Kyklos 

About: Kyklos is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Wage & Population. It has an ISSN identifier of 0023-5962. Over the lifetime, 1972 publications have been published receiving 57753 citations. The journal is also known as: International review for social sciences & Kyklos (Oxford).

Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions

Abstract: Denzau and North argue that ideas matter, and that the way that ideas are communicated among people is crucial to building useful theories that will enable us to deal with strong uncertainty problems at the individual level. Under conditions of uncertainty, individuals' interpretation of their environment will reflect the learning that they have undergone. Individuals with common cultural backgrounds and experiences will share reasonably convergent mental models, ideologies and institutions and individuals with different learning experiences (both cultural and environmental) will have different theories (models, ideologies) to interpret that environment. It is the argument of this essay that in order to understand decision making under such conditions of uncertainty we must understand the relationship between the mental models that individuals construct to make sense out of the world around them, the ideologies that evolve from such constructions, and the institutions that develop in a society to order interpersonal relationships.

The Determinants of Foreign Direct Investments: Sensitivity Analyses of Cross‐Country Regressions

Abstract: A vast empirical literature has used ad hoc linear cross-country regressions to search for the determinants of FDI. The literature is extensive and controversial. Can policy-makers use this body of research to learn anything that can help them stimulate FDI? The author uses Extreme Bound Analysis (EBA) to examine if any of the conclusions from the existing studies is robust to small changes in the conditioning information set. The EBA upholds the robustness of the correlation between FDI and market-size, as measured by per-capita GDP, but indicates that the relation between FDI and many of the controversial variables (namely, tax, wage, openness, exchange rate, tariff, growth, and trade balance)bare highly sensitive to small alterations in the conditioning information set. The author also studies the distribution of the estimated coefficients of the controversial explanatory variables to rank them in order of their likelihood of their being correlated with FDI.

The Effects of Domestic Environmental Policies on Patterns of World Trade: An Empirical Test

Abstract: In theory, environmental control costs encourage reduced specialization in the production of polluting outputs in countries with stringent environmental regulations. The premise that trade suffers from the imposition of environmental policy has a strong element of a priori plausibility but, surprisingly, has little empirical support. This chapter considers the results of the less rigorous location of industry studies by providing an empirical test of the hypothesis that stringent environmental policy has caused trade patterns to deviate in commodities produced by the world's 'dirty' industries. The location-of-industry studies have explored the related ideas that stringent pollution control measures push industries out of the US, and that less-developed countries compete to attract multinational industries by minimizing their own environmental policies. The effect of domestic environmental policy on trade may be getting lost in the 'noise'. If environmental policies reduce countries' international comparative advantage in the most pollution-intensive commodities, then the sign on the environmental endowment coefficient should be negative and significant.