This paper tests the generalized Trivers Willard hypothesis, which predicts that parents with heritable traits that increase the relative reproductive success of males compared to females will have relatively more males than females. As in Kanazawa (2005) we test if taller mothers have relatively more sons in a pooled sample of Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) from 46 developing countries. Despite using a rich dataset and an array of statistical models that address some of the concerns raised by Gelman (2007), we provide further evidence against the hypothesis.
There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not. We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times, but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageurs liquidity providers in normal times, namely their tolerance of risk, enables a large increase in asset price risk during a financial panic. We show that a policy that discourages balance sheet risk reduces the magnitude of financial panics, as well as asset price risk in both normal and panic states.
The Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price. This link implies that risk about tomorrow’s asset price depends on uncertainty about risk tomorrow. This dynamic mapping of risk into itself gives rise to the possibility of multiple equilibria and self-fulfilling shifts in risk. We show that this can generate risk panics. The impact of the panic is larger when the shift from a low to a high risk equilibrium takes place in an environment of weak fundamentals. The sharp increase in risk leads to a large drop in the asset price, decreased leverage and reduced market liquidity. We show that the model can account well for the developments during the recent financial crisis.
Based on the recent trade models of the Heterogeneous Firms Trade (HFT) model and the Quality Heterogeneous Firms Trade (QHFT) model, we classify export goods (at the HS 6-digit level of disaggregation) by quality and price competition. We find a high proportions of quality-competition goods for the major EU countries and lower proportions for Canada, Australia and China. However, the overlap of these quality-competition goods is not large, which suggests that characteristics of export goods are substantially different across countries at the same HS 6-digit code.
We conduct a field experiment involving real purchasing decisions in a large supermarket chain to test the effect of different regulatory interventions aiming to induce a more climate-friendly diet on intrinsic motivation. Focusing on shoppers who prefer the dirty variety, we compare labeling, a subsidy, a product ban and neutrally framed versions of the latter two in their ability to induce shoppers to switch to cleaner varieties. Carbon footprint labels and bans activate intrinsic motivation of shoppers (crowding-in). Remarkably, a subsidy framed as an explicit intervention is less effective than both a label and an equivalent but neutrally framed price change. The effects of information and changes in relative prices are not only not additive (crowding-out) but combined perform worse than each individually (over-crowding). We therefore find markedly different effects of price and quantity based instruments on intrinsic motivation.
This paper focuses on the nature of the Appellate Body's interpretative method in arriving at its decision to read-in that Article 2.1 of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement) will not prohibit a detrimental impact on competitive opportunities for imports in cases where such detrimental impact stems exclusively from a legitimate regulatory distinction. This reading-in of the new phrase has been described as having been a contextual and teleological approach to interpretation by the Appellate Body. In this paper I consider what is meant by a teleological approach to interpretation and whether such an interpretation could in fact be another name for judicial law-making in some instances. In doing so, I suggest that a test to determine whether or not law-making has taken place could be to ask whether the Appellate Body's expression of the rights and obligations contained in the provision at issue was predictable. This is then applied to the Appellate Body's reasoning in US - Clove Cigarettes (2012) after an analysis of this reasoning, and from this I conclude that law-making could indeed have taken place in this case under the guise of a teleological approach to interpretation.
