Market Imperfection

The issue of financial market development lays beyond the Gershenkron’s paradigm. However, studies of this issue in a regional perspective could help to review the Gerschenkron’s question about a low availability of credits in a backward country. This research deals with integration processes in the commercial banking market in the Russian Empire in 1874-1897. The integration is studied through interest (lending) rate analysis. According to the statistical analysis, including regression, interest rates clearly decreased and became more homogeneous from 1874 to 1897; there were many regions with lending rates below the national average. In comparison with interest rates of the Bank of Japan in 1897 (10-12%), the Russian lending rates were significantly lower (about 7.3%). As regards the USA, the gross rates of return on earning assets were a little bit higher in Russia (Russia — 7.9%, the US reserve-city national banks — 7.5%; the US non-reserve-city national banks — 7.2%). The regional interest rates’ distribution can be explained by supply-demand effects (the more resources there were in the region the lower rates were there), scale effects (larger banks offered lower rates), as well as effects related to market imperfections, when access to bank loans was mainly for groups of privileged customers, close to the bank’s owners and its top-level managers (credit rationing).

Studies on efficiency changes in transition agriculture yield mixed results. This paper develops both a theoretical model and an empirical analysis of how distribution of efficiency scores changes with the various stages of transition. We use a unique set of representative farm survey data to calculate farm level efficiency scores, compare the efficiency distributions of different transition countries and correlate

Rural-urban migration has long been associated with economic development and growth in the economic literature. In particular, Todaro and Harris-Todaro-type probabilistic models that examine migration have concentrated on the expected wage disparities between rural and urban (formal) labor markets as a driving force behind migration decision. These models, which are static and partial equilibrium in nature, have virtually ignored the

In this period of economic and social distress, a comprehensive assessment of the foundations of our economic and social systems has been unfolding in virtually all the most developed countries. We will employ a pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach for analysing some controversial elements of the following issues: 1) the definition and analysis of the market in an institutional and evolutionary perspective; 2) authoritarian and democratic socialism, namely, how to bring together freedom and social justice; 3) the possibility of reformulating the Marxist labour theory of value without reference to the concepts of classic economics; 4) the theory of historical materialism and the importance of bringing to the fore also the cultural and psychological factors; 5) the links of these issues with the debate between holism and methodological individualism; 6) the role of psychoanalytic perspective in elucidating many aspects of these concepts and, on this basis, to identify suitable policies for our most urgent economic and social problems.

This paper provides a framework that aims at distinguishing the technological economies of vertical integration from the vertical economies resulting from an inefficient input allocation due to upstream market imperfections. To illustrate our analysis, we use consistent panel data econometric methods to estimate cost functions on a sample of North-American water utilities. Contrary to what has been found for other

We analyze the effect of inequality in the distribution of endowment of private inputs (eg, land, wealth) that are complementary in production with collective inputs (eg, contribution to public goods such as irrigation and extraction from common-property resources) on efficiency in ...

Many economists argue that the primary economic function of banks is to provide cheap credit, and to facilitate this function, they advocate the strict protection and enforcement of creditor rights. But banks can serve another important economic function: through project screening they can reduce the number of project failures and thus mitigate their private and social costs. Strict protection of