When firms collude and charge supracompetitive prices, consumers can bring antitrust lawsuits against the firms. litigation cost is low, accept as just another of doing business, whereas when high, lower price to deter litigation. Class action modeled a mechanism that allows plaintiffs attorneys obtain economies scale. We show class actions, firms’ incentive block them, may or not be socially d...

Firm-level, revenue-based productivity measures are ubiquitous in studies of firm dynamics and aggregate outcomes. One common measure is increasingly interpreted as reflecting “distortions” since distortions’ absence, equalization marginal revenue products should yield no dispersion this measure. Another but distinct the residual firm-level function, which reflects “fundamentals.” Using micro-l...

In parametric stochastic frontier models, the composed error is specified as the sum of a two-sided noise component and a one-sided inefficiency component, which is usually assumed to be half-normal, implying that the error distribution is skewed in one direction. In practice, however, estimation residuals may display skewness in the wrong direction. Model respecification or pulling a new sampl...

The "big-bang" liberalization of the inefficient Russian economy in 1992 provides a fruitful setting for analyzing the impact of several dimensions of market competition and other factors on enterprise efficiency. We analyze 1992-1998 panel data on 14,961 enterprises covering 75 percent of industrial employment, emphasizing the varied sources, geographic scope, intensity, time path, and surviva...

Agriculture is the focus of much contention in free trade negotiations. The Japanese government is against liberalizing the rice trade on the grounds that it would threaten “national food security” in the events of such shocks as crop failure, war, and embargo. Trade liberalization is expected to make Japan more dependent upon food imports and to make the Japanese economy more susceptible to th...

The impact of ICT (information and communication technology) on economic performance has been the subject of academic research for several decades, and despite the remarkable and significant innovation in computer technology, usage, and investments, only a small growth in productivity was observed. This observations has been coined the productivity paradox. Usingmeta-analysis, my paper answers ...

American industries have grown more concentrated over the last 40 years. In absence of productivity innovation, this should lead to price hikes and output reductions, decreasing consumer welfare. With US census data from 1972 2012, I use disentangle revenue output. Industry-level estimates show that concentration increases are positively correlated real growth, uncorrelated with changes overall...

Using detailed household-level data from Malawi on physical quantities of agricultural outputs and inputs, we measure farm total factor productivity (TFP), controlling for land quality, rain, transitory shocks. We find that operated size capital are essentially unrelated to TFP, implying substantial misallocation. The output gain a reallocation factors their efficient use among existing farmers...

JEL Classification Code(s): J 31, J 71) "Perceptions of Discrimination, Effort to Obtain Psychological Balance, and Relative Wages: Can We Infer a Happiness Gradient?" There is a substantial literature that finds a linkage between happiness and relative economic well being as measured by earnings or wages. There is also a well documented racial gap in wages. One explanation for this is disparat...

one of the most important issues about production structure and measurement of factors utilization in industry is the study of substitutability among the production factors. while, energy, for its particular features like finite and the direct relationship between energy usage and air pollution; and specifically abundance of energy resources and allocation of subsidies to different energy carri...