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A burgeoning literature in labor economics is focused on modeling employer labor market power, generally finding nontrivial estimates of monopsony power. A smaller literature also simultaneously incorporates product market power. Deb, Eeckhout, Patel, and Warren (2024) is an example of applying an oligopoly‐oligopsony model to the U.S. labor market, arguing for important effects on wage levels and inequality from rising market power. I support combining IO and labor as a fruitful way of studying wages and business dynamism, but argue for looking more broadly at (i) differential degrees of employer power in labor and product markets; (ii) investigating the dynamic sources of markups (e.g., through innovation), and (iii) considering wage bargaining models, not just wage posting models, which have some starkly different implications for wage setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the introduction of the UK Gender Pay Gap Reporting legislation to large firms, defined as over 250 employees, we use linked employee–employer panel data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings to explore pre‐legislation variation in the gender pay gap by firm size. In doing so, we contribute to the evidence on the relationship between two prominent empirical regularities in the labour economics literature, namely the gender pay gap and the firm‐size wage premium. We find that both the raw and adjusted gender pay gaps increase with firm size in the UK private sector, even after controlling for unobserved worker heterogeneity, consistent with the legislation being targeted effectively. However, this conclusion changes after accounting for unobserved firm‐level heterogeneity. Large firms have smaller within‐firm raw gender pay gaps and similar adjusted gender pay gaps when compared to smaller firms. Our findings are not specific to the current definition of large firms but hold more generally, including at alternative proposed size thresholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic efficiency is the ultimate goal of all markets, including the electricity market. Several technical and pecuniary restrictions known as externalities in economics literature can significantly affect the economic efficiency of the electricity market. Negative externalities resulting from the operational restrictions of generation units are inherent to electricity markets. In this paper, after reviewing the effects of externalities on the day‐ahead electricity markets' economic efficiency using a unit commitment‐based model, an innovative and theoretically efficient service‐based procedure aimed at internalizing negative externalities in the day‐ahead electricity markets is presented. In this way, a new service procured by the energy storage system to provide energy interchange possibilities in the electricity market is introduced. The proposed service uses both price and quantity adjustment methods to internalize externalities. A new discriminatory method for pricing the service and a bi‐level optimization problem for determining the capacity of the energy storage system required to provide the service are considered. The consideration of the proposed method facilitates reaching the first‐best optimal market solution by alleviating negative externalities existing in the sub‐optimal second‐best solution in the presence of generation sector operational constraints. Numerical case studies demonstrate the functioning of the proposed externalities internalization scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Regional Science Policy & Practice is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sufficientarianism is a prominent approach to distributive justice in political philosophy and in policy analyses. However, it is virtually absent from the formal normative economics literature. We analyze sufficientarianism axiomatically in the context of the allocation of 0–1 normalized well‐being in society. We present three characterizations of the core sufficientarian criterion, which counts the number of agents who attain a "good enough" level of well‐being. The main characterization captures the "hybrid" nature of the criterion, which embodies at the same time a threshold around which the worst off in society is prioritized, and an indifference to equality in other regions. The other two characterizations relate sufficientarianism, respectively, to a liberal principle of noninterference and to a classic neutrality property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Economics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A large economics literature has debated the best formula to estimate a cost‐of‐living index (COLI). This study shows that formula does not matter for many purposes for an index chained at a monthly frequency once chain drift has been removed. Spurious chain drift is removed with a new method revealing the large majority of the difference between the CPI‐U and the C‐CPI‐U (a COLI) is due to the CPI‐U weights effectively chaining at the biennial frequency, rather than the difference in formula assumptions. This sufficiently justifies the C‐CPI‐U and similar chained indexes while also showing their assumptions are not critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the effect of rainfall on agricultural output and democratization in the world's most agricultural countries. As in the agricultural economics literature, we find that the relationship between rainfall and agricultural output has an inverted U‐shape, as agriculture is harmed by both droughts and very wet conditions. We also find the effect of rainfall on agricultural output to be transitory. The relationship between rainfall and democratization is U‐shaped in the short run, and this effect persists in the long run. Hence democratic transitions outlast the (transitory) rainfall shocks that started the democratization process. The U‐shaped relationship between rainfall and democratization is consistent with rainfall affecting democratization through its (inverted‐U‐shaped) effect on agricultural output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast majority of the wildlife valuation literature focuses on entire populations or substantial changes in those populations (e.g., 25% or more). The policy questions that motivated these existing studies differ considerably from the question of values for individual animals. Compensation for poaching incidents or accidental death of individual animals, as well as analyses of regulatory actions affecting a small number of animals, require economic value estimates for individual animals that are almost entirely missing from the economics literature. In the absence of value estimates for individual animals, wildlife managers are forced to rely on proxy measures that have little to no basis in economic valuation. This study presents one of the first applications of contingent valuation focused on the total economic value of an individual animal. In contrast to the existing literature on preservation values, this involves a unique study design to focus the scenario on animals at the individual level. Our valuation study takes place in the novel setting of "virtual tourists" who watch live animal webcams and interact and connect with the good in question. Results suggest that preservation values for individual animals can be quite high. The range of preservation values for one brown bear is estimated at $70–$140 per person based on a parametric spike model and non‐parametric Turnbull and Kristrӧm estimators. The valuation approach illustrated in this article can be useful for collecting compensation for incidents of poaching, destruction of habitat, or evaluating the costs and benefits of regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilizes a political economy framework to examine how FDA regulations impacted the U.S. healthcare sector's ability to address COVID‐19. I specifically examine the developing COVID‐19 testing, the approval of the medication remdesivir, and COVID‐19 vaccines. By examining periods before and after the FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs), my analysis finds that the FDA's regulations enacted before the COVID‐19 pandemic began strongly restricted clinician and patient access to COVID‐19 testing, remdesivir treatment, and approving vaccines. After the FDA issued EUAs, the healthcare sector quickly adopted COVID‐19 testing and remdesivir with little evidence of negative consequences. These findings contribute to the economics literature examining the FDA and contemporary COVID‐19 policy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether individuals' cultural background affects their housing investment decisions, drawing inferences from property location choices, and transaction prices in Australia. We propose a novel measure of cultural distance for each homebuyer–neighborhood pair, adopting the six‐dimensional cultural framework of Hofstede. Our measure captures interethnicity similarity and thus measures the cultural similarity of each buyer and neighborhood pair at a more granular level. Utilizing housing transaction data of a culturally diverse city Sydney, Australia, we find that buyers are more likely to buy properties in neighborhoods with a shorter cultural distance to their culture of origin and are willing to pay a premium for properties in those locations, consistent with buyers' preference for cultural proximity. Further, we show that cultural proximity preference is stronger for ethnicities from recent migration waves, particularly Asia. Our findings are generalizable to other regions with ethnic aggregations and offer new insights into the growing literature on culture and household finance as well as the urban economics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider discrete‐time dynamic principal–agent problems with continuous choice sets and potentially multiple agents. We prove the existence of a unique solution for the principal's value function only assuming continuity of the functions and compactness of the choice sets. We do this by a contraction mapping theorem and so also obtain a convergence result for the value function iteration. To numerically compute a solution for the problem, we have to solve a collection of static principal–agent problems at each iteration. As a result, in the discrete‐time setting solving the static problem is the difficult step. If the agent's expected utility is a rational function of his action, then we can transform the bi‐level optimization problem into a standard nonlinear program. The final results of our solution method are numerical approximations of the policy and value functions for the dynamic principal–agent model. We illustrate our solution method by solving variations of two prominent social planning models from the economics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impact of country‐level environmental performance and national culture on the stock price crash risk of renewable energy firms. Employing a large sample of 626 renewable energy firms across 31 countries, we find a significant nonlinear relationship between country‐level environmental performance and crash risk. National culture dimensions are found to strongly predict the crash risk of renewable energy firms, particularly after the global financial crisis. On the contrary, national culture dimensions and environmental policies are observed to not exert any significance in explaining the crash risk of fossil fuel firms. Our results are robust with respect to alternative measures of stock price crash risk and the endogeneity of national culture dimensions. Overall, the findings of this paper contribute to the environmental economics literature by providing new evidence regarding the role of societal and environmental factors in explaining the stock price crash risk of energy firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Economics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the literature on monetary economics, there is the 'inflationary bias' result which predicts that the rate of inflation will be biased towards a higher level under discretionary monetary policy than under a rule‐based policy regime. It is established that a credible nominal target can eliminate this 'inflationary bias'. In this paper, we examine the case of nominal GDP targeting, which is a rule‐based monetary regime. Depending on the degree of conservativeness by the central bank, we show in a stylized model the choice of different combination of inflation and real GDP targets can still result in an 'inflationary bias', and there also exists the possibility of a 'dis‐inflationary bias'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new definition of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis with respect to information, which is more formal and precise than those of Rubinstein [13], Fama [4], Jensen [6], and Beaver [1], and which fits well as a framework for interpreting the many tests of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis in the literature. Security markets are here considered "efficient with respect to information set " if and only if revealing to all agents would change neither equilibrium prices nor portfolios. In addition to other desirable features, this definition has the "subset property": efficiency with respect to implies efficiency with respect to any subset of . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a general equilibrium model with endogenous stochastic production and establishes that the equilibrium interest rate can he constant in a closed production economy when the preferences are represented by constant absolute risk aversion utility functions. The results in this paper and their limitations are compared and contrasted with related contributions in the financial economics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical analysis of mergers has a great deal of significance independent of the fact that, when markets are perfect and in equilibrium, incentives for further merger activities are, by definition, exhausted temporarily. Two originally separated gases in a closed container will get mixed up and reach an equilibrirum state after one removes the partition. But that is hardly any reason for neglecting the investigation of how and why they get mixed up. It is in light of this observation that an attempt is made in the present article to reexamine a purely financial rationale for merger, which has already attracted a lot of attention in the finance literature. By drastically simplifying our considerations, we are able to arrive at three general conclusions on the basis of structured models. First, co-insurance, one of the many things that take place in a merger, has a cost and benefit structure to an equity class that can in principle be delineated. The pure cost of co-insurance to an equity class, if perceived, consists of that part of the expected residue used to subsidize the loan class of the other firm at the pre-coinsurance rate when default occurs in the latter. The pure benefit of co-insurance to an equity class is made possible by the concessions, if any, in contractual loan rates of both firms following the co-insurance. It is argued that the source of this benefit is a far cry from that resulting from preferential tax treatment of the allegedly enlarged "debt capacity" (however defined) of the participating firms. Second, residue redistribution effect in a merger must not be ignored. The simple but essential point is that it, again largely a matter of perception, may be regarded as working for or against the interest of a particular equity class. To that extent, therefore, any conclusion based on co-insurance effect alone is weakened. Third, to dispose of the misplaced emphasis on statistical correlation of revenues, it is reasoned that the really... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The description and theory of regulation have received a great deal of attention in the Economic Literature in recent years. Most of the literature dealing with regulation has been concerned with the impact of regulation on some particular aspect of firm behavior, usually in a single period setting. Little attention has been paid to the construction of a total model of the optimum financing, investment, and valuation of the firm under regulation. The purpose of this paper is to construct such a model which, in addition, captures the intertemporal interdependencies of optimum firm behavior. The model will be used to derive both the optimum behavior of a regulated firm over time and to show the impact of changes in the allowable rate of return (regulatory rate) on this behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a general-purpose citation-indexing system for finance journals, with the primary objective of illustrating the cross-disciplinary impact of journals of finance. A brief historical overview of the growth of professional literature is presented, and it is suggested that writers of financial literature often use only a few sources in their research. The citation-indexing system introduced by the authors can assist researchers in bibliographic searches, identification of widely used finance journals, and the selection of appropriate journals for their needs.

The author discusses his views on the value of economic and finance literature as an aid to decision-making. He believes the literature tends to promote policies that are either impractical or informed by inadequate analysis, and that rigorous application of economic techniques to apparently solvable problems is limited. He also discerns too great a willingness on the part of writers to publish work of merely academic interest, without expending the effort to determine whether it is applicable to real-world problems, or how it can be made so. Three examples are detailed to illustrate his contentions.

The article presents the financial report of the executive secretary and treasurer of the American Finance Association (AFA) for the year ending September 30, 1991. The article reports that the AFA celebrated it's Golden Anniversary Annual Meeting in the year 1992, and that editor Rene Stulz has commissioned a number of review articles for the "Journal of Finance." The article states that the AFA is sponsoring research on ways to help start academic finance associations in eastern Europe and Russia. The article states that the AFA will publish an updated finance literature index, and will be exploring additional outlets for publishing some of the manuscripts received that had to be turned away because of lack of space.

This study provides comprehensive publications performance data over a 25-year period for finance doctorates. These data indicate that publishing one article per year in any finance journal (or finance, accounting, economics, or business journal) over any prolonged period of time is a truly remarkable feat, met by only 5% of the graduates. Tenure screens combining various quantity and quality requirements are examined to assess their ability to predict future publication productivity. Faculty and administrators seeking defensible benchmarks for evaluating faculty research productivity in finance will find that these data and results are particularly useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the term structure of interest rates in a multiperiod production and exchange economy with incomplete information. Unable to observe their stochastic investment opportunities, investors engage in dynamic Bayesian inference. This results in the endogenous identification of a more complex production function which generates a richer term structure, resembling the one that actual market prices imply. In addition, this paper introduces a characteristic function of the term structure and demonstrates that, in contrast with a fully observable economy, the widely investigated expectations hypothesis holds true only if interest rates are nonstochastic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an inventory of research on the U.S. capital market from 1954 to 1963 that was compiled by a committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Many ongoing research projects related to various aspects of the U.S. economy are, the article notes, being undertaken by agencies such as the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Commission on Money and Credit, and Harvard University. A bibliography is also included in the article that illustrates articles and books on the capital market and financial institutions, including the book "Individual's Saving: Volume and Composition," by I. Friend and V. Natrella, the article "Saving in the National Economy: From the National Income Perspective," by E. F. Denison, and "Variation in Bank Asset Portfolios," by R. McEvoy.

The list of books received includes: "Prices, Income, and Public Policy," by C. L. Allen, J. M. Buchanan, and M. R. Colberg; "Changes in the Structure of Texas Commercial Banking, 1946-1956," by William Hubert Baughn; and "The Job of the Federal Executive," by Marver H. Bernstein.

We exploit cross-sectional and temporal differences in search intensity in order to examine the relationship between search costs and price dispersion using a hand-collected panel data set from Jerusalem's Shuk Mahane Yehuda outdoor market. We present empirical evidence that price dispersion increases with the cost of search using several different measures of price dispersion; however, our interpretation of this finding is sensitive to the search proxy in question. We also address several acute difficulties facing empiricists seeking to test theoretical price-dispersion models in which consumers are heterogeneous in their search behavior. ( JEL L11, L13) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of books related to finance and economics including "Short-Term Capital Movements Under the Pre-1914 Gold Standard," by Arthur I. Bloomfield, "The Small Business Executive Decision Simulation: Administrator's Manual," by the Bureau of Business Research, and "An Analysis of the Teen-Age Market," by Philip R. Cateora.

A vast theoretical literature explores inefficient market structures in free-entry equilibria, and previous empirical work demonstrated that excessive entry may obtain in local radio markets. We extend that literature by relaxing the assumption that stations are symmetric, allowing for endogenous horizontal and (unobserved) vertical station differentiation. We find that, in most broadcasting formats, a social planner who takes into account the welfare of market participants eliminates 50%-60% of the observed stations. In 80%-94.9% of markets where high-quality stations are observed, welfare could be unambiguously improved by converting one such station into low-quality broadcasting, suggesting local overprovision of quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We disentangle the contribution of unobserved heterogeneity in demand and productivity to firm growth using Italian data containing unique information on firm-level prices. Demand and total factor productivity (TFP) shocks are equally important in shaping firm growth. However, the pass-through of shocks to growth is highly incomplete, more so for productivity shocks. We argue that incompleteness and asymmetry of the pass-through can be explained by frictions that, unlike those studied by the literature on factor misallocation, have differential effects according to the nature of the shock. We propose hurdles to firms' ability to reorganize as an example of these types of frictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop an equilibrium framework that relaxes the standard assumption that people have a correctly specified view of their environment. Each player is characterized by a (possibly misspecified) subjective model, which describes the set of feasible beliefs over payoff-relevant consequences as a function of actions. We introduce the notion of a Berk-Nash equilibrium: Each player follows a strategy that is optimal given her belief, and her belief is restricted to be the best fit among the set of beliefs she considers possible. The notion of best fit is formalized in terms of minimizing the Kullback- Leibler divergence, which is endogenous and depends on the equilibrium strategy profile. Standard solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium and self-confirming equilibrium constitute special cases where players have correctly specified models. We provide a learning foundation for Berk-Nash equilibrium by extending and combining results from the statistics literature on misspecified learning and the economics literature on learning in games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of civil wars-and the massive human and economic costs that they impose-has attracted the attention of many scholars, including economists. This article briefly introduces three strands in the economics literature on civil war-causes, consequences and solutions-and identifies potential gaps in the existing literature which may be useful to students who are keen on pursuing further research on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semidefinite matrices often arise in economic models, usually as Hessian matrices of convex or concave functions. Anytime the matrix can be semidefinite, rather than definite, the task of characterizing it is burdensome because extant results require that all principal minors be signed. A theorem is presented that shows it is sufficient to sign only selected principal minors when the matrix has a definite submatrix. This theorem is particularly useful in duality applications. The theorem also provides relatively easy proof of the standard relationship between semidefiniteness and principal minors. (JEL C02) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are several factors that affect a firm's ability to successfully integrate internally and externally for organizational improvement. This study seeks to understand the relationship between a firm's strategy, its supply chain integration efforts, and firm performance. Leveraging the theoretical lens of structure-conduct-performance from the industrial organization economics literature, and utilizing both archival and survey data, we describe how firms may align their internal and external supply chain integration strategies with customers and suppliers. In doing so, these internal and external integration strategies affect the firm's ability to respond to customer demand, which then impacts operational and financial performance. Our work provides theoretical and empirical evidence of these relationships and thus extends prior strategic supply chain integration literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to offer a revision of the corporate social performance (CSP) model. CSP exemplifies how corporate social responsibility translates into an organization's practice by focusing on three key features of performance: principles, processes and outcomes. However, the development of the model has not kept pace with the literature on social and environmental responsibility. This study builds on an argument that if corporate social responsibility in general - in which CSP plays an important role - is to respond to the challenges of sustainable development, the CSP of businesses could be more profoundly planned in order to design knowledge outcomes that contribute to meeting those challenges. The paper thus answers the recent call for the development of a CSP model by revising some of the key elements in the existing model and also by adding a knowledge creation dimension. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use quantile regression and counterfactual decomposition methods to explore gender gaps across the earning distribution for a sample of full-time employees in the Australian private sector. Significant evidence of a self-selection effect for the women into full-time employment (or of components of self-selection related to observable or unobservable characteristics) is, interestingly, not found to be relevant in the Australian context. Substantial gender earnings gaps (and glass ceilings) are established, however, with these earnings gaps found to be predominantly related to the women receiving lower returns to their observable characteristics than the men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Regional Science Policy & Practice is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article adds to the regulatory compliance literature through the theoretical development and experimental testing of two endogenous audit mechanisms that use contemporaneous relative comparisons, based on disclosed information or imperfect signals of compliance effort, to generate a compliance competition among agents. This type of audit mechanism has some advantages over the more widely studied dynamic audit mechanisms that condition an agent's audit probability on past compliance, and provides an alternative explanation for the stylized fact, in many settings, that most agents are compliant most of the time even though audit rates and expected penalties are low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the genealogy of the theoretical thought about services in economic and geographical economic literature, I argue in this article that in today's Service World it is highly important to develop an integrated approach that sees both consumption and production as impacting work relationships within legal thought. The current structure of labour law, which is based on the Fordist model of employment, is centred mainly on the production side, thus creating an incongruity between labour law and services. I propose thinking about work relations through a new framework -'the nexus of service work'- that incorporates consumerism into the legal thought of work relationships, detaching it from the Fordist model of employment to achieve a more attuned approach to today's Service World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent business literature argues that several incentives drive firms to cooperate with government environmental regulators and regulation without pressure from the government. This study explores and tests such arguments using a metric called regulatory intensity. The study uses survey data from the radioactive scrap metal industry. The findings challenge the recent literature that ‘going green pays’. The study found that strong government actions (regulatory intensity) are related to firm cooperation. Firms seem to adopt cooperative strategies when coerced to do so by the government. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about smart subsidies for conservation is presented. It discusses smart subsidy to continue the creation of contiguous habitat, creating a network between neighboring landowners through agglomeration bonus payment. The paper is based on the experimental economics literature on smart markets, in which exchange institution was designed smart.

This economics literature review article addresses important developments in the literature during calendar year 2007. This is not a list or detailed documentation of papers that were published during 2007. Instead, the discussion focuses on two broad categories. The first category addresses the literature either directly or indirectly related to environmental policies and sustainable development or is mainly concerned with the following subjects: sustainable development; watershed management; climate change and disaster risk management; environmental policies management; and fisheries development. The second category addresses literature related to economic policies. This section addresses the following; political economy and conflict; water supply policies; water consumption; water price regulation and valuation. It should be noted that assigning articles to these categories was done to help organize this review, but points made in many of the articles discussed below relate to many topics across categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents various reviews on the periodical literature concerning economic history that was published in 2006. Significant themes that were addressed in the year's released literature include population studies, overseas trading, early modern economy studies, gender studies such as the investment behavior of women, banking and institutional reform, and studies on the interaction of Great Britain in the first era of globalization. According to one reviewer, the discipline of economic history has declined formally, while social and cultural history have increased in popularity as disciplines.

The article presents a description of the "Australian Economic Review," which published its 150th issue in June of 2005. The Review was initially published in the late 1960s, and was modelled after the "National Institute Economic Review," produced by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in London. Over the years, the aims, format and content of the "Australian Economic Review" have changed. Economics as a discipline has changed and become more technical and specialized over the last 40 years. The quantity of social and economic data have increased rapidly and accessibility to it has improved dramatically with advances in information technology. Publication has changed and affected the way academic journals are produced and circulated. Academics have tailored their activities to comply with standards set by governments and universities to measure academic performance.

This paper identifies the extent to which James Buchanan's interpretation of Knut Wicksell’s unanimity rule, as spelled out in the second essay in Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen (1896), has come to dominate the public economics literature despite competing with the interpretation offered by Richard Musgrave. A brief summary of the differing interpretations is offered. Citation analysis is used to examine the frequency with which Wicksell is cited and by whom. The sociology of the economics profession and avenues for the dissemination of ideas are examined to understand the dominance of Buchanan's particular interpretation and application of the unanimity rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rewards for publications in good economics journals are very high, and submission fees and other monetary costs associated with submitting an existing manuscript are low. Consequently, the editorial delay (especially the first-response time—the time until the first editorial decision), by postponing monetary rewards to publication, constitutes the major submission cost (from the author's perspective). Reducing the delay will induce many additional submissions of low-quality papers to good journals, increasing significantly the workload of editors and referees. Moreover, the rejection rate will increase and cause papers to be rejected more times before publication, offsetting at least some of the shorter first-response times. As a result, the efforts of many editors to reduce the editorial delay, although attracting more submissions to their journals, may have adverse effects from a social perspective, and the optimal delay might be longer than the current average of four months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between output volatility and long-run growth for 18 developed countries between 1880 and 1990. The analysis builds on the existing literature by decomposing output growth volatility into expected and unexpected components and then examining whether the types of volatility have different effects on long-run growth. The results are consistent with the view that unexpected volatility reduces long-run growth and that expected volatility increases long-run growth. The results also suggest that the combined effect of expected and unexpected volatility is to reduce long-run growth for most countries and most time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald F. Gordon hypothesized that mathematical complexity in economics is inversely related to operationalism. Here we (i) operationalize Gordon's hypothesis, (ii) test for the significance of trends in complexity for the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, and (iii) test Gordon's hypothesis by conducting analyses of the contents of articles from the American Economic Review (AER), as well as the contents of articles citing the AER articles. The results do not refute the hypothesis that complexity crowds out operationalism in economics. Additionally, the presence of significant, positive trends toward complexity suggests that the magnitude of the crowding out is on the rise in these journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the key characteristics of intellectual property rights, and the particular problems they pose for market processes. The question of whether the legal recognition of rights to intellectual property involves the creation of monopoly rights is the subject of some dispute. Some commentators treat this as an issue merely of semantics with no policy import. Other commentators regard the issue of classification as important. Developments in the literature of economics have done much to clarify the types of monopoly problems that may be associated with legal recognition of rights to intellectual property. Property rights are defined as the power to exclude others. The implication is that if someone wants access to the property held by others, then these rights must be purchased in a voluntary transaction in which the value of the rights is agreed between the buyer and seller. In general, the holder of property rights on physical items can readily exclude others from the use of those items. In contrast, holders of rights over intellectual property have more limited exclusionary provisions. One aspect of intellectual property which distinguishes these rights from physical assets is the difficulty in confining use. To address the particular limitations of enforcement, intellectual property rights are generally directed at their potential commercial use of intellectual property rather than their actual use.

In her recent survey, Carola Frege concludes that economic analysis of the works council has reached a ‘dead end’. The present paper offers a very different assessment. The evolving economic literature is shown to follow three distinct phases, the last of which contains some of the most positive evaluations to date of works council impact on establishment performance. Although these estimates are exaggerated, and the effects of works councils are likely to be small on average, the new literature redirects our research focus towards factors producing swings around this average, including differences in works council types and their workplace environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]