transferring williamson s discriminating alignment to the analysis of environmental governance of social ecological interdependence institutional fit is operationalized by transferring transaction costs economics tce to the analysis of instances of social ecological interdependence we carefully spell out the differences with conventional tce and outline analytical steps based on discriminating alignment that enable a tce analysis of environmental governance of nature related transactions we illustrate the approach through the example of wildlife management in germany here we find hierarchical governance a prohibition of killing of wolves embedded into a polycentric hybrid monitoring arrangement in applying tce to nature related transactions we argue that characteristics of nature related transactions can be subsumed under the core categories of jointness uncertainty asset specificity frequency rivalry excludability and social relational distance benefits of this approach include its generating a narrow list of descriptors of instances of biophysically mediated interdependence related to one evaluation criterion cost effectiveness the tce of nature related transactions thus identifies sets of stylized contextual factors and aspects related to the governance of hazards of ex post opportunistic behavior that cut across scales they can be used as composite descriptors that facilitate analysis of complex multi scalar arrangements of natural resource governance we propose the concept of governance challenge derived from tce as being useful for building research on environmental governance

institutional determinants of power sector reform in pakistan the electricity supply sector in pakistan has performed poorly in recent years reforms were introduced in the mid 1990s to improve the sector but progressed slowly with no significant impacts on pre reform performance this study uses new institutional economics as a theoretical basis to elucidate reasons for the failure of power sector reforms in pakistan to make improvements interviews with 23 experts using q methodology generated 215 statements that were used as a q concourse of these 51 statements were selected for the q sample and ranked by 34 respondents depending on their importance analysis revealed four important discourses on the determinants of power sector reform failure in pakistan these included weak governance structure country and sectoral endowments inefficient regulator and unspecified political institutions or unfriendly political contexts the study recommends establishment of institutions that support a market based power supply sector and improvements to the contractual arrangements between stakeholders to reduce opportunistic behaviour

the federal funds rate and the channels of monetary transmission the authors show that the interest rate on federal funds is extremely informative about future movements of real macroeconomic variables then they argue that the reason for this forecasting success is that the funds rate sensitively records shocks to the supply of bank reserves that is the funds rate is a good indicator of monetary policy actions finally using innovations to the funds rate as a measure of changes in policy the authors present evidence consistent with the view that monetary policy works at least in part through credit i e bank loans as well as through money i e bank deposits copyright 1992 by american economic association

world war i and the postwar depression a reinterpretation based on alternative estimates of gnp abstract this paper examines the official commerce department estimates of gross national product for 1909 1928 and suggests that they are far inferior to the less commonly used kendrick gnp estimates the paper then derives a revised version of the kendrick series that alters significantly the representation of annual movements in gnp before 1919 this endorsement of a revised kendrick gnp series in place of the official commerce department estimates before 1929 suggests that aggregate demand movements had much less effect on real output during world war i and the depression of 1921 than is commonly believed

nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the new institutional economics this outstanding book presents new original contributions from some of the world s leading economists including ronald coase douglass c north masahiko aoki oliver e williamson and harold demsetz it demonstrates the extent and depth of the new institutional economics research programme which is having a worldwide impact on the economics profession

opec market failure or power failure abstract the actions of opec and saudi arabia are discussed in terms of their objectives and their technical and social constraints it is concluded 1 that opec does not act as a cartel and 2 that hotelling s rule is not an important feature of pricing or production opec s more specifically saudi arabia s ideal policy is to keep price moderate to try to assure a market for their high reserves over the long run such an action would require heavy investments in capacity including in excess capacity for times of interruption of supply from other countries as in the 1990s and for times of high demand as in the 2000s the action may be inconsistent with other objectives and in any case may be too difficult to achieve

politics not opec interventions explain oil s extraordinary price history oil prices in 2008 10 measured in constant money were almost eight times the level of 1970 72 the prices of minerals and metals another exhaustible resource group increased by a mere 45 in th

financial factors in the great depression eginning with irving fisher 1933 and john maynard keynes 1931 b 1963 macroeconomists have argued that financial markets were important sources and propagators of decline during the great depression turning points during the depression often coincided with or were preceded by dramatic events in financial markets stock market collapse waves of bankruptcy and bank failure and contractions in the money stock but the mechanism through which financial factors contributed to the depression has been a source of controversy as has been the relative importance of financial factors in explaining the origins and persistence of the depression this essay reviews the literature on the role of financial factors in the depression and draws some lessons that have more general relevance for the study of the depression and for macroeconomics i argue that much of the recent progress that has been made in understanding some of the most important and puzzling aspects of financial real links in the depression followed a paradigm shift in economics a central neglected theoretical piece of the story for financial factors was the allocative effects of imperfections in capital markets which can imply links between disruptions in financial markets and subsequent economic activity also the increasing emphasis on learning and path dependence in economics has helped to explain why financial shocks during the 1930s were so severe and why policy makers failed to prevent the depression

does eu enlargement increase agro food export duration this paper examines the impact of eu enlargement on agro food export performance across 12 new eu member states and five newly independent states in the eu markets covering the period 1999 to 2007 the performance is examined by duration of export and hazard model we find larger duration for the agro food exports from the new eu member states the results confirm gains from the eastward eu enlargement and governance on export increases and longer duration for exporting higher value added specialized consumer ready food and more competitive niche agro food products

national culture and corporate investment we explore the relation between individualism and horizons and types of corporate investment based on individualism s implications for risk taking we find that firms in individualistic countries invest more in long term risky than in short term safe assets moreover the effect of individualism on long term investment hinges on rd and 2 firms in individualistic countries invest more in r d because they have higher investment efficiency or pick less risky r d projects we further find that individualistic firms tend to employ excess cash to increase r d rather than increase dividends and r d decisions are less reliant on internal financing but more responsive to growth opportunities in individualistic countries

income uncertainty and the onset of the great depression income uncertainty and the onset of the great depression income uncertainty contributes substantially to explaining the fall in consumption that marks the onset of the great depression consistent estimates of the variance of income measure income uncertainty from 1921 30 and are produced using a linear moment model this series provides a statistical link between the large erratic swings in income uncertainty after september 1929 and the great crash in the stock market comparison of the behavior of income uncertainty in the 1920s to the pre world war i and post world war ii eras suggests that the experience after the great crash was historically unique i introduction the great depression of 1929 41 can be broken down into several phases i the initial recessionary phase from october 1929 to october 1930 ii the first two waves of bank failures between november 1930 and december 1931 iii the incipient recovery of late 1932 and the impending collapse in march 1933 iv the recovery of the financial system and the economy from the cyclical trough and v the recession of 1937 38 among others many researchers have presented well articulated theories and extensive empirical analyses for each phase of the depression friedman and schwartz 1963 hamilton 1987 gordon and wilcox 1981 and burbidge and harrison 1985 have examined the role of money and monetary policy during the depression brown 1956 examined the stance of fiscal policy during this period bernanke 1983b provided an explanation of the role of the financial crisis in the propagation of the great depression most of this research has focused on the events that turned a recession in 1929 30 that was not historically unprecedented that is it is comparable to the recession of 1920 22 into the deepest slide in the history of the american business cycle explanations of the depression s initial phase from late 1929 to october 1930 however are much less satisfactory meltzer 1976 and mishkin 1978 examined this period and concluded that the fall in output can be attributed largely to the stance of monetary policy and the stock market s impact on the household balance sheet respectively the remainder of the existing literature centers around a debate between temin 1976 1981 and schwartz 1981 that has produced no consensus about the role of monetary and nonmonetary factors in providing the impetus for the great depression hence the period sometimes called the mysterious first year 1 is the least understood of all the phases of the depression we think that recent advances in our understanding of the influence of income uncertainty on consumption expenditures may help explain the onset of the great depression the theoretical work of leland 1968 sandmo 1970 dreze and modigliani 1972 and others has shown that an increase in uncertainty about future income measured as the variance of income results in a reduction in current consumption expenditures under standard assumptions regarding risk preferences recently flacco and parker 1990 included an estimate of the standard deviation of income in a conventional specification of the consumption function from blinder and deaton 1985 and found that this measure of income uncertainty is indeed negatively related to consumption this result estimated using post world war ii data holds up to a number of statistical significance and specification tests romer 1990 examined the relationship between consumer expenditure proxied by various disaggregate spending series and stock market volatility during the first year and a half of the great depression expanding on bernanke s 1983a analysis of investment under uncertainty romer estimates a model of consumer spending on durable goods in the face of temporary uncertainty empirical evidence reveals that inclusion of the volatility of the stock market as a proxy for income uncertainty dramatically reduces forecast errors for consumption of durable goods in 1929 and 1930

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

political governance civil liberties and human capital evaluating their effect on foreign direct investment in emerging and developing economies we study the influence of a country s political governance on its attractiveness to foreign direct investors we argue that democracy is not a unidimensional concept and that the effect of host country political governance on incoming foreign direct investment fdi differs depending on whether fdi originates from a democratic or an autocratic country we also hypothesize that the effect of civil liberties depends on the motivations of investing multinational enterprises mnes and that human capital moderates this relationship we test our hypotheses on a sample of 35 000 investments in emerging and developing countries between 2003 and 2013

do country level institutional frameworks and interfirm governance arrangements substitute or complement in international business relationships interfirm relationships among partners from institutionally distant environments are subject to governance difficulties owing to the paucity of shared cognitive and regulatory frameworks we examine the potential of formal contracting and relational governance developed at the partnership level to overcome the formal and informal institutional gap at the country level empirical results from a sample of 184 international partnerships of large us firms support an overall substitutive relationship between informal institutional frameworks and interorganizational relational arrangements whereby the performance benefits of relational governance are reinforced at higher degrees of informal institutional distance contrastingly formal institutional frameworks and contractual governance are found to have a complementary relationship with performance gains from formal contracting undermined at higher degrees of formal distance

religiosity and the cost of debt abstract in a cross country setting we document that stronger religiosity is associated with lower loan interest spread in addition we show that this negative association is more pronounced in countries with weaker creditor rights suggesting that religious values play a more significant role in constraining opportunistic behavior in a weaker legal environment our analysis reveals that stronger religiosity is also related to other favorable terms in loan contracting such as larger facility amount use of accounting based performance pricing and lower upfront fee corroborating our cross country findings we also show that in the u s setting firms in regions with stronger religiosity enjoy lower loan interest spread our study contributes to understanding the important role religiosity plays in debt financing

oil price shocks and the dispersion hypothesis recent research by david lilien shows that a significant fraction of aggregate unemployment can be explained by the dispersion of employment growth across industries this paper presents two new results in this area first it is shown that a significant fraction of the variation in lilien s dispersion index is due to the differential impact of oil shocks across industries second and more important it is shown that once the dispersion in employment growth due to oil shocks is accounted for the residual dispersion has no explanatory power for unemployment

national culture and corporate debt maturity abstract we investigate the influence of national culture on corporate debt maturity choice based on the framework of williamson we argue that culture located in social embeddedness level can shape contracting environments by serving as an informal constraint that affects human actors incentives and choices in market exchange we therefore expect national culture to be related to debt maturity structure after controlling for legal political financial and economic institutions using hofstede s four cultural dimensions uncertainty avoidance collectivism power distance and masculinity as proxies for culture and using a sample of 114 723 firm years from 40 countries over the 1991 2006 period we find robust evidence that firms located in countries with high uncertainty avoidance high collectivism high power distance and high masculinity tend to use more short term debt we interpret our results as consistent with the view that national culture helps explain cross country variations in the maturity structure of corporate debt

the nonmonetary effects of financial factors during the interwar period i introduction in a monetary history of the united states friedman and schwartz 1963 attributed the enormous decline in real output and prices during the great depression of 1929 1933 to an unprecedented fall in the supply of money while there is much support today for the view that money played an important role in this episode many economists feel that this variable alone does not provide a sufficiently complete explanation of the link between the chaotic conditions in the u s financial sector and aggregate output and prices bernanke 1983 contended in an influential paper that financial shocks had important nonmonetary effects on aggregate economic activity in addition to their effects via the supply of money rather than consider the 1929 33 episode outside of its context bernanke widened his sample to include the entire interwar period which he defined as january 1919 december 1941 the major purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence on the importance of the nonmonetary effects of financial factors in explaining fluctuations in real output and prices during the interwar period we define the interwar period as august 1922 june 1938 by omitting from our sample a few years immediately following world war i and immediately preceding world war ii we avoid the potential problems connected with war related government expenditures and autonomous gold flows discussed in joines 1985 our interwar period corresponds closely to the four peacetime cycles identified by firestone 1960 the theoretical literature on the nonmonetary effects of financial factors focuses on two related but distinct aspects 1 first studies by bernanke and blinder 1988 williamson 1987a 1987b bernanke and gertler 1987 and scheinkman and weiss 1986 demonstrate that the efficiency with which banks perform their intermediation function is an independently important determinant of the level of real economic activity second bernanke and gertler 1989 1990 gertler and hubbard 1988 and calomiris and hubbard 1990 focus on the effects of shocks to borrowers net worth positions on aggregate economic activity this approach suggests that exogenous shocks to borrowers net worth may be a source of economic fluctuations therefore for example to the extent that a deflation is unanticipated it is likely to erode borrowers net worth and thereby adversely affect aggregate economic activity beginning with fisher 1933 this deflation story has played an important role in studies such as bernanke 1983 hamilton 1987 and bernanke and james 1990 that attempt to explain the great depression in evaluating the effects of financial sector shocks during the great depression bernanke 1983 argued that in addition to the traditional monetary effects of adverse shocks to financial intermediation stressed by friedman and schwartz 1963 these shocks increased the cost of credit intermediation which in turn led to credit contraction rejection of otherwise profitable projects and subsequent falls in output to test this hypothesis bernanke included the deposits of failing banks and the liabilities of failing businesses as joint proxies for the cost of credit intermediation in a barro 1977 type output equation that also included unanticipated money both the deposits of failing banks and liabilities of failing businesses were found to be significant moreover dynamic simulations of the path of output for the period between mid 1930 and march 1933 accounted for substantially more of the actual decrease in output than was captured when only unanticipated money was included in the output equation in place of the joint proxies bernanke also used the yield differential between baa corporate and long term u s government bonds as a proxy for credit intermediation costs in all cases entry of the credit cost proxies significantly increased the percentage of the decline in output that was captured

anticipated money unanticipated money and output 1873 1930 anticipated money unanticipated money and output 1873 1930 i introduction this paper examines the roles of anticipated and unanticipated money in the period between the civil war and the depression 1 such an examination is warranted for at least two reasons first estimation of the impact of anticipated and unanticipated money on output for historical periods can enhance our understanding of the responses of economic activity to these key variables 2 second recent work has shown that traditional historical estimates of output may be faulty see romer 1986a 1986b 1986c 1988 not only do most studies investigating the economic roles played by anticipated and unanticipated money concentrate on the post world war ii era those that discuss the period before world war ii such as rush 1985 1986 use traditional data indeed despite the interesting analyses by rush if the validity of the conventional data on output and unemployment for the era under consideration is rejected then virtually no results on the importance of monetary and real factors for economic activity are available for this important period thus further discussion of this topic is needed to answer two important questions what do the revised data show us about the historical economy do these revisions change the inferences drawn about monetary influences on economic activity the analysis presented here is comprehensive in that a wide range of output measures are employed both in terms of the types of output and in terms of the manner in which the output measures are constructed given this variety in the output measures consistent results on the effects of anticipated and unanticipated money across output measures indicate that conclusions drawn from the analysis are robust in particular the empirical results presented below support the following hypotheses i that anticipated m2 and monetary base growth have no effect on output regardless of the output measure used ii that unanticipated m2 and monetary base growth do effect output regardless of the output measure used and iii that changes in financial intermediation may be important for the evolution of output over time support for hypotheses i and ii is consistent with the monetary explanation of business cycles support for hypotheses iii may be consistent with real explanations of business cycles if exogenous shocks to the monetary production technology subsequently affect output 3 taken together the joint support for hypotheses i iii suggests that at a minimum neither the real nor the monetary explanations for historical u s business cycles can be discounted without additional work the remainder of the paper is organized as follows section ii presents a brief overview of the historical period under consideration along with a discussion of prior work on the effects of anticipated and unanticipated money on output determination during this time period section iii discusses the data and the methodology the empirical results are presented in section iv and the conclusions in section v ii overview the historical period the period under investigation 1873 1930 is one of substantial economic change banking panics the return to the gold standard the founding of the federal reserve system and world war i are some of the more important events occuring during this period we consider the role played by expected and unexpected money in output determination for several major subperiods while data availability largely determined the selection of these subperiods they generally correspond to major economic events despite the structural and institutional changes over the period we also examine the roles of anticipated and unticipated money growth in the determination of output over the entire time period to be valid tests of the impact of money growth on output require a reasonable degree of homogeneity in the economic environment

explanations for the 2014 oil price decline supply or demand abstract the brent price of crude oil declined from 112 in june 2014 to a low of 31 in january 2016 both nominal prices a cumulative decrease of more than 70 some attribute the decline to increased oil production due to the u s shale revolution this paper proposes a variety of diagnostics to assess the how consistent this explanation is with the data i find that the data are broadly inconsistent with this attribution of the decline to shale oil rather the data are more consistent with a demand side explanation of weakening global economic conditions and demand for commodities including but not limited to oil in summary there is no evidence that the u s shale revolution played a significant role in the decline in oil prices since 2014 rather the evidence suggests that weakening oil demand played a much stronger role in driving the 2014 decline in oil prices

opec behavior a test of alternative hypotheses since interpretations of past and future oil price patterns depends on the model chosen the author tests and compares alternative theories of opec as a first step in validating the choice on any one model the results show that among opec countries the partial market sharing cartel model is the only model not rejected by at least some of the 11 members and gives the best explanation of production in comparison with 11 non opec countries the competitive model could not be rejected for 10 of the 11 non opec producers this raises the question of why if opec is a cartel friedman s predictions have not come true and introduces new questions for future research 19 references 3 tables

how well does the is lm model fit postwar u s data postwar u s time series for money interest rates prices and gnp are characterized by a multivariate process driven by four exogenous disturbances those disturbances are identified so that they can be interpreted as the four main sources of fluctuations found in the is lm phillips curve model money supply money demand is and aggregate supply shocks the dynamic properties of the estimated model are analyzed and shown to match most of the stylized predictions of the model the estimated decomposition is also used to measure the relative importance of each shock to interpret some macroeconomic episodes and to study sources of permanent shocks to nominal variables

money real interest rates and output a reinterpretation of postwar u s data this paper reexamines both monthly and quarterly u s postwar data to investigate if the observed comovements between money real interestrates prices and output are compatible with the money real interest output link suggested by existing monetary theories of output which include both keynesian and equilibrium models the major empirical findings are these 1 in both monthly and quarterly data we cannot reject the hypothesis that the ex ante real rate is exogenous or granger causally prior in the context of a four variable system which contains money prices nominal interest rates and industrial production 2 in quarterly data there is significantly more information con tained in either the levels of expected inflation or the innovationof this variable for predicting future output given current and lagged output than in any other variable examined money actualinflation nominal interest rates or ex ante real rates the effect of an inflation innovation on future output is unambiguously negative the first result casts strong doubt on the empirical importance of existing monetary theories of output which imply that money should have a causal role on the ex ante real rates the second result would appear incompatible with most demand driven models of output in light of these results we propose an alternative structural model which can account for the major dynamic interactions among the variables this model has two central features i output is unaffected by money supply and ii the money supply process is motivated by short run price stability this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

public transaction costs of agri environmental schemes and their determinants analysing stakeholders involvement and perceptions despite an overall budget increase for rural development in the new programming period 2007 2013 most older member states in the now expanded european union are facing a substantial reduction in their budget for rural development and thus for agri environmental schemes aess it can be assumed that in most countries none or at best only part of this loss can be offset by national funds therefore the design of more efficient national governance structures for aess which decrease public transaction costs tcs would be an appropriate solution to this problem the objective of this paper is to define the factors that influence these public tcs so that appropriate action can then be taken to reduce them a statistical analysis with a proxy for public tcs is combined with an analysis of stakeholder perceptions excluding farmers concerning public tc influencing factors the research showed that it is mainly scheme related factors that are perceived to be important although the governance structure institutional environment and level of trust also play a role finally the analysis of perceptions concerning tcs also showed that aes related actors have a limited knowledge of tcs

why do farmers join payments for ecosystem services pes schemes an assessment of pes water scheme participation in brazil payments for ecosystem services pes have become a popular instrument in the last decades and this growing trend is also clearly evident in brazil however challenges related to implementation of these schemes are often underestimated any guarantee that a payment will secure or provide such a service is subject not only to underlying ecological uncertainties but also to those entailed by the kinds of social interaction that are inherent to policy implementation it is argued that the objectives proposed with these instruments can only be attained by ensuring a wide participation of land users this article advances this topic reporting and discussing evidence on farmer s reasons to participate in three pes water schemes in brazil using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research approaches results indicate that the diverging opinions regarding how ecosystem services are generated or secured decentralized governance structures and the involvement of representative bodies in scheme design and implementation are important factors to consider furthermore access to information and general environmental concern were found to be important variables to explain the propensity of farmers to participate this generates serious policy implications for developing consistent communication and consultation strategies with scheme beneficiaries

an empirical analysis of oil price shocks in the interwar period i introduction post world war ii experience demonstrates that disturbances to aggregate supply are important determinants of aggregate economic performance a casual glance at the post 1970 data strongly suggests a correlation between shocks to the price of oil and recession hamilton 1983 formally demonstrates that this correlation arises from what appears to be a causal link that runs from oil price increases to reduced economic activity the sequence of oil price increases followed by recession characterizes every post world war ii economic downturn in the u s with the exception of 1960 61 other research confirms the critical role of supply shocks in explaining post world war ii macroeconomic performance burbidge and harrison 1984 employ vector autoregressions vars to examine the impact of oil price shocks over the 1962 82 period for several countries they conclude that these shocks played a large role in deepening the recessions of the 1970s with the impact on the 1973 74 recession much greater than that of 1979 80 tatom 1988 estimates the impact of the 1979 80 increase in the relative price of oil and reports that this shock reduced the amount of output that could be produced with available labor and capital by 5 7 percent thoma 1992 re examines the work of litterman and weiss 1985 and finds that the ex ante real interest rate is not exogenous to supply shocks contrary to what is reported in litterman and weiss using annual data over the 1948 82 period loungani 1986 shows that any correlation between an index of the dispersion of unemployment across industries and the aggregate unemployment rate is due to the dispersion index s collinearity with oil price shocks once this collinearity is accounted for the dispersion index has no explanatory power to account for movements in the aggregate unemployment rate while the evidence for the causal link between supply shocks and output appears most dramatic for the post 1970 data hamilton 1983 argues that the entire post war period be treated as a continuous whole the enduring regularity of the oil price shock recession relation in this period leads to a natural question is there any evidence that oil price shocks either positive or negative played any role in the cyclical fluctuations and secular expansion of the 1920s and the great depression figure 1 presents a plot of the relative price of oil defined precisely in section ii for the 1921 1 1938 6 period we observe a number of sharp movements in the relative price of oil that suggest an assessment of the empirical impact of oil price shocks during the interwar period is warranted accordingly we investigate the effects of oil price shocks during the interwar period within the context of a small macroeconomic model 1 the empirical framework is a var model that consists of output the price level the monetary base the m2 money multiplier the commercial paper rate government spending a financial intermediation variable and a measure of oil price shocks these are variables frequently found in small macroeconomic models monthly data for the period 1924 2 1938 6 are used to specify and estimate the model we evaluate the impact of oil price shocks on prices and output through computation of variance decompositions the standard errors reported are generated through monte carlo simulations historical decompositions for the 1929 9 1938 6 period are also computed so we can specifically examine the effects of oil price shocks over the sample period that includes the great depression we chose the var modeling approach because there is little agreement on the appropriate structural model and var estimation places few restrictions on the way in which the system s variables interact in the specification and estimation of the model all variables are treated as jointly determined no a priori assumptions are made about the exogeneity of any of the system s variables at this stage of analysis

bank lending technologies and credit availability in europe what can we learn from the crisis abstract using a unique sample of european manufacturing firms we empirically investigate how bank lending technologies nd soft information adoption affected firms credit availability during the 2007 2009 financial crisis estimation results indicate that transactional lending technologies increased firms credit rationing whereas soft information mitigated asymmetric information problems and improved firms access to credit by looking at the combined effect of bank lending technologies and soft information we also provide evidence about the complementarity between transactional lending techniques and soft information adoption when soft information was incorporated in transactional lending technologies firms credit rationing significantly reduced this result is especially strong for small borrowing firms and for companies matching with large financial institutions

unexpected monetary disturbances during the gold standard era abstract this empirical paper uses the barro methodology of estimating unexpected monetary shocks to determine the effect these shocks had on real output in the u s during the gold standard era between 1880 and 1913 it also investigates whether changes in a measure of financial intermediation had real effects the results indicate that neither expected nor unexpected money shocks affected output changes in financial intermediation however were significantly correlated with output this result lends support to theories which stress the endogeneity of broad measures of the money supply

a critical assessment of transaction cost theory and governance of public services with special reference to water and sanitation this is a pre copyedited author produced version of an article accepted for publication in cambridge journal of economics following peer review the version of record hulya dagdeviren and simon a robertson a critical assessment of transaction cost theory and governance of public services with special reference to water and sanitation cambridge journal of economics vol 40 6 1707 1724 january 2016 is available online at https doi org 10 1093 cje bev079

opec and other commodity cartels a comparison abstract the economic literature provides specific characteristics for cartels although the theory of international cartels is not well developed in the literature and every cartel is unique some of these characteristics exist in each cartel this study investigates the existence of these characteristics in six known commodity cartels including opec in addition it compares the oil companies cartel the seven sisters to opec and summarizes the findings of opec econometric models developed in the literature in the last 25 years and concludes that the results do not support cartel or competitive models for opec although other cartels are more successful than opec many books and articles in economics use opec as a cartel example neither statistical tests nor theory support the popular use of opec as a cartel example indeed this article concludes that opec is composed of saudi arabia the dominant world producer plus several distinct sub groups and that separate models are required to explain the behavior of each assigning the power of some opec members to opec has caused confusion about its behavior recent opec success is attributed to political natural and technical capacity limitations in the oil fields that prevented countries from cheating on their quota in other words opec adherence to the quota except for saudi arabia is anything but voluntary

the making of economic policy a transaction cost politics perspective economic policymaking as a political process the normative approach to policy analysis the positive view of political economy a synthesis the policy process in real time a theme transaction costs the transaction cost politics framework political outcomes and economic efficiency transaction cost analysis in politics mechanisms to cope with transaction costs in politics national differences two case studies to illustrate transaction cost politics tax and expenditure reform in the united states the gatt and national trade politics some reflections and suggestions some lessons for the policy process the role of the economist concluding comments appendix multiprincipal multitask agencies

shifting boundaries in economics the institutional cognitive strand and the future of institutional economics this paper aims at contributing to the debate on the future of institutional economics and of the field as a whole by starting from the literature that discusses the relationship between old original institutional economics and new institutional economics it suggests that the process of reunifying oie and nie and evolutionary economics prompted by part of the literature could be improved by the contribution of the cognitive institutional economics the paper follows a two stage pathway first it frames the debate on the relationships between nie and the oie and it concentrates on a subset of the literature that shows that nie s recent developments complicate the distinction between nie and oie and it explores the possibility that nie and oie may merge so that an amalgam of nie oie and evolutionary economics becomes the next economic paradigm secondly the paper argues that a step forward in the direction outlined by the literature has been made by cie which is a research stream that developed from cross fertilization among nie oie and the hayekian contributions to the analysis of institutions in the concluding remarks the possible emergence of a single institutional paradigm is discussed in the light of the literature about change in economics

the new institutional economics and the theory of behaviour under uncertainty the new institutional economics nie is diverse in terms of the theory of behaviour under uncertainty some views are close to neoclassical economics but others are similar to those held by heterodox economists distinctions between procedural and substantive uncertainty weak and strong uncertainty and ambiguity and fundamental uncertainty help to identify different approaches to uncertainty in nie regarding the influence of institutions on economics behaviour not all nie focuses on institutions as constraints and takes individuals as given the dominant views of rationality in nie are standard neoclassical maximization and bounded rationality but alternative notions have also been defended

mitigating climate change by planting trees the transaction costs trap land use change and forestry projects are considered a low cost option for addressing climate change mitigation in canada afforestation is targeted to sequester enough carbon to meet one fifth of its international obligations and at lower cost than emissions reduction we examine economic aspects of the institutions and incentives needed to encourage landowners in canada to adopt tree planting on a large scale based on data from a survey of landowners the transaction costs of getting landowners to convert their land from agriculture to plantation forests appear to be a significant obstacle possibly increasing the costs of afforestation projects beyond what conventional economic analysis suggests