The author systematically examines one of the important issues of information — establishing the market price. He introduces the concept of «search» — where a buyer wanting to get a better price, is forced to question sellers. The article deals with various aspects of finding the necessary information.

Economics of Information

This paper estimates 50-year trends in the intergenerational persistence of educational attainment for a sample of 42 nations around the globe. Large regional differences in educational persistence are documented, with Latin America displaying the highest intergenerational correlations, and the Nordic countries the lowest. We also demonstrate that the global average correlation between parent and child's schooling has held steady at about 0.4 for the past fifty years.

The Inheritance of Educational Inequality: International Comparisons and Fifty-Year Trends

Sharp increases in the price of oil are generally seen as a major contributor to business cycle asymmetries. Moreover, the very recent highs registered in the world oil market are causing concern about possible slowdowns in the economic performance of the most developed countries. While several authors have considered the direct channels of transmission of energy price increases, other authors have argued that the economic downturns arose from the monetary policy response to the inflation presumably caused by oil price increases. In this paper a structural cointegrated VAR model has been considered for the G-7 countries in order to study the direct effects of oil price shocks on output and prices and the reaction of monetary variables to external shocks. Empirical analysis shows that, for most of the countries considered, there seems to be an impact of unexpected oil price shocks on interest rates, suggesting a contractionary monetary policy response directed to fight inflation. In turn, increases in interest rates are transmitted to real economy by reducing output growth and the inflation rate.

/pdf/oil-prices-inflation-and-interest-rates-in-a-structural-3096w1i2ky.pdf

Oil Prices, Inflation and Interest Rates in a Structural Cointegrated VAR Model for the G-7 Countries

What determines whether children grow up to be rich or poor? Arguing that parental actions are some of the most important sources of wealth inequality, Casey B. Mulligan investigates the transmission of economic status from one generation to the next by constructing an economic model of parental preferences. In Mulligan's model, parents determine the degree of their altruistic concern for their children and spend time with and resources on them accordingly—just as they might make choices about how they spend money. Mulligan tests his model against both old and new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of consumption, earnings, and wealth, including models that emphasize "financial constraints." One major prediction of Mulligan's model confirmed by the evidence is that children of wealthy parents typically spend more than they earn. Mulligan's innovative approach can also help explain other important behavior, such as charitable giving and "corporate loyalty," and will appeal to a wide range of quantitatively oriented social scientists and sociobiologists.

Parental Priorities and Economic Inequality

Nowhere has the divide between advocates and critics of globalization been more striking than in debates over free trade and the environment. And yet the literature on the subject is high on rhetoric and low on results. This book is the first to systematically investigate the subject using both economic theory and empirical analysis. Brian Copeland and Scott Taylor establish a powerful theoretical framework for examining the impact of international trade on local pollution levels, and use it to offer a uniquely integrated treatment of the links between economic growth, liberalized trade, and the environment. The results will surprise many.

	The authors set out the two leading theories linking international trade to environmental outcomes, develop the empirical implications, and examine their validity using data on measured sulfur dioxide concentrations from over 100 cities worldwide during the period from 1971 to 1986.

	The empirical results are provocative. For an average country in the sample, free trade is good for the environment. There is little evidence that developing countries will specialize in pollution-intensive products with further trade. In fact, the results suggest just the opposite: free trade will shift pollution-intensive goods production from poor countries with lax regulation to rich countries with tight regulation, thereby lowering world pollution. The results also suggest that pollution declines amid economic growth fueled by economy-wide technological progress but rises when growth is fueled by capital accumulation alone.

	Lucidly argued and authoritatively written, this book will provide students and researchers of international trade and environmental economics a more reliable way of thinking about this contentious issue, and the methodological tools with which to do so.

Trade and the environment : theory and evidence

Using the October Household Surveys, we found that the intergenerational education mobility of whites is higher than that of blacks. Among blacks, females have a higher intergenerational education mobility than males, while the poorest have the lowest intergenerational education mobility. The lower education mobility of blacks than that of whites indicate that factors such as access to the credit market, as well as the availability and quality of schools, are important determinants of educational attainment. Interestingly, the cross section estimates of black intergenerational education mobility do not differ from those obtained by using pseudopanel data, which control for unobserved community effects.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20730745

Intergenerational education mobility of black and white South Africans

Emission taxes and the market for abatement goods and services

Pollution abatement goods and services are now largely being delivered by a specialized "eco-industry.'' This note reconsiders Pigouvian taxes in this context. We show that the optimal emission tax must depart from the marginal social cost of pollution according to the polluters' and the environment firms' relative market power. Mots cles : Taxe pigouvienne, Industrie de l'environnement

http://web.hec.ca/scse/articles/Nimubona.pdf

The Pigouvian Tax Rule in the Presence of an Eco-Industry *

During the Doha Round at the World Trade Organization, reductions in trade barriers on environmental goods (EG) were put forward as a means of helping developed and developing countries alike deal with current environmental problems. We examine the potential effectiveness of such a strategy in a developing country that imports all its consumption of EG from an imperfectly competitive foreign eco-industry. We point out that trade liberalization of EG might in fact lead to less stringent pollution taxes, which can result in an actual rise in pollution levels. We then show that the environmental effectiveness objective of this trade reform can be achieved when the regulator uses quantitative abatement standards as an alternative pollution policy instrument. However, this environmental achievement comes at the expense of social welfare.

Pollution Policy and Trade Liberalization of Environmental Goods

We compare the performance of R&D cooperation and R&D competition within the eco-industry using a model of vertical relationship between a polluting industry and the eco-industry. The polluting industry is assumed perfectly competitive, and the eco-industry is a duopoly in the market for abatement goods and services, with one firm acting as a Stackelberg leader and the other firm as a follower. When there are full information sharing under R&D cooperation and involuntary information leakages under R&D competition, we find that the only case where government intervention is needed is the case where R&D cooperation yields a higher welfare but smaller profits for the follower eco-industrial firm than R&D competition. Furthermore, because of the market power that the eco-industry enjoys, we show that more total R&D efforts under R&D competition do not necessarily translate into more abatement activities and larger social welfare. When there are no involuntary leakages of information under R&D competition, this result occurs because R&D competition can induce more total R&D efforts than R&D cooperation even for significantly high R&D spillovers, if the marginal environmental damage is large.

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Alain-Désiré Nimubona

Papers

Intergenerational education mobility of black and white South Africans

Emission taxes and the market for abatement goods and services

The Pigouvian Tax Rule in the Presence of an Eco-Industry *

Pollution Policy and Trade Liberalization of Environmental Goods

Environmental R&D in the Presence of an Eco-Industry