meta paradigm change and the theory of the firm many seemingly unrelated debates on the theory of the firm are in fact part of a single deeper transformation of the social sciences as the foundational assumptions of 20th century social science have slowly been shown by science to be false new sub paradigms have emerged which cumulatively drop i theoretical assumptions about markets to explain firms ii epistemological assumptions about knowledge to explain diversity and iii metaphysical assumptions about causality to explain technical change debates occur across each of these levels

doomed from the start what is the value of selecting a future dominant design this study investigates how important it is for a firm to select what turns out to be a dominant design in a technology driven industry using the personal computer industry as a case study this research shows that firms are not doomed when their entry design choices turn out to be wrong for early entrants we found that switching to the dominant design is associated with increased chances of survival and market share contrary to our expectations we found that even later entrants that switched to the dominant design also enjoyed higher survival rates and greater market position copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

distorted agricultural incentives and economic development asia s experience earnings from farming in many low income countries have been depressed by a pro urban bias in own country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favouring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies both sets of policies reduce national and global economic welfare the rapid development of many asian emerging economies has been accompanied by a gradual reduction in their anti agricultural policies but many distortions remain and some countries have moved from negative to positive assistance for farmers following the earlier examples of first japan and then korea and taiwan drawing on results from a new multi country research project this paper examines the extent of these changes relative to those of other developing countries over the past five decades it concludes by pointing to prospects for further policy reform in asia

the dual policy in the dual economy the political economy of urban bias in dictatorial regimes in many developing countries public resource allocation is often biased against the rural population since a vast majority of the poor live in rural areas the bias is highlighted as one of the most important institutional factors contributing to poverty this paper develops a political economy model of urban bias in a dictatorial regime a novel result of the model is that urban bias can emerge in predominantly agrarian economies even if there is no bias in political power toward urban residents the empirical evidence from a recently compiled country level panel dataset on agricultural taxes subsidies is consistent with the prediction of the model

induced innovation evolutionary theory and path dependence sources of technical change the i960s to the i98os were very productive of new theory and empirical insights into the sources of technical change in the i96os and i970s major attention focused on the implications of changes in demand and relative factor prices on the rate and direction of technical change in the late i 970s and early i980s attention shifted to evolutionary models inspired by a revival of interest in schumpeter s insights into the process of economic development since the early i98os these have been complemented by the development of historically grounded path dependent models of technical change each of these models has contributed substantial insight into the sources of technical change this paper was motivated by a perception that each of the three research agendas is approaching a dead end the three models induced evolutionary and path dependent represent elements of a more general theory that has not yet been invented ruttan 1996 a in a closing comment i suggest some steps toward the development of a more general theory of the sources of technical change

the induced innovation hypothesis and energy saving technological change we develop a methodology for testing hicks s induced innovation hypothesis by estimating a product characteristics model of energy using consumer durables augmenting the hypothesis to allow for the ine uence of government regulations for the products we explored the evidence suggests that i the rate of overall innovation was independent of energy prices and regulations ii the direction of innovation was responsive to energy price changes for some products but not for others iii energy price changes induced changes in the subset of technically feasible models that were offered for sale iv this responsiveness increased substantially during the period after energy efficiency product labeling was required and v nonetheless a sizable portion of efficiency improvements were autonomous

political economy of public policies insights from distortions to agricultural and food markets the agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational while others have been gradual but persistent this paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political economy explanations that have been advanced based on a rich global data set covering a half century of evidence on commodities countries and policy instruments the paper identifies hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible

the political economy of regulations and trade wine trade 1860 1970 dramatic changes in the 1860 1970 wine trade provide insights on the political economy of regulations and policy instrument choice and trade an invasion of phylloxera in the 1870s turned france from the world s leading exporter to a massive importer of wine and grapes when french production recovered a combination of tariffs safety regulations and quality standards were introduced to protect its french producers causing dramatic changes in global wine and grape production and trade including in spain italy turkey greece algeria tunisia and morocco changes in wine regulations were caused by relative income and loss aversion factors in political economy tariffs were the preferred policy instruments as they directly restrict imports bring in revenues have low transaction costs and are preferred political instruments when there are information imperfections safety regulations and quality standards including labelling and input prohibitions reduce asymmetric information for consumers or undesirable externalities and simultaneously protected domestic producers regulations were often targeted at imported products wine and raisins when tariffs were ineffective or constrained by institutions such as on colonial wine hence tariffs and quality regulations were jointly used in wine policy both as complements and as substitutes in policy design

distributional effects of wto agricultural reforms in rich and poor countries rich countries agricultural trade policies are the battleground on which the future of the wto s troubled doha round will be determined subject to widespread criticism they nonetheless appear to be almost immune to serious reform and one of their most common defenses is that they protect poor farmers the authors findings reject this claim the analysis uses detailed data on farm incomes to show that major commodity programs are highly regressive in the united states and that the only serious losses under trade reform are among large wealthy farmers in a few heavily protected subsectors in contrast analysis using household data from 15 developing countries indicates that reforming rich countries agricultural trade policies would lift large numbers of developing country farm households out of poverty in the majority of cases these gains are not outweighed by the poverty increasing effects of higher food prices among other households agricultural reforms that appear feasible even under an ambitious doha round achieve only a fraction of the benefits for developing countries that full liberalization promises but protect u s large farms from most of the rigors of adjustment finally the analysis indicates that maximal trade led poverty reductions occur when developing countries participate more fully in agricultural trade liberalization

economic development institutional change and the political economy of agricultural protection an econometric study of belgium since the 19th century this empirical study uses 100 years of annual data on 11 agricultural commodities from belgium to measure the impact of structural changes coinciding with economic development and changes in political institutions on agricultural protection the analysis shows that changes in agricultural protection are caused by a combination of factors governments have increased protection and support to farmers when world market prices for their commodities fell and vice versa offsetting market effects on producer incomes other economic determinants were the share of the commodities in total consumer expenditures negative effect and in total output of the economy positive effect with belgium a small economy there was no impact of the trade position changes in political institutions have affected agricultural protection democratic reforms which induced a significant shift in the political balance towards agricultural interests such as the introduction of the one man one vote system led to an increase in agricultural protection the integration of belgian agricultural policies in the common agricultural policy in 1968 coincided with an increase in protection ceteris paribus both institutional factors related to changes in access to and information about the decision making at the eu level and structural changes in the agricultural and food economy may explain this effect

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

dosi s technological paradigms and trajectories insights for economics and management dosi 1982 has provided an eclectic framework which has for some time now been one of the core concepts in innovation studies while it has been very influential in public policy in management it remains underexploited many insights remain to be teased out of the framework which can help managers make better decisions this article reflects on the far reaching impact of dosi s ideas and his role in the founding and development of industrial and corporate change

taxation and political mobilization evidence from andhra pradesh abstractthis article empirically investigates whether there are differences in a region s taxation burden on the basis of support for the centralized state government in the indian state of andhra pradesh using randomness introduced by close election outcomes this article finds that the government collected less tax revenues where opposition parties were more successful the decline in tax revenue was most likely targeted at agricultural producers and a similar pattern is found in other available agricultural policies these results are consistent with a model in which it is optimal for a centralized government to catch up in elections it trails as opposed to bolstering existing leads furthermore these results suggest that taxation responds to electoral pressures and that agricultural producers in particular are targeted during times of political competition

simultaneous use of auctions and posted prices abstract i consider a model in which several identical objects are sold simultaneously via an auction and a posted price mechanism the model explains several empirical regularities regarding bidding behavior in ebay auctions such as the finding that some bidders bid multiple times over the course of the auction and that bidders tend to bid with greater frequency near the end of the auction than the beginning i also show that sellers prefer to simultaneously use auctions and posted prices than to use either mechanism individually

bargaining with arrival of new traders we study dynamic bargaining with asymmetric information and arrival of exogenous events which represent arrival of traders or information we char acterize the unique limit of stationary equilibria with frequent offers the possi bility of arrivals changes equilibrium dynamics there is delay in equilibrium and the seller slowly screens out buyers with higher valuations the seller pay off equals what he can achieve by simply awaiting an arrival in applications when buyer valuations fall average prices drop and delay increases surplus division depends on relative arrival rates of buyers sellers and expected time to trade is a nonmonotonic function of the arrival rate

dynamic matching two sided incomplete information and participation costs existence and convergence to perfect competition consider a decentralized dynamic market with an infinite horizon and participation costs in which both buyers and sellers have private information concerning their values for the indivisible traded good time is discrete each period has length and each unit of time continuums of new buyers and sellers consider entry traders whose expected utility is negative choose not to enter within a period each buyer is matched anonymously with a seller and each seller is matched with zero one or more buyers every seller runs a first price auction with a reservation price and if trade occurs both the seller and the winning buyer exit the market with their realized utility traders who fail to trade continue in the market to be rematched we characterize the steady state equilibria that are perfect bayesian we show that as converges to zero equilibrium prices at which trades occur converge to the walrasian price and the realized allocations converge to the competitive allocation we also show the existence of equilibria for sufficiently small provided the discount rate is small relative to the participation

partial pooling at the reserve price in auctions with resale opportunities abstract two features common to many auctions are the use of reserve prices and the existence of secondary markets for the goods being sold even in simple symmetric settings the combination of these features can preclude existence of an equilibrium in symmetric separating bidding strategies with a reserve price sufficiently far below the maximum endogenous valuation a symmetric equilibrium still exists but with some types pooling at the reserve the optimal reserve price depends not only on the joint distribution of bidders information before and after the auction but also on how surplus is divided in the secondary market journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 c7 l1 d82

paradigm changing vs paradigm deepening innovation how firm scope influences firm technological response to shocks we examine the direction of firms research efforts as they respond to the shock of a sharp increase in the price of a key input in terms of direction firms can respond to this shock with paradigm changing investments that develop technologies to use substitute inputs or with paradigm deepening investments that develop technologies to improve the utilization efficiency of the existing input we develop a framework that suggests that firms emphasis on paradigm changing versus paradigm deepening investments depends on the degree of input relatedness across their businesses we test our hypotheses by examining the responses of large manufacturing firms in the united states to the oil shock of the early 1980s our framework predicts and our results show that the more related a firm s businesses are the larger its investments into paradigm changing technologies are and the smaller its investments into paradigm deepening technologies in response to the oil shock are we identify the implications of these findings for technological evolution and diversification literatures

reconsidering carbon permits auction mechanism an efficient dynamic model one of major concerns for china and developing countries is the new international trade rule concerning carbon emissions which one needs to know its suitable mechanism and the possible implication on china s carbon trading market precisely in an emission and trade scheme an important question is whether the auction outcome is efficient since this is closely related with the economic costs of emissions reduction due to the unique features of carbon permits existing auction mechanisms do not seem to be suitable for their distribution inspired by the t tonnement process this paper proposes a new auction mechanism for them for both practical application and theoretical extension the discrete and continuous situations are examined respectively the result shows that the proposed auction converges to pareto optimal equilibria and that without ties the equilibrium is unique for bidders the straightforward bidding strategy is the most preferred one in the sense that the strategy makes them avoid the risk of loss intuitively the auctioneer s utility is increasing in the number of bidders while bidders pay off is increasing in permits to a certain extent the proposed auction mechanism resolves the confliction between efficiency and revenue in the multi item auction theory while it increases people s understanding for carbon emission auction mechanism design

sequential auctions with randomly arriving buyers we analyze a dynamic market in which buyers compete in a sequence of private value auctions for differentiated goods new buyers and new objects may arrive at random times since objects are imperfect substitutes buyers values are not persistent instead each buyer s private value for a new object is a new independent draw from the same in this paper we consider a model of dynamic markets in which buyers and sellers arrive randomly to the market and examine the equilibrium behavior of market participants in response to these arrivals in particular we investigate the role of current and anticipated future market conditions in determining endogenous outside options in this setting we characterize the influence of these outside options on equilibrium price determination and study the manner in which equilibrium payoffs and behavior are affected by both current conditions and future dynamics in our model buyers face an infinite sequence of auctions for heterogeneous but stochastically equivalent objects each buyer s private value for a new object is a new independent draw from a fixed distribution that arrive at random times moreover new buyers probabilistically arrive on the market in each period thus in any given auction buyers are presented with the outside option of participating in a future auction for an imperfectly substituted equivalent object but with a potentially different number of competitors we describe the unique symmetric markov equilibrium of this model by deriving a precise characterization of this option value

marketplaces and matching this paper models equilibrium trading patterns when marketplaces exist and goods are differentiated when first visiting the market a buyer samples a stock of goods if fortunate the buyer matches with and purchases one of these goods and then exits the market if an initial match does not exist the buyer can now only match with the flow of new goods for sale the previous stock has been sampled and rejected in a steady state the current stock of unmatched traders on one side of the market is trying to match with the flow of new traders on the other side it is shown that this market behaviour describes matching patterns between unemployed job seekers and vacancies in uk job centres

the growth of agricultural protection in europe in the 19th and 20th centuries 1247 johan f m swinnen dramatic changes took place in agricultural policies in europe in the 19th and 20th centuries in the 1860s european nations agreed on a series of trade agreements which spread free trade across the continent in the 1960s european nations concluded an international agreement which spread heavy government intervention and protection against imports across the continent this paper quantifies these changes in protection over the course of a century relates them to changes in policies and offers a political economy explanation for the growth in agricultural protection in europe

ideas for rent an overview of markets for technology this article surveys some of the recent literature on technology markets and summarizes its main issues and insights we structure our analysis in three parts the supply and demand of technology the factors that condition the formation and growth of technology markets industry structure and dynamic issues in addition we summarize some of the studies that have tried to document the size and growth of these markets we find that the literature has focused mainly on the supply of technology but several other aspects of these markets remain under studied including the demand for external technology the role of uncertainty in technology markets and the dynamic interaction between industry structure and the market for technology understanding these will illuminate whether markets for technology will continue to grow or remained confined to pockets of the economy copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

on the complexities of china s wto accession what are the reasons for and significance of not including china in the wto after recalling why the world has a wto and what membership involves this paper then examines why china wishes to join and the stumbling blocks that have caused the delay in china s wto accession a summary of some recent empirical estimates of the likely orders of magnitude of the economic effects of its accession both to china and to the rest of the world highlight the folly of delaying membership the stumbling blocks concern whether china should be granted developing country status in the wto whether china would be a fair competitor given the dominance of state owned enterprises in that economy still what the extent and conditions of market access into china would be and whether china can deliver on its promise of stricter enforcement of intellectual property rights actions needed by china for getting over those stumbling blocks include building a stronger and broader domestic consensus based on the net benefits from wto membership providing greater trade policy transparency and market access and working towards a compromise on the issue of china s developing country status in the wto

feeding and fueling china in the 21st century abstract this paper addresses the questions to what extent will china become a significant net importer of food and fuel in the foreseeable future and what will be the impact of that import demand growth on international markets it first summarizes what standard trade and development economics and the experiences of other asian economies suggest we should expect of china and then examines china s experience to date before turning to some forecasts for the next decade or so our review suggests that before long china will become a significant net importer of both food and fuels especially petroleum contrary to chinese fears however becoming more interdependent with the rest of the world need not be threatening and it may even offer more supply security for china in the long run

related diversification and r d intensity dynamics abstract using longitudinal data of spanish manufacturing companies we study the dynamic bidirectional relationship between firm research and development r d intensity and corporate diversification in an organic growth setting our empirical approach accounts for the different sources of endogeneity although we find a positive linear effect of r d intensity on related diversification the effect of related diversification on r d intensity assumes the form of an inverted u thus the effect of related diversification on r d intensity is positive but marginally decreases for moderate levels of related diversification such an effect can become negative however for high levels of related diversification additionally as a consequence of dynamics the effects after one year are substantially lower than the overall effects that occur over several years

lobbying incentives and the pattern of protection in rich and poor countries in seeking to explain why poor countries tend to choose policies that tax agriculture relative to manufacturing while rich countries do the opposite archetypical parameters for a poor agrarian economy and a rich industrial one are inserted in a computable general equilibrium model to simulate the medium term effects on income distribution of policies that distort the relative prices of tradables the model includes a non tradables sector and intermediate inputs realistic features that ensure even greater skewness in the distributional effects of protection than simpler models suggest the magnitude of the results helps explain the tendency for countries to change gradually from taxing to subsidizing agriculture relative to manufacturing as their economies develop the paper draws out the implications of the analysis for agricultural and trade policy reform in the 1990s this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

wto negotiations on agriculture and the distributional impacts for us rice farm households abstract the policies of wealthy countries have proven the most difficult to reform in the wto doha round negotiations considerable emphasis has been placed on developing country impacts but a gap in the literature remains on the stakes for rich country farmers despite the large role these countries play in global agricultural protection the research here considers the particular case of us rice households and their sensitivity to japanese market access reform using an applied general equilibrium model with multiple farm households we highlight the distributional impacts among these producers we argue that concessions to japan on market access make domestic reforms in rice a difficult political sale in the us since the wealthiest producers bear the largest losses improving our understanding of the distributional impacts and political realities of the richest countries is critical to informing the negotiating process because the gains to the world s poor can only be realized with creative policy redress in these rich nations

convergence to perfect competition of a dynamic matching and bargaining market with two sided incomplete information and exogenous exit rate abstract consider a decentralized dynamic market with an infinite horizon and incomplete information in which buyers and sellers values for the traded good are private and independently drawn time is discrete each period has length and each unit of time a large number of new buyers and sellers enter the market within a period each buyer is matched with a seller and each seller is matched with zero one or more buyers every seller runs a first price auction with a reservation price and if trade occurs the seller and winning buyer exit with their realized utility traders who fail to trade either continue in the market to be rematched or exit at an exogenous rate we show that in all steady state perfect bayesian equilibria as approaches zero equilibrium prices converge to the walrasian price and realized allocations converge to the competitive allocation

the long side of the market and the short end of the stick bargaining power and price formation in buyers sellers and balanced markets the determinants of bargaining power and price formation in a dynamic exchange market where new traders enter randomly over time are studied when agents on the long side of the market possess the option to wait for the arrival of future partners the terms of trade in the spot market must honor the value of this option the equilibrium terms of trade are expressed in intuitive closed form equations that highlight the distinct influences of short run spot market conditions and long run market demographics i introduction few concepts in economics are as intuitive as the idea that traders on the long side of a market wind up holding the short end of the stick that is they receive little or none of the gains from trade consider for instance the classic setting in which b identical buyers each with unit demands for an indivisible homogeneous good face s identical sellers each with one unit of the good for sale it is well known that in a broad class of one shot trading games all of the surplus in this setting goes to the short side of the market in equilibrium that is if b s buyers bid the price up to their reservation value often it is only when b s that market institutions the rules of the game have any bearing on the equilibrium division of surplus this classic result is somewhat brittle because of the discontinuity in the terms of trade when moving from positive to negative levels of excess demand its logic is familiar however from bertrand competition and it is very compelling the option value to an agent frozen out of a trade in a one shot market game is his reservation payoff of zero any outcome that confers nonzero surplus to a long side agent cannot be sustained in equilibrium because all of the long side agents who would otherwise be frozen out possess a strict incentive to undercut

walras retrouve decentralized trading mechanisms and the competitive price we extend the standard analysis of decentralized markets to allow for the possibility that traders interact simultaneously with more than one trader on the opposite side of the market in contrast with the literature we reconcile the walrasian equilibrium with the outcome of decentralized strategic trade we show that there exist generic matching technologies that determine local market conditions such that as market frictions vanish the equilibrium price is the one that would result in the static walrasian market our analysis highlights the importance of local market conditions for the determination of equilibrium prices

mass media and public policy global evidence from agricultural policies mass media play a crucial role in information distribution and in the political market and public policy making theory predicts that information provided by the mass media reflects the media s incentives to provide news to different groups in society and affects these groups influence in policy making the paper use data on agricultural policy from 69 countries spanning a wide range of development stages and media markets to test these predictions the empirical results are consistent with theoretical hypotheses that public support for agriculture is affected by the mass media in particular an increase in media television diffusion is associated with policies that benefit the majority to a greater extent and is correlated with a reduction in agriculture taxation in poor countries and a reduction in the subsidization of agriculture in rich countries ceteris paribus the empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that increased competition in commercial media reduces transfers to special interest groups and contributes to more efficient public policies

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

exploration and exploitation in innovation systems the case of pharmaceutical biotechnology abstract this paper develops a theoretical framework for an explanation of how exploitation and exploration build on each other in a cycle of discovery developed in earlier research the framework is tested empirically in the sense of seeing whether it can help to reconstruct and understand the emergence of the pharmaceutical industry one of the conclusions is that whereas recent literature stresses the idiosyncratic nature of the biotechnological revolution our analysis seems to reveal that this does not seem to be as unique as suggested from this we conclude that the theoretical framework we propose serves its purpose of explanation but there are also some lessons for improving it

the political economy of policies for smallholder agriculture summary as the experience of the 20th century has shown implementing policies that increase agricultural productivity among smallholders is a particularly promising strategy to achieve pro poor growth however history also reveals major political challenges to adopting this strategy the paper compares the experience of asian countries that were able to launch a smallholder based green revolution with the experience of african countries that are still struggling with this goal it then reviews the political economy literature to identify the factors that account for these divergent experiences finally the paper develops a conceptual framework to guide empirical research to close the knowledge gaps identified by the review

changing coalitions in value chains and the political economy of agricultural and food policy within this issue of the oxford review of economic policy which focuses on the growing divergence between the agriculture sector and the food sector this paper focuses on how this changing divergence affects the political economy of agricultural and food policies

dynamic markets with competitive bidding the model features a dynamic market in steady state in which prices are determined in first price auctions it combines competition over time familiar from the pairwise meeting models with instantaneous bidding competition it inquires how different properties of the model determine the relative importance of these two aspects of the competition and in particular how the non market clearing price result of the matching and bargaining models is affected by the

managerial incentives and investment in r d in large multiproduct firms incentives for division managers in large firms affect their risk orientation and thus their decisions to invest in r d this paper reviews theory and hypothesizes that division managers incentive compensation that is based on financial performance is negatively related to risk taking as measured by r d intensity results of a study of 184 major u s firms suggest that incentives based on short term annual division financial performance are negatively related to total firm r d intensity after controlling for industry r d intensity firm diversification size and group structure furthermore the results suggest that an emphasis on long term financial incentives may mitigate the negative relationship between these incentives and r d intensity but does not promote risk taking the results suggest the importance of emphasizing strategic controls evaluating division managers based on operational understanding of strategies proposed strategic criteria as opposed to the use of financial controls evalua

sequential auctions of stochastically equivalent objects abstract we show that in sequential auctions of a large enough number of stochastically equivalent objects with bounded values prices will on average have a downwards trend

bidding behavior and experience in internet auctions abstract we study the role of experience in internet art auctions by analyzing repeated bidding by the same bidder in a unique longitudinal field dataset our results show that experience significantly lowers the level of bids suggesting that bidders change their bidding behavior throughout time participating in more than ten auctions brings down average bids by up to 26 we further test several possible explanations for the observed learning behavior and show that the change in bidding strategy is a result of a change in within auction behavior that is generated with experience our results are robust to concerns of endogenous participation as well as bidder fixed effects

multilateral trade negotiations european integration and farm policy reform trade negotiations and farm policy kym anderson why was it so hard to reach an agreement in the uruguay round to reduce agricultural protection after surveying the growth of agricultural protection in the 1980s i develop arguments based on political economy that imply a systematic tendency for governments to protect farmers increasingly at least up to some threshold as economic development proceeds agricultural protection growth in industrializing countries is therefore normal not exceptional liberalizing those policies before reaching that threshold is unattractive politically unless new influences e g from abroad upset the domestic political equilibrium the uruguay round provided such a force what made the early 1990s so significant a crossroads for farm policy reform was that coincidently there were other changes taking place in europe which lowered the domestic political cost of reforming the ec s common agricultural policy the paper argues that the reforms to farm policy during the rest of this decade as a result of the uruguay round agreement will at best be slow and messy but that is far preferable to the alternative of a failed uruguay round and continued growth of agricultural protection

induced innovation and marginal cost of new technology abstract lacking data on development and implementation costs for input saving technologies we develop a nonparametric procedure to estimate relative differences in marginal technology costs for technical change to be consistent with the induced innovation hypothesis we apply it to u s agriculture

when the weak win the role of investment in environmental lobbying abstract old and environmentally damaging industries often lobby effectively for less stringent regulations and are slow to adopt new and cleaner technologies this paper explains the lobbying success of these industries in terms of the strategic role of investment as a credible commitment device it is demonstrated that if governments are predisposed to special interest groups underinvestment in new technology enables firms to lobby more effectively such industries are shown to be better placed to extract policy concessions despite contributing less to the government in political donations the analysis therefore suggests that political considerations may provide a significant incentive for firms to reject environmentally beneficial investments even when these lower production costs

towards an economic theory of the multiproduct firm this paper outlines a theory of the multiproduct firm important building blocks include excess capacity and its creation market imperfections and the peculiarities of organizational knowledge including its fungible and taut character a framework is adopted in which profit seeking firms are seen to diversify in order to avoid the high transactions costs associated with using various markets to trade the services of various specialized assets neoclassical explanations of the multiproduct firm are shown to be seriously deficient

opening of china s trade labour market reform and impact on rural wages government policy in china supports urban wages at the expense of returns to farm labour a model is developed to estimate how wto accession and complementary labour market reform will influence factor returns in china with wto membership a larger cut in manufacturing tariffs compared to agriculture will improve agriculture s terms of trade and will raise the agricultural wage complementary labour market reforms will further boost farm wages as labour exits agriculture in large numbers we estimate that wto membership and complementary labour market reforms will result in a decline in the agricultural labour force by about 25 per cent

strategic bargaining and competitive bidding in a dynamic market equilibrium this paper extends the bargaining and matching literature such as rubinstein 1985 and gale 1986 and 1987 by considering a new matching process we assume that a central information agency exists such as job centres and newspapers in the labour market or real estate agents in the housing market which puts potential traders into direct contact with each other with agent heterogeneity equilibrium trade is characterized by existing traders on the other side since existing traders have already sampled and rejected each other two procedures of trade coexist namely strategic bilateral bargaining and a competitive bidding process depending on the number of potential matches a new trader obtains we characterize the unique symmetric markov perfect equilibrium to this stochastic trading game

economic growth convergence and agricultural economics after nearly two centuries of lagging behind the industrial countries growth in many developing countries has surged since the early 1990s this outperformance has major implications for almost all areas of agricultural economics and if continued will likely do so into the future this article aims to identify the key ways in which the changes in rich and poor country growth rates matter for agricultural economists as a basis for formulating better research agendas a key impact arises through sharp increases in demand for agricultural resources as demand for livestock products increases this changing structure of food demand has important implications for nutrition studies and policies with the emergence of a double burden of malnutrition on the supply side growth in developing countries tends to increase domestic food supply which is also boosted by increases in research and development spending growth in developing countries both stimulates and benefits from increases in infrastructure investment evaluation of which requires new analytical tools negative impacts include the contribution of increased demand for livestock products to global greenhouse gas emissions in terms of trade policy growth in developing country is tending to lead to convergence of agricultural policies with the pattern of assistance seen in today s developed countries raising concerns about the future need to deal with collective action problems particularly those that increase the volatility of world prices

the political economy of coal subsidies in europe abstract both the mining and the burning of coal is polluting so we might expect to observe taxes on coal production and consumption yet several countries of western europe subsidize coal production and most east european countries subsidize coal consumption the first part of this paper shows that those subsidies which are emulated by other rich and poor countries respectively have become enormous neoclassical political economy is used to examine why governments adopt such inappropriate policies when they are so wasteful of resources and damaging to the environment several new and offsetting political forces have been at work in western europe in recent years though causing some countries to dismantle their coal producer subsidies the paper concludes that these pressures for reform will continue to operate in the few remaining protectionist countries if coupled with more commercial diplomatic pressure from coal exporting countries they could be sufficient to see the end of such protection by early next century