Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can't be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world.
In the historical disciplines, a fruitful approach has been to use natural experiments or the comparative method. This book consists of eight comparative studies drawn from history, archeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands.
In an Afterword, the editors discuss how to cope with methodological problems common to these and other natural experiments of history.
The distinguished International Seminar on Macroeconomics (ISoM) has met annually in Europe for thirty years. The papers included in ISoM 2006 discuss the relationship between prices and productivity in the OECD; monetary policy impact on inflation and output; implications of rising government debt; the relationship between consumption and labor market tightness; variation in real wages over the business-cycle; production sharing and business cycle synchronization in the accession countries; and pension systems and the allocation of macroeconomic risk.
The distinguished International Seminar on Macroeconomics (ISoM) has met annually in Europe for thirty years. The papers in ISoM 2007 discuss interest setting and central bank transparency; expectations, monetary policy, and traded goods prices; public investment and the golden rule; the role of institutions, confidence, and trust in financial integration within EU countries; international portfolios with supply, demand, and redistributive shocks; transmission and stabilization in closed and open economies; capital flows and asset prices; and welfare implications of financial globalization without financial development.
The distinguished International Seminar on Macroeconomics has met annually in Europe for thirty years. The papers in the 2007 volume discuss interest-setting and central bank transparency; expectations, monetary policy, and traded good prices; public investment and the golden rule; the role of institutions, confidence, and trust in financial integration within EU countries; international portfolios with supply, demand, and redistributive shocks; transmission and stabilization in closed and open economies; capital flows and asset prices; and welfare implications of financial globalization without financial development. The 2008 papers discuss the employment effects of workweek regulation in France; trade pricing effects of the Euro; reflections on monetary policy in the open economy; firm-size distribution and cross-country income differences; and exchange rates and the margin of trade.
The distinguished International Seminar on Macroeconomics has met annually in Europe for over thirty years. The topics covered in this year’s volume fall into four categories: exchange rates, global business cycles, the financial crisis, and unemployment and the Great Recession. The chapters include a study of capital-account policies that are sometimes used to peg the real exchange rate, and an analysis of panel data from OECD countries that characterizes and explains movements in house prices. Other studies explore central issues to the financial crisis, such as its impact on trade flows, the effects of official bailouts, and the nature and evolution of unemployment during the Great Recession.
The NBER Macroeconomics Annual provides a forum for important debates in contemporary macroeconomics and major developments in the theory of macroeconomic analysis and policy that include leading economists from a variety of fields. The papers and accompanying discussions in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2007 address exchange-rate models; implications of credit market frictions; cyclical budgetary policy and economic growth; the impacts of shocks to government spending on consumption, real wages, and employment; dynamic macroeconomic models; and the role of cyclical entry of new firms and products on the nature of business-cycle fluctuations and on the effects of monetary policy.
The NBER Macroeconomics Annual provides a forum for important debates in contemporary macroeconomics and major developments in the theory of macroeconomic analysis and policy. . The papers and accompanying discussions in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2008, which
The Law of the Sea (LOS) treaty resulted from some of the most complicated multilateral negotiations ever conducted. Difficult bargaining produced a remarkably sophisticated agreement on the financial aspects of deep ocean mining and on the financing of a new international mining entity. This book analyzes those negotiations along with the abrupt U.S. rejection of their results. Building from this episode, it derives important and subtle general rules and propositions for reaching superior, sustainable agreements in complex bargaining situations.
James Sebenius shows how agreements were possible among the parties because and not in spite of differences in their values, expectations, and attitudes toward time and risk. He shows how linking separately intractable issues can generate a zone of possible agreement. He analyzes the extensive role of a computer model in the LOS talks. Finally, he argues that in many negotiations neither the issues nor the parties are fixed and develops analytic techniques that predict how the addition or deletion of either issues or parties may affect the process of reaching agreement.
Why is America losing its competitive edge in basic industries ranging from automobile manufacture to consumer electronics? The reason, Michael Best shows, is the rigid command and control structures that are typical of big business in America. America firms lack the organizational flexibility of the "new competition" practiced by companies in Italy, West Germany, and Japan. The secret to the success of these foreign firms is that they are organized from top to bottom to pursue continuous improvements in methods, products, and processes. They seek competitive advantage not through lowest-cost production but through superior product design. This requires an unusual degree of organizational flexibility, which in turn demands organizational commitments to problem solving, constant attention to detail, and an integration of thought and action in the work place.
The New Competition posits a strategic tension between market competition and cooperation in successful industrial societies. Instead of bargaining with suppliers and customers at arm's length, firms can forge consultative relations with them, facilitating the flow of valuable advice, suggestions, and information and crucially modifying a key processor design. Instead of engaging in price rivalry, companies can pursue product-related rivalries that increase their international competitiveness. Best envisions a new role for national industrial policy—one not of bailing out sick firms in dying industries but of shaping industrial sectors and markets. It would encourage firms to cooperate in terms of the form that competition takes, one that involves products instead of prices.
Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) has been an important policy tool of government since the 1980s, when the Reagan administration ordered that all major new regulations be subjected to a rigorous test of whether their projected benefits would outweigh their costs. Not surprisingly, CBA has been criticized by many who claim that it neglects, especially on the benefit side, important values that are hard to measure.
In this book, the authors reconceptualize cost-benefit analysis, arguing that its objective should be overall well-being rather than economic efficiency. They show why the link between preferences and well-being is more complicated than economists have thought. Satisfying a person's preference for some outcome is welfare-enhancing only if he or she is self-interested and well-informed. Also, cost-benefit analysis is not a super-procedure but simply a way to identify welfare-maximizing policies. A separate kind of analysis is required to weigh rights and equal treatment.
This book not only places cost-benefit analysis on a firmer theoretical foundation, but also has many practical implications for how government agencies should undertake cost-benefit studies.
Contributors. A. W. Coats, Allin F. Cottrell, Jacqueline Cox, William Darity, John Davis, Robert Dimand, Peter Groenewegen, Kevin Hoover, Henry E. Kyburg Jr., David Laidler, Michael S. Lawlor, Greg Lilly, D. E. Moggridge, R. M. O’Donnell, Kerry Pearce, Jochen Runde, Teddy Seidenfeld, J. D. Tomlinson
China’s economic and political presence in Africa has expanded drastically over the past decade, especially in the sub-Saharan region. Convinced that Western attempts at providing aid to Africa have failed, Chinese officials have sought new forms of aid and invested billions to push further development in Africa. But some in the United States and around the word fear that China’s interest in sub-Saharan Africa could threaten previous efforts to protect human rights and to promote democracy in the region. The New Presence of China in Africa takes on this controversial issue, offering an overview of the Chinese model and evaluating whether it might serve as an example for future Western endeavors.
In an increasingly complex and interdependent world, states resort to a bewildering array of regulatory agreements to deal with problems as disparate as climate change, nuclear proliferation, international trade, satellite communications, species destruction, and intellectual property. In such a system, there must be some means of ensuring reasonably reliable performance of treaty obligations. The standard approach to this problem, by academics and politicians alike, is a search for treaties with "teeth"--military or economic sanctions to deter and punish violation.
The New Sovereignty argues that this approach is misconceived. Cases of coercive enforcement are rare, and sanctions are too costly and difficult to mobilize to be a reliable enforcement tool. As an alternative to this "enforcement" model, the authors propose a "managerial" model of treaty compliance. It relies on the elaboration and application of treaty norms in a continuing dialogue between the parties--international officials and nongovernmental organizations--that generates pressure to resolve problems of noncompliance. In the process, the norms and practices of the regime themselves evolve and develop.
The authors take a broad look at treaties in many different areas: arms control, human rights, labor, the environment, monetary policy, and trade. The extraordinary wealth of examples includes the Iran airbus shootdown, Libya's suit against Great Britain and the United States in the Lockerbie case, the war in Bosnia, and Iraq after the Gulf War.
The authors conclude that sovereignty--the status of a recognized actor in the international system--requires membership in good standing in the organizations and regimes through which the world manages its common affairs. This requirement turns out to be the major pressure for compliance with treaty obligations. This book will be an invaluable resource and casebook for scholars, policymakers, international public servants, lawyers, and corporate executives.
Following on F. A. Hayek's previous work Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1967), New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas collects some of Hayek's most notable essays and lectures dealing with problems of philosophy, politics and economics, with many of the essays falling into more than one of these categories. Expanding upon the previous volume the present work also includes a fourth part collecting a series of Hayek's writings under the heading 'History of Ideas.'
Of the articles contained in this volume the lectures on 'The Errors of Constructivism' (chapter 1) and 'Competition as a Discovery Procedure' (chapter 12) have been published before only in German, while the article on 'Liberalism' (chapter 9) was written in English to be published in an Italian translation in the Enciclopedia del Novicento by the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana at Rome.
The discovery of the New World was initially a cause for celebration. But the vast amounts of gold that Columbus and other explorers claimed from these lands altered Spanish society. The influx of such wealth contributed to the expansion of the Spanish empire, but also it raised doubts and insecurities about the meaning and function of money, the ideals of court and civility, and the structure of commerce and credit. New World Gold shows that, far from being a stabilizing force, the flow of gold from the Americas created anxieties among Spaniards and shaped a host of distinct behaviors, cultural practices, and intellectual pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic.
Elvira Vilches examines economic treatises, stories of travel and conquest, moralist writings, fiction, poetry, and drama to reveal that New World gold ultimately became a problematic source of power that destabilized Spain’s sense of trust, truth, and worth. These cultural anxieties, she argues, rendered the discovery of gold paradoxically disastrous for Spanish society. Combining economic thought, social history, and literary theory in trans-Atlantic contexts, New World Gold unveils the dark side of Spain’s Golden Age.
These articles include recent research on ways to incorporate the noncognitive side of ability in economic theory and to empirically assess and explain its role in labor market and behavioral outcomes. Contributions investigate the extent to which assignment of workers is determined by traditional cognitive variables and by personality traits. Also presented in this collection is research on the role of noncognitive skills in explaining the labor market position of underrepresented groups and research that integrates the economic and psychological theory and evidence on noncognitive skills.
Nonprofit organizations are all around us. Many people send their children to nonprofit day-care centers, schools, and colleges, and their elderly parents to nonprofit nursing homes; when they are ill, they may well go to a nonprofit hospital; they may visit a nonprofit museum, read the magazine of the nonprofit National Geographic Society, donate money to a nonprofit arts organization, watch the nonprofit public television station, exercise at the nonprofit YMCA. Nonprofits surround us, but we rarely think about their role in the economy, or the possibility of their competing unfairly with private enterprise.
Burton Weisbrod asks the important questions: What is the rationale for public subsidy of nonprofit organizations? In which sectors of the economy are they of real importance? Why do people contribute money and time to them and why should donations be tax deductible? What motivates managers of nonprofits? Why are these organizations exempt from taxes on income, property, and sales? When the search for revenue brings nonprofits into competition with proprietary firms—as when colleges sell computers or museum gift shops sell books and jewelry—is that desirable?
Weisbrod examines the raison d’être for nonprofits. The evidence he assembles shows that nonprofits are particularly useful in situations where consumers have little information on what they are purchasing and must therefore rely on the probity of the seller.
Written in a clear, direct style without technicalities, The Nonprofit Economy is addressed to a broad audience, dealing comprehensively with what nonprofits do, how well they do it, how they are financed, and how they interact with private enterprises and government. At the same time, the book presents important new evidence on the size and composition of the nonprofit part of the economy, the relationship between financial sources and outputs, and the different roles of nonprofits and for-profit organizations in the same industries. The Nonprofit Economy will become a basic source for anyone with a serious interest in nonprofit organizations.
Not by Timber Alone presents the findings of the Harvard Institute for International Development study, commissioned by the International Tropical Timber Organization, that examined the economic value of tropical hardwood forests as productive living systems and the potential for their multiple use management.
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