optimal design of private litigation abstract this article translates and extends becker 1968 from public law enforcement to private litigation by examining optimal legal system design in a model with private suits signals of case strength court error and two types of primary behavior harmful acts that may be deterred and benign acts that may be chilled the instruments examined are filing fees or subsidies that may be imposed on either party damage awards and payments by unsuccessful plaintiffs each of which may be decoupled and the stringency of the evidence threshold burden of proof with no constraints results arbitrarily close to the first best can be implemented prior analyses of optimal damage awards decoupling and fee shifting are shown to involve special cases more important previous results change qualitatively when implicit assumptions are relaxed for example introducing a filing fee can make it optimal to minimize what losing plaintiffs pay winning defendants and to reduce the evidence threshold as much as possible even though the direct effect of these adjustments is to chill desirable behavior a key feature absent in prior work

private v public antitrust enforcement a strategic analysis we compare private and public enforcement of the antitrust laws in a simple strategic model of antitrust violation and lawsuit the model highlights the tradeoff that private firms are initially more likely than the government to be informed about antitrust violations but are also more likely to use the antitrust laws strategically to the disadvantage of consumers assuming coupled private damages if the court is sufficiently accurate adding private enforcement to public enforcement always increases social welfare while if the court is less accurate it increases welfare only if the government is sufficiently inefficient in litigation pure private enforcement is never strictly optimal public enforcement can achieve the social optimum with a fee for public lawsuit that induces efficient information revelation private enforcement can also achieve the social optimum with private damages that are efficiently multiplied and decoupled

accuracy in the determination of liability many legal rules notably rules of procedure and evidence are concerned with achieving accuracy in the outcome of adjudication in this article we study accuracy in the conventional model of law enforcement we consider why reducing error in determining liability is socially valuable and how error and its reduction affect the optimal probability and magnitude of sanctions this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effect of immigration along the distribution of wages this paper analyses the effect immigration has on wages of native workers unlike most previous work we estimate wage effects along the distribution of wages we derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre allocating immigrants to particular skill groups in our empirical analysis we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival as for the effects on native wages we find that immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution the overall wage effect of immigration is slightly positive the positive wage effects we find are although modest too large to be explained by an immigration surplus we suggest alternative explanations based on the idea that immigrants are paid less than the value of what they contribute to production generating therefore a surplus and we assess the magnitude of these effects

immigration and house prices in the uk this article studies the effect of immigration on house prices in the uk it finds that immigration has a negative effect on house prices and presents evidence that this negative effect is due to the mobility response of the native population natives respond to immigration by moving to different areas and those who leave are at the top of the wage distribution this generates a negative income effect on housing demand and pushes down house prices the negative effect of immigration on house prices is driven by local areas where immigrants have lower education

imperfect patent protection and innovation the paper studies the effect of strengthening protection on r d incentives in the context of process innovation it shows that for non drastic innovations that do not render the pre existing technology obsolete the innovator might favor imitation if the expected royalty rate determined by the court is sufficiently high since imitation is discouraged for very high levels of patent protection r d investment is maximized for an intermediate level of patent strength this finding provides a theoretical explanation for emerging empirical evidence questioning the effectiveness of strengthening protection on innovation incentives it also serves as a justification for the imperfections of the existing patent system that allows for some infringement

optimal awards and penalties when the probability of prevailing varies among plaintiffs this article derives the optimal award to a winning plaintiff and the optimal penalty on a losing plaintiff when the probability of prevailing varies among plaintiffs optimality is defined in terms of achieving a specified degree of deterrence of potential injurers with the lowest litigation cost our main result is that the optimal penalty on a losing plaintiff is positive in contrast to common practice in the united states by penalizing losing plaintiffs and raising the award to winning plaintiffs relative to what it would be if losing plaintiffs were not penalized it is possible to discourage relatively low probability of prevailing plaintiffs from suing without discouraging relatively high probability plaintiffs and thereby to achieve the desired degree of deterrence with lower litigation costs

what money canʼt buy efficient mechanism design with costly signals i study the ex ante efficient allocation of a set of quality heterogeneous objects to a number of heterogeneous risk neutral agents agents have independent private values which represent the maximum cost they are willing to sustain to obtain an object of unitary quality the designer faces a trade off between allocative efficiency and cost of screening because the cost sustained is wasted the optimal mechanism ranks agents based on their marginal contribution to social surplus and distributes objects to higher ranked agents the ranking is independent of the scarcity of objects or the extent of their heterogeneity if the hazard rates of the distributions of values are increasing agents are ranked according to their expected values if hazard rates are decreasing and agents are symmetric the objects are allocated to the agents that sustain the highest costs in general optimal mechanisms combine both pooling and screening of values

demographic change and policy responses implications for the global economy the fertility declines associated with the final phase of the global demographic transition have led to slower population growth and accelerated ageing in developed countries and in several advanced developing countries a global demographic and economic model is used to assess the implications of these changes for population sizes age gender distributions labour force growth and their implications for economic performance a baseline projection that incorporates declining fertility is compared with a hypothetical constant population growth scenario the results show that slower population growth and ageing reduces average saving rates in industrial regions yet global investment demand is also slowed and saving rates rise in developing regions so there is no net tightening of financial markets increased aged labour force participation considered one solution to the resulting rise in aged dependency in advanced regions is found to redistribute investment in favour of the industrialised regions and hence to accelerate their per capita income growth while conferring on the other regions compensatory terms of trade improvements the alternative of replacement migration is found to require inconceivably large population movements it also impairs real per capita growth in destination regions but by least in western europe where the terms of trade are improved by the immigration

welfare payments and other economic determinants of female migration this article investigates the effects of welfare payments wages and unemployment on women s probability of interstate migration in the united states it also investigates if the income attraction of locations varies with recency of labor market experience welfare gains increase the probability of interstate migration welfare effects are largest for single mothers with small children and stronger among women with no recent labor market experience the welfare effects albeit small are larger than the wage effects the wage effects are weaker among women with no recent work experience ethnic specific analyses suggest differences in migration behavior among anglos african americans and puerto ricans

on the continuous equilibria of affiliated value all pay auctions with private budget constraints abstract we consider all pay auctions in the presence of interdependent affiliated valuations and private budget constraints for the sealed bid all pay auction we characterize a symmetric equilibrium in continuous strategies for the case of n bidders budget constraints encourage more aggressive bidding among participants with large endowments and intermediate valuations we extend our results to the war of attrition where we show that budget constraints lead to a uniform amplification of equilibrium bids among bidders with sufficient endowments an example shows that with both interdependent valuations and private budget constraints a revenue ranking between the two auction formats is generally not possible equilibria with discontinuous bidding strategies are discussed

effects of immigrant legalization on crime in the late 1970s rates of undocumented immigration into the united states began to increase dramatically fearing negative labor market and social effects congress passed the 1986 immigration reform and control act irca the primary purpose of the bill was to enhance the controls on the hiring of undocumented immigrants making it illegal to hire or recruit undocumented immigrants however the legislation also represented a near universal legalization of immigrants in the united states a group comprising almost three million people about 1 percent of the nation s population this paper examines the effects that the irca had on the commission of crime in the united states i provide estimates of the total effect of this legalization exploiting the large amount of variation in both the geographical distribution and the quasi random timing of the legalizations i find persistent decreases in crime of 3 percent to 5 percent primarily driven by a drop in property crimes this fall in crime is equivalent to 120 000 180 000 fewer violent and property crimes committed each year across the nation due to legalization moreover the declines in crime cannot be explained by existing trends economic conditions declines in drug crimes changes to police forces and prison populations or other common explanations of changes in crime rates during this period

standard auctions with financially constrained bidders we develop a methodology for analyzing the revenue and efficiency performance of auctions when buyers have private information about their willingness to pay and ability to pay we then apply the framework to scenarios involving standard auction mechanisms in the simplest case where bidders face absolute spending limits first price auctions yield higher expected revenue and social surplus than second price auctions the revenue dominance of first price auctions over secondprice auctions carries over to the case where bidders have access to credit these rankings are explained by differences in the extent to which financial constraints bind in different auction formats

fertility and savings contractions in china long run global implications following three decades of rapid but unbalanced economic growth china s reform agendas are set to rebalance the economy towards consumption while maintaining strong gdp growth headwinds include a demographic contraction that will bring negative labour force growth and rapid ageing rising aged dependency combined with lower saving rates will rebalance the economy but they will reduce both gdp growth and real per capita income while an effective two child policy could sustain growth and eventually mitigate the aged dependency problem it would set real per capita income on a still lower path these conundrums are examined using a global economic and demographic model which shows how the continuing demographic and saving contractions in china would alter the trajectories of both the chinese and global economies

welfare magnet hypothesis fiscal burden and immigration skill selectivity in this paper we investigate the effect of welfare state generosity on the difference between skilled and unskilled migration rates and the role of mobility restriction in shaping this effect we utilize the free labor movement within the european union plus norway and switzerland eur and the restricted movement from outside the eur in order to compare the free migration regime to the restricted migration regime we find strong support for the magnet hypothesis under the free migration regime and the fiscal burden hypothesis under the restricted migration regime even after controlling for differences in educational quality and returns to skills in source and host countries

the impact of immigration on the british labour market using data from the british labour force survey this article provides an empirical investigation of the way immigration affects labour market outcomes of native born workers in britain set beside a theoretical discussion of the underlying economic mechanisms we discuss problems arising in empirical estimation and how to address them we show that the overall skill distribution of immigrants is remarkably similar to that of the native born workforce we find no strong evidence that immigration has overall effects on aggregate employment participation unemployment and wages but some differences according to education

emigration and wages the eu enlargement experiment abstract the enlargement of the european union provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of the lifting of migration restrictions on the migrant sending countries with eu enlargement in 2004 1 2 million workers from eastern europe emigrated to the uk and ireland i use this emigration wave to show that emigration significantly changed the wage distribution in the sending country in particular between young and old workers using a novel dataset from lithuania the uk and ireland for the calibration of a structural model of labor demand i find that over the period of five years emigration increased the wages of young workers by 6 while it had no effect on the wages of old workers contrary to the immigration literature there is no significant effect of emigration on the wage distribution between high skilled and low skilled workers

immigration and housing rents in american cities is there a local economic impact of immigration immigration pushes up rents and housing values in us destination cities the positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas i use instrumental variables based on a shift share of national levels of immigration into metropolitan areas an immigration inflow equal to 1 of a city s population is associated with increases in average rents and housing values of about 1 the results suggest an economic impact that is an order of magnitude bigger than that found in labor markets

contests with multi tasking the standard contest model in which participants compete in a single dimension is well understood and documented multi dimension extensions are possible but are liable to increase the complexity of the contest structure mitigating one of its main advantages simplicity in this paper we propose an extension in which competition ensues in several dimensions and a competitor that wins a certain number of these is awarded a prize the amount of information needed to run the contest is hence limited to the number of dimensions won by each player we look at the design of this contest from the point of view of maximising effort in the contest per dimension and totally and show that there will be a tendency to run small contests with few dimensions the standard tullock model and its results are encompassed by our framework

the impact of immigration on the structure of wages theory and evidence from britain immigration to the uk particularly among more educated workers has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply however studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native born workers in the uk this is potentially puzzling since there is evidence that changes in the supply of educated natives have had significant effects on their wages using a pooled time series of british cross sectional micro data on male wages and employment from the mid 1970s to the mid 2000s this paper offers one possible resolution to this puzzle namely that in the uk natives and foreign born workers are imperfect substitutes we show that immigration has primarily reduced the wages of immigrants and in particular of university educated immigrants with little discernable effect on the wages of the native born

how not to raise money we show that standard winner pay auctions are inept fund raising mechanisms because of the positive externality bidders forgo if they top another s high bid revenues are suppressed as a result and remain finite even when bidders value a dollar donated the same as a dollar kept this problem does not occur in lotteries and all pay auctions where bidders pay irrespective of whether they win we introduce a general class of all pay auctions rank their revenues and illustrate how they dominate lotteries and winner pay formats the optimal fund raising mechanism is an all pay auction augmented with an entry fee and reserve price

the labour market performance of recent migrants migrant workers constitute a vital component of many western labour markets although migrants can benefit greatly by moving to higher wage economies it is important to compare their labour market outcomes with those of native born workers in this paper we discuss factors that have been found to influence labour market success in the receiving country and examine the actual performance of recent migrants to the uk the uk provides a good case study for conducting such an exercise because of the very large increases in immigration that have been seen over the past decade we find that labour market performance varies greatly between migrant groups and that outcomes have changed noticeably following the uk government s decision to allow migrants from poland and other central and eastern european countries more or less free access to the labour market after eu enlargement in 2004

non native speakers of english in the classroom what are the effects on pupil performance there has been an increase in the number of children going to school in england who do not speak english as a first language we investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native english speakers at the end of primary school we show that the negative correlation observed in the raw data is mainly an artefact of selection non native speakers are more likely to attend school with disadvantaged native speakers we attempt to identify a causal impact of changes in the percentage of non native speakers our results suggest zero effect and rule out negative effects

demography national savings and international capital flows this paper addresses the relationship between age distribution national savings and the current account balance the results point to substantial demographic effects with increases in both the youth and old age dependency ratios associated with lower savings rates they also point to differential effects on savings and investment and thus to a role for demography in determining the current account balance the estimated demographic effect on the current account balance exceeds 6 percent of gdp over the last three decades for a number of countries and given expected demographic trends is likely to be substantially larger over the coming decades copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the dynamics of pretrial negotiation it is shown that many cases proceed to court despite ample opportunity for interaction and much of the settlement takes place on the courthouse steps the deadline effect when fixed costs of bargaining are introduced a u shaped pattern of settlement appears with a greater chance of settlement at the beginning and at the end of negotiations than in the middle these characteristics persist even as the time between offers approaches zero the theoretical predictions are consistent with the stylized facts a large proportion of the lawsuits that are settled out of court are settled very close to the trial date or in the first several days of the trial 3 although the deadline effect appears in many other settings as well it has little theoretical support 4

pretrial bargaining and the design of fee shifting rules legal rules for allocating the private costs of civil litigation or fee shifting rules provide powerful incentives for settlement within the context of a direct revelation mechanism the fee shifting rule that generates the highest probability of settlement bases the allocation of costs upon the proximity of the court s award to the pretrial announcements this mechanism resembles rule 68 of the federal rules of civil procedure and other offer based rules in a simple extensive form game if the litigants have asymmetric information about the level of damages probability of prevailing then rule 68 increases decreases the settlement rate

the fiscal effects of immigration to the uk we investigate the fiscal impact of immigration on the uk economy with a focus on the period since 1995 our findings indicate that when considering the resident immigrant population in each year from 1995 to 2011 immigrants from the european economic area eea have made a positive fiscal contribution even during periods when the uk was running budget deficits while non eea immigrants not dissimilar to natives have made a negative contribution for immigrants that arrived since 2000 contributions have been positive throughout and particularly so for immigrants from eea countries notable is the strong positive contribution made by immigrants from countries that joined the eu in 2004

the determinants of household saving in china a dynamic panel analysis of provincial data in this paper we conduct a dynamic panel analysis of the determinants of the household saving rate in china using a life cycle model and panel data on chinese provinces for the 1995 2004 period from china s household survey we find that china s household saving rate has been high and rising and that the main determinants of variations over time and over space therein are the lagged saving rate the income growth rate in many cases the real interest rate and in some cases the inflation rate however we find that the variables relating to the age structure of the population have the expected impact on the household saving rate in only one of the four samples these results provide mixed support for the life cycle hypothesis as well as the permanent income hypothesis are consistent with the existence of inertia or persistence and imply that china s household saving rate will remain high for some time to come

tax rates and tax evasion evidence from missing imports in china tax evasion by its very nature is difficult to observe we quantify the effects of tax rates on tax evasion by examining the relationship in china between the tariff schedule and the evasion gap which we define as the difference between hong kong s reported exports to china at the product level and china s reported imports from hong kong our results imply that a one percentage point increase in the tax rate is associated with a 3 percent increase in evasion furthermore the evasion gap is negatively correlated with tax rates on closely related products suggesting that evasion takes place partly through misclassification of imports from higher taxed categories to lower taxed ones in addition to underreporting the value of imports

environmental impacts of china s wto accession abstract china s accession to the wto in 2001 completed the country s entry into the global economy we investigate environmental implications of wto accession there are several hypotheses in this area the scale hypothesis says that production is scaled up and in turn pollution increases the technique hypothesis says that production methods become cleaner and pollution decreases the composition hypothesis says that composition of industries changes and pollution reflects the new composition we analyse the relative strength of the hypotheses by means of an environmental cge model and in the case of air pollution find support for a composition effect in favour of clean industries thanks to the composition effect emissions to air of greenhouse gases fall emissions of particles and so2 also fall but emissions of nox and voc rise since particle and so2 emissions fall we estimate that public health improves

on the evolution of prize perceptions in contests abstract we apply an indirect evolutionary approach to players perceived prize valuations in contests evolution in finite populations leads to preferences that overstate the prize s material value and induce overexpenditure we establish an equivalence between evolutionarily stable strategies and the behavior induced by evolutionarily stable preferences

litigation and settlement under the english and american rules theory and evidence in contrast to the american rule whereby each party bears its own costs the english rule requires losers at trial to pay the winner s legal fees up to a reasonable limit we develop six hypotheses regarding how these two cost allocation rules might affect settlements and litigated outcomes through changes in i the selection of cases reaching the settle versus litigate stage and ii behavior thereafter using data from florida which applied the english rule to medical malpractice claims during the period 1980 85 we examine the rules effects on the probability of plaintiffs winning at trial jury awards and out of court settlements the english rule increased plaintiff success rates at trial average jury awards and out of court settlements our interpretation of these findings emphasizes that the overall quality of the claims reaching the settle versus litigate stage must improve to generate the combination of effects observed

modelling the take up of means tested benefits the case of housing benefits in the united kingdom official estimates of housing benefit take up rates suggest that up to two million families in the united kingdom ma y not be receiving the help with their housing costs to which they ar e entitled the authors interest in the take up of means tested bene fits is therefore motivated by two concerns the first is the governm ent revenue implications of a change to benefit entitlement levels t he second relates to the welfare of individuals who fail to claim the ir entitlement to benefit in this paper the authors investigate the relationship between the take up of means tested housing benefit in dividual socioeconomic characteristics and the level of entitlement copyright 1987 by royal economic society

clicking on heaven s door the effect of immigrant legalization on crime we estimate the eect of legalization on the crime rate of immigrants by exploiting the italian policy framework as an ideal regression discontinuity design xed quotas of residence permits are available each year applications must be submitted electronically on specic click days and they are processed on a rst come rst served basis until the available quotas are exhausted by matching data on applicants including the timing of applications in milliseconds with restricted use criminal records for the year before and after click days we show that obtaining legal status reduces the probability of being reported for having committed a serious crime by 0 6 percentage points on average on a baseline crime rate of 1 percent this eect is driven by applicants that are allegedly employed by other immigrants as domestic workers but are most likely unemployed who exhibit the highest crime rate in the year before click days as well as the greatest reduction in crime after obtaining legal status by contrast applicants sponsored by rms exhibit a very low crime rate both before and after click days we conclude that undocumented immigrants confronting worse labor market opportunities are at a higher risk of committing crimes while they are also more responsive to legalization

litigation and settlement under two sided incomplete information this paper deals with a simple game of litigation and settlement with incomplete information parties are assumed to have the choice between settling their dispute out of court or resorting to costly litigation the set of sequential equilibria is characterized and conditions are given under which an efficient equilibrium does exist efficient equilibria however will be ruled out by various tests of refinement a comparative statics analysis is carried out with respect to the quality of private information which parties are assumed to receive before any moves have to be made

trade and financial reform in china impacts on the world economy despite the setbacks from the recent asian currency crisis the ascendancy of asia as an economic centre of world economic activity is likely to continue into the 21st century a key issue that will shape the role of asia and indeed the shape of the world economy in the 21st century is the economic development of china to date china has successfully weathered the currency storm in asia and continues on a program of economic reform if anything the problems of japan and korea provide powerful lessons for other countries undergoing rapid economic growth and structural change these lessons include the importance of a well developed financial sector with lending and investment decisions based on market signals rather than government directives whether china can further integrate smoothly into global markets and sustain the fast growth of the last few decades will be a crucial development in the world economy in this paper we explore the impacts of continued chinese economic reform with a focus on the role of international financial flows both in the adjustment within china as well as in the transmission of chinese reforms to the rest of the world this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a generalized tullock contest we construct a generalized tullock contest under complete information where contingent upon winning or losing the payoff of a player is a linear function of prizes own effort and the effort of the rival this structure nests a number of existing contests in the literature and can be used to analyze new types of contests we characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium and show that small parameter modifications may lead to substantially different types of contests and hence different equilibrium effort levels

do exporters gain from vers previous literature has concentrated on the rent transfer accruing to exporting countries when a voluntary export restraint ver is binding this paper studies the efficiency and distributional effects arising when vers force factors out of industries in which they are most productive a theoretical model of the industry under the ver is developed to establish qualitative conditions under which a ver will result in spillovers of exports to unrestricted markets industry contraction and loss in national welfare key parameters of demand and supply are estimated for leather footwear exports from taiwan subject to the u s orderly marketing agreement and their implications explored in a calibrated simulation exercise the results make a strong indictment of vers for most plausible parameter values vers distort exports reduce industry size and cause overall economic losses especially if the affected industry is large

the socioeconomic consequences of in work benefit reform for british lone mothers in october 1999 the british government enacted the working families tax credit which aimed at encouraging work among low income families with children this paper uses panel data collected between 1991 and 2001 to evaluate the effect of this reform on single mothers we find that the reform led to a substantial increase in their employment rate of about five percentage points which was driven by both a higher rate at which lone mothers remained in the labor force and a higher rate at which they entered it women s responses were highly heterogeneous with effects double this size for mothers with one preschool aged child and virtually no effect for mothers with multiple older children the employment increase was accompanied by significant increases in paid childcare utilization and our analysis in fact suggests that the generous childcare credit component of the reform played a key role in explaining the estimated employment and childcare usage responses we also find that the increase in labor market participation was accompanied by reductions in single mothers subsequent fertility and in the rate at which they married behavioral responses which in turn are likely to influence the reform s overall impact on child poverty and welfare

primary commodity prices manufactured goods prices and the terms of trade of developing countries what the long run shows the authors revisit in this article the empirical foundation of the alleged secular decline in the prices of primary commodities relative to those of manufactures they use a newly constructed index of commodity prices and two modified indexes of manufactured good prices and find that from 1900 to 1986 the relative prices of all primary commodities fell on trend by 0 5 percent a year and those of nonfuel primary commodities by 0 6 percent a year they thus confirm the sign but not the magnitude of the trend implicit in the work of prebisch but even the more limited secular decline shown by their relative price indexes may be magnified by an incomplete account of quality improvements in manufactures they then show that the evolution of terms of trade of nonfuel primary commodities is not the same as that of the net barter terms of trade of non oil exporting developing countries finally they find that despite the decline that has probably occurred during the current century in the terms of trade of nonfuel primary commodities the purchasing power of total exports of these products has increased considerably similarly the fall that may have occurred after world war ii in the net barter terms of trade of developing countries seems to have been more than compensated for by the steady improvement in their income terms of trade

migration the life cycle and state benefits how low is the bottom i show that among women likely to use welfare movers move to higher benefit states i also find that the probability likely welfare users will move at all is lower in higher benefit states this effect is concentrated early in the life cycle as theory predicts i construct a theoretical framework to measure the impact of welfare migration on optimal state benefits simulation results suggest little impact in higher benefit states but possibly a more substantial impact in other states finally evidence suggests little reason for concern due to welfare migration in using cross state variation in welfare generosity to identify incentive effects of the welfare system on other outcome variables

housing subsidies and work incentives in great britain in great britain the move away from rented accommodation to owner occupation is leaving behind a large group of households with low incomes wages and hours of work and high housing costs who are increasingly in receipt of welfare transfers the disparity along all of these dimensions between renters and owner occupiers has continued to grow since the 1970 s the relationship between housing costs wages and transfer programmes is complex and yet plays an important part in determining the incentive to work for individuals in low income or high housing cost households while it is true that many individuals who are in these categories are out of the labour force retired sick and disabled there are many who are not and whose incentive to seek work or to work harder if already in work could be modified by directly changing the rent levels they face or indirectly via changes to the structure of programmes designed to subsidise housing for the poor here we estimate a static discrete choice labour supply model which allows for housing benefit programme participation we use samples of 42491 married women and 13340 unmarried women drawn from great britain family resources surveys 1994 5 97 8 we find that women are quite responsive to labour supply incentives housing benefit income has similar incentive effects to earned income which suggests any stigma is small our analysis is complemented by simulating housing benefit and direct rent subsidy reforms

immigration to the land of redistribution negative perceptions about migrants in europe are driven by concerns that foreigners abuse welfare paradoxically instruments of social inclusion are becoming weapons of mass exclusion we compare evidence on welfare access and the net fiscal position of migrants with perceptions based on a largely unexploited database eu silc we find no evidence that legal migrants notably skilled migrants are net recipients of transfers from the state however there is evidence of residual dependency on non contributory transfers and self selection of unskilled migrants in the countries with the most generous welfare states alternative strategies to unbundle migration from welfare access are discussed

comparative analysis of litigation systems an auction theoretic approach a simple auction theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown to the court the court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case rational litigants influence the quality of their cases by hiring skilful attorneys this framework permits us to compare the equilibrium legal expenditures that arise under a continuum of legal systems the british rule continental rule american rule and some recently proposed legal reforms are special cases of our model

female labour supply human capital and welfare reform we estimate a dynamic model of employment human capital accumulation including education and savings for women in the united kingdom exploiting tax and benefit reforms and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy we find substantial elasticities for labor supply and particularly for lone mothers returns to experience which are important in determining the longer term effects of policy increase with education but experience mainly accumulates when in full time employment tax credits are welfare improving in the u k increase lone mother labor supply and marginally reduce educational attainment but the employment effects do not extend beyond the period of eligibility marginal increases in tax credits improve welfare more than equally costly increases in income support or tax cuts

does trade liberalization harm the environment a new test recent events such as the nafta and the completion of the uruguay round have raised concern over the impact of trade liberalization on the environment in particular it is believed that less stringent environmental standards in developing countries will give them a comparative advantage in pollutionintensive goods using single equation models existing empirical studies have found either no relationship between environment and trade flows or a positive relationship between trade liberalization and the environment this paper develops a simultaneous equations model to estimate this relationship directly incorporating the effects of openness on growth of income and of income growth on environmental damage a two good trade model with endogenous factor supply is estimated using pooled provincial data on chinese water pollution from 1987 1995 estimation of this model reveals that trade liberalization directly aggravates environmental damage via its influence on the terms of trade but indirectly mitigates it via its effect on income growth simulations suggest that trade reform during the period may have had a net beneficial impact on emissions growth

sulfur dioxide control in china policy evolution during the 10th and 11th five year plans and lessons for the future china s central government established national goals to reduce sulfur dioxide so2 emissions by 10 in both the 10th and 11th five year plan periods 2001 2005 and 2006 2010 respectively but the early policies were unsuccessful at reducing emissions emissions increased 28 during the 10th five year plan after adapting a number of policies and introducing new instruments during the 11th five year plan so2 emissions declined by 14 we examine the evolution of these policies their interplay with technical and institutional factors and capture lessons from the 11th five year plan to guide future pollution control programs we find that several factors contributed to achievement of the 11th five year plan so2 reduction goal 1 instrument choice 2 political accountability 3 emission verification 4 political support 5 streamlined targets and 6 political and financial incentives the approach integrated multiple policy instruments market based command and control and administrative instruments specific to the chinese context the evolution of so2 reduction policies and programs has implications for further so2 reductions from power plants and other sources as well as control of other atmospheric pollutants such as nitrogen oxides nox and carbon dioxide co2 in china

restricted coasean bargaining we investigate the efficiency of coasean bargaining when restrictions are placed on the set of feasible bargaining outcomes when property rights are costly to defend appropriate we find bargaining restrictions may be pareto superior to unconstrainedvoluntary exchange under cost uncertainty over the harmful activity we show an efficient configuration of restrictions must balance the potential reduction in appropriation costs with the possibility of allocatively inefficient bargaining restrictions for an all pay auction we find conditions where precluding bargaining is always ex ante preferable to unrestricted bargaining for cases where the restrictions are contested we show conditions for the continuing existence of welfare improvements

population pessimism and economic optimism in the asian giants the timing of china s and india s demographic transitions and the implications of alternative fertility scenarios are explored here using a global economic model incorporating full demographic behaviour and measures of dependency that accurately reflect the changing proportion of workers rather than working aged in the total population the baseline scenario confirms that demographic change in india may yield significant gains to future real per capita income resulting from a continuing sharp decline in its total dependency ratio for china these gains are largely in the past although the positive contribution of declining youth and working aged dependency to future per capita income will continue to offset the negative impact of rising aged dependency through to 2030 whilst a policy change to foster higher fertility rates and hence more rapid population growth in china might ultimately ease its dependency burden in the short run it will increase it in any case such a course is contradictory to the goal of delivering improvements in real per capita income for india we confirm that the benefits of further fertility reductions in the form of increased real per capita income are substantial

immigrants and welfare programmes exploring the interactions between immigrant characteristics immigrant welfare dependence and welfare policy the primary purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the papers within the economics literature that have examined the questions of immigrant welfare use and the responsiveness of immigrants to the incentives created by welfare systems while our focus is largely on papers looking at the european case we also draw on studies from the united states in particular on issues where the european literature is thin one set of papers asks whether immigrants who are more likely to use welfare are attracted to more generous welfare states the results from these papers are not clear cut another set of papers asks if immigrants use welfare more intensively than natives and if they assimilate out of or into welfare participation in most cases the unadjusted data show higher use of welfare by immigrants although for some countries for example germany this can be explained by differences in immigrants characteristics yet another set of papers finds that the rate of welfare use by existing migrants can influence the welfare use of newly arrived co nationals we illustrate some of these issues by looking at immigrant welfare use in ireland and the uk immigrants in the uk appear to use welfare more intensively than natives but the opposite appears to be the case in ireland

accounting the effects of wto accession on trade embodied emissions evidence from china abstract the indicators of the emissions embodied in exports the balance of emissions embodied in trade and the net emissions contributed by trade are used to measure the trade embodied environmental impacts from various angles a counterfactual scenario of without wto accession is formed as the comparative baseline with the support of a dynamic computable general equilibrium model then the difference between factual and counterfactual scenarios is worked out to reflect the impact of china s wto accession on emissions embodied in trade according to the present study wto accession produced a measureable increment of the emissions embodied in exports through exports expansion which slightly intensified environmental stress in china if considering the difference in emissions embodied in exports and imports then the difference of the balance of emissions embodied in trade between factual and counterfactual scenarios indicate that china has suffered more local emissions than its trade partners after its wto accession if considering the offset effect of imports embodied emissions to domestic emissions then the difference of the net emissions contributed by trade between factual and counterfactual scenarios indicate that wto accession had a trivial effect on aggregating trade embodied emissions the study results suggest that china should continue pushing for trade liberalization and at the same time reduce the adverse effects on the environment by reducing its total emissions intensity of domestic production and optimizing trade structure

do population control policies induce more human capital investment twins birthweight and china s one child policy in this paper we address the issues of whether reductions in fertility increase human capital investments per child and whether twinning can identify the quantity quality q q trade off we show that estimates of the effects of twinning at higher parities on the outcomes of older children in prior studies do not identify family size effects but are confounded by inter child allocation effects because of the endowment deficit and close spacing of twins however examining the effects of twinning by birth order net of the effects stemming from the endowment deficit of twins can provide upper and lower bounds on the trade off between the family size and average child quality our estimates based on data from china indicate that an extra child at parity one or at parity two net of one component of birth endowment effects associated with birth weight significantly decreases the schooling progress the expected college enrolment grades in school and the assessed health of all children in the family despite the evident significant trade off between number of children and child quality in china the findings suggest that the contribution of the one child policy in china to the development of its human capital was modest copyright wiley blackwell

endogenous timing in general rent seeking and conflict models we examine simultaneous versus sequential choice of effort in a two player contest the timing of moves determined in a preplay stage prior to the contest subgame as well as the value of the prize is allowed to be endogenous contrary to endogenous timing models with an exogenously fixed prize the present paper finds the following 1 players may decide to choose their effort simultaneously in the subgame perfect equilibrium spe of the extended game 2 the spe does not need to be unique in particular there is no unique spe with sequential moves if the direct costs of effort are zero 3 symmetry among players does not rule out incentives for precommitment to effort locally away from the cournot nash level 4 finally there may be no correlation between win probability and strategic incentives in our framework a finding most central in the analysis of fixed prize contests

immigration and welfare magnets this article investigates if the location choices made by immigrants when they arrive in the united states are influenced by the interstate dispersion in welfare benefits income maximizing behavior implies that foreign born welfare recipients unlike their native born counterparts may be clustered in the states that offer the highest benefits the empirical analysis indicates that immigrant welfare recipients are indeed more heavily clustered in high benefit states than the immigrants who do not receive welfare or than natives as a result the welfare participation rate of immigrants is much more sensitive to changes in welfare benefits than that of natives

welfare reform and the race to the bottom theory and evidence economists have argued that welfare migration leads to a race to the bottom in the choice of welfare benefits although a system of federal matching grants can remedy this problem the recent welfare reform law replaced the existing matching grant structure with block grants a policy change that appears undesirable to judge whether this critique of welfare reform is justified this paper evaluates the evidence in favor of a race to the bottom after explaining the theoretical effects of welfare migration the paper surveys the empirical evidence on the occurrence of such migration concluding that the evidence is mixed the discussion also considers recent empirical tests for strategic interaction which show that benefit levels in nearby states affect a given state s benefit choice the most plausible source of such interaction is a concern about welfare migration which leads policymakers to look at benefits in neighboring states when making their own choices judging that the evidence appears consistent with the existence of a race to the bottom the paper concludes that the demise of matching grants may be undesirable from a policy perspective

the effects of in work benefit reform in britain on couples theory and evidence this paper examines the effects of the working families tax credit wftc on couples in britain we develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system its main implications are then tested using panel data from the british household panel survey collected between 1991 and 2002 overall the financial incentives of the reform had negligible effects on a wide range of married mothers decisions such as eligible working at least 16 hours per week and full time employment working at least 30 hours per week employment transitions childcare use and divorce rates women s responses however were highly heterogeneous depending on their partners labour supply and earnings mothers married to low income men showed larger responses in employment especially if they had younger children they were more likely to remain in the labour force and had higher rates at which they entered it while more likely to receive the tax credit they also experienced a greater risk of divorce we find virtually no effect for women with higher income husbands likewise there are no statistically significant responses among married men