Showing 61 - 70 of 84 Items
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Sujan Garapati
Access: Open access
- Since 2001, Japan has experienced two extended quantitative easing (QE) periods that aimed to address its low growth and deflationary environment. This paper investigates the transmission channels of the country’s QE policies during both periods: QE1 and Abenomics. Investigating three primary QE channels, signaling, inflation, and safety, the analysis identifies a signaling channel with different characteristics during both periods, no inflation channel, and a safety channel with different strengths during both periods. During QE1, event dates signaled low yields on short- and medium-term bonds but not on long-term bonds, suggesting a weak signaling channel. In contrast, under Abenomics, the signaling channel was strong for long-term bonds, reflecting a credible commitment to sustained low interest rates. Event dates in both periods were associated with deflation, so the evidence does not support the presence of an inflation channel. Across both periods, a significant safety channel was present. Investors paid a premium for safe assets that decreased yields as the BOJ purchased bonds, especially during Abenomics. The findings suggest that Abenomics was more successful at decreasing interest rates than QE1. Overall, this paper reveals that QE can effectively lower yields through signaling and safety effects but fails to raise inflation expectations in Japan.
Date: 2014-04-29
Creator: Stephen Polasky, David J. Lewis, Andrew J. Plantinga, Erik Nelson
Access: Open access
- Many ecosystem services are public goods whose provision depends on the spatial pattern of land use. The pattern of land use is often determined by the decisions of multiple private landowners. Increasing the provision of ecosystem services, though beneficial for society as a whole, may be costly to private landowners. A regulator interested in providing incentives to landowners for increased provision of ecosystem services often lacks complete information on landowners' costs. The combination of spatially dependent benefits and asymmetric cost information means that the optimal provision of ecosystem services cannot be achieved using standard regulatory or payment for ecosystem services approaches. Here we show that an auction that sets payments between landowners and the regulator for the increased value of ecosystem services with conservation provides incentives for landowners to truthfully reveal cost information, and allows the regulator to implement the optimal provision of ecosystem services, even in the case with spatially dependent benefits and asymmetric information.
Date: 2016-10-01
Creator: Erik J. Nelson, Matthew R. Helmus, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Stephen Polasky, Jesse R., Lasky, Amy E. Zanne, William D. Pearse, Nathan J.B. Kraft, Daniela A. Miteva
Access: Open access
- Increasing trade between countries and gains in income have given consumers around the world access to a richer and more diverse set of commercial plant products (i.e., foods and fibers produced by farmers). According to the economic theory of comparative advantage, countries open to trade will be able to consume more-in termsof volume and diversity-if they concentrate production on commodities that they can most cost-effectively produce, while importing goods that are expensive to produce, relative to other countries. Here, we performa global analysis of traded commercial plant products and find little evidence that increasing globalization has incentivized agricultural specialization. Instead, a country's plant production and consumption patterns are still largely determined by local evolutionary legacies of plant diversification. Because tropical countries harbor a greater diversity of lineages across the tree of life than temperate countries, tropical countries produce and consume a greater diversity of plant products than do temperate countries. In contrast, the richer and more economically advanced temperate countries have the capacity to produce and consume more plant species than the generally poorer tropical countries, yet this collection of plant species is drawn from fewer branches on the tree of life. Why have countries not increasingly specialized in plant production despite the theoretical financial incentive to do so? Potential explanations include the persistence of domestic agricultural subsidies that distort production decisions, cultural preferences for diverse local food production, and that diverse food production protects rural households in developing countries from food price shocks. Less specialized production patterns will make crop systems more resilient to zonal climatic and social perturbations,but this may come at the expense of global crop production efficiency, an important step in making the transition to a hotter and more crowded world.
Date: 2016-11-01
Creator: Erik Nelson, Virginia Matzek
Access: Open access
- Nascent US carbon markets reward farmers for reforesting agricultural land, with consequent ecological co-benefits. We use a dynamic optimization model to determine the likelihood of an orchard farmer in northern California converting to forest under 90 plausible future scenarios. We find reforestation to be a highly unlikely outcome, occurring only 4.0% of the time under current economic, biophysical, and policy conditions, and only 18.5% of the time under a set of assumptions that make carbon offset production more economically viable. Conversion to "carbon farming" was more sensitive to changes in orchard production costs and yields than to carbon offset policy changes. In the absence of other changes, the price of a carbon offset would have to increase nearly a hundredfold to make reforestation compete economically with orchard agriculture. Our results partly explain low participation in the reforestation sector of US carbon markets. We conclude that farmers will not be interested in forest conversion unless their land has limited agricultural potential or they are motivated by social, rather than economic, rewards.
Date: 2004-05-01
Creator: B. Zorina Khan, Kenneth L. Sokoloff
Access: Open access
Date: 2000-01-01
Creator: B. Zorina Khan
Access: Open access
Date: 2015-01-01
Creator: B. Zorina Khan
Access: Open access
- Prizes for innovations are currently experiencing a renaissance, following their marked decline during the nineteenth century. Debates about such incentive mechanisms tend to employ canonical historical anecdotes to motivate and support the analysis and policy proposals. Daguerre's "patent buyout," the Longitude Prize, inducement prizes for butter substitutes and billiard balls, the activities of the Royal Society of Arts and other "encouragement" institutions-all comprise potentially misleading case studies. The article surveys and summarizes extensive empirical research using samples drawn from Britain, France, and the United States, including "great inventors" and their ordinary counterparts, and prizes at industrial exhibitions. The results suggest that administered systems of rewards to innovators suffered from a number of disadvantages in design and practice, which might be inherent to their nonmarket orientation.

Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Angela Goldshteyn
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Isabel Krogh
Access: Open access
- Income inequality and intergenerational mobility are two common measures of economic fairness in society. While they measure distinct ideas, they are significantly related in an inverse way across countries as well as across regions in the United States. This relationship is illustrated on the Great Gatsby Curve. Unequal access to education is one factor that has been found to drive the negative relationship between these two measures and therefore create the negatively sloping Great Gatsby Curve. Therefore, creating more equal access to education, such as through government spending, could lessen the connection between these two factors. The primary purpose of this research is to explore the effect of public educational expenditure on intergenerational mobility as well as on the slope of the Great Gatsby Curve. At the primary/secondary education level, this study finds that places with higher public spending on education tend to have higher levels of intergenerational mobility. However, no significant relationship is found between spending on tertiary education and intergenerational mobility. In addition, while higher primary/secondary educational spending is associated with a flatter Great Gatsby Curve at the school district level, these results were not consistent at the commuting zone level, so no strong conclusions can be made about the effect of public educational expenditures as a mediating factor of the Great Gatsby Curve.
Date: 2016-05-01
Creator: John L Anderson
Access: Open access
- This study specifies the types of consumers that participate in the U.S. organic market and investigates their revealed preferences. I propose three theoretical consumer types – indifferent consumers, informed organic food lovers, and uninformed organic food lovers – and conduct cross-sectional and time-trend analyses utilizing organic fruit purchase data compiled by The Neilsen Company. The cross-sectional analysis is estimated with a two-stage Heckman selection model, while the time-trend analysis uses simple descriptive statistics and a differenced OLS regression technique. Households are most likely to participate in the organic fruit market if they have a well-educated white or Asian head, are located in a metropolitan area on the West coast, have higher income, have young children, are married, and are making decisions in the spring, summer, or fall. However, households are estimated to purchase more organic fruit, conditional on participating, if they live in a rural area in regions other than the West coast. Having a higher income, being married, having a child less than six years old, being college-educated, and living in a metropolitan area on the West coast are all associated with more dedication to the organic fruit market over time. Households who increased their organic expenditures from 2011 to 2012 likely lived in metropolitan areas on the West coast. Average per-household contribution to the nationwide increase in organic fruit expenditures from 2011 to 2012 on the extensive and intensive margins is estimated to have been about $7 and $14, respectively. I posit relationships between empirical results and the theoretical consumer types.