Are Risk Regulators Rational? Evidence from Hazardous Waste Cleanup Decisions by W. Kip Viscusi and James T. Hamilton. Published in volume 89, issue 4, pages 1010-1027 of American Economic Review, September 1999
The property that ideas are nonrivalrous leads to a tight link between idea-based growth models and increasing returns to scale. In particular, changes in the size of an economy’s population generally affect either the long-run growth rate or the long-run level of income in such models. This paper provides a partial review of the expanding literature on idea-based models and scale effects. It presents simple versions of various recent idea-based growth models and analyzes their implications for the relationship between scale and growth.
The soft budget constraint is a syndrome that was identified and studied by Janos Kornai in his analysis of centrally planned economies ( see, Kornai, 1980 ) . The syndrome is said to arise when a seemingly unprofitable enterprise is bailed out by the government or the enterprise’s creditors. In other words, the enterprise is not held to a fixed budget, but finds its budget constraint ‘‘softened’’ by the infusion of additional credit when it is on the verge of failure. Kornai viewed the soft budget constraint as a crucial ingredient for explaining the salient features of socialist economic performance, in particular, the pervasiveness of shortages. One interesting puzzle is why centrally planned economies have been particularly susceptible to the influence of the soft budget constraint; the capitalist world is hardly immune, as the recent financial crisis in Asia attests, but on the whole it has proved less vulnerable. Indeed, the very origin of the soft budget constraint and the mechanism by which it gives rise to shortages and other undesirable effects are also obviously important questions. Although Kornai’s work has long been well known and appreciated, answers to these associated theoretical questions have been hazarded only recently. In Maskin ( 1996 ) , I surveyed some of the initial efforts in this direction, including Mathias Dewatripont and Maskin (1995), which argues that centralization of credit can give rise to soft budget constraints because it facilitates the refinancing of
Gender is rarely included as a factor in economic models. However, recent work in experimental economics, as well as in psychology and political science, suggests that gender is an important determinant of economic and strategic behavior. Gender differences in bargaining are examined using the trust game introduced by Joyce Berg et al. (1995). In this two-person game, the proposer is given a choice of sending some, all, or none of his or her $10 experimental payment to an anonymous partner, the responder. For US subjects, Berg et al. found that 30 of 32 proposers deviated from economic equilibrium and sent some money to their partners. In sending money, proposers are trusting that their partners will return some money to them. In addition, 24 out of 32 of responders who received money returned some. Gender differences in this game are discussed.
In a recent paper, Kaushik Basu and Pham Hoang Van (BV, 1998) develop an important and very interesting model in which a fairly productive economy exhibits multiple equilibria, with children working in at least one. They identify two assumptions as essential to this result. The first - - which they call the "luxury axiom" - - is that a family sends its children to the labor market only if its income from sources other than child labor is very low. The second is embodied in their "substitution axiom" which states that from the point of view of firms, child labor is substitutable for adult labor. In this comment, we show that in addition to these two assumptions about the micro-level behavior of households and firms, there is also an essential macro-level assumption that may be termed the "distribution axiom:" income or wealth from non-labor sources must be sufficiently concentrated in the hands of a few agents. We establish that if non-labor income is distributed with sufficient equality, a market equilibrium with child labor cannot exist in the BV model. Beyond their contribution as an extension of BV's theory, our results formalize a proposition implicit in recent policy discussions of child labor. Christiaan Grootaert and Ravi Kanbur (1995) note that as household-level poverty is well-known to be the major cause of child labor, "[g]eneral economic development, equitably distributed, is the best and most sustainable way of reducing child labor." (p. 198, emphasis added) Policy documents from the International Labor Organization (ILO) have long conveyed this view, and now the World Bank appears to as well (Peter Fallon and Zafiris Tzannatos, 1998). There is a growing recognition that while economic development and development policies are necessary to eliminating child labor, they are not always sufficient on their own. Distributional considerations matter. Indeed, in the case in which BV's model yields multiple equilibria, the economy is developed enough to eliminate child labor. In this comment it becomes clear that if child labor exists in this economy, the causes are purely distributional.
Many economists today agree with the use-fulness of generational accounting as a pow-erful alternative to conventional measures of budget deficits. Japan provides the primary ex-ample of showing a huge discrepancy between one of the lowest ratios of net debt to GDP and the highest imbalance of generational ac-counts. The complete lack of a consistent re-lationship between a nation’s deficit or debt positions and the its generational imbalance is not surprising, given that there is no intrinsic connection between the two measures. Some may argue that Japan’s ratio of gross debt to GDP has already reached an alarm-ingly high level, second only to Italy among OECD countries. The gap between the gross debt and the net debt is mainly explained by the accumulation of surpluses in the social-security system. As social-security funds are held to fulfill the government’s pledge to pay future pensions, the Japanese government can less afford to keep spending its way out of the current economic crisis. Generational accounting, in fact, sheds light on the large unfunded portion of future pension liabili-ties. In other words, the future liabilities (i.e., off balance sheet) of the government can be captured by this innovative account-ing method. There are some reasons for the worsening of Japan’s fiscal position. First, growth in tax revenue has remained very low as the econ-omy itself has grown very slowly in recent years. Second, the population is aging at an
In a socialist economy, when a state-owned enterprise (SOE) incurs losses, the government often provides it with additional funding, cuts its taxes, and offers other compensations. Coincidentally, the managers of an SOE also expect to receive financial assistance from the state. Such a phenomenon is called the soft budget constraint (SBC), a term coined by Janos Kornai (1986). Kornai attributes many problems in a socialist economy to the existence of the SBC. To achieve successful reform of both the SOE's and socialist economies, it is imperative to eliminate the SBC. However, the SBC phenomenon continues to exist in transitional economies, even after SOE's are privatized (World Bank, 1996 p. 45). There is a large literature on the SBC. Mathias Dewatripont et al. (1996) and Eric Maskin (1996) provide surveys on the recent literature. According to Kornai (1998), there are two types of explanations for the existence of the SBC: the exogenous and endogenous. Explanations of the first type attribute the existence of the SBC to various exogenous reasons, including the paternalism of a socialist state and the government's aims for job creation or for gaining political support (Kornai, 1986). Explanations of the second type view the SBC as an endogenous phenomenon, arising from a time-inconsistency problem (Dewatripont and Maskin, 1995). For an inefficient, uncompleted investment project, the state or creditor may have incentives to refinance the investment because the marginal benefit of refinancing exceeds the marginal cost of abandoning it. Yingyi Qian (1994) attributed the shortage of goods in socialist economies to the SBC based on such a timeinconsistency argument. In this paper, we provide another explanation for the prevalence of the SBC in socialist and transitional economies. We will argue that the SBC is rooted in the state's accountability problem. The traditional Stalinist system was designed to facilitate the establishment of certain strategic SOE's, which were not viable in a market system. To establish the nonviable SOE's, a socialist government distorted the prices of all kinds of inputs and of outputs and used administrative measures to allocate these inputs and outputs according to plans. However, due to information and coordination problems, the state could make wrong decisions regarding investment/production and fail to deliver necessary materials and inputs in time. Consequently, the state, instead of SOE's, was accountable for the failures and needed to allocate additional credits and other assistance to the SOE's in order to complete the investment and production. As such, the SBC arose. After the transition to a market economy, many strategic firms still remain nonviable in a market economy. For strategic purposes, the state needs to support these finns. Moreover, most firms in a transitional economy carry many types of policy burdens, inherited from the pretransition system (Lin et al., 1998). Because the state is accountable for the losses arising from policy burdens, the SBC phenomenon persists. In a market economy, the state's attempts to build nonviable industry and the state's policy burdens on enterprises will also lead to SBC.
The rapid diffusion of information technology (IT) is a direct consequence of the swift decline in the price of computer-related equipment, which has led to a vast and continuing substitution of IT equipment for other forms of capital and labor. This substitution generates substantial returns for the economic agents who undertake IT investments and restructure their activities in order to increase the role of IT. There is little evidence, however, that substitution is accompanied by technical change as this term is used by economists. While this appears highly paradoxical to technologists, who think of substitution of a more IT-intensive mode of production for a less ITintensive mode as a change in technology, it is entirely consistent with the economic framework developed by Robert M. Solow (1957). What do economists mean by ‘‘technical change’’ and how could this exclude the substitution of a more IT-intensive production process for one that is less IT-intensive? Substitution represents movement along a given production function, while technical change corresponds to a shift in the production function. Substitution takes place if the introduction of computer-intensive equipment produces benefits that are fully captured or internalized by the users of IT and their suppliers. Technical change occurs only if more
Although microeconomic studies find a positive relationship between R&D and skill premia, much of the recent rise in U.S. wage inequality was accompanied by slowing labor-productivity growth and relatively slow introduction of new technologies. These conflicting observations are consistent with the effects of a skewed distribution of “absorptive capacities”—the rate at which technology-specific skills can be acquired—in a model of endogenous technological change. The framework is used to assess whether the productivity slowdown and the rise in wage inequality can be jointly accounted for by the contemporaneous decline in the growth rate of labor quality.
The Winner's Curse and Public Information in Common Value Auctions: Comment by James C. Cox, Samuel H. Dinkin and Vernon L. Smith. Published in volume 89, issue 1, pages 319-324 of American Economic Review, March 1999