A simple model illustrates interactions between the 'primary' fiscal deficit (total deficit minus interest payments), economic growth and debt. The deficit/income ratio responds countercyclically to ...growth while growth may respond positively (a 'Keynes' case) or negatively (à la 'Merkel') to the deficit. The recent Great Recession in the USA was atypical in that there was a weak countercyclical fiscal response. The increase in government net borrowing was significantly less than the decrease in private borrowing—an historically unprecedented asymmetry. Econometric estimates verify the historical pattern and further suggest that there is a strong positive effect on growth of a higher primary deficit, even when possible increases in the interest rate are taken into account.
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to model the relationships between women's outerwear consumption, frequency of purchase and consumer profiles, and to analyse historical changes in particular, ...using repeated cross-sectional data on household expenditure.Design methodology approach - A sample of over 20,000 female spenders, aged between 16 and 54 were extracted from UK Family Expenditure Survey (FES). Tobit model, "two-part" model and pseudo-panel model were used to estimate consumer demand for women's outerwear, taking infrequency of purchase into account.Findings - The importance of "fashion" in clothing consumption has risen by two-fold since the 1960s, measured by purchase probability. Clothing have transformed from durable goods to consumables. Youth, class and women's employment are found to be significantly related to fashion consumption, controlling for the rise in income.Research limitations implications - The findings are limited to UK female consumers and to the demographic data that are available from FES. The effects of occasions, serendipity, emotions and weather remain to be assessed in future research.Originality value - This paper provides a unique measurement of "fashion" for a comparative social science research across time and space. It promotes the usefulness of the perspective of fashion as a powerful critique against the rationality assumption of neoclassical economics with complementary evidence.
The literature on inequality among economies has focused mainly on analysing the dispersion of indicators such as current income per capita. In this paper we adopt a different approach from the usual ...one. In order to analyse inequality and convergence among Spanish regions, we propose to use a measure of permanent income that takes into account the entire life cycle dimension. On the basis of this approach, we make various simulations to determine the influence on inequality and convergence in permanent income of variables, such as survival rates and the existence or non-existence of convergence in current income. The results indicate that inequality in permanent income is clearly lower than that observed when the full life cycle of individuals is not taken into account.
Stigler and Becker (
1977
) argue that tastes neither change capriciously nor differ importantly between people; it is differences in prices and incomes that determine differences in behaviour. In ...this paper we analyse the alcohol consumption patterns of drinkers from 8 industrialized countries. We identify a number of empirical regularities and verify Stigler and Becker's hypothesis that income and price elasticities of demand are international constants by showing that alcohol consumption patterns in the eight countries exhibit intriguing similarities. The income and price elasticities of alcohol are found to be about 0.8 and −0.6, respectively, in all eight countries.
Dans cette étude, nous avons évalué, en utilisant un modèle gravitaire amélioré, l'effet des vagues d'immigration retardée, par provinces, sur les importations et les exportations. Nous avons testé ...ce modèle de façon empirique à l'aide de données portant sur les flux d'importations et d'exportations, que nous avons mises en rapport avec les 40 principaux pays d'origine des immigrants canadiens (établis à partir de la plus récente vague d'immigration). Nous avons alors obtenu des résultats qui correspondent à ce qu'ont montré des études antérieures, c'est-à-dire que l'immigration intensifie le flux des échanges commerciaux en matière d'importations et d'exportations. En ajoutant une variable au modèle, soit l'immigration par provinces, nous avons également observé que l'arrivée de nouveaux immigrants influe presque immédiatement sur les importations, alors que, dans le cas des exportations, il faut au moins cinq ans avant que l'effet soit significatif, celui-ci pouvant même ne se faire sentir pleinement qu'après 20 ans. /// We utilize an enhanced gravity model to estimate the effect of lagged immigration waves on Canadian imports and exports by province. Empirically, this model was tested using Canadian data on import and export flows to the top 40 countries of origin for Canadian immigrants based upon the composition of the most recent immigrant wave. The results are consistent with previous studies, where immigrants increased both import and export trade flows. By adding the provincial immigrant wave variable, it was also found that new immigrants affect imports almost immediately, whereas for exports, the immigrant effect is not significant for at least five years and may take as long as 20 years to reach full impact.
In this paper we estimate a Translog output distance function for a balanced panel of state level data for the Australian dairy processing sector. We estimate a fixed effects specification employing ...Bayesian methods, with and without the imposition of monotonicity and curvature restrictions. Our results indicate that Tasmania and Victoria are the most technically efficient states with New South Wales being the least efficient. The imposition of theoretical restrictions marginally affects the results especially with respect to estimates of technical change and industry deregulation. Importantly, our bias estimates show changes in both input use and output mix that result from deregulation. Specifically, we find that deregulation has positively biased the production of butter, cheese and powders.
Many international macroeconomic models link the real exchange rate to a ratio of marginal utilities. We examine this link empirically, allowing the marginal utility of consumption to depend on ...government expenditure, real money balances, or external habit. We also consider two environments with incomplete asset markets; one with exogenously missing markets but an endogenous discount rate that anchors the distribution of wealth and one with endogenous market segmentation. Although none of these satisfies theoretical and over-identifying restrictions for every country, utility with external habit persistence provides the best match with real exchange rates for OECD countries between 1961 and 2001.
The idea that changes in Supreme Court decision rules should have measurable effects on the volume of cases litigated has a compelling plausibility, and several models of litigation predict this ...result. The prediction is a fragile one, however, because it implies very restrictive assumptions about the probability distributions of the cases subject to dispute. The period studied includes four Supreme Court decisions widely regarded as changing the rules and altering the level of uncertainty surrounding the legality of the anti-tying provisions of the antitrust laws. Broad trends in antitrust activity generally and changes in firm profitability statistically explain over three-quarters of the observed variation in tying litigation. Changes in legal precedent have only modest effects upon litigation. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
In Jan 2005, after more than three years of sluggish employment growth, the US economy finally recovered the jobs lost during the 2001 recession. Baffled by such a delayed rebound in payrolls, many ...speculated about the cause. Inevitably, observers compared the 2001 and 1991 recoveries, both widely considered to have been jobless. Schreft and Singh showed previously that one common feature of the first year of the jobless recoveries was the greater use of just-in-time employment practices. They also speculated that the greater availability of just-in-time employment practices contributed to the recoveries' lack of job growth. This explanation of delayed hiring is termed the "wait-and-see hypothesis." As a result, firms are willing to wait to hire until they see sufficient improvement in business conditions to justify expanding payrolls. Schreft, Singh, and Hodgson describe how a wait-and-see approach to hiring can contribute to such recoveries.
The study gives the theoretical justification for the per capita growth equations using Solovian model (1956) and its factor accumulation assumptions. The different forms of the per capita growth ...equation is used to test for 'conditional convergence' hypotheses and also work out the speed of conditional convergence for EU, East Asian and South Asian regions together from 1961-2001. Conditional convergence is prevalent among almost all pairs of regions in our sample except East Asian and South Asian nations together. Speed of conditional convergence ranges from 0.2% in an year to 22%. Countries that are poor relative to their own steady state do tend to grow more rapidly. It does not mean that all countries in the world are converging to the same steady state, only that they are converging to their own steady states (conditional convergence)