Journal of Economic Literature
Vol. 38, No. 4, December 2000
Contents
Natural "Natural Experiments" in Economics
Mark R. Rosenzweig and Kenneth I. Wolpin 827
Renewable Natural Resource Management and Use without
Markets
Gardner M. Brown 875
The "New Political Economy": Recent Books
by Allen Drazen and by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini
Gilles Saint-Paul 915
A Review of O'Rourke and Williamson's Globalization
and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy
C. Knick Harley 926
Book Reviews
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Natural "Natural Experiments" in Economics
Mark R. Rosenzweig and Kenneth I. Wolpin
The recent literature exploiting natural events as "natural experiment"
instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical
knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that
the necessary set of behavioral, market, and technological assumptions
made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates
is often absent. The methodology and findings from twenty studies are
summarized and simple economic models are used to elucidate the implicit
assumptions made by the authors and to demonstrate the sensitivity of
the interpretations of the findings to the relaxation of some of these
assumptions.
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Renewable Natural Resource Management and Use without Markets
Gardner M. Brown
Natural resources, by their nature, are not readily bent to the status
of private property. Efficient resource use is complicated by jurisdictional
externalities, public goods, non-use values, and beneficiaries spatially
separated from the location of resources. The task is made more challenging
by ecological complexity which obscures cause (benefits) and effects (costs),
and dramatic time lags between individual actions and subsequent social
consequences which, together with substantial uncertainty, introduce the
chance of irreversibilities. Resource economists have played a major role
in the literature on externalities, the development of individual transferable
quotas, non-market valuation techniques and common property management.
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The "New Political Economy": Recent Books by Allen Drazen and
by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini
Gilles Saint-Paul
The last fifteen years have seen an explosion of contributions in the
field of political economy. Two new books, Political Economy in Macroeconomics
by Allan Drazen, and Political Economy: Explaining Economic Policy
by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, organize this literature and evaluate
what has been learned. Drazen mostly focuses on applications for macroeconomic
policy, while Persson and Tabellini focus on the various tools that can
be used to analyze the political process, and the institutional details
of decision-making.
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A Review of O'Rourke and Williamson's Globalization and History: The
Evolution of a Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy
C. Knick Harley
Much of the comparative economic history of the nineteenth century focuses
on the spread of the Industrial Revolution from Britain. Incomes converged,
in this view, as the transfer of superior technology raised incomes in
the periphery. In Globalization and History, Kevin O'Rourke and
Jeffrey Williamson challenge this technological approach, arguing that
neoclassical effects of trade and factor supply changes provide more insight.
Increased trade, stimulated by falling transportation costs, and factor
movements caused prices of locally scarce factors to fall and promoted
factor price convergence.
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