Manage Research Papers

Manuel G. Flores-Romaro

The objective of this paper is to oer an answer to the question: why do some entrepreneurs wish to own another firm in the future after having closed an unsuccessful one? We first show this question is relevant because making use of a sample of entrepreneurs in the UK who have experienced a business closure, we show that 45% of them have the desire to own another firm in the future, despite having an unsuccessful experience in small firm ownership. To tackle our question we develop a model where the profits of the small firm depend on two firm-specific parameters: the efficiency parameter, which represents the skills of the entrepreneur to manage and cope efficiently with the everyday tasks of the small firm, and the demand parameter, which denotes the success of the firm’s product to attract demand or capture a market niche. It is found that our model answers our initial question by revealing the existence of a mechanism of entrepreneurial self-selection. Under such mechanism, skilful entrepreneurs are the only ones who wish to own another firm in the future, regardless of the degree of success in their previous venture, whereas unskilful entrepreneurs prefer to go to wage work. We show this mechanism accounts not only for the empirical evidence relevant to our initial question, but also for the rest of cases of entrepreneurs’ attitudes after experiencing a business closure.

Jari Eloranta

This paper evaluates theories aiming to explain the size and growth of government spending, develops a framework inclusive of the so-called guns vs. butter tradeoff effect, and offers insights especially for the period 1870-1938. There were differences between the excessive and responsive government explanations, and between the long-run and short-run explanations, as well as cross-section and time series approaches. Here central government spending, conditioned by the regime characteristics, is proposed to be analyzed on the basis of the demand characteristics of military spending and social spending, their interaction, public debt constraints, as well as institutional constraints and other environmental variables.

Lucia Buenrostro and Amrita Dhillon

This paper studies the dominance-solvability (by iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies) of general scoring rule voting games. The scoring rules we study include Plurality rule, Approval voting, Negative Plurality Rule, Borda rule and Relative Utilitarianism. We provide a classification of scoring rule voting games according to whether the sufficient conditions for dominance solvability require sufficient agreement on the best alternative or on the worst alternative. We also characterise the solutions when the sufficient conditions for dominance solvability are satisfied

Amrita Dhillon

This chapter gives a flavour of recent theoretical work on coalition formation and political parties. I survey recent work on both pre-election coalition formation and post election coalition (or government) formation. A number of alternative rationales for the formation of parties are compared with the help of some illustrative examples.

Samuel Donyina Ameyaw

This paper contains an empirical investigation of the effects of trade and inflation on a conventional macroeconometric model for Ghana. First, the results corroborate the findings of the Fund that both devaluation and credit restraint are effective in addressing the balance of payment issues facing Ghana. Second, the direction and time pattern of the effects of these two policy experiments are different. Third, further depreciation of the domestic currency is unfavourable to the cause of curbing inflation in Ghana. It rather leads to price increases and is a source of fueling inflation, and could lead to a spiral of inflation through the agitation for higher wages by employees.

Jesus Otero, Jeremy Smith and Monica Giulietti

This paper uses the approach of Im, Pesaran and Shin (2003) to propose seasonal unit root tests for dynamic heterogeneous panels based on the means of the individuals HEGY test statistics. The standardised t-bar and F-bar statistics are simply averages of the HEGY tests across groups. These statistics converge to standard normal variates.

Gianna Boero, Jeremy Smith and Kenneth F. Wallis

In this paper we conduct a Monte Carlo study to determine the power of Pearson's overall goodness-of-fit test as well as the "Pearson analog" tests (see Anderson (1994)) to detect rejections due to shifts in variance, skewness and kurtosis, as we vary the number and location of the partition points. Simulations are conducted for small and moderate sample sizes. While it is generally recommended that to improve the power of the goodness-of-fit test the partition points are equiprobable, we find that power can be improved by the use of non-equiprobable partitions.

Joanne Sault, Otto Toivanen and Michael Waterson

In this paper we study whether learning from rivals affects within-market location decisions between competing firms. We show it does, using detailed locational data from two leading hamburger chains in the UK. Using four different tests, we demonstrate that alternative explanations - pre-emption and product differention- have less bite than between firm learning.

Massimiliano Bratti, Abigail McKnight, Robin Naylor & Jeremy Smith

Official employment-related Performance Indicators in UK Higher Education are based on the population of students responding to the First Destination Supplement (FDS). This generates potentially biased performance indicators as this population of students is not necessarily representative of the full population of leavers from each institution. University leavers not obtaining qualifications and those not responding to the FDS are not included within the official analysis. We compare an employment-related performance indicator based on those students responding to the FDS with alternative approaches which address the potential non-random nature of this sub-group of university leavers.

Alexander Kovalenkov and Myrna Wooders

A "Law of Scarcity" is that scarceness is rewarded. We demonstrate laws of scarcity for cores and approximate cores of games. Furthermore, we show that equal treatment core payoff vectors satisfy a condition of cyclic monotonicity. Our results are developed for parameterized collections of games and exact bounds on the maximum possible deviation of approximate core payoff vectors from satisfying a law of scarcity are stated in terms of the parameters describing the games. We note that the parameters can, in principle, be estimated. (Paper to appear in Economic Theory)

Jesus Otero and Jeremy Smith

We investigate the effects of outliers on the KPSS tests. We find that for nonstationary series outliers induce spurious stationarity by lowering the power of these tests. The empirical size of these tests is also found to be sensitive to the location of the outlier.

Frank H. Page Jr, Myrna Wooders & Samir Kamat

We make two main contributions to the theory of economic and social network formation. First, we introduce the notion of a network formation network or a supernetwork. Supernetworks provide a framework in which we can formally define and analyze farsightedness in network formation. Second, we introduce a new notion of equilibrium corresponding to farsightedness. In particular, we introduce the notion of a farsightedly basic network as well as the notion of a farsighted basis, and we show that all supernetworks possess a farsighted basis. A farsightedly basic network contained in the farsighted basis of a given supernetwork represents a possible final resting point (or absorbing state) of a network formation process in which agents behave farsightedly, Given the supernetwork representation of the rules governing network formation and the preferences of the individuals, a farsighted basis contains networks which are likely to emerge and persist of individuals behave farsightedly.

Guillaume Haeringer and Myrna Wooders

This paper studies a decentralized job market model where firms (academic departments) propose sequentially a (unique) position to some workers (Ph.D. candidates). Successful candidates then decide whether to accept the offers, and departments whose positions remain unfilled propose to other candidates. We distinguish between several cases, depending on whether agents’ actions are simultaneous and/or irreversible (if a worker accepts an offer he is immediately matched, and both the worker and the firm to which she is matched go out of the market). For all these cases, we provide a complete characterization of the Nash equilibrium outcomes and the Subgame Perfect equilibria. While the set of Nash equilibria outcomes contain all individually rational matchings, it turns out that in most cases considered all subgame perfect equilibria yield a unique outcome, the worker-optimal matching

Edward Cartwright and Myrna Wooders

Intepret a set of players all playing the same pure strategy and all with similar attributes as a society. Is it consistent with self interested behaviour for a population to organise itself into a relatively small number of societies? In a companion paper we characterized how large " must be, in terms of parameters describing individual games, for an equilibrium to exhibit conformity in pure strategies. In this paper we provide a wide class of games where such conformity is boundedly rational, that is, where " can be chosen to be small

Edward Cartwright and Myrna Wooders

We introduce a framework of noncooperative games, allowing both countable sets of pure strategies and player types, in which players are characterized by their attributes and demonstrate that for all games with sufficiently many players, every mixed strategy Nash equilibrium can be used to construct a Nash "-equilibrium in pure strategies that is ‘"-equivalent’. Our framework introduces and exploits a distinction between crowding attributes of players (their external effects on others) and their taste attributes (their payoff functions). The set of crowding attributes is assumed to be compact; this is not required, however, for taste attributes. For the special case of at most a finite number of crowding attributes, we obtain analogs, for finite games, of purification results due to Pascoa (1993a,b,1998) for games with a continuum of players. Our main theorems are based on a new mathematical result, in the spirit of the Shapley-Folkman Theorem but applicable to a countable (not necessarily finite dimensional) strategy space.

Nattavudh Powdthavee

This paper is the first of its kind to study quality of life responses of crime victims. Using cross-sectional data from the OHS97 survey of South Africa, we show that victims report significantly lower well-being than the non-victims, ceteris paribus. The calculated ‘compensating variation’ suggests that it would take, on average, an extra $10,000 per month to offset the psychological costs of crime. Happiness is lower for nonvictimized respondents currently living in higher crime areas. However, we find a strong evidence for females that criminal victimization hurts, but hurts less if the crime rate on our reference group is high.

Edward Cartwright

We model a learning dynamic in which players imitate and innovate. Of interest is to question whether Nash equilibrium play emerges, and if so, the role that imitation plays in this emergence. Our main result provides a general class of coordination games for which approximate Nash equilibrium play does emerge. Important conditions include that players imitate "similar" individuals. The role of imitation in learning is discussed in the context of two examples where it is shown that imitation can lead to pareto superio outcomes.

Carlo Perroni and Kimberley A. Scharf

Taxation is only sustainable if the general public complies with it. This observation is uncontroversial with tax practitioners but has been ignored by the public finance tradition, which has interpreted tax constitutions as binding contracts by which the power to tax is irretrievably conferred by individuals to government, which can then levy any tax it chooses. However, in the absence of an outside party enforcing contracts between members of a group, no arrangement within groups can be considered to be a binding contract, and therefore the power of tax must be sanctioned by individuals on an ongoing basis. In this paper we offer, for the first time, a theoretical analysis of this fundamental compliance problem associated with taxation, obtaining predictions that in some cases point to a re-interptretation of the theoretical constructions of the public finance tradition while in others call them into question.

Myrna Wooders, Edward Cartwright and Reinhard Selton

Gianluigi Vernasca

We study a discrete time dynamic game of price competition with spatially differentiated products and price adjustment costs. We characterise the Markov perfect and the open-loop equilibrium of our game. We find that in the steady state Markov perfect equilibrium, given the presence of adjustment costs, equilibrium prices are always higher than prices at the repeated static Nash solution, even though, adjustment costs are not paid in steady state.This is due to intertemporal strategic complementarity in the strategies of the firms and from the fact that the cost of adjusting prices adds credibility to high price equilibrium strategies. On the other hand, the stationary open-loop equilibrium coincides always with the static solution. Furthermore, in contrast to continuous time games, we show that the stationary Markov perfect equilibrium converges to the static Nash equilibrium when adjustment costs tend to zero. Moreover, we obtain the same convergence result when adjustment costs tend to infinity.

Michaela Redoano

In this paper we investigate whether there is empical evidence that EU Countries set their public expenditure and their taxes interdependently. We use a panel of data across European countries, years and fiscal variables to estimated countries’ reactions functions. We find evidence of intedependences consistent with the literature on tax and yardistick competition

Michael Waterson

This paper shows that even if all consumers face search costs, if these are below a certain level dependent upon the firm numbers and demand elasticity, the Diamond-type equilibrium with all prices at the monopoly level fails to exist.

Dennis Leech

This paper argues that the voting power approach is much more general than is portrayed by Albert (“The Voting Power Approach: Measurement without Theory”, European Union Politics, 4:3, 2003) and is therefore capable of generating important insights about voting systems, such as qualified majority voting in the EU Council. The voting power approach focuses on understanding the properties of voting systems by analysing outcomes and thereby is able to generate empirical facts that are not otherwise obvious. That the approach is so general has not previously been pointed out in the relevant literature; it has usually been taken as coinciding with power indices. Albert’s criticism is directed at one aspect of the theory of voting power indices: the assumption of probabilistic voting that underlies conventional power indices. It is argued that he fails to take account of the different uses of power indices and that the probabilistic voting assumptions he derides may or may not be useful depending on this. It is necessary to emphasise the key distinction between a priori power indices and measure of empirical voting power. Albert misrepresents the voting power approach and is not willing to allow that it encompasses a diversity of methods as well as a research agenda.

Paul W. Dobson and Michael Waterson

Chain-stores now dominate most areas of retailing. While retailers may operate nationally or even internationally, the markets they compete in are largely local. How should they best operate pricing policy in respect of the different markets served - price uniformly across the local markets or on a local basis according to market conditions? We model this by allowing local market differences, with entry being inevitable in certain markets while being naturally or institutionally blockaded in others. We show that practising price discrimination is not always best for the chain-store. Competitive conditions exist under which uniform pricing can raise profits.

Alessandro V.M. Oliveira

This paper aims at assessing the impacts of recent economic liberalisation on an important subset of the Brazilian airline industry: the air shuttle market on the route Rio de Janeiro – São Paulo, a pioneer service created in 1959. In order to estimate structural relationships of the competition model, a product differentiated setting with conduct parameter was designed. Results permitted inferring about a rupture in the degree of firms' heterogeneity and in the extent of the deviation from Nash behaviour due to regulatory reform, as well as estimation of pertinent route-level cost information.

Nattavudh Powdthavee

Is happiness pattern structurally the same between the poor countries and the rich countries? Using a cross-sectional data from SALDRU93 survey, we show that relationships between subjective well-being and socioeconomic variables have a similar structure in South Africa as they are in the developed countries. Well-being appears to rise with income. Unemployment, however, is detrimental to reported well-being, both at the individual- and household-level. Living standard indicators such as durable assets ownership seem to be as good determinants of happiness levels as income. Relative income also matters in the evaluation of subjective well-being, once relative consumption is controlled for.

Michaela Redoano

Previous research has shown that if countries "merge", (i.e. move to centralized policy choices) the effect is to reduce lobbying. However empirical evidence suggests that this is not the case. This paper explains the empirical evidence in a two-jurisdiction political economy model of public good provision under policy centralization and policy decentralization, where the policy choice can be affected by the pressure of endogenously formed lobbies. We measure lobbying in three ways:(i) the number of lobbies formed under the two settings, (ii) their impact on policy decisions and (iii) the amount of resources transferred to the policy makers. We show that preference heterogeneity and lobby formation are positively related and that moving from decentralization to centralization can affect both the number and the type of lobbies. We develop some examples; among them: under centralization, compared to decentralization, the size of lobbies can be higher but the impact on policy can be smaller. Moreover we show how the majority groups try to o.set lobbying by strategic voting for a candidate of a different group.

Clare Kelly

This paper presents the partial analytical solution to a model of periodic consumption that incorporates imperfect capital markets and uncertainty. Our model assumes that consumption decisions occur more frequently than income receipt. We show that the week specific consumption functions can be ordered. At low levels of wealth these functions exhibit a “ushaped”pattern between income receipts. We show analytically that changes in the level of the borrowing constraint affect only the level of consumption function and not the MPC whilst mean preserving changes in uncertainty affect both.

Edward Cartwright and Myrna Wooders

Intepret a set of players all playing the same pure strategy and all with similar attributes as a society. Is it consistent with self interested behaviour for a population to organise itself into a relatively small number of societies? By introducing the concept of approximate substitute players in non-cooperative games we are able to put a bound on the rationality of such social conformity for an arbitrary game and arbitrary number of societies.

Edward Cartwright

We illustrate one way in which a population of boundedly rational individuals can learn to play an approximate Nash equilibrium. Players are assumed to make strategy choices using a combination of imitation and innovation. We begin by looking at an imitation dynamic and provide conditions under which play evolves to an imitation equilibrium; convergence is conditional on the network of social interaction. We then illustrate, through example, how imitation and innovation can complement each other; in particular, we demonstrate how imitation can ‚help a population to learn to play a Nash equilibrium where more rational methods do not. This leads to our main result in which we provide a general class of large game for which the imitation with innovation dynamic almost surely converges to an approximate Nash, imitation equilibrium.

Sayantan Ghosal and Ben Lockwood

In a model of majority voting with common values and costly but voluntary participation, we show that in the vicinity of equilibrium, it is always Pareto-improving for more agents, on the average, to vote. This demonstrates that the negative voting externality identified by Borgers(2001) in the context of private values is always dominated by a positive informational externality. In addition, we show that multiple Pareto-ranked voting equilibria may exist and moreover, majority voting with compulsory participation can Pareto dominate majority voting with voluntary participation. Finally, we show that the ineffciency result is robust to limited preference heterogeneity.

Antoni Meseguer-Artola, Myrna Holtz Wooders and Juan-Enrique Martinez-Legaz

Myrna Wooders and Ben Zissimos

This paper shows how competition among governments for mobile firms can bring about excessive differentiation in levels of taxation and public good provision. Hotelling’s Principle of Minimum Differentiation is applied in the context of tax competition and shown to be invalid. Instead, when an equilibrium exists, differentiation of public good provision is maximized. Non-existence of equilibrium, which can occur, is a metaphor for intense tax competition. The paper also shows that, to some extent, perfect tax discrimination presents a solution to the existence problem created by Hotelling tax competition, but that the efficiency problem of Hotelling tax competition is exacerbated.

Carmelo Rodriguez-Alvarez

We extend the analysis of Dutta, Jackson and Le Breton (Econometrica 2001) on strategic candidacy to probabilistic environments. For each configuration of the agenda and each profile of voters' preferences over running candidates a probabilistic voting procedure selects a lottery on the set of candidates at stake. Assuming that candidates cannot vote, we show that random dictatorships are the only unanimous probabilistic voting procedures that never provide unilateral incentives for the candidates to leave the ballot independently of the composition of the agenda. However, more flexible rules can be divised if we focus on the stability of specific agendas.

Carmelo Rodriguez-Alvarez

For each set of candidates at state and each profile of voters' preferences over running candidates a voting correspondence selects a set of candidates. following Dutta, Jackson and Le Breton (Econometrica 2001) a voting correspondence is candidate stable if a candidate never benefits from withdrawing unilateraly her candidacy. If candidates cannot vote and compare sets of candidates according to their expected utility conditional on some prior probability assessment only dictatorial voting correspondences are candidate stable and unanimous. If the assessments are restricted to be uniform, rules that select the set of best candidates of two fixed voters are also allowed. We also analyze other domains of preferences fitting extreme attitudes towards risk in which positive results are obtained.

Roman Horváth and Luboš Komárek*

In this paper the authors calculate OCA-indexes for industrial countries in an effort to estimate the benefit-cost ratio of adopting a common currency. The results correspond to the estimation of Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1997b) and show that the ranking of the economies suitable to form a monetary union stays the same in the 1980s as well as in the 1990s. In other words, the economies, which were structurally close to each other in the 1980s, remain close in the 1990s and the opposite is valid for the structurally different economies. This empirical estimation also does not provide evidence for views, which emphasise the seemingly striking difference between the core and the periphery of the European Union. The authors perform also an estimation of the same index by including the Czech Republic and find no support for the view that the economy of the Czech Republic could possibly structurally differ more than the EMU member countries between each other. Then they conclude that if the EMU is sustainable, the accession of the Czech economy should not change it.

Yoonhee Tina Chang

This paper is concerned with examining behaviour of firms (banks) and consumers (banks’customers) in the event of a new technology (internet banking) introduction. The determinants of consumer adoption of internet banking are characterised using survey data from Korea in both static and dynamic framework. I find evidence that adoption of internet banking is influenced by sex, age, marital status, degree of exposure to internet banking, and the characteristics of the banks. A duration analysis shows no evidence of first mover advantage (order effects) in internet banking whilst the largest bank (rank effects) in commercial banking remains dominant in internet banking. The results imply that the internet banking adoption is dominated by social norm effects.

Gianna Boero and Emanuela Marrocu

The aim of this paper is to analyse the out-of-sample performance of SETAR models relative to a linear AR and a GARCH model using daily data for the Euro effective exchange rate. The evaluation is conducted on point, interval and density forecasts, unconditionally, over the whole forecast period, and conditional on specific regimes. The results show that overall the GARCH model is better able to capture the distributional features of the series and to predict higher-order moments than the SETAR models. However, from the results there is also a clear indication that the performance of the SETAR models improves significantly conditional on being on specific regimes.

Mark Harrison

The paper considers the influence of the budget for military spending in the Soviet command economy. A specific problem is that the Soviet strategy of concealment left us without good measures of the military burden on Soviet resources. The paper surveys previous western attempts to fill this gap alongside post-Brezhnev revelations. A new documentary source from 1982 that appears authoritative suggests much higher figures than anything proposed or revealed so far, and supports these higher figures in detail. However, the figures contain many puzzles and the authenticity of the document itself cannot be fully assured.

Joanne Sault, Otto Toivanen and Michael Waterson

One of the phenomena of the twentieth century, chainstores, are remarkably little studied by economists. Amongst open questions are the following: What factors influence the pattern of their openings? Does the spread of one constrain others having broadly the same retail offer? Do they locate close to competitors? To answer such questions, one must examine a time path of development- put simply one must observe actual entry. This is precisely what is done in a series of papers (Toivanen and Waterson, 2000; 2001; Sault, Toivanen and Waterson -hereafter STW, 2002; forthcoming) we are working on concerning the spread of restaurant outlets in the UK. This paper sketches the main elements of our program, then examines a particular issue, the micro-geography of location, in detail.

Frank H.Page Jr and Myrna H. Wooders

The main contribution of this paper is to provide a framework in which the notion of farsighted stability for games, introduced by Chwe (1994), can be applied to directed networks. In particular, we introduce the notion of a supernetwork. A supernetwork is made up of a collection of directed networks (the nodes) and uniquely represents (via the arcs connecting the nodes) agent preferences and the rules governing network formation. By reformulating Chwe’s basic result on the nonemptiness of farsightedly stable sets, we show that for any supernetwork (i.e., for any collection of directed networks and any collection of rules governing network formation), there exists a farsightedly stable directed network. We also introduce the notion of a Nash network relative to a given supernetwork, as well as the notions of symmetric, nonsimultaneous, and decomposable supernetworks. To illustrate the utility of our framework, we present several examples of super-networks, compute the farsightedly stable networks, and the Nash networks.

Robin Naylor, Jeremy Smith and Abigail McKnight

We exploit individual-level administrative data for whole populations of UK university students for the leaving cohorts of 1985-1993 to investigate the determinants of graduate occupational earnings. Among other results, we find that there are significant differences in the occupational earnings of leavers, according to university attended, subject studied, and degree class awarded, ceteris paribus. We also find that the premium associated with the award of a high degree class increased between 1985/6 and 1993/4, a period of substantial expansion in the graduate population. We suggest that this is consistent with a signalling model of the returns to higher education qualifications.

Massimiliano Bratti

This paper investigates the effect of parents’ current income and long-term family characteristics on individuals’ highest educational qualification obtained by age 26 using UK data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. The issues of the possible sample selection bias produced by the not completely random omission of current family income and that of its potential endogeneity are addressed, using a hot-deck multiple imputation procedure and including an indicator of child ability, respectively. I find evidence that current family income has a statistically significant positive impact on children’s education, although it is one of negligible magnitude. Long-term family characteristics are far more important

Robin Naylor and Jeremy Smith

From a unique data-set identifying the school attended prior to university for a full cohort of UK university students, we examine the determinants of final degree classification. We exploit the detailed school-level information and focus on the influence of school characteristics, such as school type, on subsequent performance of students at university. We estimate that, on average, a male (female) graduate who attended an Independent school is 6.5 (5.4) percentage points less likely to obtain a `good' degree than is a student who attended an LEA (that is, state-sector) school, ceteris paribus. We also find considerable variation around this average figure across different Independent schools. We find that, for males, the variation in the probability of attaining a `good' degree across schools can largely be explained by the level of school fees.

Clare Kelly and Gauthier Lanot

This paper establishes a theoretical framework to characterise the optimal behaviour of individuals who receive income periodically but make consumption decisions on a more frequent basis. The model incorporates price uncertainty and imperfect credit markets. The simulated numerical solution to this model shows that weekly consumption functions are ordered such that the functions within the payment period are highest in the first and the last week of the payment cycle for all wealth levels. Using weekly expenditure data from the FES, we estimate the coefficient of relative risk aversion (point estimates are between 1.2 and 7) and the extent of measurement error in the data (which accounts for approximately 60% of the variance in the data).

Joanne Sault, Otto Toivanen and Michael Waterson

We examine the development of UK outlets of a major fast food chain, from inauguration in 1974 until 1990, after which industry structure changed somewhat. The chain effectively introduced the counter-service burger concept. Locational spread across local authority district markets is explained by the characteristics of the areas where the outlets are sited. Of special interest is the effect of scale economies, measured by outlet numbers in neighboring districts. Both first and second entry are examined. We find that the hazard of first entry is positively influenced by market size and population density and negatively by distance from company headquarters.

Katsuhiro Sugita

This paper proposes Bayesian methods for estimating the cointegration rank using Bayes factors. We consider natural conjugate priors for computing Bayes factors. First, we estimate the cointegrating vectors for each possible rank. Then, we compute the Bayes factors for each rank against 0 rank. Monte Carlo simulations show that using Bayes factor with conjugate priors produces fairly good results. We apply the method to demand for money in the US.

Gianna Boero, Jeremy Smith, and Kenneth F. Wallis

The properties of Pearson’s goodness-of-fit test, as used in density forecast evaluation, income distribution analysis and elsewhere, are analysed. The components-of-chi-squared or “Pearson analog” tests of Anderson (1994) are shown to be less generally applicable than was originally claimed. For the case of equiprobable classes, where the general components tests remain valid, a Monte Carlo study shows that tests directed towards skewness and kurtosis may have low power, due to differences between the class boundaries and the intersection points of the distributions being compared. The power of individual component tests can be increased by the use of nonequiprobable classes

Ben Zissimos

This paper argues that free trade agreements (FTAs) are regional because, in their absence, optimal tariffs are higher against (close)regional partners than (distant) countries outside the region. Optimal tarffs shift rents from foreign firms to domestic citizens. Lower transport costs imply higher rents and therefore higher tarffs. So regional FTAs have a higher pay-off than non-regional FTAs. Therefore, only regional FTAs may yield positive gains when sponsoring a FTA is costly. To analyze equilibrium, standard theory of non-cooperative networks is extended to allow for asymmetric players. Naive best response dynamics show that ‘trade blocks can be stepping blocks’ for free trade.

Michael K. Pitt

In this paper,a method is introduced for approximating the likelihood for the unknown parameters of a state space model.The approximation converges to the true likelihood as the simulation size goes to infinity. In addition,the approximating likelihood is continuous as a function of the unknown parameters under rather general conditions.The approach advocated is fast, robust and avoids many of the pitfalls associated with current techniques based upon importance sampling.We assess the performance of the method by considering a linear state space model, comparing the results with the Kalman filter, which delivers the true likelihood. We also apply the method to a non-Gaussian state space mo del, the Stochastic Volatility model, finding that the approach is efficient and effective. Applications to continuous time finance models are also considered. A result is established which allows the likelihood to be estimated quickly and efficiently using the output from the general auxilary particle filter.

Matthew Haag and Roger Lagunoff

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how “much” cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group cooperation vary with the group’s size and structure? For an arbitrary distribution of discount factors, we characterize the maximal average co-operation (MAC) likelihood of this game. The MAC likelihood is the highest average level of cooperation, over all stationary subgame perfect equilibrium paths, that the group can achieve. The MAC likelihood is shown to be increasing in monotone shifts, and decreasing in mean preserving spreads, of the distribution of discount factors. The latter suggests that more heterogeneous groups are less cooperative on average. Finally, we establish weak conditions under which the MAC likelihood exhibits increasing returns to scale when discounting is heterogeneous. That is, larger groups are more cooperative, on average, than smaller ones. By contrast, when the group has a common discount factor, the MAC likelihood is invariant to group size.

Jennifer C. Smith

This paper tests the "morale" theory of downward nominal wage rigidity. This theory relies on workers disliking nominal pay cuts: cuts should make workers less happy. We investigate this using panel data on individual employees' pay and satisfaction. We confirm that nominal cuts do make workers less happy than if their pay had not fallen. But we find no difference in the effect on happiness of cuts and pay freezes. This represents important information about the nature of wage rigidity in practice and the applicability of the morale theory. The morale theory may be able to explain generalised downward wage rigidity, but apparently fails to explain downward nominal rigidity.

Dennis Leech

A priori voting power analysis can be useful in helping to design a weighted voting system that has certain intended properties. Power indices can help determine how many weighted votes each member should be allocated and what the decision rule should be. These choices can be made in the light of a requirement that there be a given distribution of power and/or a desired division of powers between individual members and the collective institution. This paper focuses on the former problem: choosing the weights given that the power indices and the decision rule are fixed exogenously

Roman Horvath and Lubos Komarek

The optimum currency area (OCA) theory tries to answer an almost prohibitively difficult question: what is the optimal number of currencies to be used in one region. The difficulty of the question leads to a low operational precision of OCA theory. Therefore, we argue that the OCA theory is a framework for discussion about monetary integration. We summarize theoretical issues from the classical contributions to the OCA literature in the 1960s to the modern “endogenous view”. A short survey of empirical studies on the OCA theory in the connection with the EMU and the Czech Republic is presented. Finally, we calculate OCA-indexes for the Czech Republic, EU, Germany and Portugal. The index predicts exchange rates variability from the view of traditional OCA criteria and asseses benefit-cost ratio of implementing common currency for a pair of the countries. We compare the structural similarity of the Czech Republic and Portugal to the German economy and find that the Czech economy is closer. The results are reversed when the EU economy is considered as a benchmark country.

Jan Frait and Lubos Komarek

This paper aims to enrich the debate on the overvaluation/undervaluation of the Czech koruna and the currencies of other selected transition economies by applying the concept of the debt-adjusted real exchange rate (DARER), thereby offering monetary policy makers another indicator for more responsive management of this important economic variable. The motivation for constructing DARER is the fact that many transition economies finance their long-term current account deficits with capital flows, which often leads to real overvaluation of their currencies. DARER can signal to the authorities that the real exchange rate is becoming unsustainable in the medium term and that if this signal is ignored, a currency crisis may ensue. The paper is in seven parts. The first three parts contain the theoretical underpinning of the concept. Part four defines newly proposed indicators of exchange rate overvaluation. Part five contains empirical DARER results for the Czech Republic. Part six and annex 1 to this work contain empirical DARER results for selected transition countries, including a brief description of those countries’ exchange rate histories. The final part examines the possibilities and limitations of the DARER concept in practice. The primary aim of this part, however, is to explain the information content of the real exchange rate as a very good warning signal of potential currency crisis.

Dennis Leech

In his well known 1971 paper the mathematical sociologist James S. Coleman, proposed three measures of voting power: (1) "the power of a collectivity to act", (2) "the power to prevent action" and (3) "the power to initiate action". (1) is a measure of the overall decisiveness of a voting body taking into account its size, decision rule and the weights of its members, while (2) and (3) are separate indices of the power of individual members, in being able to block or achieve decisions. These measures seem to have been little used for a variety of reasons, although the paper itself is widely cited. First, much of the power indices literature has focused on normalised indices which gives no role to (1) and means that (2) and (3) are identical. Second, Coleman's coalition model is different from that of Shapley and Shubik which has sometimes tended to dominate in discussions of voting power. Third, (2) and (3) are indistinguishable when the decision quota is a simple majority, the distinction becoming important in other voting situations. In this paper I propose that these indices, which are based on a fundamentally different notion of power than that assumed by game-theoretic approaches, have a useful role in aiding a better understanding of collective institutions in which decisions are taken by voting. I use them to illustrate different aspects of the design of a weighted voting system such as the governing body of the IMF or World Bank, or the system of QMV in the European Council.

Dennis Leech

Power indices are a useful tool for studying voting systems in which different members have different numbers of votes. Many international organisations are organised in this way in order to accommodate differences in size of countries, including the system of QMV in the European Union Council of Ministers. A power index is a measure of power based on the idea that a member’s power is his ability to swing a decision by changing the way his vote is cast. This paper addresses the problem of the computation of the two most widely used power indices, the so-called classical power indices, the Banzhaf index (and also the related Coleman indices) and the Shapley-Shubik index. It discusses the various methods that have been proposed in the literature: Direct Enumeration, Monte Carlo Simulation, Generating Functions, Multilinear Extensions Approximation, the Modified MLE Approximation Method. The advantages and disadvantages of the algorithms are discussed including computational complexity. It also describes methods for so called “oceanic games”. The paper also discusses the so-called “inverse problem” of finding what the weights should be given the desired power indices. The method is potentially useful as providing a basis for designing a voting system with a given desired distribution of power among the members, for example, to reflect differences in population or financial contributions. Examples are given from the International Monetary Fund, shareholder voting and the European Union Council.

Francesco L Galassi

The paper models co-operative engagement under varying environmental constraints giving rise to different forms of collective action problems, specifically focussing on water management in pre-industrial societies. I show that societies where water availability is strongly seasonal develop no mechanism to encourage society-wide co-operative behaviour because the benefits of water storage are fully excludable. With pre-industrial technology water storage is a pure club good, and optimal club size can be shown to be very small under credible parameter values, converging to 1 in some cases (private good). The social consequences of the environmental constraint include strongly circumscribed co-operation and rent seeking. In contrast, areas where water management involved flood control and irrigation develop society-wide institutions based on self-sustaining co-operative engagement assisted by external policing. The model thus offers an explanation of varying levels of "civic virtue" in different areas.

Michael P Devereux, Ben Lockwood and Michela Redoano

This paper tests whether OECD countries compete with each other over corporate taxes in order to attract investment. We develop two models: with firm mobility, countries compete only over the statutory tax rate or the effective average tax rate, while with capital mobility, countries compete only over the effective marginal tax rate. We estimate the parameters of reaction functions using data from 21 countries between 1983 and 1999. We find evidence that countries compete over all three measures, but particularly over the statutory tax rate and the effective average tax rate. This is consistent with a belief amongst governments that location choices by multinational firms are discrete. We also find evidence of concave reaction functions, consistent with the model outlined in the paper.

Alexander Kovalenkov and Myrna Wooders

In a series of papers (Kovalenkov and Wooders 2001a, Games and Economic Behavior, 2001b, Mathematics of Operations Research, and 1997, Journal of Economic Theory to appear), the authors have developed the framework of parameterized collections of games and also that of parameterized collections of economies with clubs. These papers apply to collections of games with nontransferable utility and similarly to economies with clubs and general preferences. The game theoretic framework encompasses the earlier `pregame' framework (cf., Wooders 1994b Econometrica) and also earlier models of economies with clubs and with possibly multiple memberships in clubs (cf. Shubik and Wooders 1982). In this paper, we consider the special case of games with side payments and illustrate the application of our more general results in this special, and much simpler but still important, framework. The motivation for this line of research is developed and application to environmental problems is discussed.

Tone Arnold and Myrna Wooders

We present a dynamic model of jurisdiction formation in a society of identical people. The process is described by a Markov chain that is defined by myopic optimization on the part of the players. We show that the process will converge to a Nash equilibrium club structure. Next, we allow for coordination between members of the same club,i.e. club members can form coalitions for one period and deviate jointly. We define a Nash club equilibrium (NCE) as a strategy configuration that is immune to such coalitional deviations. We show that, if one exists, this modified process will converge to a NCE configuration with probability one. Finally, we deal with the case where a NCE fails to exist due to indivisibility problems. When the population size is not an integer multiple of the optimal club size, there will be left over players who prevent the process from settling down. We define the concept of an approximate Nash club equilibrium (ANCE), which means that all but k players are playing a Nash club equilibrium, where k is defined by the minimal number of left over players. We show that the modified process converges to an ergodic set of states each of which is ANCE

Nizar Allouch and Myrna Wooders

In the context of a socially networked economy, this paper demonstrates an Edgeworth equivalence between the set of competitive allocations and
the core. Each participant in the economy may have multiple links with other participants and the equilibrium network may be as large as the entire set of participants. A clique is a group of people who are all connected with each other. Large cliques, possibly as large as the entire population, are permitted; this is important since we wish to include in our analysis large, world-wide organizations such as workers in multi-national firms and members of world-wide environmental organizations, for example, as well as small cliques, such as two-person partnerships. A special case of our model is equivalent to a club economy where clubs may be large and individuals may belong to multiple clubs. The features of our model that cliques within a networked economy may be as large as the entire population and individuals may belong to multiple cliques thus allow us to extend the extant decentralisation literature on competitive pricing in economies with clubs and multiple memberships (where club sizes are uniformly bounded, independent of the size of the economy).

Robin Naylor

We show that a firm’s profits under Cournot oligopoly can be increasing in the number of firms in the industry if wages are determined by (decentralised) bargaining in unionized bilateral oligopoly. The intuition for the result is that increased product market competition following an increase in the number of firms is mirrored by increased labor market rivalry which induces (profit-enhancing) wage moderation. Whether the product or labor market effect dominates depends both on the extent of union bargaining power and on the nature of union preferences. A corollary of the results derived is that if the upstream agents are firms rather than labor unions, then profits are always decreasing in the number of firms, as in the standard Cournot model. We also show that if bargaining is centralized then there is no wage moderation effect and wages are the same independent of the number of firms, as in the standard model with exogenous factor costs.

Nizar Allouch, Cuong Le Van and Frank H Page Jr

In his seminal paper on arbitrage and competitive equilibrium in unbounded exchange economies, Werner (Econometrica, 1987)proved the existence of a competitive equilibrium, under a price no-arbitrage condition, without assuming either local or global nonsatiation. Werner's existence result contrasts sharply with classical existence results for bounded exchange economies which require, at minimum, global nonsatiation at rational allocations. Why do un-bounded exchange economies admit existence without local or global nonsatiation? This question is the focus of our paper. We make two main contributions to the theory of arbitrage and competitive equilibrium. First, we show that, in general, in unbounded exchange economies (for example, asset exchange economies allowing short sales), even if some agents' preferences are satiated, the absence of arbitrage is sufficient for the existence of competitive equilibria, as long as each agent who is satiated has a nonempty set of useful net trades - that is, as long as agents' preferences satisfy weak nonsatiation. Second, we provide a new approach to proving existence in unbounded exchange economies. The key step in our new approach is to transform the original economy to an economy satisfying global nonsatiation such that all equilibria of the transformed economy are equilibria of the original economy. What our approach makes clear is that it is precisely the condition of weak nonsatiation - a condition considerably weaker than local or global nonsatiation - that makes possible this transformation. Moreover, as we show via examples, without weak nonsatiation, existence fails.

Myrna Wooders, Edward Cartwright and Reinhard Selten

We introduce a framework of noncooperative pregames, in which players are characterized by their attributes, and demonstrate that for all games with sufficiently many players, there exist approximate (e )Nash equilibria in pure strategies. In fact, every mixed strategy equilibrium can be used to construct an e-equilibrium in pure strategies, an ‘e -purification’ result. Our main result is a social conformity theorem. Interpret a set of players, all with attributes in some convex subset of attribute space and all playing the same strategy, as a society. Observe that the number of societies may be as large as the number of players. Our social conformity result dictates that, given e > 0, there is an integer L, depending on e but not on the number of players, such that any sufficiently large game has an e -equilibrium in pure strategies that induces a partition of the player set into fewer than L societies.

Mark Harrison

Information adds value to transactions in three ways: it supports reputations, permits customisation, and provides yardsticks. In the Soviet economy such information was frequently not produced; if produced, it was often concealed; whether concealed or not, it was often of poor quality. In short, the Soviet command system forced economic growth on the basis of a relatively low–value information stock. This may help explain aspects of Soviet postwar economic growth and slowdown, the collapse of the command system, and the persistence of low output after the collapse.

Alexander Kovalenkov and Myrna Holtz Wooders

We introduce the framework of parameterized collections of games with and without sidepayments and provide three nonemptiness of approximate core theorems. The parameters bound (a) the number of approximate types of players and the size of the approximation and (b) the size of nearly effective groups of players and their distance from exact effectiveness. Our theorems are based on a new notion of partition-balanced profiles and approximately partition-balanced profiles. The results are applied to a new model of an economy with clubs. In contrast to the extant literature, our approach allows both widespread externalities and uniform results.

Maria Eugenia Delfino

The Argentine banking industry has experienced increasing consolidation during the last decade. On the one hand, it can be argued that this has resulted from cost economies, perhaps associated with technical change. But on the other, it can also be argued that increased concentration in this industry may allow the exploitation of market power in the input (deposits) and output (loans) markets. These issues are addressed in this study using bank-level data for Argentine retail banks over the period 1993-2000 to estimate a cost-function based model incorporating deposits- and loans-market pricing behaviour. The results provide evidence of market power exploitation in both the markets for loans and deposits but also the presence of significant cost economies. The findings further show an increase in consumers’ surplus and banks’ profits over the period possibly associated to the exploitation of cost economies and technical change which may have counteracted the effect of market power.

Dennis Leech

This paper considers the incentives faced by investors (financial institutions) to become actively involved in the direction of their under-performing portfolio companies as proposed by recent policy reports on corporate governance. It proposes a metric by which to measure the returns to activism in terms of the size of holding, measures of risk and return to the company, the degree of under performance and the level of commission received by fiduciary fund managers. By comparing this with costs of activism it proposes a method by which 'significant shareholdings' may be estimated. A significant shareholding is the level above which a shareholding in a company may be said to have private incentives to activism. This approach is applied to two groups of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, the top 250 and a ten percent random sample. The results indicate that there are very strong incentives for shareholders to be activist participants in corporate governance among the top 250 companies while there is much more diversity among the smaller companies. Results differ considerably between those where the shareholder is an own-account investor and a fund manager.

Monica Correa Lopez and Robin A. Naylor

This paper compares Cournot and Bertrand equilibria in a downstream differentiated duopoly in which the input price (wage) paid by each downstream firm is the outcome of a strategic bargain with its upstream supplier (labour union). We show that the standard result that Cournot equilibrium profits exceed those under Bertrand competition - when the differentiated duopoly game is played in imperfect substitutes - is reversible. Whether equilibrium profits are higher under Cournot or Bertrand competition is shown to depend upon the nature of the upstream agents’ preferences, on the distribution of bargaining power over the input price and on the degree of product market differentiation. We find that the standard result holds unless unions are both powerful and place considerable weight on the wage argument in their utility function. One implication of this is that if the upstream agents are profit-maximising firms, then the standard result will obtain.

Mark B. Stewart

This paper uses longitudinal data from three contrasting datasets (matched Labour Force Surveys, the British Household Panel Survey and matched New Earnings Surveys) to estimate the impact of the introduction of the UK minimum wage (in April 1999) on the probability of subsequent employment among those whose wages would have needed to be raised to comply with the minimum. A difference-in-differences estimator is used, based on position in the wage distribution. No significant adverse employment effects are found for any of the four demographic groups considered (adult and youth, men and women) or in any of the three datasets used.

Bhaskar Dutta and Anirban Kar

We propose a new cost allocation rule for minimum cost spanning tree games. The new rule is a core selection and also satisfies cost monotonicity. We also give characterization theorems for the new rule as well as the much-studied Bird allocation. We show that the principal difference between these two rules is in terms of their consistency properties

Bhaskar Dutta, Matthew O. Jackson and Michel Le Breton

We develop a definition of equilibrium for agenda formation in general voting settings. The definition is independent of any protocol. We show that the set of equilibrium outcomes for any Pareto efficient voting rule is uniquely determined. We also show that for such voting rules, if preferences are strict then the set of equilibrium outcomes coincides with that of the outcomes generated by considering all full agendas for voting by successive elimination and show that the set of equilibrium outcomes corresponds with the Banks set. We also examine the implications in several other settings.

Normal J. Ireland

This paper considers a simple model of competition based on some buyers making price comparisons between two suppliers. The difficulties of making appropriate comparisons are made greater by exclusive dealer agreements and restrictions, and by suppliers trading under more than one name. It is argued that suppliers will set prices using mixed strategies, and that prices become less competitive as price comparisons become more difficult. The implications for competition policy are considered in the light of recent judgements of the UK’s Office of Fair Trading and the European Court of Justice.

J. Robert Branston, Keith Cowling and Roger Sugden

A theory of the firm based on strategic decision-making highlights governance as a central issue. Preferences vary over strategy but not all interests are currently being represented, resulting in a failure to govern in the public interest. As solutions, we consider the design of company law and also more immediate ways forward, focusing on regulation and democratically controlled public agencies, but stressing the fundamental significance of active, effective citizens. Throughout, the arguments are illustrated using examples from various countries and industries, including education, information technology, football and public utilities in Europe and the US.

Keith Cowling and Philip R. Tomlinson

This paper considers the problems of "hollowing out" using a Case Study of Japan's machinery sector. In doing so, it explores the roots of the present crisis by focusing upon the role played by Japan's large transnational corporations. This is important because these corporations are the "central actors" within the Japanese economy and they control a significant proportion of Japanese manufacturing. It is their strategic decisions - those that determine the level and location of investment, employment and output - which ultimately shape the development path for Japanese industry (see Cowling and Sugden, 1994, 1998). In recent years, Japan’s large transnationals have become engaged in the process of elite globalisation, pursuing their own interests at the expense of domestic Japanese industry. This is a fundamental insight that is crucial for designing appropriate policy responses to arrest Japan's current industrial decline. It is argued that the lessons from Japan's experience might guide policy-makers in other regions, such as Wisconsin, who are concerned with future industrial development, the effects of globalisation and problems of "hollowing out".

Keith Cowling and Philip R. Tomlinson

For a long period in the twentieth century, the development of the Japanese corporation appeared congruent with the development of the Japanese economy. The growth maximising behaviour of the Japanese corporation and the preference for internal growth over acquisitions (see Odagiri, 1992) appeared to suit the long-term ambitions of Japan. Now, that formerly clear connexion between the ambitions of corporate Japan and the Japanese public interest is no longer so clear. Increasingly, the global ambitions of the corporation appear as an impediment to Japan's
development. By favouring the development of large-scale transnational corporations, Japanese industrial policy-making appears to have contained a fundamental flaw. Japan is now dominated by large-scale organisations that are controlled by a corporate elite. It is unlikely that their strategic decisions will correspond with the wider public interest, which raises the possibility that Japan is now afflicted with "strategic failure". Other examples from around the world suggest that Japan is not unique in this respect. Alternative ways forward are suggested.

Nizar Allouch

Since Hart's [5] and Werner's [10] seminal papers, several conditions have been proposed to show the existence of equilibrium in an asset exchange economy with short-selling. In this note, we discuss the relationship between two no-arbitrage conditions. The first condition is the assumption that the individually rational utility set U is compact, as considered by Dana, Le Van and Magnien [1]. The second is inconsequential arbitrage, introduced by Page, Wooders and Monteiro [9]. The main result of this comparison is to show that the inconsequential arbitrage condition is stronger than the assumption that U is compact.

Myrna H Wooders, Ben Zissimos and Amrita Dhillon

In a classic model of tax competition, we show that the level of public good provision and taxation in a Nash equilibrium can be efficient or inefficient with either too much, or too little public good provision. The key is whether there exists a unilateral incentive to deviate from the efficient
state and, if so, whether this entails raising or lowering taxes. A priori, there is no reason to suppose the incentive is in either one direction or the other. In addition, we demonstrate conditions ensuring existence of an asymmetric Nash equilibrium with efficient public good provision. As in prior literature, local amenities enhance capital’s productivity. Prior literature, however, focuses on under-provision of public goods.

Frank H PageJr, Myrna H. Wooders and Samir Kamat

The main contribution of this paper is to provide a framework in which the notion of farsighed stability for games, introduced by Chwe (1994) can be applied to directed networks. Then, using Chwe's basic result on the nonemptiness of farsightedly stable sets for games, we show that for any given collection of directed networks and any given collection of rules governing network formation, there exists a farsightedly stable directed network.

Myrna Wooders and Hugo van den Berg

As female primates carry and nurse the fetus, it naturally falls on them to rear the offspring. On the assumption that males are at least equally adept at obtaining food, it follows that they generate a surplus which they might either share with females or consume themselves. This choice lies at the heart of an evolutionary battle of the sexes. If females succeed in obtaining a large share of the surplus, there is little scope for size dimorphism between males and females; otherwise males can use the surplus to sustain larger and stronger bodies, which are advantageous in sexual competition with other males. Besides competing with males, females may compete with each other. Moreover, dependency may coincide with sexiness and such dependency can persist. This paper examines these ideas in a game-theoretic setting.

May Arunanondchai

We use a simple model of sequential duopoly to examine the effect of different industrial structures on firms' output decision and profit shares in the international market for raw and processed tropical timber products. The model provides insights that can be applied to the Indonesian logging and plywood industry: shedding light on the appropriate policy responses. Whether optimal trade policy in each industry involves a tax or subsidy depends on the ownership structure and on the comparative profit margins from upstream and downstream exports. Log barriers may improve welfare even if the downstream sector is inefficient. When the industry is vertically separated, this is true regardless of the comparative profit margins. However, when the industry is vertically integrated (which is the case of Indonesia), this is only true when the downstream sector is more profitable at the margin.

Wiji Arulampalam, Robin Naylor and Jeremy Smith

Objectives: To assess the extent to which various factors influence the probability that an individual medical student will drop out of medical school during their first year of study, focussing on the influence both of prior qualifications, such as A-level subjects taken and scores attained, and of type of school and family background. Results: The probability that a student will drop out of medical school during their first year of study is influenced significantly both by the subjects studied at A-level and by the scores achieved. Among students who took Biology, Chemistry and Physics at A-level, each extra grade achieved reduces the probability of dropping out by about one-third of a percentage point. There is an additional effect for students with the maximum A-level score of 30 points in their best 3 A-levels (that is, three grade As): such a student is almost one percentage point less likely to drop out of medical school, ceteris paribus, compared to a student with 28 points. Furthermore, this estimated effect of A-level performance on dropout behaviour is very similar for each of the 13 cohorts. In general, indicators of both the social class and the previous school background of the student are largely insignificant, with the exception that students with a parent who is a medical doctor are significantly less likely to drop out. There are significant differences by gender, with males more likely to drop out. There is also evidence of significant age effects, with a tendency for the dropout probability to fall with age.

Jonathan Gardner and Andrew J. Oswald

This paper studies workers’ lives in modern Britain. It uses longitudinal data to examine stress and job satisfaction through the decade of the 1990s. The results are disturbing. On both measures, the wellbeing of British public sector workers worsened sharply over the decade. The size of the deterioration was between one half point and one full point on a standard GHQ mental stress scale. This is remarkably large. Stress levels among private sector employees also rose. Job satisfaction in the private sector ran approximately flat through time. These findings may be of interest to nations who are thinking of adopting the British government’s policies towards the public sector, and to those who have conjectured that working life is becoming more pressurised.

David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J Oswald

This paper estimates micro-econometric happiness equations for the United States and Great Britain. Reported levels of wellbeing have declined over the last quarter of a century in the US; life satisfaction has run approximately flat through time in Britain. These findings are consistent with the Easterlin hypothesis (1974, 1995). The happiness of American blacks, however, has risen. Despite legislation on gender discrimination, the well-being of women has declined. White women in the US have been the biggest losers. Well-being equations have a stable structure. Money buys happiness. People care also about relative income. Wellbeing is U-shaped in age. The paper estimates the dollar values of events like unemployment and divorce. They are large. A lasting marriage (compared to widow-hood as a ‘natural’ experiment), for example, is estimated to be worth $100,000 a year.

Rafael di Tella, Robert J. MacCulloch and Andrew J Oswald

This paper shows that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970's to the 1990's. Happiness equations are monotonically increasing in income, and have a similar structure in different countries. Second, movements in reported well-being are correlated with changes in macroeconomic variables such as Gross Domestic Product. This holds true after controlling for the personal characteristics of respondents, country fixed-effects, year dummies, and country-specific time trends. Third, the paper establishes that recessions create psychic losses that extend beyond the fall in GDP and rise in the number of people unemployed. These losses are large. Fourth, the welfare state appears to be a compensating force: higher unemployment benefits are associated with higher national well-being.

Lubos Komarek and Martin Melecky

In this paper we strive to present a somewhat internationalised view of demand for money as applied to the Czech Republic. We extend the traditional money demand function, consisting purely of domestic variables, to include certain foreign determinants that probably affect the demand for money in a small open transition economy. We do so in the case of both narrow and broad money. For the purposes of generalisation and robust estimates we employ several estimation techniques, namely the Johansen procedure, ARDL, DOLS and ADL. We also consider the aspect of the stability of such estimates. Finally, we analyse the possible effects on prices and output of disequilibria on money market. We have found that a liquidity gap probably has a significant influence on both prices and output.

Lubos Komarek and Martin Melecky

Currency substitution appears to be an important issue affecting the design of monetary policy, especially in transition economies. Therefore, this paper strives to analyze the particular relevance of a currency substitution phenomenon for the Czech Republic is case. We initially discuss various approaches and definitions of currency substitution that found in the literature. Subsequently, we discuss the role of currency substitution in small open economies in transition with some illustrations relating to the Czech Republic - we distinguish and analyse a locally and globally substituting currency from a substituted one and consequences of euroization. The empirical part of this paper presents estimations of modified Branson and Henderson portfolio model for the Czech Republic’s case. This provides a multi-perspective approach to currency substitution in a broad sense. Further, we attempt to intensify the robustness of our estimation, applying several cointegration techniques. These are namely the Johansen procedure, the ARDL, the DOLS and the ADL. Finally, we discuss potential implications of currency and assets substitution according to our estimates present in the Czech economy.

Amrita Dhillon and Emmanuel Petrakis

This paper studies a strategic aspect of profit-sharing in an oligopolistic industry with a monopoly union. Whenever a uniform profit share exists in the industry, we show that a union that values the per worker remuneration positively, may have incentives to reduce industry employment, decreasing thus total output and causing total profits to increase. Thus, we show that profit-sharing may lead to higher profits for such an industry even if productivity effects are absent.

Mark Harrison

By studying a Soviet R&D failure, the prewar attempt to create a new aeroengine technology based on the steam turbine, we find out more about the motivations, strategies, and payoffs of principals and agents in the Soviet command economy. Alternative approaches to the evaluation of R&D failure are outlined. New archival documentation shows the scale and scope of the Soviet R&D effort in this field. The allocation of R&D resources resulted from agents’ horizontal interactions within a vertical command hierarchy. Project funding was determined in a context of biased information, adverse selection, and agents’ rent seeking. Funding was rationed across projects and through time. Budget constraints on individual projects were softened in the presence of sunk costs, but were hardened periodically. There is no evidence that rents were intentionally distributed through the Soviet military R&D system to win trust or reward loyalty; the termination of aviation steam power R&D in 1939 despite the sunk costs they represented was timely.

Myrna Wooders and Hugo van den Berg

Female primates carry and nurse the fetus, and thus have the first responsibility for rearing the offspring. Assuming males are at least equally adept at obtaining food, males might either share surplus food with females or consume the food themselves. The distribution of the surplus is the subject of a battle of the sexes. If females succeed in obtaining a large share of the surplus, then there is little size dimorphism between males and females; otherwise males use the surplus themselves to become larger and stronger, and to engage in sexual competition with other males. Besides competing with males, females may compete with each other. Dependency may coincide with sexual competitiveness (sexiness). This paper introduces these ideas in a game theoretic setting and derives a simple bound on the male ‘sexiness’ required for a nonsupportive strategy to be worthwhile.

Mark Harrison

The paper considers some of the views of the Stalin–era relationship between Soviet industry and the Red Army that are current in the literature, and disentangles some confusions of translation. The economic weight of the defence sector in the economic system is summarised in various aspects. The lessons of recent archival research are used as a basis for analysing the army–industry relationship under Stalin as a prisoners’ dilemma in which, despite the potential gains from mutual cooperation, each party faced a strong incentive to cheat on the other. It is concluded that the idea of a Soviet military–industrial complex is not strictly applicable to the Stalin period, but there may be greater justification for the Soviet Union after Stalin.

Stefano DeMichelis and Amrita Dhillon

Both complete and incomplete game Theoretic Models of Voter Turnout (Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1983,1985) have the problem of multiple equilibria, some of which seem unreasonable. How can the counter intuitive high turnout equilibria be explained? Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985) suggest that the main reason is that strategic uncertainty is too low in a complete information model. We show that this is not the main problem with these equilibria - incomplete information may exacerbate the problem of multiple equilibria. We propose a very intuitive criterion based on voter learning to distinguish reasonable equilibria. This paper makes precise the sense in which the high turnout equilibria in the Palfrey-Rosenthal model are not robust. We show how the model can be used to qualitatively explain several phenomena observed in reality.

Michael Waterson

This paper develops the idea that consumers’ behaviour matters significantly from the viewpoint of industry performance. This is examined through some theoretical propositions, but then at greater length by means of some case study examples. These examples demonstrate how, even in potentially competitive industries, reluctance on the part of consumers to search or to switch suppliers can lead to a sub-competitive outcome. The significance of non-traditional competition policy remedies in changing the outcome is drawn out.

Mark Harrison and Byung-Yeon Kim

This paper reconsiders Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny’s suggestion that a socialist industry will always prefer to cut both price and output relative to a market–clearing equilibrium in order to maximise bribe income. The evidence from recent archival studies of the Soviet economy does not support this conjecture. To understand the evidence we present an analytical framework within which a plan–setter and an effort–setter interact, subject to a hard resource constraint, to determine real output and hidden inflation simultaneously. We find that managers who use resources gained corruptly were enabled to produce more real output with less hidden inflation and fulfil the plan more honestly as a result. We find clear rationales for plan–setters to have tolerated corruption and siphoning while maintaining plan tension, and we associate reduced plan tension in the 1970s with the spread of disloyal behaviours.

Mark Harrison

The paper outlines the problem of aviation jet propulsion in the interwar period and World War II and analyses Soviet progress towards a solution using newly available archival documentation. Soviet R&D commitments were influenced by long–term security motivations and the need to invest in local tacit knowledge. The scale and diversity of the Soviet R&D effort is described. The allocation of resources resulted from R&D agents’ horizontally organised market–like interactions within a vertically organised command system. Financing decisions were made in a context of asymmetric information, adverse selection, and opportunism. Overall funding was rationed; budget constraints on individual projects were soft, but were periodically hardened. In addition to decisions to finance and refinance or terminate projects, takeovers and mergers took place in a secondary asset market. There is evidence of rent–seeking activity, but where rent–seeking was detected it was punished.

Mark Harrison

The collapse of the Soviet economy at the end of the 1980s is ascribed to command failure. The likely sources of command failure and economic collapse in the Soviet case are analysed in terms of the payoffs to a dictator who controls the level of coercion and producers who control the level of effort. This approach is used to frame an analytical narrative of the evolution of the Soviet system under Brezhnev and Gorbachev. The paper is a nontechnical version of TWERPS no. 602.

Mark Harrison

The economic dimensions of the Soviet war effort are appraised. The surprising fact is that the Soviet economy did not collapse in 1942. A rational-choice model is developed to illustrate the economic conditions under which a wartime collapse of the economy is rendered more and less likely.

Mark Harrison

Are command systems that rest on coercion inherently unstable, and did the Soviet economy collapse for this reason? Postwar evidence is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the Soviet economy was unstable. If it was not unstable, why did it collapse? A repeated game of coordination between a dictator and producers shows that a high level of coercion may yield a stable high–output equilibrium, that the command economy contains a time–consistency problem for central planners, and that a transition to a low state of coercion and performance in which everyone’s income falls may be brought about by rising monitoring costs and the dictator’s loss of reputation. The facts of the Soviet case are consistent with a collapse triggered when the dictator threw in the towel.

John P. Conley, Ali Toossi and Myrna Wooders

We reconsider the classic puzzle of why election turnouts are persistently so high when formal analysis strongly suggests that rational agents should not vote. If we assume that voters are not making systematic mistakes, the most plausible explanation seems to be agents receive benefits, from the act of voting itself. This is very close to assuming the answer, however, and immediately begs the question of why agents feel a warm glow from participating in the electoral process. In this paper, we approach this question from an evolutionary standpoint. We show for a range of situations that public-spirited agents have an evolutionary advantage over those who are not as public-spirited. We also explore when this kind of altruistic behavior is advantageous to agents. The details depend on the costs of voting, the degree to which agents have different preferences over public policies and the ratio of various preference types in the population, but we conclude that evolution may often be a force that causes agents to internalize the benefits their actions confer on others