bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Principal Components of Growth in the Less Developed Countries
Authors: Headey Derek 
Published: September 2010

SUMMMARYThis paper re‐examines the international evidence on the sources of growth in less developed countries (LDCs) using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Although EFA was first used in the development context by Adelman and Morris (1967) it has rarely been used since, despite being ideally suited to a context in which a large number of latent factors have been hypothesized to determine growth, and in which an even greater number of imperfectly measured and multicollinear proxies have been used to measure these latent factors. This paper uses EFA to minimize these problems of omitted variables biases, multicollinearity and measurement error, by reducing a large array of hypothesized growth determinants into a parsimonious and non‐collinear set of composite indices. The paper then provides theoretical interpretations of the derived indices, tests their statistical significance and quantitative importance in otherwise conventional growth regressions, and uses these results to reappraise the usefulness of cross‐country empirics in deriving robust, policy‐relevant knowledge of the principal components of growth in LDCs, including the so called ‘economic miracles’.
Market Orientation and Gender Wage Gaps: an International Study
Authors: Zweimüller Martina , Winter‐Ebmer Rudolf , Weichselbaumer Doris 
Published: September 2010

SUMMARYMore market orientation may reduce gender wage gaps via its effects on competition in product and labor markets and a generally lower level of regulation in the economy. On the other hand, less regulation and state intervention – which goes along with higher market orientation – may diminish the role of legislature and institutions that influence wage setting and may therefore increase gender wage differentials. In this paper, two very different approaches are used to test the relation between market orientation and gender wage differentials in international data. The first approach employs meta‐analysis data and takes advantage of the fact that many studies already exist which use national data sources to the best possible extent. The second approach uses comparable micro data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), which allows calculating internationally consistent gender wage residuals in the first place. By comparing these two very different methods of data collection we get the robust result that higher levels of market orientation as proxied by the Economic Freedom Index lead to lower gender wage gaps across countries and time periods.
The Structure of Social Practices and the Connection between Law and Morality*
Authors: BONGIOVANNI GIORGIO , ROTOLO ANTONINO , ROVERSI CORRADO , VALENTINI CHIARA 
Published: September 2010

AbstractIn his work, Jules Coleman has held that the rule of recognition, if conceived of as a shared cooperative activity, should be the gateway through which to incorporate moral constraints on the content of law. This analysis, however, leaves unanswered two important questions. For one thing, we do not know when or even why morality becomes a criterion of legality. And, for another thing, we still do not know what conception of morality it is that we are dealing with. In this article, we will attempt to clarify in greater depth what relations there are between the social practice of law and morality. We will thus see how the cooperative nature of social practices imbues law with a moral force, and how this makes it possible to establish a “weak” connection between law and morality: To see this, we will need to single out some basic features of cooperative social practices, thus setting out a suitable framework for the view just mentioned.
Positivism and Interpreting Legal Content: Does Law Call for a Moral Semantics?
Authors: HIMMA KENNETH EINAR 
Published: September 2010

AbstractIn two fascinating papers, Jules Coleman has been considering an idea, first articulated and defended by Scott Shapiro in his forthcoming book Legality, that law calls for a moral semantics. In a recent paper, Coleman argues it is a conceptual truth that legal content stating behavioral requirements, whether construed as propositions or imperatives, can “truthfully be redescribed as expressing a moral directive or authorization” (Coleman 2007, 592). For example, the directive “mail fraud is illegal”expresses, if not that mail fraud is morally wrong, then the idea that we have a content‐independent moral reason for not committing mail fraud. In this essay, I will attempt to explicate and evaluate Coleman's arguments, as well as to determine what the “Redescription Thesis,” as I call it, amounts to.
Practice, Reasons, and the Agent's Point of View*
Authors: PAVLAKOS GEORGE 
Published: September 2010

AbstractPositivism, in its standard outlook, is normative contextualism: If legal reasons are content‐independent, then their content may vary with the context or point of view. Despite several advantages vis‐à‐vis strong metaphysical conceptions of reasons, contextualism implies relativism, which may lead further to the fragmentation of the point of view of agency. In his Oxford Hart Lecture, Coleman put forward a fresh account of the moral semantics of legal content, one that lays claim to preserving the unity of agency while retaining the social facts thesis, which has been a key intuition of positivism. The present essay identifies potential weaknesses with this account and proposes a reconstruction along rationalist lines: First, it advances a descriptive account of reflective agency that is delivered in terms of a modest conceptual analysis; secondly, this is combined with a context‐sensitive or “buck‐passing” account of value, which illustrates that substantive reasons for action must be anchored, ontologically speaking, to particular social practices (Social Dependency Thesis). In the end the unity of agency comes at an affordable price, for it is no longer necessary to resort to metaphysical necessity and the most demanding conditions this imposes, in order to defend it.
Legal Truths and Falsities*
Authors: SMITH MATTHEW NOAH 
Published: September 2010

AbstractThis paper has a two‐pronged thesis. First, laws should be understood as making factual claims about the moral order. Second, the truth or falsity of these claims depends as much on the content of the law as on whether the lawmaker has political authority. In particular, laws produced by legitimate authorities are successful as laws when they guide subjects' behavior by giving subjects authoritative reasons for action. This paper argues that laws produced by legitimate authorities accomplish this task (i) by being on their own sufficient to change the moral state of affairs, which (ii) thereby generates for people new moral reasons to act that they can read right off of the legislation.
Inclusive Legal Positivism, Legal Interpretation, and Value‐Judgments
Authors: VILLA VITTORIO 
Published: September 2010

AbstractIn this paper I put forward some arguments in defence of inclusive legal positivism. The general thesis that I defend is that inclusive positivism represents a more fruitful and interesting research program than that proposed by exclusive positivism. I introduce two arguments connected with legal interpretation in favour of my thesis. However, my opinion is that inclusive positivism does not sufficiently succeed in estranging itself from the more traditional legal positivist conceptions. This is the case, for instance, with regard to the value‐freedom principle, which is commonly accepted by inclusive positivist scholars. In contrast with this approach, I try to show, in the concluding section, how a constructivistic version of inclusive positivism could legitimately acknowledge the presence of value‐judgments in the cognitive activities of jurists and legal theorists.
Tourism Taxes: Implications for Tourism Demand in the UK
Authors: Durbarry Ramesh 
Published: September 2010

AbstractBefore one can understand tax implications for the tourism industry, one must understand the sensitivity of tourism demand. Using a recently developed theoretical framework, we model inbound tourism demand in the UK. The results suggest that tourism demand in the UK is very price sensitive and that measures which result in increasing tourism prices will have a significant negative impact on tourist arrivals. It is believed that a reduction in the VAT rate could boost UK's tourism sector, depending on the extent to which a decrease in taxation is passed on in the form of price reductions. The results also suggest that arrivals from neighboring countries are 98% higher than from distant origins; however, expenditure per capita of the former is 52% lower than the latter. We also found that common language between the origin and the destination increases arrivals 7% more than non‐native English‐speaking origins.
Multinational Firms, International Knowledge Flows, and Dual Labor Markets in Developing Economies
Authors: Cieślik Andrzej 
Published: September 2010

AbstractThis paper seeks to explain how the expansion of multinational firms in a developing economy affects its labor market variables, such as wages in indigenous firms, the average wage level and total employment. Three potential effects: the transfer of foreign knowledge and the associated technological change, diffusion of this knowledge among indigenous firms, and the inflow of the physical capital from abroad, are examined under two possible scenarios: fixed and unlimited labor supply. The results obtained depend on the organization of the labor market in the host country, differences in capital intensity between multinational and local sectors, the amount of physical capital transferred to the host country from abroad, as well as the magnitude of knowledge spillovers stemming from multinational activity to indigenous firms. The predictions of the model are more consistent with empirical observations reported in empirical studies than those of other theoretical studies existing in the literature.
Inter‐Regional Migration in Transition Economies: The Case of Poland
Authors: Ghatak Subrata , Mulhern Alan , Watson John 
Published: September 2010

AbstractIn this paper, we modify the Harris–Todaro model of migration to incorporate the impact of human capital, housing stock, and the availability of publicly provided goods such as healthcare and road provision in order to analyze the determinants of migration in different regions of Poland. We apply the Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equation (SURE) model to investigate the data. Our results show that GDP per capita, unemployment, and distance have a strong effect on regional migration in Poland. Human capital is also an important explanatory factor as is the provision of key publicly provided facilities such as roads. The lack of housing in Poland is important in explaining the low levels of internal migration.
Foreign Capital in a Growth Model
Authors: Mallick Sushanta , Moore Tomoe 
Published: September 2010

AbstractWithin the mechanism of endogenous growth, this paper empirically investigates the impact of financial capital on economic growth for a panel of 60 developing countries, through the channel of domestic capital formation. By estimating the model for different income groups, it is found that while private FDI flows exert beneficial complementarity effects on the domestic capital formation across all income‐group countries, the official financial flows contribute to increasing investment in the middle income economies, but not in the low income countries. The latter appears to demonstrate that the aid‐growth nexus is supported in the middle income countries, whereas the misallocation of official inflows is more likely to exist in the low income countries, suggesting that aid effectiveness remains conditional on the domestic policy environment.
Effects of Multilateral Trade Liberalization on Prices*
Authors: Ishikawa Jota , Mukunoki Hiroshi 
Published: September 2010

AbstractTo analyze the effects of simultaneous tariff reductions by multiple importing countries on prices, we construct a simple three‐country model where a good is produced by a monopolist with nonconstant marginal cost and imported by two countries. We compare two representative tariff‐reduction formulas: the “fixed‐amount” and the “uniform percentage” reductions. The uniform percentage reductions may increase the consumer price in the importing country, whose initial tariff is lower. Thus, importing countries with relatively low tariffs may prefer a bilateral trade agreement to a multilateral one to ensure consumer gains.
Port Efficiency and Trade Flows*
Authors: Blonigen Bruce A. , Wilson Wesley W. 
Published: September 2010

AbstractGrowing international trade and increasing congestion focus attention on trade facilitation. Ocean ports are a central and necessary component in facilitating trade. Yet, there is only limited comprehensive information available on the efficiency of ports or evidence of the effect of port efficiency on trade. We develop and apply a straightforward approach to estimate port efficiency. The approach uses detailed data on US imports and associated import costs, yielding estimates across ports, products, and time. These measures are incorporated into a gravity trade model where we estimate that improved port efficiency significantly increases trade volumes.
Foreign Direct Investment, Economic Growth, and the Human Capital Threshold: Evidence from US States*
Authors: Ford Timothy C. , Rork Jonathan C. , Elmslie Bruce T. 
Published: September 2010

AbstractThe United States has experienced a dramatic increase in foreign direct investment (FDI) in recent years. While foreign firms bring immediate benefits of high‐paying jobs, data limitations have prevented detailed study on FDI's long‐term effects on the states receiving it. By creating a new stock measure of FDI based on employment, we are able to capture these long‐term effects. Results demonstrate that FDI has a greater impact on per capita output growth than domestic investment for US states that meet a minimum human capital threshold. Ironically, the most active states in the recruitment of FDI tend to fall below this threshold.
Financial Openness and Growth: Short‐run Gain, Long‐run Pain?*
Authors: Bussière Matthieu , Fratzscher Marcel 
Published: September 2010

AbstractNo empirical evidence has yet emerged for the existence of a robust positive relationship between financial openness and economic growth. This paper argues that a key reason for the elusive evidence is the presence of a time‐varying relationship between openness and growth: countries tend to gain in the short term, immediately following capital account liberalization, but may not grow faster or even experience temporary growth reversals in the medium to long term. The paper finds substantial empirical evidence for the existence of such an intertemporal tradeoff for 45 industrialized and emerging market economies. The acceleration of growth immediately after liberalization is found to be often driven by an investment boom and a surge in portfolio and debt inflows. By contrast, the quality of domestic institutions, the size of FDI inflows and the sequencing of the liberalization process are found to be important driving forces for growth in the medium to longer term.
Trade Policy in the Presence of Technology Licensing*
Authors: Ghosh Arghya , Saha Souresh 
Published: September 2010

AbstractWe consider strategic trade policy when a high‐cost and a low‐cost firm belonging to two different countries compete in quantities in a third country, and technology is transferable via licensing. We characterize the effects of subsidies on (i) licensing payments—a new source of rents, (ii) the decision to license, and (iii) the subsidy bill difference (compared to when licensing is infeasible). We find that, in the presence of licensing, optimal strategic trade policy has several interesting features. For example, even under Cournot competition, optimal policy can be an export tax instead of an export subsidy. Also, unlike results in strategic trade policy with asymmetric costs, we find that optimal export subsidies are not necessarily positively related to the cost‐competitiveness of firms. In other words, governments need not necessarily favor “winners” when licensing is possible. Furthermore, there exist parameterizations such that a government, if it can, might ban licensing.
The Balassa–Samuelson Hypothesis in the Asia‐Pacific Region Revisited*
Authors: Thomas Alastair , King Alan 
Published: September 2010

AbstractIn a study of nine Asia‐Pacific countries' real exchange rates,Chinn (2000)finds some evidence in support of theBalassa (1964)andSamuelson (1964)hypothesis. His findings, however, are based on the application of a model containing several potentially restrictive simplifying assumptions to a dataset of limited span. Consequently, we look to assess the effect on Chinn's findings of considerably increasing the sample size and relaxing these assumptions. We find a comparable level of evidence for the Balassa–Samuelson hypothesis when applying Chinn's model to the larger sample, but obtain significantly greater support when a less restrictive approach is adopted.
Taylor Rules for the ECB using Expectations Data*
Authors: Gorter Janko , Jacobs Jan , De Haan Jakob 
Published: September 2010

AbstractWe estimate Taylor rules for the euro area using Consensus Economics data for expected inflation and output growth, and compare these estimates with more conventional specifications in which actual outcomes are used. We find that the ECB takes expected inflation and expected output growth into account in setting interest rates, while in the more conventional model specification, the coefficient of realized inflation is not significantly different from zero.
Model-Based Measurement of Latent Risk in Time Series with Applications
Authors: Bijleveld Frits , Commandeur Jacques , Gould Phillip , Koopman Siem Jan 
Published: September 2010

SummaryRisk is at the centre of many policy decisions in companies, governments and other institutions. The risk of road fatalities concerns local governments in planning countermeasures, the risk and severity of counterparty default concerns bank risk managers daily and the risk of infection has actuarial and epidemiological consequences. However, risk cannot be observed directly and it usually varies over time. We introduce a general multivariate time series model for the analysis of risk based on latent processes for the exposure to an event, the risk of that event occurring and the severity of the event. Linear state space methods can be used for the statistical treatment of the model. The new framework is illustrated for time series of insurance claims, credit card purchases and road safety. It is shown that the general methodology can be effectively used in the assessment of risk.
Incidence-Based Estimates of Life Expectancy of the Healthy for the UK: Coherence Between Transition Probabilities and Aggregate Life-Tables
Authors: Khoman Ehsan , Mitchell James , Weale Martin 
Published: September 2010

SummaryWill the UK’s aging population be fit and independent, or suffer from greater chronic ill health? Life expectancy of healthy people represents the expected number of years of healthy well-being that a life-table cohort would experience if age-specific rates of mortality and disability prevailed throughout the cohort’s lifetime. Robust estimation of this life expectancy is thus essential for examining whether additional years of life are spent in good health and whether life expectancy is increasing faster than the decline of rates of disability. The paper examines a means of generating estimates of life expectancy for people who are healthy and unhealthy for the UK that are consistent with exogenous population mortality data. The method takes population transition matrices and adjusts these in a statistically coherent way so as to render them consistent with aggregate life-tables.
A light‐tailed conditionally heteroscedastic model with applications to river flows
Authors: Elek Péter , Márkus László 
Published: September 2010

Abstract.  A conditionally heteroscedastic model, different from the more commonly used autoregressive moving average–generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (ARMA‐GARCH) processes, is established and analysed here. The time‐dependent variance of innovations passing through an ARMA filter is conditioned on the lagged values of the generated process, rather than on the lagged innovations, and is defined to be asymptotically proportional to those past values. Designed this way, the model incorporates certain feedback from the modelled process, the innovation is no longer of GARCH type, and all moments of the modelled process are finite provided the same is true for the generating noise. The article gives the condition of stationarity, and proves consistency and asymptotic normality of the Gaussian quasi‐maximum likelihood estimator of the variance parameters, even though the estimated parameters of the linear filter contain an error.An analysis of six diurnal water discharge series observed along Rivers Danube and Tisza in Hungary demonstrates the usefulness of such a model. The effect of lagged river discharge turns out to be highly significant on the variance of innovations, and nonparametric estimation approves its approximate linearity. Simulations from the new model preserve well the probability distribution, the high quantiles, the tail behaviour and the high‐level clustering of the original series, further justifying model choice.
Neoclassical Difficulties: Tort Deterrence for Latent Injuries*
Authors: FELSTINER W. L. F. , SIEGELMAN PETER 
Published: September 2010

Economists often claim that the tort system leads firms to provide consumers and workers with the socially optimal level of safety. Moreover, in the case of work‐related hazards, employers are alleged to have another source of incentives to take precautions. If wages are sensitive to job‐related risks, employers should spend money to reduce such risks when, by doing so, they can save more in wage costs than the costs of the precautions taken.Whatever their merits in other settings, in the case of latent injuries such as workplace exposure to asbestos neither tort nor market are likely to provide an optimal level of safety; indeed, they have failed to do so in the examples we discuss. We find that the introduction of a long delay between the exposure to a hazard and the onset of symptoms introduces a variety of empirical complications that overwhelm the assumptions on which the neoclassical model rests. Our conclusion is thus that comparisons between tort and alternative systems of deterrence/compensation should start from an empirical assessment of how the tort system actually works (and doesn't work), rather than beginning with misleading theoretical claims about the system's optimality.
THE TWO‐SECTOR VON THÜNEN ORIGINAL MARGINAL PRODUCTIVITY MODEL OF CAPITAL; AND BEYOND
Authors: Etula Erkko 
Published: September 2010

ABSTRACTThis article considers a two‐sector model of scalar capital from the perspectives of smoothly differentiable neoclassical technologies and also non‐differentiable technologies based on discrete alternative Leontief–Sraffa techniques. The analysis shows that in these Thünen‐like scenarios without joint production the real wage and the interest rate are necessarily in an inverse Ricardian tradeoff. This complements the findings of Samuelson and Etula (2006, Japan and the World Economy, 18, pp. 331–356) and completes the analysis of single homogeneous scalar capital.