Using the Internet survey data from 6500 individuals, this study examines the determinants for supporting the restart of nuclear power plants operation in Japan. The variable of interest is the level of support that is measured as a categorical and ordered variable, for which ordered logit or probit is commonly estimated. This study departs from the literature using Bayesian ordinal quantile regression (Rahman 2015, Bayesian Anal. doi:10.1214/15-BA939) to address whether covariates have differential effects at various conditional quantiles of the latent response variable. This approach allows us to explore, for example, whether three otherwise identical individuals, the first with an average unobserved preference for the restart, the second with a low unobserved preference, and the third with a high unobserved preference, respond similarly or differently to a change in a covariate. The results show that for most of the covariates examined, including concerns about meltdowns and concerns about global warming, the effects differ across conditional quantiles of the latent response variable. In other words, the covariate effects depend crucially on individuals’ unobserved preferences for the restart (conditional on observables). The results also show that there are considerable gender differences in response to changes in covariates.

Using a household survey conducted in a suburb of Tokyo, we examine whether individuals properly perceive the benefits of energy-saving actions. A bivariate regression shows that, on average, individuals overestimate the benefits. The tendency to overestimate is robust to controlling for individual and home characteristics. Our results are contrary to those of Attari et al. (2011), who found that individuals in the U.S. tended to underestimate the benefits of energy-saving activities. The difference in our results suggests that the provision of information about the benefits of energy saving may be an effective policy to address global warming issues in one country but not necessarily in all countries. We also find that the magnitude of overestimation is greatest among young single males, whereas the benefits perceived by older married females are the smallest. This result suggests that the provision of tailored information (i.e., highly personalized and specific information) can be an effective intervention even in Japan. (C) 2014 International Energy Initiative. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organization. We use quantile and IV quantile regressions in our tests, using the data from Gawande and Bandyopadhyay (2000). Surprisingly, the results do not provide any evidence favoring the PFS model. We also explain why previous work may have found support for it. © 2013.

We characterise petrol pricing dynamics in an unusual policy environment. A timing restriction in the Western Australian market imposes discrete time pricing on petrol retailers, enabling us to observe the exact timing of price changes. We employ a Markov-switching regression model, finding the existence of Edgeworth price cycles of a similar nature to those recently observed in some other retail petrol markets. Cycles are frequent, asymmetric and of substantial amplitude. Importantly, firms change prices almost every period, limiting the relevance of the leading theory of Edgeworth cycles due to Maskin and Tirole (). We also discuss episodes of disruption and evolution of the price cycle.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we explore the relationship between body mass and wages. We use quantile regression to provide a broad description of the relationship across the wage distribution. We also allow the relationship to vary by the degree of social skills involved in different jobs. Our results find that for female workers body mass and wages are negatively correlated at all points in their wage distribution. The strength of the relationship is larger at higher-wage levels. For male workers, the relationship is relatively constant across wage distribution but heterogeneous across ethnic groups. When controlling for the endogeneity of body mass, we find that additional body mass has a negative causal impact on the wages of white females earning more than the median wages and of white males around the median wages. Among these workers, the wage penalties are larger for those employed in jobs that require extensive social skills. These findings may suggest that labor markets reward white workers for good physical shape differently, depending on the level of wages and the type of job a worker has. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we examine the relationship between initiating substance use and youth sexual behaviour. We employ a combination of panel data and propensity score matching techniques to control for observed and unobserved heterogeneity. The results indicate striking differences across gender. For males, initiating alcohol or marijuana use is positively and significantly associated with the likelihood of engaging in sexual intercourse and uncontracepted sexual intercourse. For females, in contrast, there is no robust evidence for such links.

A recent article by Caporale and Caporale (2008, this Journal) provides an important finding on the determinants of the sacrifice ratio: central bank independence is not a determining factor for the sacrifice ratio when political regimes and other factors are controlled for. Our replication study shows that their result is driven by errors in the data. With correct data, it can be found that central bank independence is positively and significantly correlated with the sacrifice ratio, even when the nature of the political regime is controlled for.

Most gravity model specifications assume that a currency union varies the level of bilateral trade between members by a constant proportion. We demonstrate that a common currency also alters the slope of the relationship between bilateral trade and member country GDPs. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Using Japanese facility-level data, we estimate the effects of ISO 14001 certification on the promotion of more advanced practices, namely green supply chain management (GSCM). Our results show that ISO 14001 promotes GSCM practices. Facilities with environmental management systems (EMS) certified to ISO 14001 are 40% more likely to assess their suppliers' environmental performance and 50% more likely to require that their suppliers undertake specific environmental practices. Further, government programs that encourage voluntary EMS adoption indirectly promote GSCM practices. These programs increase the probabilities that facilities will assess their suppliers' environmental performance and require suppliers to undertake specific environmental practices by 7% and 8%, respectively. Combined, these findings suggest that there may be significant but previously unnoticed spillover effects of ISO 14001 and government promotion of voluntary action. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Using game-level panel data on the National Basketball Association (NBA), we examine the causal effect of within-team salary dispersion on team performance. We exploit three measures of salary dispersion and examine the effect at three levels: whether the outcome of the game is influenced by salary dispersion among (1) players participating in the current game (active players), (2) players who played more than half of their team's games in a season (regular and occasional players) and (3) the entire player population. Regardless of the measures used, we find that salary dispersion does not influence team performance.

The Penn World Tables (PWT) are an important data source for cross-country comparisons in economics. The PWT have undergone several revisions over time. This paper documents how countries' output growth rates change across four publicly available versions of the PWT. We show that for some countries the magnitude of the differences is significant and/or the sign of the growth rates changes across versions. Using as an example Ramey and Ramey (1995), who found growth volatility has a significant negative effect on growth, we demonstrate that conclusions based on one version of the PWT may not hold under another version.

This paper asks whether the results obtained from using the standard approach to testing the influential Grossman and Helpman "protection for sale" model of political economy might arise from a simpler setting. A model of imports and quotas with protection occurring in response to import surges, but only for organized industries, is simulated and shown to provide parameter estimates consistent with the protection for sale framework. This suggests that the standard approach may be less of a test than previously thought. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Applied economists often wish to measure the effects of policy changes (like trade liberalization) or managerial decisions (like R&D expenditures or exporting) on firm-level productivity patterns. But firm-level data on physical quantities of output, capital, and intermediate inputs are typically unobservable. Therefore, when constructing productivity measures, most analysts proxy these variables with real sales revenues, depreciated capital spending, and real input expenditures. Our first objective is to argue that the resultant productivity indices have little to do with technical efficiency, product quality, or contributions to social welfare. Nonetheless, they are likely to be correlated with policy shocks and managerial decisions in misleading ways.
Our second objective is to develop an alternative approach to inference. We assume firms' costs and revenues reflect a Bertrand-Nash equilibrium in a differentiated product industry, as in Berry [Berry, Steven (1994) "Estimating discrete-choice models of product differentiation," Rand journal 25(2), pp. 242-262.]. This allows us to impute each firm's unobserved marginal costs and product appeal from its observed revenues and costs. With these in hand, we calculate each firm's contribution to consumer and producer surplus. Further, we link these welfare measures to policy and managerial decisions by assuming that marginal costs and product appeal indices follow vector autoregressive (VAR) processes, conditioned on policy proxies and/or managerial choice variables. We estimate the demand system parameters and VAR parameters jointly using Bayesian techniques.
Applying our methodology to panel data on Colombian paper producers, we study the relation between our welfare-based measures and conventional productivity measures. We find that the two are only weakly correlated with one another. Further, they give contrasting pictures of the relationship between firms' performances and their participation in foreign markets. One reason is that product appeal variation has little effect on standard productivity indices, but it is captured by welfare-based performance measures. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper critically and selectively surveys the literature on protection for sale and discusses directions for future research in this area. It suggests that the standard approach needs to be augmented to provide more compelling tests of this model. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We provide a theory to explain the existence of inequality in an economy where agents have identical preferences and have access to the same production technology. Agents consume a 'health' good which determines their subjective discount factor. Depending on initial distribution of capital the economy gets separated into different permanent-income groups. This leads to a testable hypothesis: 'The rich save a larger proportion of their permanent-income'. We test this implication for savings behaviour in Australia. We find that even after controlling for lifecycle and health characteristics, higher permanent income is positively related with higher savings rates and better saving habits.

Using Japanese facility-level data from an OECD survey, we estimate the effects of implementation of ISO14001 and publication of environmental reports on the facilities' environmental performance. While most previous studies focused on an index of emissions toxicity, this study examines three areas of impacts, none of which have been explored in the literature: natural resource use, solid waste generation, and wastewater effluent. The study is also unique in that the effectiveness of ISO14001 is considered in relation to environmental regulations. Our findings are summarized as follows. First, both ISO14001 and report publication help reduce all three impacts; the former appears more effective in all areas except wastewater. Second, environmental regulations do not weaken the effect of ISO14001. Third, assistance programs offered by local governments-a voluntary approach-promote facilities' adoption of ISO14001. These findings suggest that governments can use command-and-control and voluntary approaches concurrently. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.