Prof. Segerson is the invited editor of a forthcoming volume on the Economics of Pollution Control, which is scheduled for publication in February 2011 by Edward Elgar Publishers. The book collects 26 previously published articles that provide a contemporary overview of this field. Rather than highlighting classic papers in the field, the volume focuses on more recent key contributions, highlighting advances in theory, models, and empirical methods that have occurred over the past ten to fifteen years. The included papers illustrate the wide range of contexts and ways in which the insights from economics in general, and environmental economics in particular, can inform current policy debates over pressing environmental issues. The volume is part of Elgar’s The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics series.
Faculty publication
From Detroit to Singur
“As land gets transferred from agriculture to industry, many people (like share croppers and landless workers) will lose their livelihood. It would be morally reprehensible to drive a Nano or a Cadillac on the dirt roads wet with the tears of the dispossessed. Economic rehabilitation of these displaced workers remains the first priority of any responsible government.”
An article by Professor Subhash Ray recently appeared in the November 17, 2009 issue of the highly esteemed biweekly literary magazine, Desh, published in Bengali from Calcutta. His paper draws upon the parallel between the experiences of General Motors in Poletown, MI in the 1980s and the recent events relating to Tata Motors and the agricultural land in Singur, West Bengal, to raise a number of questions about government taking of land for private development. A brief review of the history of land acquisition through eminent domain in the US serves as the background for a discussion of the different important questions like the problem of strategic holdouts and fair compensation. The essay ends with an emphasis on the moral obligation of the government, especially in India, for proper rehabilitation of the displaced when exercise of Eminent Domain powers becomes unavoidable.
His paper has attracted a lot of attention and has been highly acclaimed by scholars interested in the question of land acquisition for economic development. An English version of the paper is available as a University of Connecticut Economics working paper. The original article in Bengali is available on request from the author.
Prof. Ross to publish in the Review of Economics and Statistics
Prof. Stephen Ross with his co-authors Eric Brunner (BA alumnus) and Ebonya Washington had their paper “Economics and Policy Preferences: Causal Evidence of the Impact of Economic Conditions on Support for Redistribution and Other Ballot Proposals” accepted recently at the Review of Economics and Statistics, one of the leading journals in the profession.
In this paper, they analyze voting data on California ballot propositions between 1990 and 2004 classifying these propositions based on their political leaning (Democrat vs. Republican) and based on the type of proposition (fiscal vs. social). They find strong evidence that positive economic shocks lead to declines in support for redistributive policies using an exogenous proxy for economic shocks based on changes in national employment composition and the composition of worker industry at the neighborhood level. Further, they find that voters behave as if the voters have a preference for consistency in political preferences so that economic shocks have a smaller but similar impact on voting on non-economic ballot issues.
Prof. Couch publishes in American Economic Review
An article based on the work of Prof. Kenneth Couch that examines the experiences of workers who have lost jobs they held for a long time is contained in the current issue of the American Economic Review. The paper, entitled “Earnings Losses of Displaced Workers Revisited“, is co-authored with Dana Placzek who is a research analyst for the Connecticut Department of Labor. The research makes use of state administrative records to show that workers displaced due to large-scale layoffs and plant closures experience sustained earnings losses. Those losses are seen as the proportion of earnings attributable to specific human capital. The analysis also demonstrates that the size of the earnings losses depends heavily on whether workers take Unemployment Insurance benefits during the period of job transition.
The same research project that resulted in this publication in the centennial issue of the American Economic Review (Volume 100, Issue 1) also resulted in an additional publication in Research on Aging regarding specific experiences of older displaced workers in Connecticut that was co-authored with Dana Placzek and Nicholas Jolly, when he was a graduate student in our program. Additional work from this project showing the impact of the business cycle on the depth of earnings losses is still under review.
Prof. Furtado publishes in AER P&P
In a paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, Prof. Delia Furtado and coauthor, Heinrich Hock (Mathematica Policy Research), explore the role of immigration in explaining the labor supply and fertility decisions of high-education U.S. native women. The evidence presented in the paper suggests that low-skilled immigration decreases the price of childcare services, making it easier for career-minded women to combine work and family. The authors find that large inflows of immigrants to a city attenuate the negative relationship between female labor force participation and fertility, which translates into an increase in the proportion of women that both work and have a young child in the home.
Relative to women in most other developed countries, American women have very high rates of labor force participation and fertility. This is especially remarkable given how many countries have family leave and subsidy policies that are far more generous than those in the United States. The results in this paper point to immigration as a partial explanation for this phenomenon. Whereas most immigration research focuses on the reduced employment prospects of natives, this paper considers the potential benefits of immigration to high skill native women. Prof. Furtado plans to continue this line of research in future work.
Each May, the AER Papers and Proceedings publishes a sampling of the papers presented at the Annual Meeting of American Economics Association. A working paper version of the article is available here.
Profs Coşgel and Miceli publish on state and religion
Professors Metin Coşgel and Thomas Miceli have recently published an article titled “State and Religion.” The paper develops a theoretical and empirical analysis of the historical relationship between government and religion. The authors argue that an important function of religion throughout history has been to help legitimize the state, thereby reducing both its cost of tax collection and its susceptibility to being overthrown by popular revolt. In this sense, the model is an effort to formalize Marx’s famous dictum that religion serves as “an opiate of the masses.” The model also tries to explain why some regimes, notably communist, have tried to suppress religion. If the actions of the state are contrary to religious doctrine, for example, the state may find it necessary to suppress practice of that religion in order to maintain power. The paper uses a rich set of cross-country data on the relationship between religion and state, as well as examples drawn from history, to evaluate the predictions of the model.
This article, which was published in the September 2009 issue of the Journal of Comparative Economics (UConn working paper version), is part of a larger research agenda that Professors Cosgel and Miceli have recently embarked upon that seeks to examine the interaction of religious, political, and legal institutions from an economic perspective.
Prof. Matschke publishes in Canadian Journal of Economics
Earlier this month, Prof. Xenia Matschke got a paper accepted in the Canadian Journal of Economics. The paper titled “Trade Policy in Majoritarian Systems: The Case of the U.S.” was coauthored with Per Fredriksson (University of Louisville) and Jenny Minier (University of Kentucky). A previous version of this paper was published as UConn Economics Working Paper, “For Sale: Trade Policy in Majoritarian Systems“. Another paper by the same authors on the influence of a majoritarian electoral system on environmental tax policies was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (see blog entry).
In the current paper on trade policy in majoritarian systems, Matschke and her coauthors provide a theory of trade policy determination that incorporates the protectionist bias inherent in majoritarian systems, as suggested by Grossman and Helpman (2005). The prediction that emerges is that in majoritarian systems, the majority party favors industries located disproportionately in majority districts. The authors test this prediction using U.S. data on tariffs, Congressional campaign contributions, and industry location in districts represented by the majority party over the period 1989-97. They find evidence of a significant majority bias in trade policy for the years when Democrats were the majority party in Congress. An industry’s estimated benefit from being represented by the majority party appears at least as large in magnitude as the benefit from lobbying.
Prof. Matschke publishes in JEEM
Prof. Matschke recently got a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), the leading field journal in environmental economics. The paper, titled “Environmental Policy in Majoritarian Systems” (UConn Economics Working Paper 2008-01), is the outcome of an ongoing research project with Per Fredriksson (University of Louisville) and Jenny Minier (University of Kentucky) on the influence of majoritarian systems on economic policy.
This paper sheds new light on the determination of environmental tax policies in majoritarian federal electoral systems such as the U.S., and derives implications for the environmental federalism debate on whether the national or local government should have authority over environmental taxes. In the absence of majority bias, the socially preferred policy would be federal district-level taxation which accounts both for cross-boundary pollution and differences in industry concentration across districts. If majority representatives use environmental tax policy to maximize the welfare of only their own districts rather than social welfare, federal district-level pollution taxes are typically suboptimal, and decentralized or federal uniform taxation may be the preferred solution.
Vicki Knoblauch publishes on preferences and collective choice
Prof. Knoblauch (IDEAS) has had a lot of success recently in publishing articles in economic theory. She has been working in two main areas. One is concerned with increasing our understanding of consumer and voter preferences. “Recognizing One-Dimensional Euclidean Preferences,” forthcoming in the Journal of Mathematical Economics, shows how to determine whether voters’ preferences over candidates were formed on the basis of a single issue when the preferences themselves are the only information available. “Binary Relations: Finite Characterizations and Computational Complexity,” published in Theory and Decision, defines a category of easy-to-implement techniques for studying consumer preferences.
Her other area of study concerns the design of mechanisms that combine individual preferences into a collective choice. “Three-Agent Peer Evaluations,” forthcoming in Economics Letters, is an investigation into the recent surprising discovery that no rule that divides a profit fairly among three partners based on reports they submit can respect those reports when they agree. “Marriage Matching and Gender Satisfaction,” published in Social Choice and Welfare, is, among a vast literature on the subject of marriage matching, one of only a handful that has made progress in determining men’s and women’s satisfaction with the outcome of the best-known matching algorithm.
Latest issue of Indian Economic Review features three articles with UConn connections
In a rare coincidence, all three lead articles on the Indian Economic Review, a top journal in India, have a UConn connection. The first is authored by Rangan Gupta (IDEAS) a 2005 PhD alumnus very recently promoted to full professor at the University of Pretoria: Financial Liberalization and a Possible Growth-Inflation Trade-Off. The second is authored by Basab Dasgupta, a 2005 PhD alumnus: Endogenous Growth in the Presence of Informal Credit Markets in India: A Comparative Analysis Between Credit Rationing and Self-Revelation Regimes. And the third is authored by Prof. Ray, currently faculty at UConn: Are Indian Firms too Small? A Nonparametric Analysis of Cost Efficiency and the Optimal Organization of the Indian Manufacturing Industry.
Both Gupta and Dasgupta were advised by Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS). The first article is also available as a University of Pretoria working paper, and the latter two articles as UConn working papers: 1, 2, 3.