Download or read book Essays on Imperfect Information and Economic Growth written by Niloy Bose and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Economics for an Imperfect World written by Joseph E. Stiglitz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of Joseph Stiglitz's work in economics throughout his long and distinguished career has been on the real world, with all of its imperfections.

Download or read book Three Essays on Asymmetric Information and Imperfect Credit Markets written by Basab Dasgupta and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Institutions Economic Policy and Development written by Silviu Dochia and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three essays examining the relationship between institutions and economic development. Essay one focuses on private participation in infrastructure. Over the past decade private involvement in the provision of infrastructure services has grown increasingly common in a large number of countries around the world. Increased activity brought along a good deal of controversy, most frequently relating to the cancellation of high profile projects. This paper analyzes this phenomenon empirically, using project level panel data from the 1990-2005 period. My first finding is that, contrary to popular belief, infrastructure project cancellations are rare. Second, contract cancellations are not randomly distributed, but seem correlated with a number of factors. I find that cancellation rates are higher for water sector projects, countries with a poor track record of protecting property rights and those with more effective local bureaucracies. Neither the level of GDP per capita nor its growth rate seem to be important factors, but larger current account deficits are correlated with more cancellations. Essay two examines the economic rationale for industrial policies aimed at supporting small firms with the intention of improving the rate of innovation and economic growth. I argue that such policies, while very common in the last few decades, frequently ignore two fundamental facts. First, a firms' size is largely determined by the economic environment surrounding it, and in particular by the uncertainty it must face. Attempts to actively micromanage the mix of small to large firms while ignoring the environment they operate within is more likely to be harmful than helpful. The second often overlooked observation is that small and large firms often play complementary roles in the process of innovation. Instead of attempting to actively pick winners with certain characteristics, policymakers' efforts are better spent on building a framework which is conducive to all innovation, wherever it may originate. In the third paper I analyze the real world impact of direct financing programs for small and medium enterprises. I base my analysis on two specific SME financing schemes implemented in Romania between 1998 and 2004, but my findings are broadly applicable. I argue that direct funding programs can suffer from two major flaws: a failure to address the financial system's binding constraints, and a difficulty in dealing with imperfect information. I find that both problems were acutely relevant in Romania, where they created programs that appeared successful at the firm level but in fact had very limited impact.

Download or read book The Economics of Imperfect Knowledge written by G. B. Richardson and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: G.B. Richardson's writings, although from 1953 to 1972, are still very relevant to modern economics. The central theme of this book of his papers is that the knowledge upon which business decisions are taken is limited and uncertain and that the availability of it is affected by market structure.

Download or read book The Economics of New Goods written by Timothy F. Bresnahan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New goods are at the heart of economic progress. The eleven essays in this volume include historical treatments of new goods and their diffusion; practical exercises in measurement addressed to recent and ongoing innovations; and real-world methods of devising quantitative adjustments for quality change. The lead article in Part I contains a striking analysis of the history of light over two millenia. Other essays in Part I develop new price indexes for automobiles back to 1906; trace the role of the air conditioner in the development of the American south; and treat the germ theory of disease as an economic innovation. In Part II essays measure the economic impact of more recent innovations, including anti-ulcer drugs, new breakfast cereals, and computers. Part III explores methods and defects in the treatment of quality change in the official price data of the United States, Canada, and Japan. This pathbreaking volume will interest anyone who studies economic growth, productivity, and the American standard of living.

Download or read book Essays on Political Economy written by Frédéric Bastiat and published by . This book was released on 1853 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Development Economics Wealth and poverty written by Jagdish N. Bhagwati and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume I, Wealth and Poverty, addresses domestic or internal development problems.

Download or read book Three Essays on Political Institutions Inequality and Economic Growth written by Ling Shen and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Keynesian and Kaldorian Economics written by A. Thirlwall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays contains 16 papers the author has written over the last 40 years on various aspects of the life and work of John Maynard Keynes and Nicholas Kaldor. It covers both theoretical and applied topics and highlight the continued relevance of Keynesian and Kaldorian ideas for understanding the functioning of capitalist economies.

Download or read book Essays in Economics of Education and Elections written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How economic agents can make sense from imperfect information is a central challenge in economic theory. In this thesis, I first explore how voters try to infer the quality of their government based not only on the information they personally receive but also on observations of their home and foreign governments' policies. Can voters learn from such information and thus any improved accountability reduce "political pandering"? Secondly, I study two models of education where the incentives of both students and firms are profoundly affected by the imperfect informativeness of education certificates and study how increases in enrolment and tuition fees affect educational and job market outcomes. The first chapter, Pandering Across Borders, studies when voters can use information from foreign countries to reduce domestic political pandering, and when pandering is contagious between countries. The voters condition their electoral decisions not only on policies chosen in their home countries, but also on those implemented abroad. Since the policy decisions are driven by re-election concerns, both sources of information may be biased. As a result, informational linkages between the countries give rise to pandering externalities which lead to ambiguous welfare effects of access to international news. The model also shows that institutional harmonisation via internal synchronisation of election dates increases the parameter range in which pandering may occur. Beliefs, Access Constraints and Voluntary Education Decisions, the second chapter of this thesis, contributes to the debate on the negative consequences of high growth rates in university enrollment with a focus on CEE countries. I propose a theory how low education supply elasticities in the short run can lead to self-fulfilling equilibria in a setting in which signalling is reduced to an effortless binary certification technology. When the agents believe that the certification precision is low they enrol at a higher rate and, due to those inelasticities, their beliefs fulfil. The opposite holds when the agents have high beliefs on the quality. The selection among these equilibria depends on students' initial beliefs about the quality of the certification technology. The final chapter, Tuition Fees in a Signalling Model of Education, analyses the trade-off between tuition fees and educational effort. Education serves purely as a signaling device and implies a non-pecuniary cost inversely proportional to students' ability, while tuition fees are independent of ability. In this framework, higher tuition fees can be beneficial for high ability students since they reduce the enrolment rates of the less able agents reducing the effort level necessary to separate. The overall effect of tuition fees is complex and is associated with non-monotonicities in actions of the players in the model.

Download or read book Globalization Heterogeneity and Imperfect Information written by Dennis Petrus Johannes Botman and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Kahnemann and Tversky and the making of behavioral economics written by Floris Heukelom and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Public Economics and Development written by Francois Gerard and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present thesis studies public economics questions in the context of developing countries. In particular, I investigate the impact and design of specific government policies in Brazil. Government interventions may be desirable when unregulated market economies deliver socially inefficient outcomes. Goods and services tend to be under-provided in the presence of imperfect or asymmetric information. Such market failures may be pervasive in the insurance market and prompt governments to provide certain types of insurance directly. Chapters 1 and 2 study social insurance programs, and more specifically unemployment insurance (UI). In contrast, goods and services tend to be over-provided if they generate negative externalities. In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in the negative externalities associated with energy consumption. Chapter 3 studies energy conservation policies, and more specifically residential electricity conservation. In each of the three essays, I develop a simple theoretical framework to guide my empirical analysis. I then estimate the relevant impacts and combine theory and empirics to inform the design of government programs. There is vast literature in public economics (and related fields) on social insurance programs and energy conservation policies. Yet, as for most research in public economics, existing work focuses almost entirely on the context of developed countries. Arguably, social insurance and energy conservation are not first-order priorities in least developed countries. However, these topics are becoming increasingly relevant for developing countries. Most of the growth in energy demand is forecast to come from the developing world, especially for residential consumers. Social insurance programs have been adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Currently some form of UI exists in Algeria, Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Chile, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela and Vietnam; Mexico, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand have been considering its introduction. Moreover, the severe data constraints that limited empirical work at the intersection of public and development economics are being removed. Today, large administrative datasets and high-quality surveys are available in many developing countries. Importantly, results from more advanced countries are unlikely to translate easily to a developing country context. For instance, the enforcement of social program eligibility is a major challenge in developing countries where the informal sector accounts for a large share of the economy. In Brazil, about half of the employed population works in jobs that escape oversight and monitoring from the government. The presence of a large informal sector is widely believed to increase the efficiency costs of social programs. The main concern is that informal job opportunities exacerbate programs' disincentives to work in the formal sector. The essay in the first chapter (joint work with Gustavo Gonzaga) evaluates such a claim. We begin by developing a simple theoretical model of optimal UI that specifies the efficiency-insurance tradeoff in the presence of informal job opportunities. We then combine the model with evidence drawn from 15 years of uniquely comprehensive administrative data to quantify the social costs of the UI program in Brazil. We first show that exogenous extensions of UI benefits led to falls in formal-sector reemployment rates due to offsetting rises in informal employment. However, because reemployment rates in the formal sector are low, most of the extra benefits were actually received by claimants who did not change their employment behavior. Consequently, only a fraction of the cost of UI extensions was due to perverse incentive effects and the efficiency costs were thus relatively small (only 20% as large as in the US, for example). Using variation in the relative size of the formal sector across different regions and over time in Brazil, we then show that the efficiency costs of UI extensions are actually larger in regions with a larger formal sector. Finally, we show that UI exhaustees have relatively low levels of disposable income, suggesting that the insurance value of longer benefits in Brazil may be sizeable. In sum, the results overturn the conventional wisdom, and indicate that efficiency considerations may in fact become more relevant as the formal sector expands. The findings of this essay have broader implications for our understanding of social policies in developing countries. Many social programs and taxes generate incentives for people to carry out their economic activities informally. For the same reasons as for UI, they are viewed as imposing large efficiency costs in a context of high informality. By going against the conventional wisdom, our results cast doubt on whether efficiency considerations actually limit the expansion of social policies in these cases too. The essay in the second chapter (joint work with Gustavo Gonzaga) follows directly from the above results. Governments face two main informational constraints when implementing any program or regulation (e.g., welfare program). First, there is a screening issue. Government may fail to identify the ex-ante population of interest (e.g., poorest households). Second, there is a monitoring issue. Agents may adopt unobserved behaviors to join or escape the population of interest (e.g., reducing work efforts). The lack of strict monitoring policies for government programs is often considered to be a major issue in developing countries where non-compliance is widespread. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the magnitude of the behavioral responses that we wish to mitigate, relative to the cost of efficient monitoring policies. The Brazilian UI program offers a stark example of a weak monitoring environment. Until recently and for over 20 years, there was absolutely no monitoring of formal job search for UI beneficiaries in Brazil, even though many beneficiaries work informally when drawing UI benefits. In the second chapter, we argue that the results presented in the first chapter may rationalize the complete lack of monitoring in Brazil until 2011. We begin by deriving a theoretical upper bound for the maximum price that a government should be willing to pay per beneficiary to perfectly monitor the formal job search of UI beneficiaries. We show that the bound corresponds to the share of program costs due to behavioral responses. Intuitively, there is little incentive to introduce monitoring if most beneficiaries draw UI benefits without changing their formal reemployment behavior. The overall scope of the monitoring issue is thus limited in Brazil because most beneficiaries would collect UI benefits absent any behavioral response, as shown in the first chapter. Yet, monitoring policies may still be cost-effective if the government is able to target them towards workers with relatively larger behavioral responses. In the empirical analysis, we investigate to what extent the government could use information readily available ex ante (a signal) to identify worker categories with relatively larger behavioral responses. We find that most of the heterogeneity is not easily captured by observable characteristics. Therefore, monitoring policies would be relatively costly even if the government used available signals to target them efficiently. These results motivate future work on the cost-effectiveness of job-search requirements for UI beneficiaries, which have been recently introduced in Brazil. If there is little evidence on the impact of social insurance programs in developing countries, there is almost no evidence on the impact of energy conservation policies. Moreover, results from more advanced countries are also unlikely to translate easily to the context of developing countries. Households in the developing world own fewer appliances and consume much less energy on average. Average monthly residential electricity consumption in Brazil was below 200 kilowatt hours in 2000. Enforcement is also a major challenge. Electricity theft amounts to 15% of the total load for some utilities in Brazil. In the third chapter, I investigate the short- and long-term impacts on residential consumption of the largest electricity conservation program to date. This was an innovative program of economic (fines) and social (conservation appeals) incentives implemented by the Brazilian government in 2001-2002 in response to supply shortages of over 20%. Achieving ambitious energy conservation targets through economic incentives is often considered infeasible. Yet, there is little evidence from ambitious conservation policies. I find that the Brazilian conservation program reduced average electricity consumption per customer by .25 log point during the nine months of the crisis. Importantly, the program induced sizable lumpy adjustments; it reduced consumption by .12 log point until at least 2011. Using individual billing data from three million customers, I show that average effects came from dramatic reductions by most customers. I also provide suggestive evidence that lumpy adjustments came from new habits rather than physical investments. Finally, I structurally estimate a simple model to quantify the role of social incentives and lumpy adjustments. Social incentives amounted to a 1.2 log point increase in electricity tariffs, and may thus be particularly powerful in times of crisis. Importantly, a .6 log point permanent increase in tariffs would have been necessary to achieve the observed consumption levels during and after the crisis absent any lumpy adjustment. The possibility of triggering lumpy adjustments may thus substantially reduce the incentives necessary to achieve ambitious energy conservation targets. Beyond the specific issues it addresses, I hope that this dissertation will help convince senior and junior scholars alike of the relevance.

Download or read book Essays in International Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics written by Peter Nicholas Kriz and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labour Markets written by Sebastian Buhai and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Come Close and Co create written by Sandra Phlippen and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Access to relevant external knowledge is crucial for a firms' competitiveness in innovation-driven industries. This thesis focuses on how different forms of proximity affect a firm's ability to access such knowledge. We consider the influence of being co-located in space, of being embedded in a network, and of being active in similar knowledge domains. By integrating these three proximity perspectives, we contribute to various disciplines such as economic geography, organizational sociology and innovation studies. Further, we investigate the make, buy or ally strategies that pharmaceutical firms employ to maximize the probability of innovation (finding new drugs). Our findings suggest that firms employ multiple governance structures simultaneously, even when targeting similar innovations. These insights contribute to our understanding of the boundaries of the firm.