The 1870s have always held a special attraction for specialists in the history of thought. For economic theory these are the years of the Great Crossroads when economic theory was at critical breaking point, after which several powerful theoretical streams emerged that were to determine later on the overall course of the evolution of economics. The book by the French economist and philosopher Gilles Campagnolo is an attempt to find out exactly what happened in the years of the Great Crossroads. It offers not only factual and historical reading, but also theoretical interpretation to explaining the evolution, mutual influence and intermingling of the above individual schools of thought in the economic science. The present paper is a review essay on Gilles Campagnolo’s new book.

This paper makes the case that the biomedical workforce in the United States is characterized by positive feedbacks. The paper begins by setting out background information on (1) the way in which research is structured in the biomedical sciences; (2) the reward structure among biomedical researchers; and (3) the funding enterprise for biomedical sciences. After addressing these three key components, the paper examines what these mean in terms of the market for graduate stud ents, postdocs and faculty. It then explores ways in which the positive-feedback mechanisms could be dampened. It concludes that the presence of positive feedbacks in the biomedical workforce is a result of system-wide problems. Any fix requires changing incentives. This is unlikely to occur as long as the U.S. Congress and faculty have their way.

Scientific research has properties of a public good; there are few monetary incentives for individuals to undertake basic research and the conventional wisdom is that the market, if left to its own devices, would under- invest in research in terms of social benefits relative to social costs. Thus research, especially of a basic nature, has traditionally been supported by either the government or philanthropic institutions. More recently, industry has also begun to support research conducted in nonprofit institutions. This paper explores the various sources of support for research in the university sector. Although the focus is on the United States, the paper discusses trends in other countries as well. The paper also examines mechanisms for distributing funds, including peer review and performance based distribution. The paper closes with a case study of the National Institutes of Health doubling during the period 1998-2002.

There are two aspects through which an economic policy can influence the economic situation – monetary and fiscal. Monetary and fiscal policies have different and sometimes controversial goals to achieve by means of specific instruments. While the mission of central banks is generally price stability, governments usually set their goals in the realm of economic growth and employment. Fiscal institutions , however, often use inflation in order to derive revenues (seigniorage) and finance budget deficits. Hence, inflation is viewed as a public finance phenomenon (Barro, 1979; Mankiw, 1987; Grilli, 1989).
The purpose of this paper is to present a historical perspective on the behaviour of the monetary and fiscal policies pursued in Bulgaria from 1879, when the Bulgarian National Bank was established (soon after the liberation from the Ottoman Empire). Furthermore, historical time series of monetary and fiscal indicators give us the chance to study the link between government budget problems, fluctuations of monetary variables and inflation dynamics in different monetary episodes.

The prolific (serial) inventors set up the core of the paper. Prolific inventors tend to have a high productivity in terms of inventions (patents) having in general more economic value. The capacity to produce a lot of inventions (patents) is termed “prolificness”. We want to deepen our knowledge about the size of their population, some of their main characteristics, the factors that explain the number patents applied. We exploit a rich data set built onto information available released by the US Patent and Trade Mark Office (USPTO) for the five more important countries as far as technological activities are concerned: Great-Britain, France, USA, Germany, Japan over a long time period (1975-2002). We give insights upon the size of the population of prolific inventors and provide new information about some of their characteristics. We carry out an empirical study in order to explain the prolific inventor patents distribution. We suggest models for estimating the effects of the main variable explaining their productivity. Binomial regressions explaining the inventor productivity after controlling for patent duration and time concentration (among others factors) show that interfirm and international mobility and technological variety (at the inventor level) affects positively the inventor productivity. But there is simultaneity. The overall results suggest that the same factors impact positively productivity with no difference across countries (with exceptions).

Demographic ageing in Western countries has increased the pressure on children of elderly parents to provide care privately as an alternative to more costly institutionalization, and this pressure is likely to intensify. While some papers have recently investigated the optimal structure of family policy in this context, there is little work so far on the distributional impact of programs whose purpose is to subsidize the care of seniors who remain at home.
We investigate analytically and with simulation the measurement of the fiscal incidence of programs that subsidize home care for the elderly, when both individual welfare and family structure matter. The definition of welfare incidence, the comparison of welfare-based incidence with budgetary incidence for non-cooperative and cooperative families, and the calculation of the shifting of program benefits between family members, some of whom may be altruistic, are key issues in the analysis. The integration of individual welfare, family structure and benefit shifting provides a new perspective on the study of the distributional consequences of home-care programs.

The paper proposes an original survey on the evolution of the concept of technological knowledge and of its produc tion, as well as of its operational translations in the empirical literature. We move from the former notion of knowledge capital stock, implying a linear approach to the process of knowledge generation, and then we go through the knowledge production func tion and the recombinant knowledge approach, which are related respectively to a systemic and to an exogenous complexity view on knowledge creation. It is argued that the most recent empirical and theoretical approaches to technological knowledge are well suited to elaborate a framework in which knowledge is the outcome of endogenous complex dynamics, involving qualified interaction among innovating agents that are likely to shape the architecture of knowledge structure as well as to be influenced by it. We show some of the empirical methodologies fitting into this landscape and propose some prolific avenues of research.

This paper offers a new and robust model of the emergence and persistence of cooperation.  In the model, interactions are anonymous, the population is well-mixed, and the evolutionary process selects strategies according to material payoffs.  The cooperation problem is modelled as a game similar to Prisoner’s Dilemma, but there is an outside option of non-participation and the payoff to mutual cooperation is stochastic; with positive probability, this payoff exceeds that from cheating against a cooperator.  Under mild conditions, mutually beneficial cooperation occurs in equilibrium.  This is possible because the non-participation option holds down the equilibrium frequency of cheating.

International taxation rules for multi- national enterprises (MNEs) prescribe that international prices for goods and services between different subsidiaries – and therefore incomes of these subsidiaries - must be comparable to those set between independent international firms for the purpose of taxation. These rules also prescribe that risk should be accounted for in pricing and income. Since current practice of price comparisons does not yet fully allow accounting for risk, prices and in turn earnings and taxation may be distorted. We analyze a panel of about 160,000 European manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade firms for the years 1992 to 2007 in order to establish to what extent earnings do take risk into account. Risk measured by earnings volatility emerges as one major determinant of income. When earnings are set in relation to invested capital, risk emerges as the only stable determinant of income. Results indicate that both MNEs and independent firms regularly account for risk as a major determinant of income when pricing international goods and services.

In a small open country such as Slovenia, drivers can either purchase automotive fuel within the country or abroad. A simple demand model is used to test the proposition that changes in excise tax policy caused the decline of purchases in the country, and to delineate the effects of excise tax policy from the effects of the simultaneously occurring economic crisis. To do that, short- and long-run, and direct- and cross-price elasticities are estimated for the purchase of gasoline and automotive diesel in five regions: Slovenia's four border regions and the interior. For the estimation of "volume of transportation" elasticity, vehicle crossings through road sites with automatic traffic meters are used. The simulations indicate that more than half of the decline in the purchase of automotive fuels in 2009 can be attributed to excise tax policy and less than half to the economic crisis, and that the increase in tax revenues generated by excise tax policy significantly exceeded the decrease in the sellers' earnings.

The objectives of this paper could be brought to three. First, a methodological one, to explain how economic knowledge disseminates and what its channels are, as well as the basic transmission mechanisms of economic theory in Bulgaria after the disintegration of the socialist bloc. Second, a purely informational objective, to present the major topics and issues studied over the period 1989-2009, and, of course, the economists working on them. And a third and parallel task to interpret theoretically the development of the Bulgarian economic thought during that period, its character and
specificities.

I perform Arellano-Bond GMM estimations using panel data over the period 1995-2008 and explore the growth effects of Africa’s trade with China, distinguishing between the effect of imports and the effect of exports, and controlling for the role of export concentration. Four important results are obtained from the empirical analysis. First, there is no empirical evidence that exports to China enhance growth unconditionally. Second, the results suggest that export concentration enhances the growth effects of exporting to China, implying that countries which export one major commodity to China benefit more (in terms of growth) than do countries that have more diversified exports. Third, contrary to the widely held view that increasing imports from China would have a negative effect, the empirical results show that the share of China in a country’s total imports has a robust positive effect on growth. Finally, the evidence suggests that there is an in verted-U relationship between exports to developed countries and growth in Africa. Overall, the results seem to provide support for the hypothesis of growth by destination (i.e., that where a country exports matters for the exporting country’s growth and development) in the sense that exports to more developed (OECD) countries has (at least up to a threshold) a positive impact on growth but no such effect is unambiguously (unconditionally) shown in the case of exports to China. I draw on these findings to outline some policy implications.

In the vast majority of the literature on the economics of copyright royalties, it is assumed that the copyright holder is remunerated either by a fixed payment or by a payment that amounts to an additional marginal cost to the user, or both. However, in some significant instances in the real-world, copyright holders are constrained to a compensation scheme that involves revenue sharing. That is, the copyright holder takes as remuneration a part of the user’s revenue. In essence, the remuneration is set as a tax on the user’s revenue. This paper analyses such remuneration mechanisms, establishing and analysing the optimal tax rate, and also the Nash equilibrium tax rate that would emerge from a fair and unconstrained bargaining problem. The second option provids a rate that may be useful for regulatory authorities.

In this note we show that the measure of intensity of downside risk aversion proposed recently by Crainich and Eeckhoudt (2007) cannot be guaranteed to exist. We do this by means of an example in which the existence of the measure depends upon the values of the parameters in the problem.

The poet Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) was a moralist who regarded economics as key to understanding human society, and thereby to solve most social problems. He became a prolific writer of economic texts, in which he espoused the ideas of two heretic economists: Major Clifford Douglas’ social credit and national dividend, and Silvio Gesell’s perishable currency. Pound’s economic thought has long been neglected, but in times of financial crisis his crusade against bankers and his utopian visions might make a timely come back. It is therefore unfortunate that, of Pound’s economic lessons, the morally most compelling are also those less economically sound.

In this paper, we show that, in 1961 and before he had read "The Problem of Social Cost", Calabresi reached exactly the same conclusions as the one reached by Coase and summarized by Stigler as the "Coase theorem" but he believed that this result was valid only in the theoretical world of the economists. We also analyze how Calabresi's thought evolved, in particular including transaction costs in his reasoning, but nonetheless remained faithful to his conclusions about the practical validity of the Coase theorem. Calabresi's conclusions remained ignored by economists and by most of legal scholars until the early 1970s. It was only when scholars started to emphasize the unrealistic assumptions upon which rest the Coase theorem that they also started to pay attention to Calabresi. His works were quoted and essentially used to emphasize the limits of the Coase theorem. Calabresi and Coase were then put on the same footing; the works of the former presented as more complete and more practical than the works of the later.

Indirect reciprocity is generally considered one of the leading mechanisms to explain how cooperation may emerge by natural selection. The basic intuition is that establishing a reputation of being a helpful individual increases the probability of being in turn helped. Two models have been proposed to describe how indirect reciprocity may work: the standing model (Sugden, 1986/2004) and the image-scoring model (Nowak and Sigmund, 1998a,b). Although there is evidence that the former model would perform better under a wide set of circumstances, it is often maintained that it requires individuals with an implausibly large capacity of processing recursive information. In this paper I argue that this is not actually the case. I then suggest that the information needed by the image-scoring model, under reasonable assumptions, may be sufficient for the standing model to work. Finally I emphasize that even if the hypothesis of indirect reciprocity is unable to give a fair account of the ecological bases of cooperation, it has inspired a deal of research precious to social sciences.

Water markets in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) and the US west are compared in terms of their ability to allocate scarce water resources among competing uses. Both locations have been in the forefront of the development of water markets with defined water rights and conveyance structures to assist in the reallocation of water across competing demands. They also share the challenge of managing water with climate variability and climate change. As these two markets occur in developed, wealthy countries, their experiences in water markets with different water rights (appropriative, riparian and statutory rights) provide ‘best-case’ scenarios of what institutional arrangements work best, indicate which are less effective, and demonstrate what might be possible for greater use of water markets elsewhere in the world. The paper finds that the gains from trade in the MDB is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in per year, total turnover in water rights exceeds $2 billion per year and the volume of trade accounts for over 20% of surface water extractions by irrigators. In the key states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and Texas, trades of committed water annually range between 5% and 15% of total state freshwater diversions with over $4.3 billion (2008 $) spent or committed by urban buyers between 1987 and 2008. Despite the clear benefits of water markets in both locations, there are on-going restrictions to trade that limit the potential gains and also third-party effects from use that require resolution.

Causes and consequences of deregulation and restructuring in utility markets in US states continue to draw heated debate. It is unclear why different utilities choose retail restructuring, price caps or sliding-scale plans. Various economic and political reasons lend themselves to explaining regulatory decisions. This study uses a stylized capture model to formulate predictions about regulators’ net benefits from a particular form of deregulation. Empirical hazard model evaluates the revealed choice at each regulator-utility pair. Among state-level political factors, frequency and timing of commissioner re-elections, system of selection of commissioners, and party composition of the commissions and state legislatures are significant in explaining the pattern of deregulation. Utilities’ prices, capacity and scope of operations help explain the timing of deregulation. Market concentration contributes. A negative significant association between the prevalence of restructuring (and sliding-scale plans), and of price caps across utility industries is identified.

There are both high resource and political costs in defining and enforcing property rights to water and in managing it with markets. In this paper, I examine these issues in the semi-arid U.S. West where many of the intensifying demand and supply problems regarding fresh water are playing out. I begin by illustrating the current state of water markets in 12 western U.S. states. There are major differences in water prices across uses (agriculture, urban, environmental) and these differences appear to persist, suggesting that water markets have not developed fully enough to narrow the gaps. Moreover, there is considerable difference in the extent and nature of water trading across the western states, suggesting that water values and transaction costs of trade vary considerably across jurisdictions. I then turn to the resource and political costs of defining water rights and expanding the use of markets. In this discussion, efficiency and equity objectives play important, often conflicting, roles. This tension reflects the very social nature of the water resource.

We show that grandfathering fishing rights to local users or recognizing first possessions is more dynamically efficient than auctions of such rights. It is often argued that auctions allocate rights to the highest-valued users and thereby maximize resource rents. We counter that rents are not fixed in situ, but rather depend additionally upon the innovation, investment, and collective actions of fishers, who discover and enhance stocks and convert them into valuable goods and services. Our analysis shows how grandfathering increases rents by raising expected rates of return for investment, lowering the cost of capital, and providing incentives for collective action.

The paper provides an integrated framework to assess water markets in terms of their institutional underpinnings and the three ‘pillars’ of integrated water resource management: economic efficiency, equity and environmental sustainability. This framework can be used: (1) to benchmark different water markets; (2) to track performance over time; and (3) to identify ways in which water markets might be adjusted by informed policy makers to achieve desired goals. The framework is used to identify strengths and limitations of water markets in: (1) Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin; (2) Chile (in particular the Limarí Valley); (3) China (in particular, the North); (4) South Africa; and (5) the western United States. It identifies what water markets are currently able to contribute to integrated water resource management, what criteria underpin these markets, and which components of their performance may require further development.

Katharine Coman’s “Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation,” published in March 1911 in the first issue of the American Economic Review addressed issues of water supply, rights, and organization. These same issues have relevance today 100 years later in face of growing concern about the availability of fresh water worldwide as demand grows and as supplies become more uncertain due to the potential effects of climate change. The central point of this article is that appropriative water rights and irrigation districts that emerged in the American West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to aridity to facilitate agricultural water delivery, use, and trade raise the transaction costs today of water markets. These markets are vital for smooth re-allocation of water to higher-valued uses elsewhere in the economy and for flexible response to greater hydrological uncertainty. This institutional path dependence illustrates how past arrangements to meet conditions of the time constrain contemporary economic opportunities. They cannot be easily significantly modified or replaced ex post.