Non-tariff barriers, integration and the transatlantic economy

We examine the potential impact of TTIP through trade-cost reductions, applying a mix of econometric and computational methods to develop estimates of the benefits (and costs) for the EU, United States, and third countries. Econometric results point to an approximate 80% growth in bilateral trade with an ambitious trade agreement. However, at the same time, computable general equilibrium (CGE) estimates highlight distributional impacts across countries and factors not evident from econometrics alone. Translated through our CGE framework, while bilateral trade increases roughly 80%, there is a fall of about 2.5% in trade with the rest of the world in our central case. The estimated gains in annual consumption range between 1% and 2.25% for the United States and EU, respectively. A purely discriminatory agreement would harm most countries outside the agreement, while the direction of third-country effects hinges critically on whether NTB reductions end up being discriminatory or not. Within the United States and EU, while labour gains across skill categories, the impact on farmers is mixed.

Relative Distribution Methods in Stata

The concept of the relative density seems like a fruitful nonparametric approach to studying distributional differences between groups (Handcock and Morris 1999), yet it appears that the technique has gone more or less unnoticed in applied social science research. A scarcity of canned software might be one of the reasons the method is underutilized. Therefore, I present a new Stata command called reldist to plot the relative density, decompose distributional differences into location and shape effects, and compute relative distribution summary measures. The command is illustrated by an application comparing earnings by sex.

Online Reputation Systems and Cumulative Advantage

The study of online reputation systems and their importance for promoting trust and cooperation and, therefore, the smooth functioning of online markets has received considerable attention over the last few years. In the first part of our talk we will try to give a brief overview of the existing theoretical and empirical work in this field, summarize the main findings from this research and identify open questions where results are either controversial or do not yet exist. The second part of our talk will focus on one of these issues that deserve further research, namely the relation between online reputation systems and processes of "cumulative advantage." Cumulative advantage is the mechanism where a favorable relative position of having a good reputation becomes a resource for further relative gains. The process leads to increased status inequality and a heavily skewed distribution of number of feedbacks, i.e. the ties in the reputation network. We present empirical evidence for direct and indirect reputation effects on the micro level of an auction reputation system and discuss the distributional consequences for the market level.

Multinomial goodness-of-fit: large sample tests with survey design correction and exact tests for small samples

A new Stata command called -mgof- is introduced. The command is used to compute distributional tests for discrete (categorical, multinomial) variables. Apart from classic large sample $\chi^2$-approximation tests based on Pearson's $X^2$, the likelihood ratio, or any other statistic from the power-divergence family (Cressie and Read 1984), large sample tests for complex survey designs and exact tests for small samples are supported. The complex survey correction is based on the approach by Rao and Scott (1981) and parallels the survey design correction used for independence tests in -svy:tabulate-. The exact tests are computed using Monte Carlo methods or exhaustive enumeration. An exact Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for discrete data is also provided.

The Silent Reform of Swiss Federalism: The New Constitutional Articles on Education

This article examines the decision-making process leading to the new constitutional articles on education in Switzerland. It analyzes how actors from both state levels (Confederation and cantons) could reach consensus in a process that was prone to a "joint-decision trap". To that end, we hypothesize which factors may be conducive to a "problem-solving" style of policy-making in a compulsory negotiation system. Rich empirical material from various sources supports our theoretical arguments: We show that shared beliefs and a common frame of reference, the procedural separation between constitutional and distributional issues, neutral brokers, and informal structures were all beneficial to the success of the reform project.