Showing 71 - 80 of 80 Items
Commercial plant production and consumption still follow the latitudinal gradient in species diversity despite economic globalization
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.
Inventing Prizes: A Historical Perspective on Innovation Awards and Technology Policy
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.
Institutions and democratic invention in 19th-century America: Evidence from "great inventors," 1790-1930
Date: 2004-05-01
Creator: B. Zorina Khan, Kenneth L. Sokoloff
Access: Open access
"Not for ornament": Patenting activity by nineteenth-century women inventors
Date: 2000-01-01
Creator: B. Zorina Khan
Access: Open access
From American Dream to American Reality: The Effect of Educational Expenditures on Intergenerational Mobility and the Great Gatsby Curve
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.
Modeling and Testing Consumer Engagement in the U.S. Organic Food Market
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.
Digital Market Concentration: An Institutional and Social Cost Analysis
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Jack Shane
Access: Open access
- In this thesis, I develop an analysis of the industry concentration seen in digital markets today. I begin with a description and argument for the use of institutional economics. This framework allows for the integration of an interdisciplinary approach to economics. My analysis details the socioeconomic and political impacts, as well as the underlying market dynamics that have pushed digital markets towards concentration. I offer novel explanations for the lack of firm behavior that should theoretically increase profit, the existence of barriers to competition, and consumer behavior that focus on the role of social institutions. I also detail many of the social costs of these concentrated markets, such as their impact on democracy, power to influence social institutions, and the impact they have on concentration in other markets. This is done to show that the fears surrounding monopolies do not end with prices. Even in digital markets, where many times prices are very low, if not zero, there are reasons that monopoly is economically inefficient and socially sub-optimal. However, due to the path-dependent nature of the extreme benefits associated with digital markets, policymakers cannot reasonably propose breaking up these companies. Instead, they must use the power of the government to counteract the conglomerations of social power seen in these private companies in search of an optimal outcome.
Hot Boy Summer? Analyzing Managerial Reactions to Season-long Fluctuating Player Performance In Major League Baseball
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: John Rodgers Hood
Access: Open access
- This paper suggests numerical weights that a Major League Baseball (MLB) manager may use when comparing player performance across multiple past performance periods to predict future performance. By the end of the MLB regular season, current season performance becomes more predictive than prior season performance for pitchers but not hitters. After estimating weights for different past time periods of performance, this paper compares the weights with how managers value performance in high-stakes situations across these same time periods. I find that MLB managers overreact to recent performance by both hitters and pitchers in postseason settings.
Self-Censorsh** in the Classroom This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-14
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Sarah Greenberg
Access: Embargoed
Systemic Risk in the Airline Industry: Investigating the Effects of Network Interconnectedness on MES Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Angela Goldshteyn
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community