AEAweb: JEL: Contents: December 1998

Journal of Economic Literature
Vol. 36, No. 4, December 1998

Contents

Industrial Organization and New Findings on the Turnover and Mobility of Firms
Richard E. Caves      1947

Whither the World Bank and the IMF?
Anne O. Krueger      1983

The Economics of Wagering Markets
Raymond D. Sauer      2021

Nonrenewable Resource Scarcity
Jeffrey A. Krautkraemer      2065

Empirical Approaches to the Measurement of Welfare
Daniel T. Slesnick      2108

Recent research uses census-type longitudinal data to establish many new facts about turnover, entry, and exit among competing firms. Mean regression fosters stable concentration levels. Entrants experience high infant mortality, but entry buys them options to expand. Changes in control resemble a job-matching process. These patterns are reconciled with traditional industrial organization based on equilibrium models to establish relative roles of random and structural determinants of concentration and the normative role of turnover in raising industry productivity and efficiency. The patterns vary little from country to country, except for less sunkenness (more mobility) in developing countries.

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This article assesses the possible future directions and roles of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It first reviews their initially envisaged roles at Bretton Woods, and their evolution, concluding that both institutions played valuable roles earlier on. But for both institutions, the world has changed, and the questions as to their future are important. For the IMF, those questions center on its role in providing finance for poor developing countries in balance of payments difficulties and on its role for middle income countries in managing financial crises. For the World Bank, the question is whether it can and should gradually phase out lending for most middle income countries except in times of drastic policy reforms and focus on low-income countries, or whether it should address the "soft issues" of development.

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Wagering markets provide a natural laboratory for testing models of market prices and behavior under uncertainty. The literature on wagering, albeit contentious, has established the following. First, prices set in these markets, to a first approximation, are efficient forecasts of outcomes. Second, price changes in these markets are driven by an informed class of bettors and improve prediction. Nevertheless, there are important departures from generic notions of market efficiency. Recent models focusing on diverse information, heterogeneous agents, and transaction costs help to explain these findings.

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Nonrenewable resource theory often is summarized by Hotelling's rule. This paper reviews theoretical extensions and empirical investigations of resource extraction models. Observed data are often inconsistent with the Hotelling rule, suggesting that other characteristics of nonrenewable resource supply, including exploration, heterogeneous ore quality, technological progress, and capital investment, are important determinants of the dynamic behavior of resource prices. Given the persistent recurrence of concern about nonrenewable resource scarcity, measures of nonrenewable resource scarcity and the empirical evidence for the time trends of those measures are reviewed. Finally, the implications of nonrenewable resource scarcity for economic growth are examined.

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It has now been over twenty-five years since Arnold Harberger (1971) published his open letter to the profession, in which he proposed a set of guidelines for applied welfare economics. Since then, there has been great progress in the implementation of measures of welfare that are ordinally equivalent to household utility. While welfare measurement at the micro level is of independent interest, of greater practical concern is the issue of the well-being of groups of households. In the second half of the survey, I examine the issue of the aggregation of welfare across households and describe a framework that provides a consistent ranking of social outcomes.

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