movements towards free trade and domestic market performance with imperfect competition this paper studies the response of a dominant domestic oligopoly to the reduction in the rate of a protective tariff the issue here is whether domestic market performance is improved through a movement toward free trade alone put another way is free trade always a substitute for competition policy we find that the lower tariff may lead to inferior domestic market performance the direction of the change and its magnitude are functions of the shape of the import supply function the degree of competition between oligopolists and whether or not entry is possible thus there is reason to believe that a strong competition policy may in some markets be complementary to freer trade

β convergence and the cyclical dynamics of uk regional house prices the potential convergence of regional house prices in the uk is examined in contrast to the existing literature which focuses upon stochastic convergence the present paper considers alternative f

differing house price linkages across uk regions a multi dimensional recursive ripple model the aim of this study is to determine the nature of the relationship between house prices of different types of housing across the uk regions we use an autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach to determine the long run relationships between house prices as well as an error correction model to estimate the short run dynamics between house prices the data include house prices across the regions of great britain and for new old and modern houses the results suggest that house price shocks ripple across regions although the nature of the relationship varies across housing types we further simulate the impact of house price shocks and reveal a complex structure whereby a house price shock in region a impacts upon prices in other regions which in turn feedback into region a in a recursive ripple

are there asymmetries in uk consumption a time series analysis in this paper we use time series techniques in order to test for asymmetric dynamics in uk consumption the notion that fluctuation over the business cycle are asymmetric has been put forward at various times in the last century nevertheless the most common representations of aggregate time series in macroeconomies are usually smooth and sluggish the use of time series methods should be considered as only the first stage of an empirical investigation of asymmetries it is also essential to develop economic models of asymmetric behaviour and to employ tests of asymmetric adjustment at the level structural realtionship

measuring the impacts of teachers ii teacher value added and student outcomes in adulthood abstract are teachers impacts on students test scores value added a good measure of their quality this question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value ad

trade liberalisation and plant exit in new zealand manufacturing data on new zealand manufacturing plants are used to examine the impact of trade liberalization on plant exit recent theories suggest that the prospect of a declining market might cause firms to adopt strategic behavior that causes low cost plants to exit first this hypothesis is generally unsupported surviving plants were larger lower cost and were owned by specialized firms with few plants plant costs were more important than firm size for explaining the plant closing behavior of single plant firms diversified multiplant firms were more likely to close plants and were influenced by plant size but not plant costs copyright 1996 by mit press

common trends and common cycles the existence of a serial correlation common feature among the first differences of a set of i 1 variables implies the existence of a common cycle in the beveridge nelson stock watson decomposition of those variables a test for the existence of common cycles among cointegrated variables is developed the test is used to examine the validity of the common trend common cycle structure implied by flavin s excess sensitivity hypothesis and campbell and mankiw s mixture of rational expectations and rule of thumb hypothesis for consumption and income linear independence between the cointegration and the cofeature vectors is exploited to decompose consumption and income into their trend and cycle components copyright 1993 by john wiley sons ltd

trade and trade policy with imperfect competition the case of identical products and free entry abstract this paper analyses intra industry trade between economies containing an imperfectly competitive industry in which firms produce a homogeneous output production is subject to increasing returns to scale and there is free entry and exit of firms trade is shown to unambiguously increase welfare by reducing the degree of monopoly in each market and increasing firm size the effects of differences in technology and endowments on the pattern of trade and welfare are examined import tariffs are shown to raise welfare in the country employing the tariff and the welfare implications of various types of industry subsidy are examined

a dynamic model of housing production abstract this paper derives the optimal development strategy for a housing producer with perfect foresight in a steady state environment where dwellings deteriorate as they age under the assumption of zero demolition costs the optimal strategy is an infinite sequence of identical buildings building abandonment is shown to be possible with positive demolition costs a solution highlighting the model s spatial properties is computed using cobb douglas functions

pay for percentile we propose an incentive scheme for educators that links compensation to the ranks of their students within comparison sets under certain conditions this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort moreover because this scheme employs only ordinal information it allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessments this removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and eliminates opportunities to influence reward pay by corrupting assessment scales education authorities can employ separate no stakes assessment systems to track trends in scaled measures of student achievement jel i21 i28 j33 j45

a disaggregated analysis of asymmetrical behaviour in the uk housing market potential asymmetrical adjustment in uk house prices is considered the present analysis extends previous research in a number of crucial ways first a seminal examination of asymmetry in regionally disaggregated uk house prices is undertaken secondly data are examined which are further disaggregated according to the age or vintage of the housing stock however the major development concerns the application of a non parametric testing approach to detect cyclical asymmetry in contrast to previously employed tests in the economics literature the triples test employed possesses high power and is not sensitive to outliers it is found that extensive asymmetry is present in uk house prices with cyclical peaks typically being greater in magnitude than corresponding troughs the implications of these findings for the comparison and construction of economic theories of the housing market the specification of econometric models and the construction and implementation of economic policy are noted

trade liberalization in oligopolistic industries the quota case abstract this paper analyzes the short and long run effects on domestic price and output of partially liberalizing quota restrictions in a general model of oligopolistic interactions it is shown that perverse outcomes are possible in a number of cases including that of rational conjectures a larger quota may result in an increase in domestic output in the short run and a higher price in the long run the relationship between oligopolistic conjectures and the number of firms in the industry is critical in determining the long run outcome

the effects of government housing policies in a vintage filtering model abstract long run and short run effects of low income government housing policies are examined in a model that treats housing as a durable good which declines in quality over time short run and long run market equilibria are characterized rent subsidies are analyzed in detail and results for other policies are presented

a new perspective on the ripple effect in the uk housing market comovement cyclical subsamples and alternative indices an alternative perspective is provided on the existence of a ripple effect in the uk housing market in contrast to previous studies the analysis involves consideration of information on the changes in house prices to which the hypothesis of house price diffusion posited by the ripple effect relates rather than their levels in an examination of changes in house prices in london relative to other regions of the uk directional forecasting methods are employed to establish the extent of the relationship between geographical proximity and comovement across the three month window provided by quarterly data consequently the analysis provides a direct examination of the ripple effect which refers to changes in prices rather than the convergence of levels which has become a feature of the empirical literature the literature is extended further by both the application of dating techniques to perform the analysis across cycles and phases of cycles recovery and recessionary periods in the uk housing market

tariff limit pricing relative plant scale and the eastman stykolt hypothesis this paper provides a formal basis for the widely held proposition sometimes called the eastman stykolt effect that the interaction of tariff protection and small domestic market size prevents canadian firms from achieving scale efficiency it considers a free entry cournot nash equilibrium in a homogeneous goods industry protected by tariffs the model demonstrates that the tariff limit pricing effect can arise without appeal to collusion or product differentiation moreover it is not appropriate to test for the eastman stykolt effect by simply including the interaction of market size and tariffs in a regression explaining relative plant scale

up the average cost curve inefficient entry and the new protectionism abstract a two country model is developed in which each country produces one good with increasing returns the goods being perfect or imperfect substitutes with cournot nash behavior and free entry certain restrictive trade policies have effects opposite to their favorable effect under noentry assumptions import tariffs and export subsidies lead to inefficient entry that raises rather than decreases the average production cost of and price charge by the domestic industry with negative welfare consequences we argue that these predictions of our model are closely consistent with extensive canadian data on entry exit and firms responses to trade liberalization

spatial aspects of housing quality density and maintenance this paper is concerned with how housing quality maintenance and structural density and household income vary over location when the housing stock is durable these issues have been investigated before but the models employed have been restrictive for example in brueckner 1981 maintenance expenditures are constrained not to vary through time in sweeney 1974a 1974c the maintenance technology is defined in a way which does not allow upgrading or even holding housing at constant quality and in ho man and pines 1982 there is no clear distinction between construction and maintenance and their model describes a long run accumulation of housing capital as a process of gradual upgrading a similar approach can be found in the nonspatial model of von rabenau 1976 in an earlier paper amott et al 1983 adp hereafter we extended the analysis of landlord builder behavior by allowing the unrestricted construction maintenance policy in this paper we use the model of adp to investigate some spatial aspects of the filtering process in a stationary state housing market in the process we examine the robustness of some results in the literature

statistical properties of uk house prices an analysis of disaggregated vintages the statistical properties of uk house prices are considered at a disaggregated level where disaggregation occurs according to the age or vintage of the housing given the frequency of transactions in the housing market and the sophistication of the estate agent system it might be expected that the series would share long run relationships and be subject to common short run shocks it is found via conventional techniques that both the long run and short run relationships are less pronounced than might be expected however by extending recent research concerning the testing of common features commonality in the short run cycles of the house price series is uncovered albeit with a partial lag despite this the cycles are shown to differ in terms of their asymmetric behaviour

globalization trade and income my purpose in this paper is to address two questions that confront our discipline repeatedly these days first what is a useful classification of the symptoms and the determinants of globalization a phase used in a remarkable variety of contexts to economists globalization is generally thought of as the increasing internationalization of the production distribution and marketing of goods and services the term is used less precisely in the popular literature perhaps best exemplified by kenichi ohmae s book the borderless world and when used loosely it invokes a wide variety of political sociological environmental and economic trends that are the concern of media attention almost daily however one defines globalization it is surely a development that is having a profound impact on the subject of economics as a whole and ought to have on the field of international economics in particular my second purpose is to ask how globalization is affecting our profession s view of theory and empirical work in international economics traditional trade theory was concerned with a set of fairly well defined questions regarding the determinants of trade the pattern of trade and the welfare consequences of various trade policy instruments the last two decades and perhaps the last decade in particular has led to a much wider interpretation of what living in an open economy means the change that is occurring on a wide range of economic social scientific and

spatial housing economics a survey this introduction to the virtual special issue surveys the development of spatial housing economics from its roots in neoclassical theory through more recent developments in social interactions modelling and touching on the role of institutions path dependence and economic history the survey also points to some of the more promising future directions for the subject that are beginning to appear in the literature the survey covers elements of hedonic models spatial econometrics neighbourhood models housing market areas housing supply models of segregation migration housing tenure subnational house price modelling including the so called ripple effect and agent based models possible future directions are set in the context of a selection of recent papers that have appeared in urban studies nevertheless there are still important gaps in the literature that merit further attention arising at least partly from emerging policy problems these include more research on housing and biodiversity

business cycle asymmetry a deeper look this paper distinguishes two types of asymmetry in business cycles deepness and steepness deepness is defined as the characteristic that troughs are further below trend than peaks are above most previous research has focused exclusively on steepness which refers to cycles in which contractions are steeper than expansions a test for deepness is proposed and applied to u s post war quarterly unemployment real gnp and industrial production evidence of deepness is found for unemployment and industrial production while the evidence for real gnp is weaker previous evidence of steepness in unemployment is confirmed

why do the free trade gain numbers differ so much the role of industrial organization in general equilibrium a small general equilibrium model calibrated approximately to match the canadian tradeable goods sector is used to examine the implications of a range of assumptions about pricing behaviour and entry barriers for the impact of free trade with the united states it turns out that only a model with an extreme combination of non competitive product market and free entry as well as unexploited scale economies can generate substantial gains from free trade other assumptions modelled include monopolistic competition market share pricing an economist s model and a mainstream industrial organization approach the predicted welfare gains range from zero to more than 7 per cent of gnp pourquoi est ce que les evaluations numeriques des gains derives de l accord de libre echange different tellement le role de l organisation industrielle dans l analyse d equilibre g6neral l auteur utilise un petit modele d equilibre general calibre pour approximer le secteur canadien des biens echangeables avec l exterieur dans son analyse des implications d un ensemble de postulats quant a la tarification et aux barrieres a l entree sur l impact du libre echange avec les etats unis il appert que seul un modele impliquant une combinaison extreme de marches de produit non concurrentiels et d entree libre ainsi que d economies d echelle non exploitees peut engendrer des gains substantiels comme resultat du libre echange on examine aussi d autres postulats concurrence monopolistique tarification pour maintenir une part du marche un modele a saveur economiste et 1 approche standard d organisation industrielle les gains de bien etre qu on predit selon les postulats de base couvrent un eventail de zero a 7 pour cent du pnb

spatial pricing with a general cost function the effects of taxes on imports one of the authors of this paper referred some years ago in a somewhat different context to a mislaid maxim in the hope that the maxim in question will not be permanently mislaid greenhut and ohta 1976 p 267 much the same hope can be expressed with respect to one of our objectives in this paper it is a familiar principle in microeconomics that specific or unit taxes act somewhat differently from ad valorem taxes although we would suggest that the full extent of this difference has not been investigated there is also the suggestion in international trade theory that tariff barriers and by implication local sales taxes operate very much like transport costs and so can be analyzed like transport costs in particular just as we might expect spatial price discrimination through freight absorption so we can expect spatial price discrimination through tariff or sales tax absorption what is not made clear is that there is a potential conflict between these two accepted wisdoms determined by whether the tariff or sales tax is specific or ad valorem we examine this conflict in some detail in this paper we shall show that just as the profit maximizing producer can be expected to absorb some proportion of transport costs so we can also expect him to absorb some proportion of the tariffs or taxes to which his goods are subject but the precise nature of tariff absorption depends crucially on the particular tariff barriers that exist only specific tariffs impact the same way as do transport costs ad valorem tariffs will be shown to have a very different effect they will appear at least in part as a change in convexity of the individual demand function a related objective of the paper and one with which we shall deal first in the analysis is to show how an optimal spatial pricing rule can be derived when marginal production costs take a general form the analysis of spatial competition and of spatial price discrimination has relied quite heavily on the assumption of constant marginal production costs it follows naturally from this assumption that the price quantity decisions applicable to a market at location i are independent of the price quantity decisions at location j the optimal discrimination pricing policy over a series of distinct markets under conditions of constant marginal production costs would be the one that maximizes profit at each market point what happens when this assumption is relaxed consider the simple example