approximating wtp and wta for environmental goods from marginal willingness to pay functions abstract willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta for a change in the quantity of an environmental good can be represented by corresponding hicksian welfare measures the paper suggests a simple method of approximating wtp and wta given the information about the marginal willingness to pay mwtp for it it demonstrates that a polynomial based on the mwtp function allows to approximate the hicksian measures which may differ considerably much better than consumer s surplus in quantity space

finance inflation and employment a post keynesian kaleckian analysis the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the post keynesian kaleckian macroeconomic literature we develop a macroeconomic model that explicitly integrates the role of borrowing and cash payment commitments on outstanding debt interest plus principal repayment into the consumption and investment expenditures as well as into the inflation generating process we explore the way that finance influences the distribution effects of inflation in the demand side of a money credit using economy we suggest a new phillips curve that encapsulates the impact of financial commitments on wage and profit claims we argue that high debt and cash payment commitments are likely to be associated with a positive demand side effect of inflation on the rate of employment and that they might be conducive to a negative supply side effect of employment on the inflation rate the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved

a review of wta wtp studies abstract willingness to accept wta is usually substantially higher than willingness to pay wtp these constructs have been studied for roughly 30 years and with a wide variety of goods this paper reviews those studies we find that the less the good is like an ordinary market good the higher is the ratio the ratio is highest for non market goods next highest for ordinary private goods and lowest for experiments involving forms of money a generalization of this pattern holds even when we account for differences in survey design ordinary goods have lower ratios than non ordinary ones we also find that ratios in real experiments are not significantly different from hypothetical experiments and that incentive compatible elicitation yields higher ratios

efficient methods of measuring welfare change and compensated income in terms of ordinary demand functions a utility maximizing consumer with a completely known system of ordinary demand functions q h p c is considered let p qo and p q be two arbitrary equilibrium situations the problem is to evaluate in which of the situations the utility is higher without knowing the utility function revealed preference theory tells that the ordinary demand functions which are in principle observable contain enough information to solve the problem remaining difficulties are therefore mainly computational we present how the compensated income c i c p qo and the compensated demand h p cl1 are calculated with arbitrary accuracy using only the ordinary demand system our two efficient algorithms also have interesting interpretations in terms of index numbers and consumer surplus measures

theoretical approaches to monetary disinflation abstract during the 1980s many countries adopted tight monetary policies to reduce high inflation rates which were the legacy of the 1970s as inflation threatens to rise at the beginning of this decade this paper provides a survey of the 1980s literature which sought to provide theoretical understandings of how monetary disinflation is achieved four models are presented monetarist neo keynesian new classical and post keynesian each model s explanation of the recession which accompanies the monetary disinflation is outlined as well as possible policy measures to reduce the extent of the recession and to hasten the return to full employment

wage norms capital accumulation and unemployment a post keynesian view the paper presents a post keynesian view of unemployment it argues first that the effective labour demand need not be downward sloping with respect to real wages and aggregate demand need not be downward sloping with respect to inflation second that there is a broad case for unemployment hysteresis understood as endogeneity of the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu based on social norms in wage bargaining and on the supply side effects of capital accumulation and third that much as keynes argued capital investment rather than labour market institutions is the key variable to explain changes in aggregate unemployment performance across countries and over time overall the paper advocates a keynesian view of the nairu where effective demand determines unemployment in the short run and the deviation of actual unemployment from the nairu determines the change in inflation in the medium term the nairu is endogenous and follows actual unemployment copyright 2011 oxford university press

a critical reconsideration of the foundations of monetary policy in the new consensus macroeconomics framework monetary policy has become firmly based on the use of interest rate as the key policy instrument and in a one instrument one target framework the approach to monetary policy is closely associated with the new consensus in macroeconomics ncm this paper undertakes a critical appraisal of the role of monetary policy in the context of the ncm after setting out the main features of the ncm there is critical discussion of the role of monetary policy and the ncm framework the discussion covers the nature of the loss function the role of the natural rate of interest and the phillips curve this is followed by a critical evaluation of the is curve in the ncm and the classical dichotomy the paper finishes by asking whether interest rates do have the effects claimed for them

a note on the linsanity of measuring the relative efficiency of national basketball association guards this note examines the productive efficiency of 62 starting guards during the 2011 12 national basketball association nba season this period coincides with the phenomenal and largely unanticipated performance of new york knicks starting point guard jeremy lin and the attendant public and media hype known as linsanity we employ a data envelopment analysis dea approach that includes allowance for an undesirable output here turnovers per game with the desirable outputs of points rebounds assists steals and blocks per game and an input of minutes per game the results indicate that depending upon the specification between 29 and 42 of nba guards are fully efficient including jeremy lin with a mean inefficiency of 3 7 and 19 2 however while jeremy lin is technically efficient he seldom serves as a benchmark for inefficient players at least when compared with established players such as chris paul and dwayne wade this suggests the uniqueness of jeremy lin s productive solution and may ex

inflation and economic growth in an open developing country the case of brazil this articles studies the relationship between inflation and gdp growth after trade and financial liberalisation in brazil the aim is to provide an explanation for the inverse relationship between economic growth and inflation verified in this economy in the considered period tradeable and non tradeable inflation experiences are studied separately for this purpose the article suggests a model for the relationship between inflation and economic growth under the cost based price approach the model is estimated for the case of brazil confirming the relationships postulated in the article

demand for football and intramatch winning probability an essay on the glorious uncertainty of sports the aims of this study are i to identify the main determinants of the demand for french premiere division football matches using all matches played during the 1997 1998 season ii to estimate a team specific probability of success and iii to propose an updating process for the intramatch winning probability the methodology is tested empirically over an out of sample data set using matches of the 1998 1999 season the results show that football appears to be an inferior product affected by both socio economic and football variables and that the main football variables have only a tenuous explanatory power concerning the final outcome of a given match

agriculture in recent development theory abstract this paper is a critical review of recent contributions to the literature on agriculture in development theory it considers and compares the main lines of advance made within neoclassical neo marxian and structuralist approaches recent neo marxian and structuralist studies of agrarian development reveal that traditional agriculture is neither stationary nor efficient that resource allocation cannot be separated from wealth distribution or production organization that forms of surplus appropriation do not necessarily follow the dictates of efficiency that the social relations of production may inhibit accumulation and determine the forms of technological change that the state s role in primitive accumulation is more economic than explicitly coercive political and that political and macroeconomic constraints preclude a simple get the prices right view of the intersectoral terms of trade the thrust of these developments is to challenge both neoclassical and some orthodox marxian formulations of agrarian development issues and add to the insights to be gleaned from a political economy of development

international competition income distribution and economic growth this paper shows that the neo keynesian case for wage led growth does not generally hold in an open economy model wage increases cause a loss of competitiveness that reduces the trade balance if the economy is relatively open to trade and price elasticities satisfy certain restrictions the worsening of the trade balance more than outweighs the increase in workers consumption thus reducing the growth rate the main theoretical innovation is a flexible markup pricing rule that allows changes in unit labor costs and exchange rates to affect profit margins implications for international relations and class conflict are discussed copyright 1989 by oxford university press

further reflections on hidden unemployment an examination of the off flows from the claimant count in the north west of england one of the most significant set of papers to come out of the portfolio of regional studies association publications in recent years has concerned the exposure of the levels of hidden unemployment in many of the old industrial areas of britain see for instance labour market adjustment in areas of chronic industrial decline the case of the uk coalfields regional studies 30 7 1997 627 640 the authors of these papers christina beatty and stephen fothergill have generated a debate that has uncovered major implications for the way the regional problem is measured perceived and tackled although these are important in terms of regional economic development strategies and policies it remains to be seen how the failure to count the real levels of unemployment will impact on the review of regional policy assisted areas the designation of european structural fund areas and the successful introduction of such initiatives as the new deal and welfare to work underpinning and deepening the rigour of t

managerial quality team success and individual player performance in major league baseball this paper uses 1969 87 major league baseball data to investigate the impact of managerial quality on team winning and individual player performance managerial quality and player performance are measured as predicted pay based on salary regressions these market based measures permit conclusions about costs and benefits of managerial quality there are two major findings first when player inputs are controlled for higher quality managers lead to higher winning percentages second players tend to play better relative to their prior performance levels the higher the manager s quality these findings suggest that as emphasized by the human resource management literature the quality of management makes an important difference in the performance of organizations

north south growth and the terms of trade a model on kaldorian lines this paper examines equilibrium growth and stability in the world economy using a north south model in which there is assumed to be surplus labor in both the north and south at an exogenously determined level of real wages the model allows for substitution in consumption between primary commodities and industrial goods in the north and treats the cases of both surplus and scarce land in the south in the case of an exogenous shock to the model the north south terms of trade may overshoot its equilibrium value and or converge to this value along a cyclical path there is no guarantee that the adjustment path is stable

measuring managerial efficiency the case of baseball in economic analysis the role of the entrepreneur is paramount to the production process the entrepreneur is engaged in a darwinian game of efficiently transforming scarce resource inputs into outputs in the modern business organization this role is delegated to managers despite the conceptual importance of the role of management in the production function very little is known about the actual effect on output of variations in managerial skill in part this is due to the lack of proprietory data in part it is due to difficulties in measuring the outputs and inputs of complex production processes in a meaningful way a number of investigators have employed the concept of the frontier production function as developed by forsund and hjalmarsson 1 and timmer 6 and more recently by schmidt and lovell 3 to measure the effect on technical and price efficiency of various property rights structures or institutional constraints to our knowledge estimates of managerial efficiency have not been obtained with firm specific data except for some regulated industries in this study we estimate managerial efficiency by manager and by firm managerial marginal revenue product the rate of change in managerial efficiency over years of experience and relative factor price efficiency we use major league baseball teams over the period 1961 1980 as our data source what is particularly appealing about the choice of major league baseball teams as the industry for analysis is that outputs win percent and inputs player skills are unambiguously measured and the production function is simply specified as shown by scully 5 our results indicate that managerial skill in baseball contributes very substantially to the production process the paper will evolve as follows first the concept of the frontier production function is briefly outlined then estimates of managerial efficiency by manager and by team are provided and discussed a managerial efficiency learning curve is estimated an estimate of managerial marginal revenue product provided and the managerial efficiency

measuring welfare changes in settings with imposed quantities abstract an intuitively attractive money metric utility measure is developed which is applicable in settings where individuals receive fixed quantities of one or more goods one use of this measure is in cost benefit analyses of imposed quantity changes the approximate measures typically used are shown to be subject to relatively large approximation errors however techniques are presented which can always be used to numerically evaluate the exact welfare measure provided that one knows the uncompensated demand function s or marginal willingness to pay function s of individuals

the impact of monetary policy on unemployment hysteresis this article investigates the hypothesis that the extent to which hysteresis occurs in the aftermath of recessions depends on monetary policy reactions the degree of hysteresis is explained econometrically by the extent of monetary easing during a recession and by standard variables for labour market institutions in a pooled cross country analysis using quarterly data the sample includes 40 recessions in 19 organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries for which the required data is available the time period lasts for the period from 1980 to 2007 this article builds on ball 1999 and extends the sample of countries the time period under investigation and the set of control variables

unemployment wage bargaining and capital labour substitution many economists believe that capital accumulation technical progress and labour force expansion have no lasting effect on unemployment this view rests on the empirically doubtful assumption that the elasticity of substitution between labour and capital is equal to unity i e production is cobb douglas using a simple model based on the work of layard nickell and jackman this paper demonstrates that with a lower elasticity of substitution the equilibrium unemployment rate is affected by all of the above factors it considers briefly how capital accumulation may be endogenised and what long run implications this has for unemployment copyright 1999 by oxford university press

evaluation of nonmarket goods recovering unconditional preferences a new approach is proposed for the evaluation of nonmarket goods starting from a complete or incomplete conditional demand system for market goods which is observable and depends on nonmarket goods this information is not sufficient to recover the underlying preference ordering of the representative consumer the central idea is to employ additional marginal willingness to pay functions for the nonmarket goods since they can be estimated either together with the demand system or in a separate step they are less arbitrary than the assumptions or hypotheses usually made if the entire system is weakly integrable the underlying ordering and appropriate welfare measures can be derived in this article i investigate the relationship between conditional and unconditional demand systems present sufficient conditions for weak integrability and demonstrate the practicability of the procedure proposed by means of three examples

revealed preference and household production abstract the paper deals with the possibilities of recovering the underlying preference ordering from observed behavior when nonmarket goods are employed in household production the problem is relevant for the evaluation of environmental goods and for the measurement of welfare in environmental policy it is shown that preferences can be recovered if and only if a corresponding mixed demand system can be integrated this system can be derived from observable behavior and the household production functions imposed the conditions for its integrability are presented and can be checked therefore the approach suggested is operational and allows to decide whether the behavior observed and the household production functions chosen as maintained hypothesis are consistent this result is important since the evaluation of nonmarket goods in this framework crucially depends on the choice of the household production functions

growth distribution and inflation a centennial synthesis microeconomics at harvard a little more than a decade ago having become disenchanted with neoclassical economics i suggested to my students that the very neoclassical course i had just taught provided one way of characterising the workings of a capitalist economy but hardly the only way after a year of utility maximisation partial and general equili brium pareto optimality and the associated agonies of lagrangians hessians jacobians and fixed point theorems my students were able to contain their enthusiasm for this news they had expected not one way of looking at the world but at the very least a magical key to knowledge and wisdom it is probably accurate to say that my message was not received at all i shall always remember the incomprehension etched on their faces the next year the last i was to teach theory in that incarnation i decided to present at least a sketch of an alternative to the neoclassical orthodoxy i soon discovered there were at least two foundations on which to build one going back to marx who died one hundred years ago the other deriving from keynes whose birth centenary we celebrate this year these two approaches it was clear were as different from each other as from the neoclassical approach the analysis of neo keynesian neo marxian and neoclassical theories has been a major focus of my research ever since and provides the framework for these lectures 1

monetary policy in the uk the authors argue that the institutional dimension of the bank of england monetary policy and the role the uk hm treasury assumes in this framework are both firmly based on the new consensus in macroeconomics ncm this is also the theoretical framework upon which the inflation targeting element of monetary policy is firmly based this paper discusses these aspects of uk monetary policy and then assesses the policy that has been pursued since 1997 with some reference made to the period between 1992 and 1997 when a version of the framework was introduced the strategy has been successful in terms of keeping uk inflation rates within the targets set by hm treasury however a number of problematic issues are highlighted and discussed

inflation deflation expectations and economic stability in a kaleckian system abstract in this paper we analyze the impact of inflation deflation expectations and the effect of the monetary authority s inflation targeting policy in a kaleckian system on the basis of macro foundation approaches for this purpose we build a dynamical system composed of four variables the rate of utilization the wage share the nominal rate of interest and the expected rate of inflation and examine the properties especially stability of this dynamical system we then find that the existence of adaptive inflation deflation expectations always destabilizes our kaleckian system irrespective of the revision speed of expectations while that the monetary authority s intensive inflation targeting policy can make the system stable but the effect of this policy depends heavily upon the public credibility of it we also perform numerical simulations to check that our analysis is valid

capital subsidies versus labor subsidies a trade off between capital and employment this paper investigates regime switching in the response of u s output to a monetary policy action we find substantial statistically significant time variation in this response that corresponds to high response and low response regimes we then investigate whether the timing of the regime shifts are consistent with three particular manifestations of asymmetry by modeling the transition probabilities governing the switching process as functions of state variables we find strong evidence that policy actions taken during recessions have larger effects than those taken during expansions we find less evidence of asymmetry related to the direction or size of the policy action

aggregate demand conflict and capacity in the inflationary process this paper focuses on an alternative perspective on inflation to that of the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu it indicates that there are no automatic forces leading to a level of aggregate demand consistent with constant inflation inflationary pressures arise from conflict over income shares and from cost elements with the price of raw materials especially oil being the most important there are supply side factors impinging on the inflationary process which arise from the level of productive capacity relative to aggregate demand the supply side constraints are viewed as arising from capacity constraints rather than from the operation of the labour market copyright 2005 oxford university press

the kaleckian model of growth and distribution and its neo ricardian and neo marxian critiques this paper analyzes the newer kaleckian models of growth and distribution and the criticisms that have been addressed to them by neo marxian and neo ricardian authors the models discussed assume overhead labor costs and target return pricing the main issues are the form of the investment function and the notions of normal rates of profit and of normal rates of capacity utilization despite the relevance of and often the similarity between the neo marxian and neo ricardian critiques it is shown that the main features of the kaleckian growth model may still be preserved c 1995 academic press limited copyright 1995 by oxford university press

the wage price spiral this paper rehabilitates the old wage price spiral it shows that after an increase in aggregate demand the process of adjustment of nominal prices and nominal wages results from attempts by workers to maintain or increase their real wage and by firms to maintain or increase their markups of prices over wages under continuous price and wage setting the process of adjustment would be instantaneous under staggering of price and wage decisions the adjustment takes time the more inflexible real wages and markups are to shifts in demand the higher is the degree of price level inertia and the longer lasting are the effects of aggregate demand on output

the long run determinants of north south terms of trade and some recent empirical evidence abstract this paper reviews some recent evidence of the long run decline in the terms of trade of primary commodities versus manufactures in the context of north south trade this evidence is evaluated in the light of competing explanations of the sources of the observed long run trends in the context of a model of north south trade which includes a general resource labor and capital in the north and specific factors in a dual economy model of the south changes in factor supply sectoral and factoral bias in technical change biased demand conditions changes in the pattern of protection and institutional elements all play a role in determining the evolution of commodity and factor prices the lewis hypothesis of sectoral bias in the pattern of technical change towards temperate agriculture in the north and against tropical agriculture in the south is then reexamined in the light of the recent empirical evidence on terms of trade movements and some sketchy evidence presented on the patterns of bias in technical change in the north and the south the evidence is not consistent with an absolute technical change bias towards temperate agriculture in the north rather the rate of technical change in temperate agriculture is now comparable to that experienced in manufactures so that engel curve effects now assert the major downward pressure on the long run terms of trade between temperate agriculture commodities and manufactures overriding the effects of diminishing returns to natural resources as northern population expands the empirical evidence onbiased technical change in the south is much more sketchy and the evidence on various components of north south terms of trade is more varied

unemployment and the real exchange rate in latin america summary today unemployment rates in several latin american countries are similar or even higher than the highest unemployment rates among oecd economies open unemployment has become for the first time in the region s history a major dimension of the employment problem this paper examines the role of the real exchange rate rer in the recent unemployment performance of latin america it presents a model of the determinants of unemployment the channels through which the rer influences unemployment performance as well as the stylized facts and empirical results about this relationship giving special attention to the cases of argentina brazil chile and mexico 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

on measuring the value of a nonmarket good using market data we use line integral theory to lay out in a more general theoretical framework the conditions under which it is possible to measure with market data the welfare effects of a change in a nonmarket good we present in detail a numerical method of measuring the value of nonmarket goods using market data under either weak neutrality or weak complementarity our numerical method is more flexible than the existing analytical method because it can be used with any well behaved marshallian demand function and can be used even when the willig condition does not hold

shirking or stochastic productivity in major league baseball reply firms produce in an uncertain environment the long literature on the theory of the firm under uncertainty has focused on demand uncertainty 4 18 14 the unanimity question 8 15 or technological uncertainty 23 1 7 regarding the latter an interesting question is how that randomness enters the technology one source might be purely unpredictable factors such as the weather or accidents agricultural output for instance is dependent not only on the quantity of inputs hired but on the amount of rainfall natural disasters and the like a different source of technical uncertainty is variations in the quality and reliability of the input services hired in professional sports for example the performance of an athlete varies from game to game and season to season the reliability of capital a crucial issue in nuclear power generation is another example reflecting the stochastic nature of input productivity one economic consequence of this randomness of productivity is that an employer cannot know a priori the input s value but rather must form an estimate of its expected marginal contribution spence 20 showed how an employer uses signals such as educational attainment to determine if a worker is worth hiring once hired the firm still faces the difficulty of determining if a below average realization of productivity resulted from shirking by the employee or a bad draw from his productivity distribution this agency problem outlined in detail by alchain and demsetz 1 and holmstrom 10 has important implications to our perception of work effort especially in the presence of long term labor contracts allegations of shirking due to long term job security have been associated with seniority rights professional athletes and in the academic institution of tenure

a stagnationist model of economic growth in an economy subject to persistent excess capacity demand related factors will play a key role in determining patterns of secular change this thesis has a long history in econ omics sometimes in the underworld and occasionally at the height of fashion as recounted by rowthorn 1982 recent manifestations in the first world are the theories of monopoly capitalism of baran and sweezy 1966 and steindl 1952 who in turn follow kalecki 1971 hobson 1902 luxemburg 1951 and the marx of realisation crises and reproduction schemes in volume ii of capital other radicals such as boddy and crotty 1975 add a profit squeeze explanation of the cycle which underlays the dynamics of the growth model specified here in developing countries difficulties in both realisation and sectoral proportions are emphasised as obstacles to growth witness lustig s 1980 review of latin american structuralist theory and dutt s 1984 model which formalises an ongoing controversy in india about how income redistribution might affect prospects for industrialisation all these authors are stagnationist in assuming that both the growth rate and the level of capacity utilisation can be different under different conditions of income distribution and or macroeconomic policy their preferred policies will presumably lead to greater equality increase utilisation or step up growth they typically ask two analytical ques tions how does output respond in the short run to shifts in the income distribution how do output adjustments feed back into distributional dynamics especially under conditions when price and wage inflation rates may be influenced by employment levels productivity changes and conflicting income claims in what follows we set out a simple model to address these questions and explore the implications for macroeconomic policy of the answers that arise since the approach is not familiar to economists with a standard training a verbal description of the growth model is given first those who wish to jump directly into a formal presentation can proceed to section 1 output x is assumed to meet demand in an instantaneous short run we measure activity as the ratio of firms net cash inflow to the value of capital stock i e the rate of profit r during the short run the price level p is fixed by a mark up rule p 1 x wb where r is the mark up rate w the money wage and b the labor output ratio with this rule the share of profits or mark up income in the value of output is r l t let u stand for the output capital ratio or capacity utilization xik by simple identity

on the measurement of welfare for market and nonmarket goods a numerical approach extending vartia s 1983 framework the paper presents a simple numerical approach to the measurement of welfare for market and nonmarket goods on the basis of an incomplete mixed demand system the method allows the determination of exact welfare measures it provides a flexible and well founded alternative to ad hoc methods based on consumer surplus

willingness to pay and willingness to accept how much can they differ comment i agree with the point made by edoh y amiran and daniel a hagen 2003 that there can be a substantial or even infinite divergence between the wta and wtp for a public good even where there is a nonzero elasticity of substitution between market goods and the public good provided that the indifference curves are asymptotically bounded with respect to market goods in the manner they describe this is an important point they are also correct to point out that the elasticity of substitution is a local concept whereas their asymptotic boundedness condition applies also for discrete changes my 1991 paper used a local analysis because it was following the structure of the analysis in robert d willig 1976 and alan randall and john r stoll 1980 i wanted to show that while randall and stoll appeared to extend willig s local result on wta versus wtp from price changes to changes in the quantity of a public good the relevant elasticity was in fact different and involved the substitution elasticity as well as the income elasticity i view these points by amiran and hagen as not two separate results but essentially the same result their asymptotic boundedness condition generalizes my zero elasticity of substitution condition to discrete changes the asymptotic boundedness condition can be expressed as follows assuming a bivariate utility function u x q and given a reference point x q associated with a reference utility level u u x q there exists some q q such that for all q q there exists no x such that u x q u in other words no amount of x can substitute for the reduction in public good from q to q q in the case of a zero elasticity of substitution q q but as amiran and hagen show in their theorem 1 this is unnecessarily restrictive when dealing with a discrete reduction in q furthermore their theorem 2 can be viewed as a special case of their theorem 1 in which q 0 which makes q an essential commodity it is well known in consumer theory that the wta to avoid the loss of an essential market good is infinite their theorem 2 extends this result to the case of an essential nonmarket good but as their theorem 1 shows essentialness is not necessary for an infinite wta the boundedness condition is the key and this implies a fundamental lack of substitutability between money market goods and the public good

capital formation and unemployment this paper criticizes the current enthusiasm for labour market policies as the main route to employment creation in oecd countries such policies are normally seen as a means of encouraging more employment on existing capital stock this approach is one sided and downplays the equally important task of increasing productive capacity with more investment in productive capacity conventional labour market policies for increasing employment would be more effective and some might be unnecessary the paper analyses the role of capital stock within the framework of a simple nairu model based on previous work by the author it also presents some empirical evidence copyright 1995 by oxford university press

pay and performance in major league baseball the case of the first family of free agents it is well established that a baseball player s salary is based on his performance experience star status bargaining power mobility and his team s ability to pay this paper focuses on veteran players who are on the brink of retirement and on the

inflation unemployment and distributional conflict in argentina 1984 90 the cycle of various economic stabilisation efforts in argentina during the 1980s has often been characterised as reflecting either policy confusion on the part of officials or their unwillingness to depart from an obsolete model of economic development hence according to some the alternation between orthodox and heterodox policy approaches has revealed an absence of either economic policy wisdom or political conviction less attention has been paid to the underlying real class based conflict for income that has manifested itself in terms of high rates of inflation and at times hyperinflation interpreting the issue from this perspective allows us to appreciate the essential continuity of the process of neo liberal reform of the argentine political economy that commenced with the post peronist military coup in 1976 and has more recently culminated with the rise of the nominally peronist regime of carlos menem

consumer s surplus without apology the purpose of this paper is to settle the controversy surrounding consumer s surplus and by so doing to validate its use as a tool of welfare economics i will show that observed consumer s surplus can be rigorously utilized to estimate the unobservable compensating and equivalent variations the correct theoretical measures of the welfare impact of changes in prices and income on an individual i derive precise upper and lower bounds on the percentage errors of approximating the compensating and equivalent variations with consumer s surplus these bounds can be explicitly calculated from observable demand data and it is clear that in most applications the error of approximation will be very small in fact the error will often be overshadowed by the errors involved in estimating the demand curve the results in no way depend upon arguments about the constancy of the marginal utility of income consequently this paper supplies specific empirical criteria which can replace the apologetic caveats frequently employed by those who presently apply consumer s surplus moreover the results imply that consumer s surplus is usually a very good approximation to the appropriate welfare measures to preview below i establish the validity of these rules of thumb for a

bargaining power effective demand and technical progress a kaleckian model of growth following the kaleckian tradition this paper presents a demand led growth model in which the distribution of income is fully endogenised this is done by introducing claims on income by workers and firms the bargaining power of these two groups affects through distribution the patterns of accumulation and inflation in turn the bargaining power of workers is affected by the rate of change of employment the paper discusses the model s static and dynamic implications including the effects of exogenous and induced technical progress the model confirms all the typical kaleckian results including the fact that increases in real wages may lead to accelerating accumulation as well as inflation it also produces a new result it is possible that an increase in the rate of change of labour productivity may not lead to an increase in the rate of change of employment

spillovers complementarities and sorting in labor markets with an application to professional sports spillovers to productivity across workers may exist when workers produce in teams under certain conditions these spillovers may cause a worker s marginal product to differ across different firms empirical examination of professional basketball finds significant spillovers to offensive productivity but finds relatively little evidence for market sorting based on spillovers thus while teammate composition is important to a player s success there is no evidence for complementarity

post keynesianism socialisation of investment and swedish wage earner funds this paper analyses the performance of one of the most controversial of recent economic policy experiments namely swedish wage earner funds wefs it examines the ability of the wefs to meet macroeconomic financial and democratic objectives the analysis indicates a favourable financial performance but little significant democratisation macroeconomic influence was constrained by the limited size of the scheme and though associated with positive changes in economic variables the experiment was ultimately overwhelmed by the collapse of an asset price bubble nevertheless the performance of the wefs has legitimised the concept of collective investment funds as an economic policy instrument copyright 2006 oxford university press

impact of league restructuring on team sport attendances the case of rugby league an econometric analysis of attendances at rugby footbal league matches in england over the period 1966 1990 is presented the major finding is that the move from one to two leagues in 1973 had a substantial impact on attendances teams in the upper league experienced greater attendances ceteris paribuswhilst those in the lower league had reduced attendances

comparative evaluation of post keynesian interest rate rules income distribution and firms debts for macroeconomic performance this article investigates the macroeconomic effects of firms debts and income distribution on economic growth and inflation under three different post keynesian interest rate rules the kansas city rule the smithin rule and the pasinetti rule by setting up a dynamic post keynesian model after reviewing debates on the post keynesian interest rate policies this article evaluates the relative merits of the three rules in their relationship with economic growth regimes and inflation dynamics accordingly this article explicitly shows that i a policy rule works effectively under some economic growth and inflation patterns but not necessarily under other patterns ii a policy rule contributing to high economic growth may not always be compatible with stabilisation of economic growth and iii the macroeconomic effects of debt and income distribution on economic growth and inflation are closely related to the choice of interest rate rule

theories of monopoly capitalism abstract this article presents a survey of theories of monopoly capitalism the defining characteristic of monopoly capitalism is that developed capitalist economies are seen as essentially dominated by firms which operate in oligopolistic industries it discusses in chronological order the contributions of hilferding lenin kalecki steindl baran and sweezy and cowling to the monopoly capitalism approach by drawing out some common features of the authors discussed we arrive at an implicit view of the nature of theories of monopoly capitalism the macroeconomic aspects of monopoly capitalism are discussed with emphasis on the implications for the level of economic activity a further section discusses the international aspects of the monopoly capital approach the final section of the paper reviews criticisms of the theories of monopoly capitalism with concentration on those advanced from a marxist perspective

profits investment and causality an examination of alternative paradigms determinants of the level of profits and the share of these profits in national income in the short run have received only limited attention from economists most paradigms such as the neo classical neo keynesian and neo marxian theories have in general attempted to explain distributive shares in long run equilibrium disequilibrium or steady state growth frameworks further there is little discussion of the behavioral relationships of various economic agents who affect and are affected by changes in distributive shares kalecki 19 argued for determination of profits and wages by the expenditure behavior of capitalists and by the distribution factors such as the degree of monopoly in output and input markets particularly the labor market 2 capitalists expenditure together with the distribution factors determine workers consumption and consequently national output and employment the national output will be pushed to the point where profits carved out of it in accordance with the distribution factors are equal to the sum of capitalists consumption and investment 19 81 further kalecki argued at length that given the distribution factors in the short run it is their capitalists consumption and investment that determine profits and not vice versa 19 79 similar behavioral roles of different economic classes are emphasized in the works of keynes 20 kaldor 18 and pasinetti 25 keynesians neo keynesians also ascribe a leading role to investment however there are differences in detail between the popular keynesian paradigm and that of keynes s own work 10 23 neo classical theory on the other hand seems to reverse this direction of causation between investment and profits due to the absence of an independent investment function

information asymmetries in baseball s free agent market this study examines whether baseball s free agent market has been characterized by an asymmetric distribution of information among clubs it is argued that the clubs for which players have performed have more information with which to estimate the players future performance than do clubs that have not employed the player evidence is presented which shows that free agents spend more time on the disabled list than non free agents over time it appears that club owners have adjusted their expectations of free agent performance

capital accumulation and unemployment a tale of two continents in contrast to much recent work regarding the causes of european unemployment in this paper we emphasize the importance of capital accumulation but unlike the few previous studies which have examined the relationship between capital accumulation and unemployment we argue that what matters for the evolution of employment and the unemployment rate is not the absolute growth rate of a country s capital stock but its evolution relative to other countries capital stock the empirical validity of the above statement is demonstrated for almost all oecd countries using quarterly time series data for the period 1961 1995 more detailed evidence is also presented for germany japan and the united kingdom

macroeconomics without the lm curve an alternative view this paper develops a fully articulated post keynesian alternative to the new consensus macroeconomic model based on explicitly post keynesian hypotheses about the inflation process the income generating process and the appropriate conduct of monetary policy the paper demonstrates how the equilibrium configuration of this model can be manipulated by non monetary policy interventions including fiscal policy and incomes policy one perhaps surprising result that emerges from the analysis is that in the context of the proper policy environment inflation targeting can have a positive impact on real economic performance

coaching team production coaching team production the actual function of managers is the subject of much debate using data on more than 3000 male college basketball players their coaches and their skill levels we find a positive and significant relation between our ability to replicate an individual coach s allocation of playing time across players and his winning percentage although this result does not answer the central question of just what it is that managers contribute the results do support the property rights paradigm managers are the employees of workers and more generally sports data can be used to help understand related economic processes where quantifiable measures of inputs and outputs are more costly to obtain what is meant by performance input energy initiative work attitude perspiration rate of exhaustion or output sometimes by inspecting a team member s input activity we can better judge his output effect it is not always the case that watching input activity is the only or best means of detecting measuring or monitoring output effects of each team member but in some cases it is a useful way i introduction a major tenet of the alchian demsetz 1972 representation of the firm is that managers are hired by workers to prevent shirking and malfeasance in their own ranks absent overseers individual workers bear only a fraction of the cost of shirking and hence everyone undersupplies labor relative to its opportunity cost in this world the managerial function is to monitor inputs and meter rewards thereby reducing the incentive to shirk and raising each worker s marginal productivity the more dependence there is in the marginal products of laborers the more important the role of management this view of supervision is simultaneously intuitively pleasing and difficult to quantify this paper investigates the role of management in a setting where indisputably there is team production intercollegiate basketball 1 data on 3012 college basketball players across ten years and sixty five teams are used to replicate one aspect of coaching the allocation of playing time next we attempt to link coaching decisions to winning the goal is to determine if coaches who manage well by our standards are successful section ii motivates the paper in section iii the empirical methodology is detailed the monitoring function is estimated and related to coaching success section iv contains a summary and conclusion ii coaching decisions the essence of team production is interdependence and the inherent immeasurability of marginal productivity across workers however this does not mean that proxies for marginal productivity cannot be developed managers monitor worker inputs and deduce marginal products accordingly of course some inputs are more cheaply quantified than others attitude is hard to measure but heart rate is easy sweat is observed cheaply but workers can feign exhaustion in the famous chinese boatpullers fable the coxswain uses his whip to insure that coolies pull efficiently to persuade each worker to give the appropriate effort 2 mcmanus 1975 341 relates a story told by cheung boats are pulled upstream by a team of coolies prodded by an overseer with a whip an american lady horrified at the sight of the overseer whipping the men as they strained at their harness demanded that something be done about the brutality she was quickly informed those men own the rights to draw boats over this stretch of water and they have hired the overseer and given him his duties here the monitor uses his vision intuition and experience to determine shirking counseling the loafers with his whip but employing subjective observation is just one way to monitor

the tragedy of uk fiscal policy in the aftermath of the financial crisis the evolving response of the uk fiscal authorities to the financial crisis and recession are briefly outlined with a focus on the fiscal austerity programme introduced by the incoming coalition government during 2010 the reasoning for that programme is critically examined and largely dismissed it is argued that the drive for major cuts in public expenditure comes from seeking to achieve a balanced structural budget and reductions in estimated potential output the significance of the latter are discussed the paper is completed by a brief consideration of alternatives

some instability puzzles in kaleckian models of growth and distribution a critical survey we tackle the issue of the possible instability of the kaleckian distribution and growth model distinguishing between keynesian and harrodian instability we review various mechanisms that have been proposed by critics of the kaleckian model to tame harrodian instability while bringing back the rate of utilisation to its normal rate we find that the mechanisms that have been suggested are far from convincing therefore we conclude that it may be premature for the critics of the kaleckian model to dismiss the endogeneity of the rate of capacity utilisation in long run growth equilibrium copyright the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

production functions in the sports industry an empirical analysis of professional cricket production functions are estimated for english county cricket using samples of data for the county championship and the john player league in the seasons of 1981 83 results suggest possible lessons for the management and conduct of the game at the level of the individual club in particular the allocation of resources for developing playing skills the composition of playing staffs selection of teams for particular games and strategies on the field results also provide statistical evidence for some points of conventional wisdom regarding the professional game

capital accumulation labour market institutions and unemployment in the medium run according to the mainstream view labour market institutions lmis are the key determinants of unemployment in the medium run the actual empirical explanatory power of measures for labour market institutions however has recently been called into question the keynesian view holds periods of high real interest rates and insufficient capital accumulation responsible for unemployment empirical work in this tradition has paid little attention to the role of lmis this paper contributes to the debate by highlighting the role of autonomous changes in capital accumulation as a macroeconomic shock in the empirical analysis medium term unemployment is explained by capital accumulation lmis and a number of macroeconomic shocks in a panel analysis covering 20 oecd countries the economic effects of changes in lmi variations in capital accumulation and other macro shocks are compared capital accumulation and the real interest rate are found to have statistically significant effects that are robust to the inclusion of control variables and show larger effects than lmi