We develop and test a model of social comparison in which individuals gain status through pro-social behavior (competitive altruism) and in which they endogenously choose the reference group and associated reference standard involved in signaling status (reference group selection). In our...

From an engineering perspective, a capital good's service is energy conversion - e.g., the physical 'work' done by a machine - and can thus be measured directly by the energy consumed in production. We show important empirical advantages of our concept over traditional measures. The empirical...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) established under the Kyoto Protocol allows industrialized Annex I countries to offset part of their domestic emissions by investing in emissionsreduction projects in developing non-Annex I countries. We present a novel CDM modelling framework which can be...

The aim of this paper is to test for the presence of dynamic increasing returns to scale in Spanish regional growth between 1962 and 1991. The theoretical framework within which this paper is based is the so-called Verdoorn's Law. Tests of the law are performed not only for the manufacturing...

The empirical literature on the impact of unions on wages has stressed two major conclusions. Firstly, unionised workers earn a wage premium when compared to comparable nonunionised workers. Secondly, the dispersion of wages within the union sector is lower than in the nonunion sector. We...

Recent theoretical developments relating to investment under uncertainty have highlighted the importance of irreversibility for the timing of investment expenditures and their expected returns. This has subsequently stimulated a growing empirical literature which examines uncertainty and...

This paper surveys and motivates the reasons for incorporating explicit long run of supply features into applied estimated macro economic models. It defines some basic stability conditions for such models and illustrates elements of long run considerations with reference to a small (22 equation)...

The Solow condition is examined in an intertemporal model that blends the shirking and the turnover models of efficiency wages with managerial supervision. It is shown that the Solow condition does not hold when shirking and turnover costs are considered. The Solow condition can be a possible...

We examine the effects of two different types of commodity taxation, specific and ad valorem, on wages and profits. We analyze two models of wage determination, one with efficiency wage setting and one with bargaining between a union and a firm. In the former, a (locally) revenue-neutral shift...