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A recent body of work has shown that quality of national institutions that enforce written contracts plays an important role in shaping a country’s comparative advantage. The current paper contributes to this literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms through which institutional frictions affect the pattern of aggregate trade flow by distinguishing its effect on the intensive and extensive margins. We find that better contracting institutions not only increase the probability of exporting (the extensive margin) but also enhance the export sales after entry (the intensive margin), particularly in industries where relationship-specific investments are most important. With around two-third to three-fourth share (depending on the definition used), the contribution of institutions along the intensive margin dominates that along the extensive margin. The benefits of improved institutions, particularly via the intensive margin, favor the less developed countries over the more developed ones. In addition, better contracting institutions increase the probability of survival of export products in more contract-intensive industries in particular. These findings are robust to measuring the intensive and extensive margins using a more granular export data based on firm-level aggregates, as well as the variety and destination based definitions.

This study provides empirical evidence and develops a model that captures the complex intra-household bargaining interactions and gender-based intergenerational occupational mobility. Using panel data from Nigeria, our estimates show that greater intra-household female bargaining power leads to greater intergenerational occupational mobility for sons more than daughters. Similarly, the median age at first marriage has a positive impact on occupational mobility for both daughters and sons. However, benefit is larger for sons. In the model, parental gender bias is modeled as non-pecuniary (psychic) cost – a representation of parents’ pessimistic attitude towards their children’s adulthood outcomes – which negatively affects the marginal benefit of investing in children’s human capital. The decision of parents is critical in determining children’s mobility and becomes the basis of gender-based differences in human capital investment and intergenerational persistence.

International audience; Besides the dreadful direct effects, enduring epidemics like HIV/AIDS induce much more subtle effects in the economy, principally via labor productivity and factor accumulation.Concerning the former, the impact of morbidity on effective labor has been recognized and accounted for since the early work of Over (1992) and Cuddington and Hancock (1994).The impact of mortality shocks on savings, and therefore on factor accumulation, has also been documented in this early literature, with an emphasis on the detrimental role of the inducedhealth expenditures. Recently, Asiedu, Jin, and Kanyama (2015) show that HIV/AIDS has a negative but diminishing effect on foreign direct investment (FDI), and this adverse effect occurseven when the prevalent HIV rate is low. In contrast, the consequences of HIV/AIDS on human capital accumulation have been more rarely treated. In particular, its impact on schoolingtime n generally omitted in the macroeconomic literature. Ferreira, Pessôa, and Dos Santos (2011) is an exception. The inherent mechanism is known as the Ben Porath mechanism (Ben Porath 1967): a downward trendin life expectancy following mortality shocks reduces the profitability of schooling, leading to a decline of human capital accumulation in the medium and long run. Boucekkine, de la Croix, and Licandro (2002) have proposed a theory ofendogenous growth based on the Ben-Porath mechanism. Notice also that the same essential argument (that shorter time horizons discourage investment) can be applied to physical capitalaccumulation; the latter may collapse not only because of the massive increase in health expenditures undermining savings as in the early literature but also via this indirect mechanism. Bothchannels are taken into account by Freire (2004) in her analysis of saving behavior in South Africa after the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

This paper studies the diffusion of products and behaviour with coordination effects through social networks when agents are myopic best responders. We develop a new network measure, the contagion threshold, that determines when a p-dominant action – an action that is a best response when adopted by at least proportion p of an agent's opponents – spreads to the whole population starting from a group of players whose size is smaller than half and independent of the population size. We show that a p-dominant action spreads to the whole network whenever the contagion threshold of that network is greater or equal to p. We then show that in settings where agents regularly or occasionally experiment and choose non-optimal actions, there exists a threshold level of experimentation below which a p-dominant action is chosen with the highest probability in the long run. This result implies that targeted contagion, a network-wide diffusion of actions initiated by targeting agents, is justified even in settings where agents' decisions are noisy.

We study dynamics of interactions among economic growth, population, and environmental quality when stochastic shocks in these systems display long-memory property. We make two important contributions. First, we show that the long-memory persistence in economic growth is determined jointly by the convergence speed of shocks in both environmental quality and population. Second, by simulating a modified Solow-Swan economy we demonstrate that the convergence-speed of shocks in these systems significantly affects the long-run growth trajectory of output. Our empirical examination evince that adjustment of output to long-run equilibrium is very slow, thanks to the slowly dissipating population and pollution shocks.

This paper employs nationally representative household survey data on parents of adult individuals to analyze the intergenerational transmission of education in nine Sub-Saharan African countries. The paper provides the levels, trends, and patterns of intergenerational persistence of educational attainment over 50 years, with a special focus on gender differences. The study finds a declining cohort trend in the intergenerational educational persistence in all the countries, particularly after the 1960s. The increase in educational mobility coincides with drastic changes in educational systems and a huge investment in human capital accumulation in the region following independence. Nevertheless, the education of parents' remains a strong determinant of educational outcomes among the children in all the countries. Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, and Uganda experienced the highest intergenerational mobility, and the Comoros and Madagascar the lowest. In all the sample countries, more mobility is observed in the lower tail of the distribution of education. Intergenerational educational persistence is strong from mothers to children, and the effect is more pronounced among daughters than sons. The results highlight the need for targeted redistributive policies that improve intergenerational mobility in the region.

We provide a reappraisal of income convergence across European regions over the last two decades by using a semiparametric partially linear model to approximate the relationship between the average growth rate of GDP per capita and the initial GDP per capita. Estimation results point out both country heterogeneity and non-linearity in the convergence process. The findings suggest that low income regions, in particular those from new adhesion countries, diverge while medium income regions converge and that there is no evidence of convergence for high income regions.

This paper examines the relationship between the environmental and economic performance of firms in the European paper manufacturing industry. It initially discusses possible functional relationships between environmental and economic performance rooted in different theoretical frameworks and links these to recent empirical and theoretical analyses of the Porter hypothesis. Following this, it reports the results of an empirical study carried out in the European paper industry. Findings fit better with 'traditionalist' reasoning about the relationship between environmental and economic performance, which predicts the relationship to be uniformly negative. In particular they confirm the necessity for a more differentiated view of the Porter hypothesis. This paper examines the relationship between the environmental and economic performance of firms in the European paper manufacturing industry. It initially discusses possible functional relationships between environmental and economic performance rooted in different theoretical frameworks and links these to recent empirical and theoretical analyses of the Porter hypothesis. Following this, it reports the results of an empirical study carried out in the European paper industry. Findings fit better with 'traditionalist' reasoning about the relationship between environmental and economic performance, which predicts the relationship to be uniformly negative. In particular they confirm the necessity for a more differentiated view of the Porter hypothesis.

This paper explores the relationship between the growth rates of per capita income and age- structured population in a non-parametric setting. Analysis in this framework provides us with new insights about the interaction structure: significant non-linear relation between the two and interesting ’direct’ and ’feedback’ effects on growth. Nonlinearity is found to be a major source of growth fluctuations in OECD and non-OECD countries.

We first provide an empirical sstudy of the energy-saving technological progress on the ENERDATA database. Energy intensity is shown to decrease over the period 1971-1999 in OECD countries, indicating a significant energy-saving technical progress trend. We also show via semiparametric partially linear estimations that : (i) this trend is positively correlated with the investment rate, and (ii) the marginal productivity of investment has accelerated in the sub-period 1985-1999 compared to 1971-1984. Second, we build a general equilibrium vintage capital model with embodied energy-saving technical progress to formalize these findings. In this set-up, we study to which extent a steady increase in the marginal productivity of investment and/or scrapping subsidies could compensate the output loss due to a cut in energy use. The latter fiscal policy is shown to be particularly inefficient in this respect, even under rapid energy-saving technical progress. In the end, our model predicts that the implementation of Kyoto-like protocols in the computers age is much less painful than what it could have been two decades ago.

Cet article étudie l'hypothèse d'utilité relative selon laquelle l'utilité de l'individu dépend non seulement de ses propres caractéristiques mais aussi de termes interdépendants. Nous utilisons les données de la base German Socio-Economic Panel pour étudier la relation entre la satisfaction dans la vie (mesure subjective de l'utilité), le revenu et le revenu de référence. Ce dernier est défini comme le revenu moyen du Länder où réside l'individu. Nous retenons une spécification de type probit ordonné sur données de panel avec deux types d'effets spécifiques aléatoires : un effet individuel et un effet de ménage. Les résultats d'estimation confirment l'hypothèse d'utilité relative. L'hypothèse de la séparabilité de la fonction d'utilité par rapport au revenu et au revenu de référence est rejetée.

This paper examines the empirical interplay between economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions using panel data.Relying on nonparametric methods, we find evidence supporting specifications which assume the constancy of the relationship between per capita CO2 emissions and per capita GDP during the period of the study. Moreover, the usually adopted polynomial functional form is rejected against our nonparametric modelling. It is shown that the relationship between gas emissions and GDP displays more complex patterns, despite its monotonous shape, than the well-known Kuznets curve obtained from ad hoc parametric specifications. The economic development process has a negative effect on gas emissions, especially for the early and the advanced stages of development. As a result, developed countries as well as developing countries should make efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.

This paper examines the relationship between the environmental and economic performance of firms in the European paper manufacturing industry. Based on panel data, it first investigates the relationship separately, with the analysis based on four hypotheses formulated with regard to country influence, process influence and firm size influence on environmental and economic performance. Hypotheses are tested using pooled regression and a panel regression framework with random firm and temporal effects. The main results of this analysis based on separated regressions are that (i) only for a direct comparison between the UK and Germany, country effects are found to be consistent with the hypotheses, i.e. German firms have better environmental, but worse economic performance than UK firms, (ii) there is a significant sub-sector effect on environmental performance only, (iii) effectively no significant firm size effect can be detected. Subsequent to analysing the relationship separately, the paper estimates the determinants of the relationship between environmental and economic performance using three simultaneous equations systems. It was found that for the system with return on sales as economic performance variable, and an environmental performance index as environmental performance variable, a significant and positive regression coefficient was estimated for the asset-turnover ratio, as well as significant and negative coefficients for the dummy variables representing the industrial and mixed sub-sector. For the system with return on capital employed and the environmental index, significant and positive coefficients were found for the latter, both linear and squared. This last finding fits better with "traditionalist" reasoning about the relationship between environmental and economic performance, which predicts the relationship to be uniformly negative.

This paper considers estimating general spatial autoregressive models using the generalized method of moments (GMM). I propose nonparametric estimates of the optimal instruments based on conditional second moment restrictions. I show that these instruments are optimal over all possible instruments, especially over those usually suggested in a spatial context. I provide a nonparametric estimator of sample autocovariances function for irregularly spaced spatial processes, and I show that this estimator converges in probability. I then derive the consistency in norm L_2 of the resulting asymptotic variance matrix estimator. Finally, the asymptotic distribution of the GMM estimator is stated.

We propose an empirical application of lattice models to actual household-level data based on the generalized method of moments. We take advantage of the two dimensional structure of panel data to construct a lattice specification. Then, a class of nonparametric, positive semidefinite covariance matrix estimators that allow for a general form of spatial dependence characterized by a metric of economic distance is introduced. This framework is applied to estimating spatial patterns in the residential demand for drinking water. Estimation results indicate that accounting for spatial dependence yields efficient estimate of the asymptotic variance matrix. Compared to non-spatial strategies, spatial dependence implies higher standard errors for all parameter estimates so as to strongly modify patterns of significance.

This study explores spatial regimes variation and the impact of public sector wa ter pricing for municipality aggregate residential water demand including electricity price effe cts. I compare estimations from two cross-sections (1988.1 and 1993.1) on a French lattice samp le, and propose a parametric spatial autoregressive regime switching model where water a verage price is approximated by a linear spline based on nonparametric regressions. I f ind evidence of spatial dependence. Consumers respond to both water and electricity average p rice. Changes in electricity price induce modifications of water consumption distribut ion according to patterns of water use. Public sector pricing results in shifts of role in reg imes between periods.

Cet article étudie la relation empirique entre la déforestation, la croissance économique et la population à partir d'un échantillon de 85 pays en voie de développement. Nous utilisons plusieurs spécifications d'un modèle de panel à effets fixes avec diverses structures du terme d'erreur. L'étude ne met pas en évidence une courbe environnementale de Kuznets de forme U inversée décrivant la relation entre le taux de déforestation et le revenu par tête. A l'inverse, nous obtenons une relation de forme U. Les résultats suggèrent qu'une augmentation du taux de croissance du revenu par tête permet de réduire le taux de déforestation. Finalement, nous montrons que la pression démographique peut amplifier le processus de déforestation.