Although previous work shows strong relationships between oil prices and economic activity, the empirical evidence on the impact of oil prices on stock market returns has been mixed. This article investigates the existence of long-term relationships between oil prices and stock market indices in Europe using both aggregate and sector indices and linear and asymmetric cointegration. Our findings show that the response of stock prices to oil price depends greatly on the sector of activity and that oil prices affect stock returns in an asymmetric fashion.

Using a new data set that allows us to analyze precisely the research output in all fields of science, we show that the gap in scientific performance between Europe, especially continental Europe, and Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the USA, is large. We measure research quality by the number of highly cited researchers in nineteen selected scientific fields. After controlling for different variables, such as par capita GDP and outlays in R&D, the differences in productivity between Anglo-Saxon countries and other countries are explained, not surprisingly, by the importance of English proficiency, but also by the quality of institutions and of governance of the countries in the studied sample, the latter being in all likelihood highly correlated with the governance quality of research institutions.

Masa Fujita is a quiet economist – articulate and funny in person, but never one for dramatic gestures or flashy presentations. His work and influence over the years have built gradually, without at first attracting widespread notice beyond urban economists. But over time he, more than anyone else, has transformed the field.

If there is an overarching theme in Masa's work, it is “escape from von Thiinen.” Let me explain.

The von Thünen model of land use and land rent has, justifiably, exerted a powerful influence on how economists think about location, especially within cities. The basic idea is that of a single urban center, with costly transportation of goods to that center; given varying costs of transportation, this leads to a predictable relationship between land rents, land use, and distance from the center. Once Alonso realized that the same basic framework could be applied to commuting to a city center rather than transporting goods to a central city, we had a ready-made way to think about urban structure – and this way of thinking remains useful to this day.

Under the Cross-Licensing system (CL), firms are allowed to trade non cooperatively the results of R&D efforts, and compete in the innovation and production stages. First, the paper proposes a simple modeling of this system. Second, a relevant comparison is made with the Cartelized Research Joint Venture (RJV), the form of R&D cooperation recognized to be the best one.

We prove that the Cross-Licensing system may be socially better than the Cartelized RJV. In terms of antitrust policy, for firms, the most favorable collusion mode is Joint Exploitation. We prove that firms are equally tempted by this mode, whether they are under CL or under Cartelized RJV.

This paper relies on Benhabib (1996)’s immigration model to analyze the political sustainability of selling immigration permits, an idea proposed by Gary Becker. To simplify the analysis, we focus on the effects of immigration flows on input prices. We find that immigration quotas almost always generate the highest capital-labor ratio (and thus the highest wage rate). We also provide an example in which immigration permits generate the lowest value of the capital-labor ratio when permits sales are wasted. Under this last assumption, we show that if the wealth of the median voter is low enough, immigration quotas will be chosen over immigration permits. If the median voter's wealth is high, then the issue of majority voting will be the system which delivers the lowest capital-labor ratio.

Le but de cet article est de montrer que le mécanisme de sélection naturelle des firmes peut entraver la croissance de la productivité agrégée de l'économie, et ce, contrairement aux résultats suggérés par la littérature théorique existante. Cette dernière considère que le mécanisme de sélection des firmes se base sur les niveaux de productivité de celles-ci. Nous supposons, dans cet article, que les firmes sont hétérogènes par non seulement leurs niveaux de productivité mais aussi par leurs coûts fixes. En outre, en tenant compte d'une possible perte d'expérience pour les firmes inactives, notre étude met clairement en avant un effet négatif de la sortie des firmes, et par là d'une baisse des subventions accordées à celles-ci, sur la croissance de la productivité agrégée tant à court qu'à long terme.

Durant les années 1930, Hicks cherche à comprendre la crise à laquelle l'économie mondiale est confrontée. Mais à la différence de la plupart des économistes de l'époque, il tente de se représenter théoriquement la situation dans un cadre d'équilibre général walrassien. Le présent article étudie la façon dont Hicks a développé cette approche dans les derniers chapitres de Valeur et capital (1939). Hicks en vient à affirmer que les fluctuations du système capitaliste mettent son existence en danger et forme le projet d'une théorie des cycles qui accorderait une place centrale aux anticipations de prix et intégrerait un scénario d'effondrement du système. Les difficultés que ce projet rencontre dès 1939 sont analysées afin d'expliquer son abandon dans A Contribution to the Theory of the Trade Cycle (1950).

This paper investigates whether remittance inflows reduce the elasticity of government size with respect to trade openness. Put differently, the paper tests the hypothesis that there is a partial substitution between public insurance through government spending and a private insurance through remittances in more open countries. The insurance role of remittances is evaluated by computing annual panel data coefficients of remittance cyclically with respect to the real GDP cycle. It appears that remittances have become more countercyclical during the end 1990s. Moreover, the trade openness, natural disasters, inflation and the shallowness nature of the financial system are among the main determinants of the countercyclicality of remittance inflows. From a simple theoretical model close to Rodrik (1998) and on the basis of econometric estimations using a large sample of developing countries (66), it appears that the positive impact of trade openness on government spending decreases with the level of remittances received. Moreover, it is when remittances are effectively countercyclical that the mechanism described here works.

There is a general presumption in urban economics that average commuting costs are increasing in city size. By analogy, it might be supposed that other spatial costs, such as distribution costs for utility services or access costs to schools and hospitals, will have the same characteristic. However, the basic commuting result derives from an urban model in which population density is uniform out to the city boundary and commuters travel individually and radially to the central business district. It is more realistic to suppose that population density declines away from the centre, as in the standard monocentric urban model and that there are likely to be scale economies in both commuting (e.g. from use of buses or metros) and distribution (e.g. larger diameter water mains). The aim of this paper is to explore the implications of such factors for spatial costs, using data on water distribution costs for 35 “urban districts” in the supply area of one of the water companies in England & Wales. Distribution cost elasticities are quantified for two contrasting urban development scenarios, confirming that in the case of Suburbanization average distribution costs are increasing in city size, as generally assumed; however, in the case of Densification these costs are decreasing in city size. The interaction with water production costs is also considered, showing that, in the case of Densification, scale economies in production are reinforced by density economies in distribution, whereas in the case of Suburbanisation they are offset to a greater or lesser extent by diseconomies in distribution, i.e. higher spatial costs. A final section relates these findings to the literature on commuting costs, urban agglomeration and sprawl. It is concluded that high density settlement has the potential to reduce average costs in distribution (including commuting) as well as production, so that both favour agglomeration. Accordingly, urban modelers should be cautious about assuming that commuting (and other spatial costs) are always increasing in city size.

This paper studies the production strategies of firms in a duopoly market of homogenous products characterized by quantity competition. Demand is partially unknown and firms are free to produce once, whenever they want before the existence of demand. We show that the nature of the equilibrium in such a game depends on the importance of the information spillovers between a leader and a follower. A Pareto-optimal sequential entry may happen. Therefore, the existence of information spillovers can be sufficient to bypass the leader's rent dissipation result in a duopoly quantity competition framework.

We study a spatial competition model which is a variant of the celebrated Hotelling (1929) framework. One of the firm is a brick-and-mortar one while the other is on-line. Both firms sell the same product except that (constant) marginal costs may differ. Consumers going to the shop around the corner face transportation costs according to their adress whereas on-line consumers bear a fix cost that may capture technological burden and risk premium. In the pricing Nash equilibria the “new economy” firm has smaller market shares eventhough it offers more attractive prices. For the on-line firm to become a leader, the cost difference must be large enough to offset the comparative disadvantage it face on the demand side. In the long run, increasing competition ultimately forces the local firm out of downtown. We argue that this effect may be related to some of the forecasts concerning the geographical impact of the development of remote access services.

This article contributes to the small literature on the relationship between the range of local public services and population size. Using new data on French local jurisdictions, we test the hypothesis that larger jurisdictions provide a broader range of public goods (the so-called “zoo effect”, Oates (1988)). We take advantage of the fact that, in France, many municipalities recently joined together, forming groups of municipalities (or communities) in order to achieve economies of scale. Using spatial econometrics, we find some evidence for the existence of a zoo effect in French communities. In other terms, larger communities provide a broader range of services than smaller ones. The intensity of the zoo effect is higher in urban than in rural areas.

We propose a method to compute an equilibrium solution for the monocentric city model with traffic congestion, and to quantify the impact of cordon tolls on social surplus. The focus of this paper is on the comparison of road pricing of one and two cordons, with the no toll and first-best situations as benchmarks.

We find that a one-cordon toll yields a social efficiency of 63% with respect to first-best, and that an optimal two-cordon toll increases the efficiency to 73%. Both policies have a positive impact on C02 emissions because they reduce the average length of trips and reduce the road size.