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1. The field of biology has seen tremendous technological progress in recent years, fuelled by the exponential growth in processing power and high-level computing, and the rise of global information sharing. Low-cost single-board computers are predicted to be one of the key technological advancements to further revolutionise this field. 2. So far, an overview of current uptake of these devices and a general guide to help researchers integrate them in their work has been missing. In this paper I focus on the most widely used single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi, and review its broad applications and uses across the biological domain. 3. Since its release in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has been increasingly taken up by biologists, in the laboratory, the field and in the classroom, and across a wide range of disciplines. A hugely diverse range of applications exists that ranges from simple solutions to dedicated custom-build devices, including nest-box monitoring, wildlife camera trapping, high-throughput behavioural recording, large-scale plant phenotyping, underwater video surveillance, closed-loop operant learning experiments and autonomous ecosystem monitoring. Despite the breadth of its implementations, the depth of uptake of the Raspberry Pi by the scientific community is still limited. 4. The broad capabilities of the Raspberry Pi, combined with its low cost, ease of use and large user community make it a great research tool for almost any project. To help accelerate the uptake of the Raspberry Pi by the scientific community, I provide detailed guidelines, recommendations and considerations, and 30+ step-by-step guides on a dedicated accompanying website (http://raspberrypi-guide.github.io). I hope this paper will help generate more awareness about the Raspberry Pi among scientists and thereby both fuel the democratisation of science and ultimately help advance our understanding of biology, from the micro- to the macro-scale.

We present a model of market hyper-segmentation, where a monopolist acquires within a short time all information about the preferences of consumers who purchase its vertically differentiated products. The firm offers a new price/quality schedule after each commitment period. Lower consumer types may have an incentive to delay their purchases until next period to obtain a better introductory offer. The monopolist counters this incentive by offering higher informational rents. Considering the dynamic game played by the monopolist and its customers, we find that there is always a Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) in which the firm immediately sells the good to all customers, offering the Mussa-Rosen static equilibrium schedule to first time customers (and getting full commitment profits). However, if the commitment period between two offers is long enough, there is another MPE with gradual market expansion. Contrary to the Coasian result for a durable-good monopoly, we find that in both equilibria the profit of the monopolist increases (and the aggregate consumers surplus decreases) as the interval of commitment shrinks.The model yields policy implications for regulations on collection and storage of customers information.

This version: 15 May 2020, China holds more international reserves than any other country. We consider if the Chinese accumulation of reserves is associated with unintended consequences in the form of increased private sector risk taking. Using sovereign credit default swap spreads and stock index prices as indicators of risk taking we provide evidence to suggest that as reserve holdings increase, so does the willingness of the private sector to take on more risk. This is an important finding that adds credence to the suggestion that insurance through costly reserves, to be used in the event of a crisis, may lead to private sector actions that in and of themselves make it more likely that this insurance will be used.

We compare two different methods of appointing a local commission agent as an intermediary for a credit program. In the Trader-Agent Intermediated Lending Scheme (TRAIL), the agent was a randomly selected established private trader, while in the Gram Panchayat-Agent Intermediated-Lending Scheme (GRAIL), he was randomly chosen from nominations by the elected village council. More TRAIL loans were taken up, but repayment rates were similar, and TRAIL loans had larger average impacts on borrowers’ farm incomes. The majority of this difference in impacts is due to differences in treatment effects conditional on farmer productivity, rather than differences in borrower selection patterns. The findings can be explained by a model where TRAIL agents increased their middleman profits by helping more able treated borrowers reduce their unit costs and increase output. In contrast, for political reasons GRAIL agents monitored the less able treated borrowers and reduced their default risk., Funding was provided by the Australian Agency for International Development, the International Growth Centre,United States Agency for International Development, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (GRF 16503014) and the HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies (IEMS15BM05).

We develop a simple North-South model of quality ladders to show that the virtual mobility of labor across time zones, facilitated by the advance in communication technology, can raise the endogenous growth rate of the world economy. The unique balanced growth rate is increasing in the endowments of skilled labor in both countries and decreasing in the rate of impatience. Moreover, we find that partial R&D offshoring to the South has initially a negative effect on the level of skilled wages in the North, but this is compensated for by its positive effect on the growth rate in both North and South., Nakanishi acknowledges the financial support of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), No.16H02016.

For the Japanese economy, we examine whether the fiscal multiplier is higher under the effective lower bound of the nominal interest rate. Using a time-varying parameter vector autoregression model with Tobit-type nonlinearity, we calculate the fiscal multipliers under two monetary policy positions. We find that when government spending shocks are inflationary, the fiscal multiplier under the zero interest rate policy increases steadily as a result of the decrease in the real interest rate. This evidence is robust to different definitions of effective lower bound, output, and government spending., This research was funded by Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists 19K13652 and the Nomura Foundation.

This study investigates how population aging impacts the effectiveness of a government spending shock. We estimate a panel VAR model with prefectural data in Japan, the world’s fastest aging country and reveal that a government spending shock becomes less effective as the aging rate increases. Subsequently, we construct a New Keynesian model with workers and retirees, which can replicate our empirical findings. This highlights the role of the supply-side channel through which workers facing a liquidity constraint can benefit from increased disposable income, in generating the state-dependent effect of the government spending shock. Our theoretical finding may suggest that promoting labor market participation by elderly people could increase the effectiveness of a government spending shock amid a rapidly aging society., This research was funded by Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists 19K13652 and the Nomura Foundation.

November 30, 2020, Consider a decision-maker who has an opportunity to wait for information before making a choice. He can obtain more information by waiting more, but this is costly. As a result, he endogenously determines the length of time to choose an alternative, which is called the response time. The present study models such a decision-maker as if he solves an optimal stopping problem. The model incorporates a dynamic information structure formalized as an evolving information partition, which is called filtration. I axiomatically characterize the model using behavioral data consisting of choices and response times that depend on choice situations and states. That is, from the data, we can identify filtration that governs the decision-maker's learning process as well as other model parameters. This result implies that using response time helps us understand the human cognitive process., This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows Grant Number JP18J12252.

How did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect female labor force participation in India over the short run and the medium run? We use an event-study approach at the district level and four waves of decadal census data in order to answer this question. We find that districts most adversely affected by infiuenza mortality saw a temporary increase in female labor force participation in 1921, an increase that was concentrated in the service sector. By 1931, this increase had been reversed. We find suggestive evidence that distress labor supply by widows and rising wages help account for these results.

December 22, 2020, Using sign restrictions within a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) framework, we provide new time-series evidence of debt-dependent multipliers for the U.S. while simultaneously obtaining larger multipliers during recessions in line with previous studies. The Ricardian channel where households reduce consumption expecting larger …scal adjustments is shown to be relevant for the debt-dependent multipliers. The TVP-VAR framework also allows us to observe changes in the magnitude of …scal adjustments. We …nd that the larger …scal adjustments in the presence of rising indebtedness is the major driving force behind the smaller multipliers in the post-Volcker period rather than debt accumulation itself.

Jewish-Muslim Intellectual History Entangled unearths forgotten texts that once belonged to the library of the Karaite community in Cairo. Consigned to oblivion for centuries, many of these manuscripts were sold in the second half of the nineteenth century to the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, where they remained inaccessible to most scholars until the end of the Cold War. The texts from the Karaite library cover a remarkable spectrum of medieval literary genres and scholarly disciplines, spanning works by Jewish, Muslim and Christian authors, in both Hebrew and Arabic. As such, they provide unique access to an otherwise lost body of literature from the medieval Islamicate world. This timely volume presents, for the first time, edited fragments of six texts by adherents of the Muʿtazila, a school of rational theology that emerged in the eighth century CE, including Karaite copies and recensions of works by Muslim authors, notably ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī and ʿAbd Allāh b. Saʿīd al-Labbād, as well as original Jewish Muʿtazilī treatises. The collection is concluded by an anonymous Rabbanite refutation of the highly influential polemical tract against Judaism, entitled Ifḥām al-yahūd. Is collection offers unprecedented insights into the intellectual crossroads between Muslims and Jews of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

This paper examines whether foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization reduces firms' monopsony power in labor markets. We estimate firm-level wage markdown, wage over marginal revenue of labor, from China's production data and identify the causal effect of FDI liberalization on wage markdown, using China's regulation changes upon its accession to the World Trade Organization. Large and productive firms, state-owned firms, exporters, and foreign firms set narrower wage markdowns. FDI liberalization widened wage markdowns and decreased labor income share in value-added. These findings are contrast to classical monopsony theory based on concentration but consistent with modern theory based on search friction., We gratefully acknowledge financial supports from JSPS Kakenhi (26220503, 17H00986, 18K12769 and 15H05728).

This study investigates which market structure gives rise to indeterminacy of stationary equilibria in a decentralized economy with non-degenerate distributions of money holdings. I develop a price-posting model with divisible money and then, examine two alternative markets: a pairwise random matching market and a many-to-many exchange. Importantly, the former market balances the number of matched buyers and sellers by definition. As a result, indeterminacy arises under the pairwise matching while a unique equilibrium exists in the many-to-many market. This balancing assumption also leads to the indeterminacy in a Walrasian market., I also acknowledge financial support from The Nakajima Foundation.

3 September 2019, We assess whether the accumulation of foreign currency reserves in the Asia-Pacific region may have unintended consequences in the form of increased private sector risk-taking. To do so we carry out a country-specific daily data event study analysis of the relationship between official announcements of reserves stocks and various proxy measures of risk-taking. Overall, our results suggest that reserves accumulation exerts no systematic influence on risk-taking.

Using panel data for 142 countries for the period from 1960 to 2014, we assess the effects of population aging on economic growth. We find that population aging proxied by old-age population share (or old-age dependency ratio) negatively affects economic growth only when it reaches a certain high level and its negative effects grow stronger as population aging deepens. We also find that population aging has hampered economic growth during more recent years, especially in more aged countries which are mostly developed countries. This nonlinear effect of aging is mainly driven by the fact that we use old-age population share as a proxy for aging. If we use lower working-age population share as a proxy for aging, the nonlinear relationship disappears: working-age population share is positively related to economic growth in a linear way., support by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government(NRF-2017S1A5A2A03069146)

We model an oligopoly where firms are allowed to freely enter and exit the market and choose the quality level of their products by incurring different set-up costs. Using this framework, we study the mix of firms in the long-run Cournot-Nash equilibrium under different cost structures and the effects of market size on market outcomes. Specifically, we consider two alternative specifications of cost structure. In the first specification, quality upgrading requires a large increment in the set-up cost or R&D investment. Under this cost structure, we show that in the Nash equilibrium, each firm specializes in a single quality level, and an increase in the market size leads to (i) an increase in the fraction of firms that specialize in the high quality product, (ii) an increase in the market share of the high quality product, and (iii) a reduction in firms'markups and in markup dispersion. Under the second type of cost structure where quality upgrading only requires higher marginal cost, we find that all firms will produce both types of product, and the value share of the high-quality product increases as the market expands, but in quantity terms, the market share of the high quality product does not change. Finally, we find that trade liberalization has broadly similar effects to that of a market expansion, but the supply of the high-quality product from the smaller economy may decrease.

We propose a dynamic model of climate change abatement in which the number of contributors is endogenous and thus may differ between two modes of cooperation, namely, loose vs tight. In the tight mode of cooperation, each member is prescribed a specific target, whereas in the loose one, members choose their own abatement levels as Nash players. Conditions exist such that the incentive to free ride is lower and the number of contributors is higher in the loose cooperation framework, and this can lead to higher welfare, both in the steady state and along the transition path. Our theoretical results suggest that the loose coalition mode, such reflected in the spirit of the Paris International COP21 Conference on Climate Change, by attracting more participants, could turn out to be more effective in reducing emissions than the Kyoto Protocol.

We show that a monopolist's profit is higher if he refrains from collecting coarse information on his customers, sticking to constant uniform pricing rather than recognizing customers' segments through their purchase history. In the Markov-perfect equilibrium with coarse information collection, after each commitment period, a new introductory price is offered to attract new customers, creating a new market segment for price discrimination. Eventually, the whole market is covered. Shortening the commitment period results in lower profits. These results sharply differ from the ones obtained when the firm can uncover the exact willingness-to-pay of each previous customer.

type:Journal Article, Despite almost 40 years of research, the origin of heavy-fermion superconductivity is still strongly debated. Especially, the pressure-induced enhancement of superconductivity in CeCu2Si2 away from the magnetic breakdown is not sufficiently taken into consideration. As recently reported in CeCu2Si2 and several related compounds, optimal superconductivity occurs at the pressure of a valence crossover, which arises from a virtual critical end point at negative temperature Tcr. In this context, we did a meticulous analysis of a vast set of top-quality high-pressure electrical resistivity data of several Ce-based heavy fermion compounds. The key novelty is the salient correlation between the superconducting transition temperature Tc and the valence instability parameter Tcr, which is in line with theory of enhanced valence fluctuations. Moreover, it is found that, in the pressure region of superconductivity, electrical resistivity is governed by the valence crossover, which most often manifests in scaling behavior. We develop the new idea that the optimum superconducting Tc of a given sample is mainly controlled by the compound’s Tcr and limited by non-magnetic disorder. In this regard, the present study provides compelling evidence for the crucial role of critical valence fluctuations in the formation of Cooper pairs in Ce-based heavy fermion superconductors besides the contribution of spin fluctuations near magnetic quantum critical points, and corroborates a plausible superconducting mechanism in strongly correlated electron systems in general.

type:Journal Article, We present accurate electrical resistivity measurements along the two principle crystallographic axes of the pressure-induced heavy-fermion superconductor CeRhIn5 up to 5.63 GPa. For both directions, a valence crossover line is identified in the p-T plane and the extrapolation of this line to zero temperature coincides with the collapse of the magnetic ordering temperature. Furthermore, it is found that the p-T phase diagram of CeRhIn5 in the valence crossover region is very similar to that of CeCu2Si2. These results point to the essential role of Ce-4f electron delocalization in both destroying magnetic order and realizing superconductivity in CeRhIn5 under pressure.

The Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey (S-PLUS) is imaging similar to 9300 deg(2) of the celestial sphere in 12 optical bands using a dedicated 0.8mrobotic telescope, the T80-South, at the Cerro Tololo Inter-american Observatory, Chile. The telescope is equipped with a 9.2k x 9.2k e2v detector with 10 mu m pixels, resulting in a field of view of 2 deg(2) with a plate scale of 0.55 arcsec pixel-1. The survey consists of four main subfields, which include two non-contiguous fields at high Galactic latitudes (vertical bar b vertical bar > 30 degrees, 8000 deg(2)) and two areas of the Galactic Disc and Bulge (for an additional 1300 deg(2)). S-PLUS uses the Javalambre 12-band magnitude system, which includes the 5 ugriz broad-band filters and 7 narrow-band filters centred on prominent stellar spectral features: the Balmer jump/[OII], Ca H + K, Hd, G band, Mg b triplet, H alpha, and the Ca triplet. S-PLUS delivers accurate photometric redshifts (dz /(1 + z) = 0.02 or better) for galaxies with r < 19.7 AB mag and z < 0.4, thus producing a 3D map of the local Universe over a volume of more than 1 (Gpc/h)(3). The final S-PLUS catalogue will also enable the study of star formation and stellar populations in and around the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, as well as searches for quasars, variable sources, and low-metallicity stars. In this paper we introduce the main characteristics of the survey, illustrated with science verification data highlighting the unique capabilities of S-PLUS. We also present the first public data release of similar to 336 deg(2) of the Stripe 82 area, in 12 bands, to a limiting magnitude of r = 21, available at datalab.noao.edu/splus.© 2019 The Author(s).Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society

Phytoplankton contribute half of the primary production in the biosphere and are the major source of energy for the Arctic Ocean ecosystem. While primary production measurements are therefore fundamental to our understanding of marine biogeochemical cycling, the extent to which current methods provide a definitive estimate of this process remains uncertain given differences in their underlying approaches and assumptions. This is especially the case in the Arctic Ocean, a region of the planet undergoing rapid evolution as a result of climate change, yet where primary production measurements are sparse. In this study, we compared three common methods for estimating primary production in the European Arctic Ocean: 1) production of 18O-labeled oxygen (GPP-18O), 2) changes in dissolved oxygen (GPP-DO) and 3) incorporation rates of 14C-labelled carbon into particulate organic carbon (14C-POC) and into total organic carbon (14C-TOC, the sum of dissolved and particulate organic carbon). Results show that primary production rates derived using oxygen methods showed good agreement across season and were strongly positively correlated. While also strongly correlated, higher scatter associated with seasonal changes was observed between 14C-POC and 14C-TOC. The 14C-TOC-derived rates were, on average, approximately 50 % of the oxygen-based estimates. However, the relationship between these estimates changed seasonally. In May, during a spring bloom of Phaeocystis sp., 14C-TOC was 52 % and 50 % of GPP-DO and GPP-18O respectively, while in August, during post-bloom conditions dominated by flagellates, 14C-TOC was 125 % of GPP-DO and 14C-TOC was 175 % of GPP-18O. Varying relationship between C and O rates may be the result of varying importance of respiration, where C-based rates estimate Net Primary Production (NPP) and O-based rates estimate Gross Primary Production (GPP).However, uncertainty remains in this comparison, given differing assumptions of the methods and the photosynth

Insight into the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) is central to any phylogeny-based reconstruction of early eukaryotic evolution. Increasing amounts of data enable such reconstructions, without necessarily providing further insight into what LECA actually was. We consider four possible concepts of LECA: an abstract phylogenetic state, a single cell, a population, and a consortium of organisms. We argue that the view most realistically underlying work in the field is that of LECA as a population. Drawing on recent findings of genomically heterogeneous populations in eukaryotes (‘pangenomes’), we examine the evolutionary implications of a pangenomic LECA population. For instance, how does this concept affect standard expectations about the ecology, geography, fitness, and diversification of LECA? Does it affect evolutionary interpretations of LECA’s cellular functions? Finally, we examine whether this novel pangenomic concept of LECA has implications for phylogenetic reconstructions of early eukaryote evolution. Our aim is to add to the conceptual toolkit for developing theories of LECA and interpreting genomic datasets.

Jaʿfar b. Abī Yaḥyā (d. 573/1177-8) was a Yemeni Zaydī theologian and judge. He was fundamental in the establishment of a Yemeni strand of Basran Muʿtazilī theology and was actively involved in the transmission of its literature to Yemen.

It is well established that animals often differ consistently from one another in their behaviour. Most work has focused on consistent differences in average behaviour, generally referred to as ‘animal personality’. However, individuals may also differ consistently from one another in how they change their behaviour over time or across environments, that is, plasticity, as well as in the predictability of their behaviour. How these three sources of behavioural variation are linked is rarely explored. Here we tested 80 wild-caught three-spined sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus, repeatedly over a 10-week period for their tendency to explore an open arena from the safety of cover, generally termed ‘boldness’. Using a mixed-modelling approach, we detected consistent individual differences in boldness, as well as in the extent to which fish changed this behaviour over time, that is, temporal plasticity. Boldness and plasticity were negatively correlated, with shy fish spending increasing amounts of time out of cover while bold fish changed little over time. After accounting for variation in personality and plasticity, we still detected individual differences in intraindividual behavioural variation (‘IIV’), that is, individual predictability. This residual variation was linked to fish’ boldness score, with shy fish having higher IIV and thus being less predictable in their behaviour than bold fish. After a 4-week break from testing, individuals on average decreased their time out of cover again to baseline levels. However, shyer, more plastic fish showed the largest changes in behaviour. Statistical simulations show that our experimental data set has sufficient statistical power to provide accurate and precise variance parameter estimates. Together, our results provide strong evidence that individual variation in boldness is linked with behavioural plasticity and predictability. Establishing the evolutionary causes as well as fitness consequences of these links in beh

The empirical finding by Trefler (2004, AER) and others that industrial productivity increases more strongly in liberalized industries than in non-liberalized industries has been widely accepted as evidence for the Melitz (2003, Econometrica) model. But it is actually evidence against the Melitz model. Segerstrom and Sugita (2015, JEEA) showed that under very general assumptions, the multi-industry Melitz model predicts that productivity increases more strongly in non-liberalized industries than in liberalized industries. This disconnect between theory and evidence we call the Melitz-Trefler Puzzle. This paper presents a solution to the Melitz-Trefler puzzle, a new model consistent with the Trefler finding.

We examine how trade liberalization affects South’s incentive to protect intellectual property rights (IPR) in a North-South duopoly model where a low-cost North firm competes with a high-cost South firm in the South market. The North firm serves the South market through either exports or foreign direct investment (FDI). The extent of effective cost difference between North and South depends on South’s imitation, which in turn depends on South’s IPR protection and absorptive capacity and North firm’s location choice, all of which are endogenously determined in our model. For a given level of IPR protection, South’s absorptive capacity under exports may be greater than under FDI. Even though innovation is exogenous to the model (and hence unaffected by South’s IPR policy), strengthening IPR protection in South can improve its welfare. The relationship between trade costs and the degree of IPR protection that maximizes South welfare is non-monotone. In particular, South has an incentive to protect IPR only when trade costs are moderate. When masking technology or licensing is incorporated into the model, however, some protection of IPR may be optimal for South even if the trade costs are not moderate.

This paper provides the first very long term empirical examination of Piketty’s (2014) controversial hypothesis that inequality is increasing in r – g, (assets - real income). Using unique annual data on asset returns for a balanced portfolio and several other variables for the UK over the period 1210-2013, the study examines whether the dynamics in capital’s income share, SW, are governed by (r–g). The analysis confirms that r and g are robust and significant determinants of factor shares and that they have been the major forces behind the large inequality waves over the past eight centuries.

Recently multinational enterprises (MNEs) originating from Asian countries such as China and Korea have rapidly expanded their global operations, but the employment effect of these MNEs in their home countries has rarely been studied. Using Korean firm–plant matched data over 2008–2013, we examine the effects of MNEs on domestic plant turnover and job growth. We find that Korean MNEs are more likely than non–MNEs to not only close down their domestic manufacturing plants but also open new plants. Along with active plant turnover, Korean MNEs exhibit greater active job reallocation across their domestic manufacturing plants within firms; however, this does not result in net job loss. This suggests that Korean MNEs participating in Factory Asia restructured their domestic manufacturing bases rather than hollowing them out.

This draft, June 2018, This article contributes to the literature on central bank independence and monetary stability during the classical gold standard era. On the eve of the First World War, European periphery had not achieved stable adherence to gold despite the protection of central banks against political pressures to monetize debt. In the 19th century, most issuing institutions were private banks whose main objective was profit maximization. As a result, monetary stability depended on negotiations between monetary and fiscal authorities and not directly on central bank independence as is the case nowadays. Strong governments were needed to impose the objective of monetary stability on central banks in negotiation practices. To test our argument, we have constructed indicators of government strength and central bank independence to measure bargaining power for the case of Spain. Results confirm that a highly independent private central bank avoided the responsibility of defending gold adherence when negotiating with weak government, even in a stable macroeconomic environment. Our research suggests that the success of central bank independence in generating monetary stability during the gold standard period depended on sound political institutions., Elena Martínez-Ruiz and Pilar Nogues-Marco acknowledge Spanish government support through Projects ECO2012-33337 (MINECO) and ECO2015-66782-P (MINECO/FEDER).

The Fisher relation, describing a one-for-one relation between the nominal interest rate and the expected inflation, underlies many important results in economics and finance. Although it is a conceptually simple relation, the Fisher relation has more or less complicated with mixed results. There are several alternative models proposed in the empirical literature for the Fisher relation that have different implications. We evaluate those alternative models for the Fisher relation based on a post-data model determination method. Our results for data from the U.S. Japan and Korea show that models with both regimes/periods, a regime with nonstationary fluctuations and the other with stationary fluctuations, fit data best for the Fisher relation.

Relatively modest difference in individual decisional skills may warrant substantial inequality in personal remunerations. This implies that the return on investment in decisional skills may be very high. These claims are illustrated applying the uncertain dichotomous choice setting while clarifying the complex relationship between the individual skills, the individual optimal decisional weights and the skill-dependent values, i.e., the individual probabilities to be pivotal.

In this paper, we estimate the competitiveness of countries in intermediate goods and in final goods. We find that China’s competitiveness in both intermediate goods and final goods increased exceptionally rapidly during 1995-2011. We also find that the gains from trade of countries with strong comparative advantage in final goods can be substantially under-estimated if we do not separately take into account trade flows in intermediate goods and final goods. We also find that, during 1995-2011, the average increase in gains from intermediate goods trade across all countries in our sample is distinctly higher than the average increase in gains from final goods trade. This suggests that gains from trade due to international fragmentation of production is becoming more important over time relative to gains from trade in final goods.

This study examines resource reallocation within firms by investigating how firms change their product portfolios in response to a fall in trade costs. Using Korean firm-product data, we show that firms experiencing large tariff reductions under the Korea-US free trade agreement are more likely to shrink their product scope. They not only decrease the number of products but also specialize their production in specific products. Furthermore, we show that those specific products are relatively more productive than others within firm by estimating a firm-product efficiency. Dropped and added products tend to be less efficient than incumbent products. However, given the sharp increase in added products’ efficiencies after they enter, the above result may not indicate the low efficiency of new products, but rather the time needed to become organized and profitable. After considering the production distributions of incumbent products within firms, this study finds that firms tend to increase the proportion of efficient products in response to tariff reductions. In other words, firms allocate resources from less efficient products to more efficient ones.

Although the decisions of policy professionals are often more consequential than those of individuals in their private capacity, there is a dearth of studies on the biases of policy professionals: those who prepare and implement policy on behalf of elected politicians. Experiments conducted on a novel subject pool of development policy professionals (public servants of the World Bank and the Department for International Development in the UK) show that policy professionals are indeed subject to decision making traps, including the effects of framing outcomes as losses or gains, and most strikingly, confirmation bias driven by ideological predisposition, despite having an explicit mission to promote evidence-informed and impartial decision making. These findings should worry policy professionals and their principals in governments and large organizations, as well as citizens themselves. A further experiment, in which policy professionals engage in discussion, shows that deliberation may be able to mitigate the effects of some of these biases.

Modern discussions of corporate governance have focused on convergence of “varieties of capitalism,” particularly the recent “Americanisation” of laws and voluntary codes in Germany, Japan, and other civil law countries. However German and Japanese legal and business historians have suggested that corporate governance, accounting transparency or other favourable factors in their countries were historically a match for - or even superior to - those in the US. An alleged consequence was deeper penetration by the Berlin and Tokyo stock exchanges of their domestic economies than of the US by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), using measures such as market capitalization/GDP ratios. This paper reviews the classic Rajan and Zingales (2003) data on the sizes of stock exchanges. It concludes that the evidence for Japanese historical precocity relative to the US, after the necessary allowance is made for regional stock exchanges and corporate bond finance, stands up better to this closer examination than that for Germany. Many financial historians (e.g. Musacchio and Turner 2013) now agree that stock exchange development was not historically determined by legal origins (“Anglo-Saxon” common vs Euro-Japanese civil law), though today it appears to be driven by legal rules protecting shareholders and/or bondholders and limiting directorial autocracy and information asymmetry. However, both today and historically in some cultures private order rules (voluntary codes, bourse listing requirements, bankers as trusted intermediaries, block-holder monitoring, etc) offered substitute protections, or at least complemented protective laws. This paper reviews the plausibility of these determinants of historical stock exchange sizes - and others that have been neglected - in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere, before 1950.

This paper evaluates an approach to shed light on capital markets using grain prices, since stored grain incurs interest costs as part of the storage costs. Though this storage cost approach has been applied in McCloskey and Nash (1984) and has potentially wide applicability in situations where interest rate data is not available, this paper provides the first analysis of how well the storage cost approach captures actual capital market developments. Using matched data on bank interest rates and grain prices for early 19th century U.S. regions, we find that the storage cost approach is useful for quantifying the performance of capital markets. While the estimation of region- and year-specific interest rates can be challenging, the approach grain price approach accurately reflects differences in capital market development. Furthermore, the approach is robust to employing time series filtering techniques as well as dealing with unavailable information on harvest times, outliers, and a range of other factors., Support by the National Science Foundation (SES grant #1124426) is gratefully acknowledged (Keller and Shiue).

Under the unanimity rule, a single voter may alter a decision that is unanimously accepted by all other voters. Under the simple majority rule, the impact of such a voter diminishes. This paper examines the marginal effect of competence on the collective performance – the likelihood of reaching a correct decision. It is shown that under the unanimity rule (simple majority rule), adding an incompetent voter to the group is inferior (superior) to giving up an existing competent voter. The negative impact of an incompetent voter cannot (can) always be balanced by adding a competent one when the decision mechanism is the unanimity (simple majority) rule. Moreover, improving a single voter's competence may have a greater effect on the collective performance under the simple majority rule relative to the unanimity rule.

We study the fair division of a continuous resource, such as a land-estate or a time-interval, among pre-specified groups of agents, such as families. Each family is given a piece of the resource and this piece is used simultaneously by all family members, while different members may have different value functions. Three ways to assess the fairness of such a division are examined. (a) *Average fairness* means that each family’s share is fair according to the ”family value function”, defined as the arithmetic mean of the value functions of the family members. (b) *Unanimous fairness* means that all members in all families feel that their family received a fair share according to their personal value function. (c) *Democratic fairness* means that in each family, at least half the members feel that their family’s share is fair. We compare these criteria based on the number of connected components in the resulting division, and based on their compatibility with Pareto-efficiency., This research was funded in part by the following institutions: The Doctoral Fellowships of Excellence Program at Bar-Ilan University, the Mordechai and Monique Katz Graduate Fellowship Program, and the Israel Science Foundation grant 1083/13.

To deepen our understanding of the urban informal sector and small enterprises in developing countries, we surveyed micro and small entrepreneurs in northeastern areas of Delhi, India. The baseline survey was conducted in November–December 2014, covering 506 sample entrepreneurs in both manufacturing and service sectors. Between June and August 2017, the endline survey was conducted to collect panel information on firm performance. As the demonetization policy in November 2016, in which high value banknotes were demonetized overnight, affected small and micro enterprises, specific questions on its impact were added in the endline survey. Between the two surveys, artefactual field experiments were also applied to the subsample to collect information on social, risk, and time preferences. In this paper, we present details of the resurveys implemented under this project and describe the key variables collected. Among 226 entrepreneurs who participated in the artefactual field experiments, many showed their tendency for present bias and high discount rates. On average, the participant entrepreneurs behaved in an altruistic manner, took substantial risk, and reduced their risk-taking when they were assigned the role of the leader. Out of 287 entrepreneurs who participated in the endline survey, 50% were unregistered with the government, implying that they were highly informal. During the period between baseline and endline surveys, innovations to expand the business were not very active, either. The majority of sample entrepreneurs were affected at least temporarily by the demonetization in 2016.

Estimating abundance and population size is essential for many ecological and conservation studies of parrots. Achieving these goals requires methods that yield reliable estimates, but parrot traits can make them difficult to detect, count, and capture. We review established and emergent sampling and analytical methods used to estimate parrot abundance and population size, focusing on their assumptions, requirements, and limitations. Roost surveys are cost-effective if all roost locations in a region are known and stable, which is uncommon. Capture¿recapture methods incorporate detection probability, but capturing, marking and resighting parrots can be difficult. Distance sampling estimates detection probability and surveys multiple species simultaneously, but is sensitive to the spatial distribution of individuals and excludes birds in flight. Roadside transects can cover large areas and survey multiple species, but habitats near roads may differ from the surrounding areas, biasing abundance estimates. Occupancy surveys and hierarchical models usually require spatially and temporally replicated datasets. Both allow estimation of detection probability; the former dispenses with count data, while the latter is a versatile set of methods that can incorporate multiple processes influencing detection and abundance. Finally, passive acoustic surveys can sample multiple species simultaneously, but identification of vocalisations can be difficult and time-consuming.

We provide a new framework to account for the diverging paths of political development in China and Japan during the late nineteenth century. The arrival of Western powers not only brought opportunities to adopt new technologies, but also fundamentally threatened the sovereignty of both countries. These threats and opportunities produce an unambiguous impetus toward centralization and modernization for small states, but place conflicting demands on larger states. We use our theory to study why China, which had been centralized for much of its history, experienced gradual disintegration upon the Western arrival, and how Japan rapidly unified and modernized.

May 2017; reviced in September 2017, A growing body of literature examines the relationships between historical events and contemporary economic outcomes. Recent studies estimate the causal effects using detailed historical data and contemporary microdata of individuals and/or households. In this paper, we discuss conceptual and econometric issues inherent in the causal inference following the potential outcomes framework. Using an empirical example, we also discuss a simple alternative approach to avoid these issues that is coherent with the potential outcomes framework.

An axiomatic analysis of the concept of unequal exchange (UE) between countries is developed in a dynamic general equilibrium model that generalises Roemer’s [22] economy with a global capital market. The class of UE definitions that satisfy three fundamental properties - including a correspondence between wealth, class and UE exploitation status - is completely characterised. It is shown that this class is nonempty and a definition of UE exploitation between countries is proposed, which is theoretically robust and firmly anchored to empirically observable data. The full class and UE exploitation structure of the international economy is derived in equilibrium.