We investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions. We identify breakthrough inventions as the top 1% of US inventions for a ...technology during 1975–1984 in terms of subsequent citations. Patenting growth is significantly higher in cities and technologies where breakthrough inventions occur after 1984 relative to peer locations that do not experience breakthrough inventions. This growth differential in turn depends on the mobility of the technology’s labor force, which we model through the extent that technologies depend upon immigrant scientists and engineers. Spatial adjustments are faster for technologies that depend heavily on immigrant inventors. The results qualitatively confirm the mechanism of industry migration proposed in models like Duranton Duranton, G., 2007. Urban evolutions: The fast, the slow, and the still. American Economic Review 97, 197–221.
The full insurance model is tested using data from three poor, high risk villages in the semi-arid tropics of southern India. The model presented here incorporates a number of salient features of the ...actual village economies. Although the model is rejected statistically, it does provide a surprisingly good benchmark. Household consumptions comove with village average consumption. More clearly, household consumptions are not much influenced by contemporaneous own income, sickness, unemployment, or other idiosyncratic shocks, controlling for village consumption (i.e. for village level risk). There is evidence that the landless are less well insured than their village neighbors in one of the three villages.
The underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) that has been widely documented appears to be a short-run phenomenon. Issuing firms during 1975-84 substantially underperformed a sample of ...matching firms from the closing price on the first day of public trading to their three-year anniversaries. There is substantial variation in the underperformance year-to-year and across industries, with companies that went public in high-volume years faring the worst. The patterns are consistent with an IPO market in which (1) investors are periodically overoptimistic about the earnings potential of young growth companies, and (2) firms take advantage of these "windows of opportunity."
Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1977-1984 offers a vivid account of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny's first creative period, during which he recorded eleven albums for the European label ECM. This unique ...music reflects his passionate belief in the need to refashion jazz in ways which allow it to speak powerfully to a new generation, and the book provides a portrait of a fascinating but often overlooked period in jazz history.
Tax competition arguments suggest that governments that operate in an open economy (such as local governments) should not and will not rely on non-benefit taxes, such as the income tax. Yet we ...observe reliance on income taxes by local governments in many countries, and such reliance changes over time. Evidence from a panel data set of 13 OECD countries over the period 1975–1984 suggests that competition between levels of government (resulting in a vertical fiscal externality) and between governments at the same level (resulting in a horizontal fiscal externality) provide some economic rationale for these changes. Moreover, the evidence indicates that the vertical and horizontal fiscal externalities interact. These results have some interesting implications for fiscal policy in the European Union, particularly as the EU continues to evolve. One implication for the EU is that enlargement that increases tax base disparities within the EU (and is not accompanied by an EU-level income tax) will tend to lower national income tax rates, although this must be qualified because it also depends on the mobility of the population. A second implication is that fiscal expansion of the EU to include an EU-level income tax may tend to lower the reliance of national governments on income taxes through the vertical externality, but may also tend to equalize tax bases across countries, and so increase reliance on national income taxes through the horizontal externality.
Ever since Adam Smith, share contracts have been condemned for their lack of incentives. Sharecropping tenants face incentives to undersupply productive inputs since they receive only a fraction of ...the marginal revenue. The empirical literature reports that lands under sharecropping are indeed less productive and employ inputs less intensively than those operated by owners. This paper shows that (1) sharecropping and fixed‐rent tenancy are both associated with low‐quality lands, (2) plots under sharecropping and fixed rent present (on average) the same unconditional productivity, (3) controlling for observed land quality and input use, their average productivities are also identical to those of owner‐operated plots, and (4) the input choices satisfy the same profit maximization conditions for all land contracts. These results challenge the conventional wisdom connecting sharecropping to incentive distortions. They support an alternative view that farmers optimally employ more input resources into good‐quality lands, which are typically managed by owners.
While folklore in finance holds that split valuation effects are due to dividend increases associated with splits, little is known about magnitudes of dividend and nondividend components of split ...announcement effects. We find that splits and dividends are indeed informational substitutes, a notion we characterize more precisely, but a significant portion of split valuation effects, 46% according to our estimates, cannot be attributed to dividend information in splits. Our techniques extend the literature on conditional event-study methods and we illustrate their practical value in testing hypotheses and analyzing data not amenable to analysis by standard procedures.
A significant proportion of migration in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas, is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage. We seek to explain these mobility patterns by ...examining marital arrangements among Indian households. In particular, we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant, dispersed yet kinship-related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks. Analysis of longitudinal South Indian village data lends support to the hypothesis. Marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption. Farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer-distance marriage cum migration. The hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains.
Tax structure in a federation Goodspeed, Timothy J.
Journal of public economics,
03/2000, Letnik:
75, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Does national taxation of a base influence the degree to which the local government will use the same tax base? Does the tax rate chosen by one local government influence the choices made by another ...local government? The theoretical answer to these questions is often in the affirmative because of vertical and horizontal externalities that result when several governments are operating at the same time in a fiscal system. However, little empirical information is available. This paper estimates the impact of horizontal and vertical externalities on the choice of tax rates by local governments operating in a federation. Higher national income tax rates and lower poverty rates are found to lead to lower local income tax rates.
PDF
