111,893 research outputs found
Do quality ladders rationalise the observed Engel curves?
No full textObserved Engel curves are non-monotonic, hence consumption goods may be regarded as luxuries only for ranges of consumer income. This paper rationalises this evidence by postulating that quality of consumption governs the distribution of spending across goods.
We argue that quality upgrading as income increases not only implies that virtually every variety of each good eventually becomes inferior. But also amends the notion of luxury good: a change in income, producing different quality variations across goods, causes heterogeneous spending responses. The resulting Engel curves shapes depend on the rise in quality of each good relative to the average consumption quality improvement. An illustrative simulation shows that the model captures the essential features of the observed Engel curves
Quality Ladders in a Ricardian Model of Trade with Nonhomothetic Preferences
No full textThe North–South trade literature has traditionally explored conditions under which international trade might further magnify income disparities between the advanced North and the backward South. We show that even when no single country is initially more advanced than any other one and productivity changes are uniform and identical in all countries, trade may still be a source of income divergence when nonhomothetic preferences and quality ladders are jointly taken into account. Income divergence will be experienced when comparative advantages induce patterns of specialization that, although initially optimal for all countries, do not offer the same scope for quality upgrading of final products
Love for quality, comparative advantage, and trade
No full textWe propose a Ricardian trade model with horizontal and vertical differentiation, where willingness to pay for quality rises with income, and productivity differentials across countries are stronger for high-quality varieties of goods. Our theory predicts that the scope for trade widens and international specialisation intensifies as incomes grow and wealthier consumers raise the quality of their consumption baskets. This implies that comparative advantages strengthen gradually over the path of development as a by-product of the process of quality upgrading. The evolution of comparative advantages leads to specific trade patterns that change over the growth path, by linking richer importers to more specialised exporters. We provide empirical support for this prediction, showing that the share of imports originating from exporters exhibiting a comparative advantage in a specific product correlates positively with the importer's GDP per head
author-bios-SRD-19-0063.R1 – Supplemental material for The Network Structure of Police Misconduct
No full textSupplemental material, author-bios-SRD-19-0063.R1 for The Network Structure of Police Misconduct by George Wood, Daria Roithmayr and Andrew V. Papachristos in Socius</p
Report on metazoan gill parasites of wild Atlantic bluefin tuna Thunnus thynnus (L.) from Sardinian waters (western Mediterranean)
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