The opium wars, opium legalization and opium consumption in ChinaFeige, Chris; Miron, Jeffrey A.
doi: 10.1080/13504850600972295pmid: N/A
The effect of drug prohibition on drug consumption is a critical issue in debates over drug policy. One episode that provides information on the consumption-reducing efffect of drug prohibition is the Chinese legalization of opium in 1858. In this paper we examine the impact of China's opium legalization on the quantity and price of British opium exports from India to China during the nineteenth century. We find little evidence that legalization increased exports or decreased price. Thus, the evidence suggests China's opium prohibition had a minimal impact on opium consumption.
1861Diebolt, Claude; Parent, Antoine
doi: 10.1080/13504850600972253pmid: N/A
We apply the outlier methodology to the issue of the regulation of Bimetallism. Did French and British central banks use their discount rates as a policy tool for currency stabilization over the period 1850–1870? The common view identifies Bimetallism as a pure automatic system constrained by specie points. Using outliers methodology we give evidence that the influence of the discount rate differential between France and England on the Sterling–Franc spot exchange rate was taken in default only on one occasion, on February 1861. The assessment of the historical context helps to understand this peculiar event which was only transitory. This article is an illustration of the importance of the outlier methodology in cliometrics as a mean to test conventional wisdom in economic history.
An alternative perspective on the stochastic convergence of incomes in the United StatesCook, Steven
doi: 10.1080/13504850600949186pmid: N/A
In recent years a number of studies has examined the potential stochastic convergence of incomes in the United States. This research has been based upon examination of the order of integration of the ratios of regional levels of per-capita income relative to US aggregate per-capita income, with stationary of the ratios taken as evidence of stochastic convergence. In the present article this research and its implicit assumption that the individual regional and aggregate per-capita series are I(1), are revisited. In a departure from previous research, application of a more robust testing procedure incorporating two structural breaks to the individual aggregate and regional per-capita series, rather than their ratios, is seen to result in overwhelming rejection of the unit root hypothesis for all of the series examined. The unit root hypothesis is rejected also for more disaggregated State level data. The evidence of stationarity presented for the component per-capita income series suggests that care should be exercised when both interpreting results presented previously in the literature and conducting further research.
On measuring group-differentials displayed by socio-economic indicators: an extensionMishra, Srijit
doi: 10.1080/13504850600972238pmid: N/A
In a recent paper, Mishra and Subramanian (2006) propose a measure to explain group-differential which is sensitive to levels in the sense that a given hiatus at lower levels of failure (or higher levels of attainment) is considered worse off. This article critically evaluates their method – refines their two axioms, adds an additional axiom of normalization and proposes an alternative which is more general. It proposes to reduce subjectivity when there is lower hiatus at lower levels of failure and also addresses scenarios when rank ordering of sub-groups will be reversed. Empirical illustration with infant mortality rate data for selected Indian states is also provided.
Vehicle price and hydrocarbon emissions: evidence from the used-vehicle marketsBin, Okmyung; Martins-Filho, Carlos
doi: 10.1080/13504850600972303pmid: N/A
This study examines how used-vehicle markets responded to the automobile hydrocarbon emissions by linking used-vehicle price to the large scale emission test data that contain 74 vehicle models manufactured over 18 years. An additive semiparametric hedonic model is estimated to analyse the relationship between vehicle price and hydrocarbon emissions. The estimation procedure is novel and involves a local polynomial estimator nested in a backfitting algorithm with the bandwidths chosen by a data-driven plug-in method. The results indicate that hydrocarbon emissions have a significant negative impact on vehicle price, but the negative association is evident only at low emission levels. The price discount appears to be unrelated to the increased costs from recent emission regulations that mainly target high-polluting vehicles.
A dual-target monetary policy rule for open economies: an application to FranceHueng, C. James; Yau, Ruey
doi: 10.1080/13504850600972220pmid: N/A
This article proposes a dual targets monetary policy rule for small open economies. In addition to a domestic monetary target, this rule targets the nominal exchange rate at a fixed level. The policy rule is derived from a dynamic programming problem and evaluated in the context of an open-economy model. Using French quarterly data from April 1977 to March 1998, counterfactual simulations show that the dual targets rule performs better than both the historical discretionary policy and the single money-targeting rule in reducing the inflation rates.
Proposed separability restriction tests using nonparametric regression methodsAoki, Takaaki
doi: 10.1080/13504850600949160pmid: N/A
This article proposes some tests for separability restriction incorporating nonparametric regression methods, as well as offering their general statistic characteristics. An effective separability restriction test is essential for appropriate model specification or appropriate implementation of semi-parametric estimation. In this article, I describe two procedures to yield the estimated residuals, which is very sensitive to separability restriction, upon which one test statistics is proposed. In some benchmark models of sine/cosine functions, I simulate out the probability density function of test statistics in a small sample. These presented results and analysis show that the proposed estimator is robust and effective to variable functional form of regression curves and to variable scale factors, broader than the ‘optimal’ level, and can be put conveniently and widely into a practical use.