In this note oligopoly with iso-elastic demand is analysed. Unlike previous studies we consider general iso-elastic demand rather than the case of unit elasticity. An n-firm Nash-Cournot equilibrium for the case of heterogeneous constant marginal costs is derived. The main result is a closed-form solution that shows the dependency of the equilibrium on the elasticity of demand and the share of industry costs. The result has applications to a wide range of areas in oligopoly theory by allowing comparisons across markets with different elasticities of demand.

Tax distortions cause a trade-off between efficiency and equity. However, taxes not only affect incentives; they also provide implicit insurance, and this may critically affect the efficiency–equity relationship. For a standard labour supply problem it is shown that the insurance effect mutes the sensitivity of labour supply to taxes, which tends to reduce tax distortions and lower the marginal costs of public funds. The relation between incentives and insurance and thus efficiency and equity is flattened by the insurance effect and it may even be non-monotone. However, the optimal utilitarian policy implies that there is always a trade-off between efficiency and equity on the margin.

According to conventional home market effects, free trade tends to shrink the market share for a smaller economy in differentiated manufacturing goods, and in the extreme, leads to a complete hollowing out of the industry. Departing from the original Helpman–Krugman modelling assumptions behind the home market effects, we introduce a technology advantage in terms of the difference in fixed cost and/or marginal cost between trading partners and prove that home market effects will be offset and even reverse if a small economy has better technology than another country. With a higher elasticity of substitution, the marginal cost advantage becomes more important if it is to dominate the home market effect. We also show that even with an identical country size, the intra-industry trade addressed in the existing literature may not occur; it will occur only if the technology differential lies within a certain range that is positively affected by the level of transport cost.

Some labour contract negotiations involve strikes while most conclude with immediate settlement. This article offers a model of union-firm negotiation with private information to show that either strikes or immediate settlement will take place in the equilibrium. Different from most signalling literature where the signals are exogenously given, this article endogenizes the choice of signals. We compare two signals, the employment level and the strategic delay. We show that the low-revenue firm will choose the signal which gives it higher payoff while separating itself from the high-revenue firm.

We develop a two-period, three-class of income model where low-income agents are borrowing constrained because of capital market imperfections, and where redistributive expenditure is financed by tax and government debt. When the degree of capital market imperfection is high, there is an ends-against-the-middle equilibrium where the constrained low-income and the unconstrained high-income agents favour low levels of government debt and redistributive expenditure; these agents form a coalition against the middle. In this equilibrium, the levels of government debt and expenditure might be below the efficient levels, and the spread of income distribution results in a lower debt-to-GDP ratio.

Horizontal mergers are usually under the scrutiny of antitrust authorities due to their potential undesirable effects on prices and consumer surplus. Ex-post evidence, however, suggests that these effects do not always take place and even relevant mergers may end up having negligible price effects. The analysis of mergers in the context of non-localized spatial competition may offer a further interpretation to the ones proposed in the literature: in this framework both positive and zero price effects are possible outcomes of the merger activity.

The intrinsic comparative statics properties of a general rate-of-return regulated, profit-maximizing model of a monopolist facing a command-and-control pollution constraint are derived. Recent advances in the theory of comparative statics are used to derive the basic comparative statics of the model, which are contained in an observable negative semi-definite matrix and possess the form of Slutsky-like expressions. We consider several command-and-control pollution constraints that are commonly implemented in practice, and conclude that the intrinsic comparative statics properties of the model are qualitatively invariant to the type of command-and-control pollution constraint imposed. We compare our results with those extant, and find that several basic results from the standard A–J model no longer hold in our model.

Previous studies focusing on the intra-distribution dynamics analysis have usually computed, in a Markov chain framework, discrete-time transition matrices. Such an approach, however, can involve some limitations, especially when using stock variables. In order to illustrate the importance of the time-scale issue when estimating transition matrices, this paper applies both discrete and continuous-time approaches to a set of cross-national European data on per capita wealth for the period 2000–10. The results reveal, on the one hand, that the continuous-time estimation provides a most accurate estimation of transition probabilities and, on the other, that the differences between both approaches are especially remarkable in the long-term equilibrium distribution.

We analyse the impact of ownership and corporate control on firms’ investment using the 2001 survey of Yacoub et al. on Ukrainian firms. The model explains investment by output, financial and soft budget constraints, and corporate control (and ownership) categories potentially enjoying private benefits of control. We find that the corporate control model fits better than the ownership model, a negative relationship between state and employee control and firms’ investment, and evidence for the presence of soft budget constraints. A negative relationship between firms’ investment and the relative size of non-monetary transactions strengthens the conclusion of private benefits of control impacting investment.

This paper compares two ex ante measures of the benefits of a project with supply uncertainty: compensating option price, the willingness to pay for a project, and equivalent option price, the willingness to accept to forego a project. The paper shows that compensating option price does not generally rank three or more projects correctly, even when the projects only impose a change in a single good. Equivalent option price, like equivalent variation with certain outcomes, always ranks three or more projects correctly. This paper also presents a method to empirically estimate equivalent option price using estimates of the benefits of certain changes. This approach is practically important so that the same study results can be used to estimate equivalent option price even as new projects are developed or as changes occur in the scientific information regarding the probabilities of various project outcomes. An application of the empirical method estimates the benefits of a policy to improve air and water quality when there is uncertainty about the effectiveness of the policy.

This paper looks at the determinants of school selection in rural Bangladesh, focusing on the choice between registered Islamic and non-religious schools. Using a unique dataset on secondary school-age children from rural Bangladesh, we find that madrasah enrolment falls as household income increases. At the same time, more religious households, and those that live further away from a non-religious school are more likely to send their children to madrasahs. However, in contrast to the theory, we find that Islamic school demand does not respond to the average quality of schools in the locality.

The overlapping-generations model of Blanchard, based on a constant probability of death, is used to study the maximum level of government debt consistent with the existence of a steady state equilibrium. In both a small open and a closed economy it is shown that maximum sustainable debt robustly occurs where the consumption of individual households reaches zero, the limit of its feasible range. Taxation absorbs all of the household's labour income here. In a closed economy, at this point the real interest rate also hits a ‘ceiling’ given by a simple combination of preference parameters and the death probability.

This paper analyses the stability of long-term inflation expectations and uncertainty, based on their sensitivity to innovations to observed inflation, short- and medium-term forecast news. News is defined in a subjective sense and derived from revisions to shorter-term fixed-target forecasts. The assessment tests for presence of non-linear effects, including regime changes during disinflation in the USA in the 1990s and the recent financial crisis. Stability is also investigated in terms of level evolution, based on a structural non-linear and non-Gaussian learning model to uncover the presence of a common trend underlying the long-term dynamics of inflation, individual expectations, and uncertainty.

Although many studies indicate that both the level and composition of public spending are significant for economic growth, the results in the empirical literature are mixed. This paper suggests that the country sample selection and expenditure classification are important in explaining these conflicting results. The empirical analysis shows that the link between growth and public spending, especially its core component, is strong only for countries with macroeconomic stability and fast GDP per capita growth dynamics, which are also capable of using public funds for productive purposes.

We introduce asymmetric information about consumers’ transportation costs (i.e., the degree of product differentiation) in the model of Hotelling. When transportation costs are high, both firms have lower profits with asymmetric information than with perfect information. Contrarily, if transportation costs are low, both firms may prefer the asymmetric information scenario (the informed firm always prefers the informational advantage, while the uninformed firm may or may not prefer to remain uninformed). Information exchange is ex-ante advantageous for both firms, but ex-post damaging if transportation costs turn out to be low. If the information is unverifiable, the informed firm does not represent a reliable source of information, since it always prefers to announce that transportation costs are high and there is no contract that induces truthful revelation.

This paper investigates the demand for money by firms and the existence of economies of scale in the Italian manufacturing industry. We estimate a model for cash elaborated by Fujiki and Mulligan using a different estimation procedure from the previous literature. We then introduce an iterative procedure based on backward exclusion of firms from model estimation which points out the high heterogeneity of Italian companies in money demand. Our estimates show that the Italian manufacturing industry, considered as a whole, does not enjoy scale economies in money demand. However, our iterative procedure points out that the cause of this result has to be ascribed to small firms which are characterized by thin cash money holdings and a consequent very modest opportunity cost.

Using US cross-sectional data, this paper calculates the welfare cost of a 10 percent inflation for different individuals and finds that the difference in cost between the poorest 20 percent, measured by their net worth, and the richest 20 percent is in the order of 102 percent. That is, a poor person is on average willing to forgive 102 percent more of their total consumption in order to have inflation reduced from 10 percent to 0. In absolute terms this represents a cost of 0.461 percent of consumption for the poorest and 0.228 percent for the richest. I accomplish this by introducing preference heterogeneity in a monetary search model first developed by Lagos and Wright, and calibrate the model to match each agent’s type of cash holdings, approximated by their holdings in transactional accounts that bear almost no interest, as a fraction of their net worth using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. I also show that this welfare difference increases to 130 percent (2.28 percent for the poorest 20 percent and 0.992 percent for the richest 20 percent) whenever frictions in the use of money are imposed (holdup problem). This distributional effect is further augmented if more frictions in the terms of trade are present. The ability to explicitly model these frictions is the advantage of using this model. Hence, inflation in this framework, as other studies have shown, acts as a regressive consumption tax; and this regressiveness is augmented with the holdup problem.

We show that economies of scale in upstream production can lead both the disintegrated downstream firm as well as its vertically integrated rival to outsource offshore for intermediate goods, even if offshore production has a moderate cost disadvantage compared to in-house production of the vertically integrated firm.

We investigate the flexible manufacturing system (FMS) by using the spatial price discrimination framework of Pal. The degree of flexibility when producing variants can be increased by increasing the investment or production cost and is endogenously determined. Our result is that private incentives for increasing flexibility are excessive from a social welfare perspective.

We study the Akerlofian adverse selection problem in a dynamic matching model where the competitive situation varies across different meetings. The ‘lemons principle’ is shown to limit the high quality sales within a wider range of quality distributions than in the Walrasian benchmark. High quality goods can nevertheless be traded, albeit less frequently than the low quality goods. For certain quality distributions, there exists a ‘partially pooling’ steady state where high quality sellers are active whenever at least two buyers compete for the good. Otherwise, the model features cycles in a sense that high quality goods are traded only in non-consecutive periods.

This paper studies the risk-free rate in an overlapping generations economy with bequests. It is shown that the risk-free rate depends on risk aversion, the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, the share of wealth invested in human wealth, life expectancy, and the preference for bequests. In a standard life-cycle context, mortality increases the subjective time rate of discount, and thus increases the compensation required to postpone consumption. This latter effect is offset in a bequest-driven model of the type considered here, leading to much more powerful income effects. In this sense, the model provides a bequest-motive explanation for the risk-free rate puzzle put forward by Weil in 1989.

We consider a model of wage determination with private information in an oligopoly. We investigate the effects of unions having relative concerns on the negotiated wage and the strike activity. We show that an increase of unions’ relative concerns has an ambiguous effect on the strike activity.

We consider a game of endogenous timing with observable delay in a mixed duopoly with endogenous vertical differentiation in the context of sequential quality and price choice. We find that a simultaneous play in the first opportunity at each stage turns out to be the unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, which contrasts with the endogenous timing in a purely private duopoly.

The paper, using a simple theory-based measure of the variations in aggregate economic efficiency in a New Keynessian structure, analyses the nature of the business fluctuations and estimates their welfare costs in Turkey during the period 1998–2009. The measure contains two components: a price markup and a wage markup. It seems that the latter mainly drives the fluctuations in Turkey. The paper also shows that inefficient fluctuations in the allocation of resources do generate moderate welfare costs on average. However, the aggregate efficiency costs increase much more during deep recessions.

In this paper, we consider political interaction in a mixed oligopoly by characterizing how a subsidy is endogenously determined through the bargaining process between firms and politicians. We discuss how the nature of the political equilibrium changes with the type of competition, the specification of the cost function, and the timing of the game. We show that when bargaining between firms and politicians takes place, the resulting social welfare may be even worse than that under a public firm monopoly.

The paper analyses the optimal pricing of the product quality scheme when concerns for relative standing exist among consumers. We demonstrate that if the proportion of high-value consumers is over (respectively, under) 1/2 of the total consumers, a firm has an incentive to select a large (respectively, small) quality gap among products. Therefore, there exists a cut-off level for status concerns, which eliminates quality differences, and the firm assigns the same quality to all the consumers. These results indicate that consumers’ qualities will reflect distortions at the top and bottom. Accordingly, the firm's profit depends on which consumer category is larger.

This paper applies a collective model of intra-household welfare distribution using individual self-reported data. The model accounts for household production, and self-reported information on economic condition is used to identify the sharing rule governing the bargaining process in the family. The theoretical framework implies a broad concept of full income, which includes household production as time allocated to domestic activities. We find that self-reported data on economic status are useful in recovering individual shares of household income and that both wages and non-strictly-economic individual variables play an important role in the bargaining process determining the sharing rule in Italy.

This article estimates poverty persistence over an individual's lifetime, using two definitions: income poverty and a multidimensional index of lifestyle deprivation. We stress the ability of the two definitions to provide a generally consistent characterization of poverty persistence risks faced by various population subgroups, but also the additional insights to be gained by analysing the two definitions in parallel in a longitudinal context. The results of multiple-spell hazard rate models highlight the weaknesses of the Italian labour market, the insufficiencies of the existing social security system, and the deep territorial dualism in generating persistent poverty for certain groups of the population.

This paper studies the problem of an uninformed decision maker who acquires expert advice prior to making a decision. I show that it is less costly to hire partisan agents than impartial agents, especially under advocacy, and that the decision maker prefers partisan advocacy to other forms of institutions. I also extend the literature, originating with Dewatripont and Tirole (1999), to a setting with contracts that condition on information provided and not just the decision made.

Distribution differences in human capital matter for a country's growth and trade. While the existing literature considers only the diversity difference in talent distribution, we argue that the kurtosis difference is also an important factor. In a two-sector equilibrium growth model, where the production function is supermodular for the consumption-good sector and submodular for the R&D sector, we prove that the diversity effect and kurtosis effect are opposite to each other. A country endowed with more diverse but leptokurtic talent distribution may have lower growth rate and import submodular goods, opposite to the conventional result from considering only the diversity difference.

Strategic market interaction is here modelled as a two-stage game in which potential entrants choose capacities and next active firms compete in prices. Due to capital indivisibility, the capacity choice is made from a finite grid and there are economies of scale. In the simplest version of the model with a single production technique, the equilibrium turns out to depend on the ratio between the level of total output at the long-run competitive equilibrium and the firm’s minimum efficient scale: if that ratio is sufficiently large (the market is sufficiently ‘large’), then the competitive price emerges at a subgame-perfect equilibrium of the capacity and price game; if not, then the firms randomize in prices on the equilibrium path. The role of the market size for the competitive outcome is shown to be even more important if there are several available production techniques.

In a small-scale New-Keynesian model with a hybrid Phillips curve and IS equation, the paper is concerned with an arbitrary frequency of the agents’ synchronized decision making. It investigates the validity of a fundamental methodological precept according to which no substantive prediction or explanation of a well-defined macroeconomic period model should depend on the real time length of the period. While this principle is basically satisfied as the period goes to zero, the impulse – response functions of the high-frequency versions can qualitatively as well as quantitatively be fairly dissimilar from their quarterly counterpart. The result proves to be robust under variations of the degree of price stickiness. The main conclusion is that DSGE modelling may be more sensitive to its choice of the agents’ decision interval.

Theoretical models suggest a non-linear relationship between government size and long-run economic growth. However, testing this hypothesis empirically in cross-country studies is complicated by the endogeneity of government spending and the accurate identification of inflexion points. This paper examines the non-linear hypothesis by incorporating threshold analysis in a cross-country growth regression. The methodology utilizes a sample-splitting framework and follows an objective strategy for identifying and testing changes in the slope. The results provide evidence in support of the non-linear hypothesis for a broad panel of countries.

This study provides a ranking of Economics Departments of Greek universities. Contrary to the existing literature, we look directly at the citations of the faculty members as a measure of academic performance and avoid the classification of journals. Additionally, the country of the PhD studies was found to be a significant variable that can explain the productivity of Greek economists. PhD holders from US and UK universities are characterized by higher productivity compared to those from other countries.

We examine how firms’ productivity level, measured by the total factor productivity (TFP), is affected by their use of academic workers. A panel dataset of Norwegian manufacturing firms is used. Firms’ production level is shown to be negatively affected by their share of academic workers, but we find no clear relationship between this share and the TFP. If we account for the fact that there is an interaction between the share of academic workers and the capital stock, we find that this share has a non-significant effect on the production level.

I look at the linkages between monetary policy and asset wealth using quarterly data for the USA. I show that a positive interest rate shock leads to a fall in aggregate wealth and an important change in portfolio composition: housing wealth gradually decreases, but the effects are very persistent; and financial wealth quickly shrinks, but the impact is short-lived. I also find that the money market can be characterized as follows: (i) the money demand has a large interest elasticity and a small output elasticity; and (ii) the estimated monetary policy reaction function highlights the special focus given by the central bank to developments in monetary aggregates. These features call for an approach whereby monetary authorities put more emphasis on tracking wealth developments, in particular, given the asset portfolio rebalancing between money holdings and financial and/or housing assets.

This paper analyses the effect of downwards wage rigidity on wage setting, wage compression and firm training. It is shown that downwards wage rigidity in future periods induces a wage penalty and increases wage compression in the present period. However, contrary to previous work this is not sufficient to increase firms’ training investments. The reason lies in the endogeneity of separations, which become more frequent.

The paper introduces the concept of an earnings frontier in explaining monthly consumption expenditure (a proxy for income) in terms of human capital and endowments of a household. Individuals who translate their potential earning into actual earnings enjoy a fully efficient position. In contrast, individuals who earn less than their potential earnings suffer from some kind of earnings inefficiency. The paper estimates an earnings frontier using the Corrected Ordinary Least Square (COLS) method and classifies households in terms of efficiency scores. Splitting the sample into an efficient and an inefficient part based on the estimated frontier and a bench mark efficiency score, the status of poverty in the two parts (groups) is studied. The poverty gap between the groups is then decomposed into a characteristics effect and a coefficients effect using the familiar Oaxaca decomposition methodology. The paper also tries to establish a link between the notion of efficiency and the coefficients effect in the Oaxaca decomposition methodology. The results obtained are interpreted in light of the poor but efficient hypothesis.

This paper studies effects of price floors in a simple model of vertical product differentiation. We find that even non-binding price floor (i.e., minimum price set below the lowest Nash equilibrium price in the baseline model) can increase quality on the market, if the cost of quality is sufficiently low. Where a binding price floor does not increase the equilibrium quality, it makes consumers worse off. There is also a possibility of over-investment into quality as a result of the binding minimum price.

Cournot establishes a Nash equilibrium to a duopoly game under output competition; Bertrand finds a different Nash equilibrium under price competition. Both treat the strategic choice variable (output versus price) and the timing of play as exogenous. We investigate Cournot-Bertrand models where one firm competes in output and the other competes in price in both static and dynamic settings. We also develop a general model where both the timing of play and the strategic choice variables are endogenous. Consistent with the conduct of Honda and Scion, we show that Cournot-Bertrand behaviour can be a Nash equilibrium outcome.

This paper analyses the costs of housing crises in terms of GDP growth and the economic conditions under which crises are particularly costly. Housing crises are often followed by recessions that are longer than other recessions. According to empirical estimates, a housing crisis reduces the GDP growth rate in the following year on average by two percentage points and has still a considerable negative impact in the second year. One important channel through which the effect of housing crises is passed on seems to be the banking sector. In addition, our results suggest that negative wealth effects possibly cause further reductions in GDP growth.

This paper applies the distance function approach for stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to compare research and development (R&D) efficiency across 24 nations during 1998–2005. In this multiple input–output framework, R&D expenditure stock and R&D manpower were inputs, while patents, scientific journal articles, and royalties and licensing fees (RLF) were outputs. Intellectual property rights protection, technological cooperation among business sectors, knowledge transfer between business sectors and higher education institutions, agglomeration of R&D facilities, and involvement of the government sector in R&D activities significantly improve national R&D efficiency.

We study an extension of job market signalling by introducing another dimension of private information. When two dimensions of attribute are intertwined in parameterizing preferences, the single crossing property no longer holds globally. In seeking the equilibrium prediction, the intuitive criterion and then the more stringent perfect sequentiality refinement are applied. The result depends on the extent to which the second characteristic affects the ability of education to signal. If the effect is mild, the equilibrium acquired is comparable to the separating outcome of the unidimensional benchmark. Otherwise, pooling must occur. This demonstrates that the problem of information transmission is more acute in a multidimensional environment.

I construct a model of a growing economy with pollution. The analysis of the model shows that the interactions between capital accumulation, endogenous lifetime and environmental quality determine both the long-run growth rate and the pattern of convergence (i.e., monotonic or cyclical) towards the balanced growth path. I argue that such interactions can provide a possible explanatory factor behind the, empirically observed, negative correlation between growth and volatility. Furthermore, the model may capture the observed pattern whereby economic growth and mortality rates appear to be negatively related in the long run, but positively related in the short run.

This paper examines the ex ante value of information in the property rights model where the possibility exists that an investing agent can be provided with relevant information before investments are undertaken. When contracts are incomplete, from an ex ante perspective, informing the investing agent does not necessarily increase the expected surplus resulting from a relationship between two economic agents. The paper highlights the fact that the second-best nature of the problem that arises from contractual incompleteness can ensure this.

The paper deals with the various institutions capable of improving the macroeconomic performance in a situation of conflict between unions and the government. In particular, we discuss the difficulty of agreeing with a cooperative solution and the need for some kind of explicit or implicit compensation for unions in signing a social pact. A cooperative solution encapsulating the operation of the different mechanisms designed to cope with the conflict and including the various elements of compensation is presented. The model shows that the amount of the explicit compensation depends on the extent of the strategic conflict between the parties as well as on the factors that determine the implicit compensation (i.e., unions’ inflation aversion, partisanship) or are partial substitutes for it (i.e., the conservative central banker). Finally, the role played by external anticipated and unanticipated shocks is also discussed.

We use the semi-nonparametric (SNP) model to study the relationship between the innovation of the Volatility Index (VIX) and the expected S&P 500 Index (SPX) returns. We estimate the one-step-ahead contemporaneous relation subject to leverage GARCH effect. Results agree with a body of newly established literature arguing non-linearity, and asymmetries. In addition, the risk-return behaviour depends on the signs as well as magnitudes of the perceived risk. We conclude that influence of fear or exuberance on the conditional market return is non-monotonic and hump-shaped. Very deep fear does not necessarily mean huge losses, instead, the loss may not be as bad as fears of normal levels. Results pass the robustness tests.

The intense competition for foreign direct investment (FDI) by state and local governments within the United States has raised concerns among some that this leads to the underprovision of public services and possibly welfare losses for local communities. Economic analysis of this hypothesis yields mixed results. This paper investigates the impact of FDI on local education expenditures both theoretically and empirically. The theoretical model shows an ambiguous impact of FDI on local expenditures for education. Empirically using US state-level data from 1991 to 2000 and the system-GMM estimator that controls for fixed effects, times series issues and endogeneity, I find evidence that FDI is positively correlated with increased expenditures on education.

An integrated monopoly, where two complements forming a composite good are offered by a single firm, is typically welfare superior to a complementary monopoly. This is ‘the tragedy of the anticommons’. We analyse the robustness of such result when competition is introduced for one or both complements. Particularly, competition in only one of the two markets may be welfare superior to an integrated monopoly if and only if the substitutes differ in their quality so that, as their number increases, average quality and/or quality variance increases. Then, absent an adequate level of product differentiation, favouring competition in some sectors while leaving monopolies in others may be detrimental for consumers and producers alike. Instead, competition in both markets may be welfare superior if goods are close substitutes and their number in each market is sufficiently high, no matter the degree of product differentiation.

We present an ultimatum wage bargaining experiment showing that a trade union facilitating non-binding communication among workers, raises wages by simultaneously increasing employers’ posted offers and toughening the bargaining position of employees, without reducing overall market efficiency.

We argue that the recent large increase in deposits’ turnover in many developing countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence is associated with the spread of the disease. The point is that the need to pay for individual treatments force large-scale withdrawals of households’ deposits, and that those large withdrawals put the banking industry at risk. In a standard demand-deposit model where the HIV/AIDS prevalence among depositors is random, we show that (1) the probability of a large-scale banking failure without a bank run increases as the odds of any prevalence level increases, and (2) it is always optimal to deposit, and thus to accept the risk of banking failure, to maintain long-term investments in place.

The objective of this paper is to consider methodology for modelling time series data of monetary aggregates such as monetary base and broad money. A brief review is made with regard to the likelihood-based cointegration analysis of I(2) (integrated of order 2) data and I(2)-to-I(1) transformations. The paper then investigates procedures for econometric modelling of monetary aggregates, which are in general deemed to be I(2) variables analogous to price indices. It is shown that I(2)-to-I(1) transformations centering on a money multiplier play an important role in the modelling procedures. Finally, the study presents an empirical illustration of the proposed methodology using monetary aggregate data from Japan.

The famous Hand rule weighs the burden of precaution against the reduction in expected harm. The burden may be type-specific, implying different standards of care for different injurer types. We show that this fact may be exploited by principals in their search for minimized individual costs. Principals may hire agents with high cost of care-taking although other agents are available. This is shown in a unilateral-care setting either with perfect or with asymmetric information. We therefore highlight a neglected downside of the negligence rule.

This paper demonstrates that Kornai's original concept of the soft budget constraint (SBC) as a theoretical innovation in micro-theory disguises income redistributions that are essentially macroeconomic relationships. The SBC also postulates a competitive market economy as the benchmark of hard budget constraint (HBC) and efficiency. A recent formal theory explains the SBC as a component of profit-maximizing strategic behaviour. From this perspective, the SBC can be integrated into the new microeconomics, but it loses its specific institutional connotation and its macroeconomic dimension. The SBC is thus included in ubiquitous market-type relationships, particularly complete (optimal) contractual arrangements.

This paper studies whether non-separabilities between consumption and leisure may help to explain the observed persistence in GNP growth. We consider an extended version of Lucas's (1988) human capital investment model that includes labour adjustment costs and compare its performance under different utility specifications with different degrees of complementarity and substitutability between consumption and leisure. We find that when consumption and leisure are complements the model succeeds in matching not only the autocorrelation of output growth but also the important trend-reverting component found in US data. These results hold even if low adjustment costs of labour are considered. Hence, we conclude that an arguably simple margin not considered conventionally can provide useful insights into observed business cycle patterns.

Motivated by a central banker with an inflation target, we show that the optimal forecast bias under non-quadratic loss functions and non-normal forecast errors can decrease or initially increase and then decrease with the forecast horizon. We initially proof that, if the variable to forecast can be described by a generalized Rayleigh distribution, its conditional mean does in general not constitute the optimal prediction under a symmetric target zone loss function. Subsequently, we approximate the target zone loss function to show the potential for variation in optimal bias over the forecast horizon.

The evolution of private labels (PLs) can be understood in terms of a strategy adopted by the retail industry with the aim of competing with national brands (NBs). In the 1990s, this strategy led to the development of ‘me too’ products, which currently represent the largest share of store brand products. Since the early 2000s, retailers have widened the range of their store brands by introducing high-quality products. The aim of this study was to estimate consumers’ attachment to ‘me-too’ and niche PLs respectively, as compared to NBs. We captured the degree of maturity of these PLs through their price-elasticities, computed for three staple goods offered by three mass retail companies. It was found that price sensitivity does not differ much between the ‘me-too’ PLs and the corresponding NBs. This result confirms that ‘me-too’ products are now considered reliable quality brands. However, in the high quality segment, consumers remain more sensitive to the price of PLs than to that of NBs, a characteristic which may relate to their recent introduction on the market.

This paper investigates the determinants of primary school enrolment, attendance, and child labour in Bolivia from 1999 to 2007, and attempts to analyse the interactions among these decisions over time. Although enrolment rates show a significant improvement, a high proportion of children do not attend school. The empirical results reveal that the increase in enrolment is led by indigenous children and those living in urban areas. Moreover, contrary to common belief, being extremely poor and indigenous are the main determinants of school attendance. Finally, although extremely poor children increased their school attendance, there was no reduction in child labour, which remains a relevant issue in Bolivia.

The aim of this paper is to test for the presence of dualism in a standard wage regression. The disparity in wages between primary and secondary workers, according to labour market segmentation theory, is not provided by worker characteristics, but rather by job characteristics. A standard way to assess this situation is by looking at the estimated coefficients in a standard regression for comparable workers across different labour market segments. In an attempt to avoid arbitrary modelling choices, we deploy mixture regression methods which allow for endogenous determination of the number of existing labour market segments. Using Italian data, our modelling strategy outlines stark differences in returns to human capital between homogeneous workers in different markets. Thus, future policies should consider these findings when implementing labour market measures.

This paper examines how wage bargaining within each firm influences the relationship between an equilibrium ownership structure and the most preferred ownership structure from the viewpoint of social welfare, in a unionized oligopoly of asymmetric firms with respect to productivity of capital. We consider the merger incentive of each firm’s owner when the wage level is determined through bargaining between the firm’s owner and union. We derive a condition for both the degree of cost asymmetry among existing firms and the relative bargaining power of each firm’s owner to her/his union such that each ownership structure can be observed in equilibrium. We also show that although the two types of ownership structures with the merger involving the least efficient firm can be equilibria and socially optimal, these structures are observed only when both the degree of cost asymmetry and the relative bargaining power of each firm’s owner are moderate. Finally, we analyse the relationship among the cooperative game approach employed in this paper and two non-cooperative merger formation approaches, and examine the robustness of the results obtained in this paper against the change in the assumption regarding each firm’s cost function.

Previous studies applying traditional unit root tests generally have difficulty providing widespread evidence supporting the real interest rate parity hypothesis (RIPH). This paper aims to analyse the empirical fulfilment of RIPH for 17 OECD countries by employing many recently developed unit root tests. Power of the tests is raised by taking different approaches, such as using cross-sectional information, accounting for non-linear adjustment towards the equilibrium and allowing for structural changes. The combined results of the tests using panel information show that broad evidence in favour of RIPH prevails for 13 of the 17 countries. By contrast, univariate tests fail to make widespread rejections of the unit-root hypothesis. Our evidence reveals a high degree of market integration for developed countries, and the effect of monetary policies as a stabilization tool might be limited at least in the long run.

I investigate the optimal monetary policy in a New Keynesian macroeconomic framework with the sticky information model of price adjustment. The model is solved for optimal policy, and welfare implications of three alternative monetary policy regimes under this optimal policy are compared when there is a cost-push shock to the economy. These monetary policy regimes are the unconstrained policy, price-level targeting and inflation targeting regimes. The results illustrate that optimal policy depends on the degree of price stickiness and the persistence of the shock. Inflation targeting emerges as the optimal policy if prices are flexible enough or the shock is persistent enough. However, the unconstrained policy or price-level targeting might be preferable to inflation targeting if prices are not very flexible and the shock is not very persistent. The results also show that as prices become more flexible, the welfare loss usually gets bigger.

Economic growth has not always generated improvements in a population's health. Biological indicators of human well-being, including stature, suggest the march to prosperity was not a steady one, and these biological indicators offer estimates of the health costs associated with modern economic growth. We employ an international data set to study the socioeconomic benefits and health costs associated with the transition to modern economic growth during the nineteenth century. We find that while the growth of GDP per capita had a positive impact on the stature of Western populations, prior to the mastery of the germ theory of disease, urbanization had a strong negative impact.

This paper examines the possibility of unit roots in the presence of endogenously determined multiple structural breaks in the total, female and male labour force participation rates (LFPR) for Australia, Canada and the USA. We extend the procedure of Gil-Alana for a single structural break to the case of multiple structural breaks at endogenously determined dates using the principles suggested by Bai and Perron. We use the Robinson LM test to determine the fractional order of integration. We find that endogenously determined structural breaks render the total, female and male LFPR series stationary or at best mean-reverting.

This paper proposes a bootstrap procedure for the covariate point optimal tests (CP_T) of Elliott and Jansson. Although the covariate tests enjoy large power gains over the traditional univariate unit root tests, our simulations show that they still suffer from severe size distortions at finite samples. Through simulations, we demonstrate the superiority of the bootstrap procedure in the sense that it can yield desirable size and power properties for the CP_T tests when the Akaike's information criterion is used. Moreover, we show the empirical relevance of the bootstrap tests by applying them to inflation in the G-10 countries, and then obtain strong evidence against the unit root hypothesis for most countries at the 5% significance level.

In the current study, several experiments re-examine the uncertainty effect using lotteries that include real products, monetary outcomes and electronic gift cards in a between-subjects design. The study also takes the selling position into consideration, in addition to the buying position considered by all previous works on the uncertainty effect. The results indicate that for all types of lotteries, the bids are higher than the bids for the worst possible realization. These findings are consistent with the internality axiom and do not support the uncertainty effect.