspective in order to understand cross country patterns of structural change one needs a world economy model in which the interdependence across countries is explicitly spelled out jel f43 o11 o14 o19

production experiences and market structure in r d competition abstract in the rd and ii the likelihood of persistent leadership increases with the value of being the winner and the value of being a loser but decreases with expected waiting time of r d innovation and the flow of monopoly profits however destructive innovations may still occur even when production experiences are allowed to play an important role in the r d competition

transitional dynamics and economic growth in the neoclassical model neoclassical transitional dynamics are a central element of standard macroeconomic theory quantitative experiments with the fixed savings rate models of the 1960s showed lengthy transitions thus potentially rationalizing sustained differences in growth rates across countries the authors investigate quantitative transitional dynamics in various neoclassical models with intertemporally optimizing households lengthy transitions occur only with very low intertemporal substitution generally when one tries to explain sustained economic growth with transitional dynamics there are extremely counterfactual implications these result from the fact that implied marginal products are extraordinarily high in the early stages of development copyright 1993 by american economic association

inflation and efficiency in search markets this paper examines how inflation affects efficiency and output in monopolistically competitive search markets it formalizes the conventional wisdom linking higher inflation price dispersion and increased resources devoted to search it also brings to light the induced exit of arms which reduces rent dissipation but the most important effect of inflation is how it alters the distribution of real transactions prices whether this reduces or promotes efficiency and output is shown to depend critically on preferences and market structure and especially on whether search costs are large or small relative to consumer surplus

the life cycle of a competitive industry firm numbers first rise then later fall as an industry evolves this nonmonotonicity is explained using a competitive model in which innovation opportunities fuel entry and relative failure to innovate prompts exit equilibrium time paths for price and quantity also share features of the data the model is estimated using data from the u s automobile tire industry a particularly dramatic example of the nonmonotonicity in firm numbers

an overlapping generations model of growth and the environment this article analyzes the potential conflict between economic growth and the maintenance of environmental quality in an overlapping generations model short lived individuals make decisions which have long lasting effects on both factor productivity and the environment the model provides a theoretical explanation of observed correlations between environmental quality and income whereby economic growth is associated first with declines then improvements in environmental quality it suggests circumstances in which multiple pareto ranked steady state equilibria may arise and in which sustained growth of both capital and environmental quality may occur overmaintenance of the environment analogous to dynamically inefficient overaccumulation of capital may emerge copyright 1994 by royal economic society

do the right thing incentives for policy selection in presidential and parliamentary systems constitutional structures shape politicians behaviour and hence policy outcomes through the dierent incentives schemes they generate in this paper we analyze these mechanisms in parliamentary and presidential systems the comparison is carried out by analyzing how the two systems may select the ecient policy in presence of asymmetric information presidential and parliamentary systems dier in that the policy proposed by the executive in the parliamentary system is condence depende nt and observable the main ndings suggest that the parliament responds better to the incentive scheme in the presidential system due to the lower uncertainty legislators face over their term limit however the parliamentary system generates a more ecient behavior of the executive due to selection and disciplining eects

political alignment and intergovernmental transfers in parliamentary systems evidence from germany combining local council election data with fiscal data on grant allocations in a german state we study partisan favoritism in the allocation of intergovernmental transfers within a quasi experimental framework we hypothesize that state governments pursue two distinct goals when allocating grants to local governments 1 helping aligned local parties win the next election and 2 buying off unaligned municipalities that may obstruct the state government s policy agenda we argue furthermore that the relative importance of these two goals depends on local political conditions in line with this argument we show empirically that the effect of political alignment on grant receipts varies depending on the degree of local support for the state government while previous contributions find that aligned local governments always tend to receive larger transfers our results imply that the political economy of intergovernmental transfers is more intricate

electoral institutions and the politics of coalitions why some democracies redistribute more than others standard political economy models of redistribution notably that of meltzer and richard 1981 fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies we develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others we show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions hence redistribution our argument implies 1 that center left governments dominate under pr systems whereas center right governments dominate under majoritarian systems and 2 that pr systems redistribute more than majoritarian systems we test our argument on panel data for redistribution government partisanship and electoral system in advanced democracies w hy do some countries redistribute more than others most work on the politics of redistribution starts from the premise that democratic institutions empower those who stand to benefit from redistribution the basic logic is succinctly captured in the meltzer richard 1981 model where the voter with the median income is also the decisive voter with a typical right skewed distribution of income the median voter will push for redistributive spending up to the point where the benefit of such spending to the median voter is outweighed by the efficiency costs of distortionary taxation this argument implies that redistibution is much greater in democracies than in nondemocracies at least of the right authoritarian variety and that among the latter inegalitarian societies redistribute more than egalitarian ones there is some evidence to supportthefirstimplication althoughitisdisputed see ross 2005 but most of the variance in redistribution is probably within the same regime type according to datafromtheluxembourgincomestudy forexample the reduction in the poverty rate in united states as a result of taxation and transfers was 13 in 1994 whereas the comparable figure for sweden was 82 thepovertyrateisthepercentageofhouseholdsbelow 50 of the median income to explain this variance we have to look at political and economic differences

malthus to solow a unified growth theory is developed that accounts for the roughly constant living standards displayed by world economies prior to 1800 as well as the growing living standards exhibited by modern industrial economies our theory also explains the industrial revolution which is the transition from an era when per capita incomes are stagnant to one with sustained growth the authors use a standard growth model with several technologies the first denoted the malthus technology requires land labor and reproducible capital as inputs the second denoted the solow technology does not require land the authors show that in the early stages of development only the malthus technology is used and due to population growth living standards are stagnant despite technological progress eventually technological progress causes the solow technology to become profitable and both technologies are employed at this point living standards improve since population growth has less influence on per capita income growth in the limit the economy behaves like a standard solow growth model excerpt

modernization of agriculture and long term growth abstract this paper develops a two sector model that illuminates the role played by agricultural modernization in the transition from stagnation to growth when agriculture relies on traditional technology industrial development reduces the relative price of industrial products but has a limited effect on per capita income because most labor has to remain in farming growth is not sustainable until this relative price drops below a certain threshold thus inducing farmers to adopt modern technology that employs industry supplied inputs once agricultural modernization begins per capita income emerges from stasis and accelerates toward modern growth our calibrated model is largely consistent with the set of historical data we have compiled on the english economy accounting well for the growth experience of england encompassing the industrial revolution