We estimate a health investment equation, derived from a health capital model that is an extension of the well-known Grossman model. Of particular interest is whether the health production function has constant returns to scale, as in the standard Grossman model, or decreasing returns to scale, as in the Ehrlich-Chuma model and extensions thereof. The model with decreasing returns to scale has a number of theoretically and empirically desirable characteristics that the constant returns model does not have. Although our empirical equation does not point-identify the decreasing returns to scale curvature parameter, it does allow us to test for constant versus decreasing returns to scale. The results are suggestive of decreasing returns and in line with prior estimates from the literature. But when we attempt to control for the endogeneity of health by using instrumental variables, the results become inconclusive. This brings into question the robustness of prior estimates in this literature.

Using data from the International Benchmarking NETwork database, the authors estimate measures of density and scale economies in the water industry in four countries (Brazil, Colombia, Moldova, and Vietnam) that differ substantially in economic development, piped water and sewerage coverage, and characteristics of the utilities operating in the different countries. They find evidence of economies of scale in Colombia, Moldova, and Vietnam, implying the existence of a natural monopoly. In Brazil the authors cannot reject the 0 hypothesis of constant returns to scale. They also find evidence of economies of customer density in Moldova and Vietnam. The results of this study show that the cost structure of the water and wastewater sector varies significantly between countries and within countries, and over time, which has implications for how to regulate the sector.

This paper examines the assertion that returns to schooling increase as an economy transitions to a market environment. This claim has been difficult to assess as existing empirical evidence covers only a few countries over short time periods. A number of studies find that returns to education increased from the "pre-transition" period to the "early transition" period. It is not clear what has happened to the skills premium through the late 1990s, or the period thereafter. The authors use data that are comparable across countries and over time to estimate returns to schooling in eight transition economies (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia) from the early transition period up to 2002. In the case of Hungary, they capture the transition process more fully, beginning in the late 1980s. Compared to the existing literature, they implement a more systematic analysis and perform more comprehensive robustness checks on the estimated returns, although at best they offer only an incomplete solution to the problem of endogeneity. The authors find that the evidence of a rising trend in returns to schooling over the transition period is generally weak...

This paper reviews the empirical and theoretical literature on economic growth to examine how the four components of the climate change bill, namely mitigation, proactive (ex ante) adaptation, reactive (ex post) adaptation, and ultimate damages of climate change affect growth, especially in developing countries. The authors consider successively the Cass-Koopmans growth model and three major strands of the subsequent literature on growth: with multiple sectors, with rigidities, and with increasing returns. The paper finds that although the growth literature rarely addresses climate change per se, some issues discussed in the growth literature are directly relevant for climate change analysis. Notably, destruction of production factors, or decrease in factor productivity may strongly affect long-run equilibrium growth even in one-sector neoclassical growth models; climatic shocks have had large impacts on growth in developing countries because of rigidities; and the introducing increasing returns has a major impact on growth dynamics...

The authors present empirical evidence on the determinants of industry-level multifactor productivity growth. They focus on "traditional factors," including the process of technological catch up, human capital, and research and development (R&D), as well as institutional factors affecting labor adjustment costs. Their analysis is based on harmonized data for 17 manufacturing industries in 18 industrial economies over the past two decades. The disaggregated analysis reveals that the process of technological convergence takes place mainly in low-tech industries, while in high-tech industries, country leaders tend to pull ahead of the others. The link between R&D activity and productivity also depends on technological characteristics of the industries: while there is no evidence of R&D boosting productivity in low-tech industries, the effect is strong in high-tech industries, but the technology leaders tend to enjoy higher returns on R&D expenditure compared with followers. There is also evidence in the data that high labor adjustment costs (proxied by the strictness of employment protection legislation) can have a strong negative impact on productivity. In particular...

"New" economic geography theory, and the development of innovative methods of analysis have renewed interest in the location, and spatial concentration of economic activities. The authors examine the extent to which agglomeration economies contribute to economic productivity. They distinguish three sources of agglomeration economies: 1) At the firm level, from improved access to market centers. 2) At the industry level, from enhanced intra-industry linkages. 3) At the regional level, from inter-industry urbanization economies. The input demand framework they use in analysis, permits the production function to be estimated jointly with a set of cost shares, and, makes allowances for non-constant returns to scale, and for agglomeration economies to be factor-augmenting. They use firm-level data for standardized manufacturing in India, together with spatially detailed physio-geographic information that considers the availability, and quality of transport networks linking urban centers - thereby accounting for heterogeneity in the density of transport networks...

Assume that a public program -- whether in the form of public expenditures or regulation of private activities -- provides not only a public good to consumers but also a collective input (say, a less polluted water source for brewers, or better roads for their trucks). In a context of optimal taxation and constant returns to scale, the author shows that only the direct benefits to consumers in the form of a public good are adjusted by the shadow price of public revenue (typically downward, as Pigou conjectured) before benefits are aggregated to establish optimal provision. When public programs benefit productive sectors through cost savings, the marginal cost of provision is in optimum equal to the marginal cost savings in the benefiting sectors. The reason that programs that benefit production are not scaled down by the shadow price of public revenue is that the benefits are derived from markets that are otherwise taxable. Government can capture those cost savings at no distortionary cost by increasing the tax rates for each good...

The authors estimate social rates of return to electricity-generating capacity and paved roads, relative to the return on general capital, by examining the effect on aggregate output and comparing that effect with the costs of construction. They find that both types of infrastructure capital are highly complementary with other physical capital and human capital, but have rapidly diminishing returns if increased in isolation. The complementarities on the one hand, and diminishing returns on the other, point to the existence of an optimal mix of capital inputs, making it very easy for a country to have too much - or too little - infrastructure. For policy purposes, the authors compare the rate of return for investing in infrastructure with the estimated rate of return to capital. The strong complementarity between physical and human capital, and the lower prices of investment goods in industrial economies, means that the rate of return to capital as a whole is just as high in rich countries as in the poorest countries but is highest in the middle-income (per capita) countries. In most countries the rates of return to both electricity-generating capacity and paved roads are on a par with...

The authors study the dynamics of output, consumption, and real wages induced by a disinflation program based on permanent and temporary reductions in the nominal devaluation rate. They use an intertemporal optimizing model of a small open economy in which domestic households face imperfect world capital markets, the labor supply is endogenous, and wages are flexible. The model predicts that, with a constant capital stock and no investment, there is an initial reduction in real wages and output expands. Consumption falls on impact but increases afterward. In addition, with a temporary shock, a current account deficit emerges and, later a recession sets in, as documented in various studies. With endogenous capital accumulation, numerical simulations show that the model can also predict a boom in investment.

This paper examines the possibility of environmental "development traps," or "brown poverty traps," caused by interactions between the impacts of climate change and increasing returns in the development of "clean-technology" sectors. A simple specification is used in which the economy can produce a single homogeneous consumption good with two different technologies. In the "old" sector, technology has global diminishing returns to scale and depends on the use of fossil energy that gives rise to long-lived, damaging climate change. In the "new" sector, the technology has convex-concave production and is not dependent on the polluting energy input. If the new sector does not grow fast enough to move through the phase of increasing returns, then the economy may linger at a low level of income indefinitely or it may achieve greater progress but then get driven back down to a lower level of income by environmental degradation. Stimulating growth in the new sector thus may be a key element for avoiding an environmental poverty trap and achieving higher...

The purpose of this paper is to come up with an estimate for the value of human capital with the World Bank wealth accounting framework for the Latin American and Caribbean Region. The proposed approach draws connections between wealth accounting and the development accounting literature that explores the effects of education and health on human capital, building on previous work by Arrow and coauthors (2012), UNU-IHDP and UNEP (2012), Farreira and Hamilton (2010), Weil (2007), and others. The approach is extended to value the loss of human capital due to air pollution and lack of access to clean water and sanitation. The wealth accounting framework is underpinned by the notion that total wealth is equal to the present value of current and future consumption in a competitive economy with constant returns to scale. The author uses a series of calculations representing the framework for and methodology of his framework. Later in this paper the author breaks down the variables in determining the value of human capital into the following categories: schooling...

My dissertation investigated business cycle effects on US sectoral stock returns. The first chapter examined the relationship between the business cycle and sectoral stock returns. First, I calculated constant correlation coefficients between the business cycle and sectoral stock returns. Then, I employed the DCC GARCH model to estimate time-varying correlation coefficients for each pair of the business cycle and sectoral stock returns. Finally, I ran regression of sectoral returns on dummy variables designed to capture the four stages of the business cycle. I found that though sectoral stock returns were closely related to the business cycle, they did not share some of its main characteristics. The second chapter developed two models in order to discuss possible asymmetric business cycle effects on US sectoral stock returns. One was a GARCH model with asymmetric explanatory variables and the other one was an ARCH-M model with asymmetric external regressors. In the second model, square root of conditional variance of the business cycle proxy was characterized as positive or negative risk, depending on the algebraic sign of past innovations driving the business cycle proxy. I found that some sectors changed their cyclicities from expansions to recessions. Negative shocks to business cycles had most power to influence sectoral volatilities. Positive and negative parts of business cycle risk had same effects on some sectors but had opposite effects on other sectors. A general conclusion of both models was that business cycle had stronger effects than own sectoral effects in driving sectoral returns. The third chapter discussed Chinese business cycle effects on US sectoral stock returns at two horizons. At a monthly horizon...

This paper examines whether taxation is effective in eliminating sunspot fluctuations by considering two separate model economies by which indeterminacy occurs for empirically plausible specification of the model parameters. In the first model where production exhibits social increasing returns to scale and private constant returns to scale, I find that i) labor income tax alone, even if the tax schedule is flat, is effective; ii) taxes on labor and capital income would be more effective with increased progressivity; iii) at each average tax rate, labor income tax is more effective than capital income tax. However, in the second model where production exhibits social constant returns to scale and private decreasing returns to scale, I find that labor and capital income taxes at all progressivity levels are ineffective in removing sunspot fluctuations.; http://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/bejmac/vcontributions.5y2005i1n3.html; Nicholas C.S. Sim

The article documents five stylized facts of economic growth: (1) the 'residual' (total factor productivity, tfp) rather than factor accumulation accounts for most of the income and growth differences across countries; (2) income diverges over the long run; (3) factor accumulation is persistent while growth is not, and the growth path of countries exhibits remarkable variation; (4) economic activity is highly concentrated, with all factors of production flowing to the richest areas; and (5) national policies are closely associated with long-run economic growth rates. These facts do not support models with diminishing returns, constant returns to scale, some fixed factor of production, or an emphasis on factor accumulation. However, empirical work does not yet decisively distinguish among the different theoretical conceptions of tfp growth. Economists should devote more effort toward modeling and quantifying tfp.

Cross-national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker. This implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor production is large, strongly statistically significant, and negative. These are 'on average' results, derived from imposing a constant coefficient. However, the development impact of education varied widely across countries and has fallen short of expectations for three possible reasons. First, the institutional/governance environment could have been sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educational capital lowered economic growth. Second, marginal returns to education could have fallen rapidly as the supply of educated labor expanded while demand remained stagnant. Third, educational quality could have been so low that years of schooling created no human capital. The extent and mix of these three phenomena vary from country to country in explaining the actual economic impact of education...

This report investigates the environmental impacts of Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization. A 10-region, 30-sector model of the Russian economy is developed. The model is innovative and more accurate empirically in that it contains foreign direct investment, imperfectly competitive sectors, and endogenous productivity effects triggered by World Trade Organization accession along with environmental emissions data in Russia for seven pollutants that are tracked for all 30 sectors in each of the 10 regions. The decomposition analysis shows that despite the fact that World Trade Organization accession allows Russia to import better technologies and reduce pollution from the "technique effect," on balance World Trade Organization accession alone will increase environmental pollution in Russia through a shift toward dirty industries (the "composition effect") and the expansion of output with its associated increase in pollution ("scale effect"). The paper assesses the costs of three types of environmental regulations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent. The paper simultaneously implements a central case scenario with each of the carbon dioxide emission reduction policy initiatives. The analysis finds that the welfare gains of World Trade Organization accession are large enough to pay for the costs of any of the three environmental abatement policies...

The results of this paper challenge the conventional wisdom in the literature that productivity plays no role in the economic development of Singapore. Properly accounting for market power and returns to scale technology, the estimated average productivity growth is twice as large as the conventional total factor productivity (TFP) measures. Using a standard growth accounting (production function) technique, Young (1992, 1995) found no sign of TFP growth in the aggregate economy and the manufacturing sector of Singapore. Based on Young's results, Krugman (1994) claimed that there was no East Asia miracle as all the economic growth in Singapore could be attributed to its capital accumulation in the past three decades. Citing evidence on nondiminishing market rates of return to capital investment in Singapore during the period of fast growth as an indication of high productivity growth, Hsieh (1999) challenged Young's findings using the dual approach. But all of these papers maintained the assumptions of perfect competition and constant returns to scale and used only aggregate macro-level data. Kee uses industry level data and focuses on Singapore's manufacturing sector. She develops an empirical methodology to estimate industry productivity growth in the presence of market power and nonconstant returns to scale. The estimation of industry markups and returns to scale in this paper combines both the production function (primal) and the cost function (dual) approaches while controlling for input endogeneity and selection bias. The results of a fixed effect panel regression show that all industries in the manufacturing sector violate at least one of the two assumptions. Relaxing the assumptions leads to an estimated productivity growth that is on average twice as large as the conventional TFP calculation. Kee concludes that productivity growth plays a nontrivial role in the manufacturing sector.

Trade, financial, and exchange rate reforms are shown to have exerted a positive impact on the growth of total factor productivity in Rwanda during the period 1995-2003. Based on a constant returns-to-scale Cobb-Douglas production function, this paper regresses total factor productivity on indices of trade, financial, and exchange rate reforms. The analysis determines that trade reforms and financial reforms each contributed positively to improvements in total factor productivity. The data also suggest that the allocation of official development assistance to human capital made a significant contribution to productivity. In contrast, the appreciation of the real exchange rate of the late 1980's hindered productivity or the growth of TFP. Taken together, the findings for Rwanda presented in this paper show that the strong growth of the past decade has not just been due to a "bounce back" effect following the genocide. The results support the notion that policies favorable to trade development, a deepening of the financial sector...

This paper develops a seven-region comparative static computable general equilibrium model of Russia to assess the impact of accession to the World Trade Organization on these seven regions (the federal okrugs) of Russia. In order to assess poverty and distributional impacts, the model includes ten households in each of the seven federal okrugs, where household data are taken from the Household Budget Survey of Rosstat. The model allows for foreign direct investment in business services and endogenous productivity effects from additional varieties of business services and goods, which the analysis shows are crucial to the results. National welfare gains are about 4.5 percent of gross domestic product in the model, but in a constant returns to scale model they are only 0.1 percent. All deciles of the population in all seven federal okrugs can be expected to significantly gain from Russian World Trade Organization accession, but due to the capacity of their regions to attract foreign direct investment, households in the Northwest region gain the most...

This paper studies the implications of procyclical capital utilization rates for inference regarding cyclical movements in labor productivity and the degree of returns to scale. We organize our investigation around five questions that we study using a measure of capital services based on electricity consumption: (1) Is the phenomenon of near or actual short-run increasing returns to labor an artifact of the failure to accurately measure capital utilization rates? (2) Can we find a significant role for capital services in aggregate and industry-level production technologies? (3) Is there evidence against the hypothesis of constant returns to scale? (4) Can we reject the notion that the residuals in our estimated production functions represent technology shocks? (5) How does correcting for cyclical variations in capital services affect the statistical properties of estimated aggregate technology shocks? The answer to the first two questions is yes. The answer to the third and fourth questions is no. The answer to the fifth question is "a lot."