Knowledge that Transforms

Cross-country demand data are often consistent with the existence of a representative consumer with homothetic preferences. While homotheticity allows the construction of tight bounds to quantity indexes and their variance, it contradicts the biological reality that humans require minimum consumption of food, clothing, and shelter. This paper presents an approach for nonparametrically estimating bounds to utility from above-subsistence consumption. OECD data are used to show that homotheticity markedly compresses the real income distribution relative to what is found under the more general class of affine-homothetic preferences, and this has major consequences for estimates of convergence.

Real-time pricing (RTP) of electricity would improve allocative efficiency and limit wholesalers' market power. Conventional wisdom claims that RTP provides additional environmental benefits. This paper argues that RTP will reduce the variance, both within- and across-days, in the quantity of electricity demanded. We estimate the short-run impacts of this reduction on SO2, NOx, and CO2 emissions. Reducing variance decreases emissions in regions where peak demand is met more by oil-fired capacity than by hydropower, such as the Mid-Atlantic. However, reducing variance increases emissions in more U.S. regions, namely those with more hydropower like the West. The effects are relatively small.

This study reports on how much productivity fluctuations are industry specific versus country specific. For the manufacturing industries in Canada and the United States, the correlation between cross-border pairings of the same industry are found to be more often highly correlated than previously thought. Furthermore, the study confirms earlier findings that the similarity of input use can help describe the comovement of productivity fluctuations across industries.

Agents are often better informed than the clients who hire them and may exploit this informational advantage. Real estate agents have an incentive to convince clients to sell their houses too cheaply and too quickly. We test these predictions by comparing home sales in which real estate agents are hired to when an agent sells his own home. Consistent with the theory, we find homes owned by real estate agents sell for 3.7% more than other houses and stay on the market 9.5 days longer, controlling for observables. Greater information asymmetry leads to larger distortions.

To resolve the theoretical ambiguity in the effect of age on the value of statistical life (VSL), this article uses a novel, age-dependent fatal risk measure to estimate age-specific hedonic wage regressions. VSL exhibits an inverted-U-shaped relationship with age. In the year 2000 cross section, workers' VSL rises from $3.7 million (ages 18–24) to $9.7 million (35–44), and declines to $3.4 million (55–62). Controlling for birth-year cohort effects in a minimum distance estimator yields a peak VSL of $7.8 million at age 46, and flattens the age-VSL relationship. The value of statistical life-year also follows an inverted-U shape with age.

We estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings using changes in compulsory schooling laws in West Germany after World War II. Most estimates in the literature indicate returns in the range of 10 to 15. While our research design is very similar to studies for various other countries, we find a zero return. We find no evidence that this is due to labor market institutions or the apprenticeship training system in Germany. The result might be due to the fact that the basic skills most relevant for the labor market are learned earlier in Germany than in other countries.

This paper provides a systematic estimation of import demand elasticities for a broad group of countries at a very disaggregated level of product detail. We use a semiflexible translog GDP function approach to formally derive import demands and their elasticities, which are estimated with data on prices and endowments. Within a theoretically consistent framework, we use the estimated elasticities to construct Feenstra's (1995) simplification of Anderson and Neary's trade restrictiveness index (TRI). The difference between TRIs and import-weighted tariffs is shown to depend on the tariff variance and the covariance between tariffs and import demand elasticities.

This paper investigates the relationship between nominal interest rates and prices using nearly two centuries of data from ten industrial countries. Both a positive relationship between interest rates and price levels (that is, a positive Gibson effect) and a negative relationship between interest rates and subsequent price changes (that is, a negative Fama-Fisher effect) prevailed until World War I. We propose a simple explanation wherein this doubly paradoxical juxtaposition of effects arises when money is supplied inelastically and prices are flexible. This double paradox disappeared after World War II when economies became mostly characterized by elastic money and sticky prices. During that period, a positive Fama-Fisher effect emerged while the Gibson effect largely dissipated.

Traditional explanations for indirect trade through an entrept focus on savings in transport costs and the role of specialized agents in processing and distribution. We provide an alternative perspective based on the potential for entrepts to facilitate tariff evasion. Using data on direct exports to mainland China and indirect exports via Hong Kong SAR, we find that the indirect export rate rises with the Chinese tariff rate, despite the absence of any legal tax advantage to sending goods via Hong Kong SAR. We present several robustness tests to rule out plausible alternative hypotheses based on existing explanations for entrept trade.

We compare price level and income convergence since 1870 for eleven developed economies using implicit price deflators derived from the GDP data of Maddison (1995, 2001, 2003). We find that “sigma” and “beta” convergence for prices occurs later and to a lesser extent than income. Price levels converge after 1950 while income convergence begins in the 1880s. We find no evidence for stochastic price convergence or for “club” price convergence.