Manage Research Papers

Tommaso Gabrieli and Sayantan Ghosal

This paper shows the robust non existence of competitive equilibria even in a simple three period representative agent economy with dynamically inconsistent preferences. We distinguish between a sophisticated and naive representative agent. Even when underlying preferences are monotone and convex, we show by example that the induced preferences, at given prices, of the sophisticated representative agent over choices in first period markets are both non convex and satiated. Therefore, even allowing for negative prices, the market clearing allocation is not contained in the convex hull of demand. Finally, with a naive representative agent, we show that perfect foresight is incompatible with market clearing and individual optimization at given prices.

Dennis Leech, Robert Leech and Anna Simmonds

An increasing trend in functional MRI experiments involves discriminating between experimental conditions on the basis of fine-grained spatial patterns extending across many voxels. Typically, these approaches have used randomized resampling to derive inferences.

Fuad Aleskerov

A set of new power indices is introduced extending Banzhaf power index and allowing to take into account agents’ preferences to coalesce. An axiomatic characterization of intensity functions representing a desire of agents to coalesce is given. A set of axioms for new power indices is presented and discussed. An example of use of these indices for Russian parliament is given.

Sheheryar Malik and Michael K Pitt

In this paper we provide a unified methodology in order to conduct likelihood-based inference on the unknown parameters of a general class of discrete-time stochastic volatility models, characterized by both a leverage effect and jumps in returns. Given the non-linear/non-Gaussian state-space form, approximating the likelihood for the parameters is conducted with output generated by the particle filter. Methods are employed to ensure that the approximating likelihood is continuous as a function of the unknown parameters thus enabling the use of Newton-Raphson type maximization algorithms. Our approach is robust and efficient relative to alternative Markov Chain Monte Carlo schemes employed in such contexts. In addition it provides a feasible basis for undertaking the non-trivial task of model comparison. The technique is applied to daily returns data for various stock price indices. We find strong evidence in favour of a leverage effect in all cases. Jumps are an important component in two out of the four series we consider.

David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald

This paper is a continuation of results in Blanchflower and Oswald (2008). It provides new evidence that well-being follows a curve through life. We use data on half a million randomly sampled individuals across eight major European nations. Importantly, we show that in this set of countries there is a U-shape even in unadjusted data, that is, without the inclusion of control variables. But we also advise against a focus on elementary bivariate associations

Sayantan Ghosal and KannikaThampanishvong

In a model with both issues of sovereign debtor moral hazard and creditor coordination under incomplete information, we show that the resulting con‡ict between ex ante and interim efficiency limits the welfare impact of strengthening CACs. Conditional on default, we show that an interim efficient CAC threshold exists and improving creditor coordination results in welfare gains. However, when ex ante efficiency requires the sovereign debtor to choose actions that reduce the probability of default, improved creditor coordination reduces ex ante efficiency and the interim efficient CAC threshold is higher than the ex ante efficient CAC threshold.

Christian Saborowski

In this paper, we take an analytical approach to examine possible adverse effects of the use of inflation targeting as a disinflation regime. The idea is that a strict interpretation of an inflation target may preserve inflationary distortions after price stability is attained. We show that such a policy not only creates a slump in output but may increase macroeconomic volatility substantially in a model in which wages are subject to a Taylor staggering structure.

Mark B Stewart

This paper uses panel data on pensioners’ subjective evaluations of their financial positions to construct equivalence scales for pensioners. A pensioner couple is estimated to require an income 44% higher than a comparable single pensioner to reach the same standard of living. This is significantly less than the equivalence scale value implied by the ratio of state pension rates, the McClements equivalence scale value and the scale value derived from Engel curve estimation for food expenditure using the same data source. The estimated equivalence scale value is robust to variations in the definition of the pensioner sample, the measurement of income and the econometric model used.

Anett Hofmann

The paper argues that the incidence of moral hazard played a significant role in the 2007/2008 credit crunch. In particular, bank traders subjected to asymmetric compensation structures have an incentive to take excessive risks even when the bank's shareholders would prefer prudent investment. Traders' incentives are shown to be unaffected by capital regulations, with the associated financial burden falling upon the taxpayer through deposit insurance or government bail-outs. Selected case studies further indicate that the phenomenon of “gambling traders” was widespread during the credit crunch, when high bonuses tempted bank employees to invest in risky subprime-backed securities. The intransparency of structured products and the inaccuracy of credit ratings contributed to the employees' ability to conceal the underlying risk from the banks' shareholders. The analysis points to an urgent need to reform compensation practices in the financial sector.

Amrita Dhillon and Silvia Rossetto

Many rms have more than one blockholder, but nance theory suggests that one blockholder should be sufficient to bestow all benefits on a firm that arise from concentrated ownership. This paper identifies a reason why more blockholders may arise endogenously. We consider a setting where multiple shareholders have endogenous conflicts of interest depending on the size of their stake. Such conflicts arise because larger shareholders tend to be less well diversified and would therefore prefer the firm to pursue more conservative investment policies. When the investment policy is determined by a shareholder vote, a single blockholder may be able to choose an investment policy that is far away from the dispersed shareholders' preferred policy. Anticipating this outcome reduces the price at which shares trade. A second blockholder (or more) can mitigate the conflict by shifting the voting outcome more towards the dispersed shareholders' preferred investment policy and this raises the share price. The paper derives conditions under which there are blockholder equilibria.The model shows how different ownership structures aeffect firm value and the degree of underpricing in an IPO.

Mark Harrison

The paper tells the story of a pensioner’s fight against a local mafia of Soviet party and government officials and farm managers in a remote rural locality in the 1950s. To Moscow, he was a whistleblower. To the leaders of his local community, he was a troublemaker. Working together, the local people went to extraordinary lengths to suppress his criticisms. Eventually, Moscow intervened to vindicate him. The story illustrates vividly the political and economic issues that arose when a centralized dictatorship that relied on mass mobilization over a vast territory with sometimes poor communications tried to contain local rent seeking while moving away from mass terror as its chief instrument of control.

Bhaskar Dutta and Debasis Mishra

In this paper, we analyze the cost allocation problem when a group of agents or nodes have to be connected to a source, and where the cost matrix describing the cost of connecting each pair of agents is not necessarily symmetric, thus extending the well-studied problem of minimum cost spanning tree games, where the costs are assumed to be symmetric. The focus is on rules which satisfy axioms representing incentive and fairness properties. We show that while some results are similar, there are also significant differences between the frameworks corresponding to symmetric and asymmetric cost matrices.

Kaushik Basu, Sanghamitra Das and Bhaskar Dutta

Some studies on child labor have shown that, at the level of the household, greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient may be an explicit modeling of the labor market. We develop a simple model which suggests the possibility of an inverted-U relationship between land holdings and child labor. Using a unique data set that has child labor hours it is found that, controlling for child, household and village characteristics, the turning point beyond which more land leads to a decline in child labor occurs around 4 acres of land per household.

Andrew J. Oswald

Journalists and others have asked me whether the favourable RAE 2008 results for UK economics are believable. This is a fair question. It also opens up a broader and more important one: how can we design a bibliometric method to assess the quality (rather than merely quantity) of a nation’s science? To try to address this, I examine objective data on the world’s most influential economics articles. I find that the United Kingdom performed reasonably well over the 2001-2008 period. Of 450 genuinely world-leading journal articles, the UK produced 10% of them -- and was the source of the most-cited article in each of the Journal of Econometrics, the International Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Rand Journal of Economics, and of the second most-cited article in the Journal of Health Economics. Interestingly, more than a quarter of these world-leading UK articles came from outside the best-known half-dozen departments. Thus the modern emphasis on ‘top’ departments and the idea that funding should be concentrated in a few places may be mistaken. Pluralism may help to foster iconoclastic ideas.

Amrita Dhillon and Tomas Sjostrom

This paper compares default incentives in competitive sovereign debt markets when leaders can be either democratically elected or dictators. When leaders can be replaced as in democracies, the incentives for repayment are mainly the ego rents from office and the possibility of getting a corrupt leader from replacement. In a dictatorship, on the other hand, the cost of not repaying loans is the permanent loss of reputation and the loss of future access to credit. There is a trade off between repayment and risk sharing. We show, counter-intuitively, that when ego rents are low, and value of reputation to dictators is high, then democracies repay more often and have lower risk premia than dictatorships.

Michael P. Clements and Ana Beatriz Galvão

The recent literature suggests that first announcements of real output growth in the US have predictive power for the future course of the economy. We show that this need not point to a behavioural relationship, whereby agents respond to the announcement, but may instead simply be a by-product of the data revision process. Initial estimates are subsequently subject to a number of rounds of revisions: the nature of these revisions is shown to be key in determining any apparent relationship between first announcements and the future course of the economy.

Wiji Arulampalam and Mark B. Stewart

This paper presents a convenient shortcut method for implementing the Heckman estimator of the dynamic random effects probit model and other dynamic nonlinear panel data models using standard software. It then compares the estimators proposed by Heckman, Orme and Wooldridge, based on three alternative approximations, first in an empirical model for the probability of unemployment and then in a set of simulation experiments. The results indicate that none of the three estimators dominates the other two in all cases. In most cases all three estimators display satisfactory performance, except when the number of time periods is very small.

Christopher J. Boyce and Gordon D. A. Brown

Many studies have argued that relative income predicts individual well-being. More recently, it has been suggested that the relative rank of an individual’s income, rather than how that income compares to a mean or reference income, is important. Here the relative rank hypothesis is examined along with the additional hypothesis that individuals compare their incomes predominantly with those of slightly higher earners. A study of over 12,000 British adults using the British Household Panel Survey (a) confirms the importance of rank and (b) finds evidence that individuals compare upwards and to those most similar. This paper appears to be the first to show in fixed effect well-being equations that the influence of rank is more important than the influence of relative pay.

Andrew Oswald, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi

Little is known by economists about how emotions affect productivity. To make persuasive progress, some way has to be found to assign people exogenously to different feelings. We design a randomized trial. In it, some subjects have their happiness levels increased, while others in a control group do not. We show that a rise in happiness leads to greater productivity in a paid piece-rate task. The effect is large; it can be replicated; it is not a reciprocity effect; and it is found equally among males and females. We discuss the implications for economics.

Scott Baker, Pak Yee Lee and Claudio Mezzetti

This paper models the disclosure of knowledge via licensing to outsiders or fringe …rms as a threat, useful in ensuring firms keep their commitments. We show that firms holding intellectual property are better able to enforce agreements than firms that don’t. In markets requiring innovation to make a product, IP disclosure presents a more powerful threat than entry by the punishing firm alone. Occasionally, a punishing firm won’t be able to translate its intellectual property into a full-blown product, making it impossible for it to enter the cheating firm’s market and punish. Even if it can’t make a product itself, the punishing firm can always credibly threaten to license the intellectual property it has on hand to someone else. With this intellectual property as a springboard, chances are at least one fringe firm will be able to do the translation, make the product and enter the cheating firm’s market. In short, the potential for licensing increases the likelihood of punishment for uncooperative behavior. In the model, firms contract explicitly to exchange knowledge and tacitly to coordinate the introduction of innovations to the marketplace. We find conditions under which firms can self-enforce both agreements. The enforcement conditions are weaker when (1) firms possess knowledge and (2) knowledge is easily transferable to other firms. The disclosure threat has implications for antitrust law generally, which are considered.

Rajdeep K Dash, Andrea Giovannucci, Nicholas R. Jennings, Claudio Mezzetti, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn Juan A. Rodriguez-Aguilar

Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms are often used to allocate tasks to selfish and rational agents. VCG mechanisms are incentive-compatible, direct mechanisms that are efficient (i.e. maximise social utility) and individually rational (i.e. agents prefer to join rather than opt out). However, an important assumption of these mechanisms is that the agents will always successfully complete their allocated tasks. Clearly, this assumption is unrealistic in many real-world applications where agents can, and often do, fail in their endeavours. Moreover, whether an agent is deemed to have failed may be perceived differently by different agents. Such subjective perceptions about an agent’s probability of succeeding at a given task are often captured and reasoned about using the notion of trust. Given this background, in this paper, we investigate the design of novel mechanisms that take into account the trust between agents when allocating tasks. Specifically, we develop a new class of mechanisms, called trust-based mechanisms, that can take into account multiple subjective measures of the probability of an agent succeeding at a given task and produce allocations that maximise social utility, whilst ensuring that no agent obtains a negative utility. We then show that such mechanisms pose a challenging new combinatorial optimisation problem (that is NP-complete), devise a novel representation for solving the problem, and develop an effective integer programming solution (that can solve instances with about 2×105
possible allocations in 40 seconds).

Mark Harrison and Nikolaus Wolf

Wars are increasingly frequent, and the trend has been steadily upward since 1870. The main tradition of Western political and philosophical thought suggests that extensive economic globalization and democratization over this period should have reduced appetites for war far below their current level. This view is clearly incomplete: at best, confounding factors are at work. Here, we explore the capacity to wage war. Most fundamentally, the growing number of sovereign states has been closely associated with the spread of democracy and increasing commercial openness, as well as the number of bilateral conflicts. Trade and democracy are traditionally thought of as goods, both in themselves, and because they reduce the willingness to go to war, conditional on the national capacity to do so. But the same factors may also have been increasing the capacity for war, and so its frequency.We need better understanding of how to promote these goods without incurring adverse side-effects on world peace

Emanuel Kohlscheen and Stephen O’Connell

We derive closed-form solutions for the Rubinstein alternating offers game for cases where the two players have (possibly asymmetric) utility functions that belong to the HARA class and discount the future at a constant rate. We show that risk aversion may increase a bargainers payoff. This result - which contradicts Roth’s 1985 theorem tying greater risk neutrality to a smaller payoff - does not rely on imperfect information or departures from expected utility maximization.

David Gill and Daniel Sgroi

A principal who knows her type can face public testing to help attract endorsements from agents. Tests are pass/fail and have an innate toughness (bias) corresponding to a trade-off between the higher probability of passing a softer test and the greater impact on agents’ beliefs from passing a tougher test. Conditional on the test result, the principal also selects the price of endorsement. The principal always wants to be tested, and chooses the toughest or softest test available depending upon the precision of the agents’ and tests’ information. Applications abound in industrial organization, political economy and labor economics

Milan Nedeljkovic

This paper studies testing for the presence of smooth transition nonlinearity in adjustment parameters of the vector error correction model. We specify the generalized model with multiple cointegrating vectors and different transition functions across equations. Given that the nonlinear model is highly complex, this paper proposes an optimal LM test based only on estimation of the linear model. The null asymptotic distribution is derived using empirical process theory and since the transition parameters of the model cannot be identified under the null hypothesis bootstrap procedures are used to approximate the limit. Monte Carlo simulations indicate a good performance of the test.

Paulo Santos Monteiro

I study the impact of idiosyncratic risk on savings and employment in a small open economy populated by two-member families. Families incur a fixed cost of participation when both members are employed. Because of market incompleteness and information asymmetries, this cost coupled with labor market frictions can generate multiple equilibria. In particular, there might be one equilibrium with high employment and low saving and another one with low employment and high saving. The model predicts that aggregate saving and employment rates are negatively correlated across countries. I present empirical evidence that supports the general equilibrium prediction of the model.

Paulo Santos Monteiro

Full consumption insurance implies that consumers are able to perfectly share risk by equalizing state by state their inter-temporal marginal rates of substitution in the presence of idiosyncratic endowment shocks. In this paper I test the implications of full consumption insurance using band spectrum regression methods. I argue that moving to the frequency domain provides a possible solution to many difficulties tied to tests of perfect risk sharing. In particular, it provides a unifying framework to test consumption smoothing, both over time and across states of nature. Full consumption insurance is soundly rejected at business cycle frequencies.

Enrique Schroth and Dezsö Szalay

This paper studies the impact of financing constraints on the equilibrium of a patent race. We develop a model where firms finance their R&D expenditures with an investor who cannot verify their effort. We solve for the optimal financial contract of any firm along its best-response function. In equilibrium, any firm in the race is more likely to win the more cash and assets it holds prior to the race, and the less cash and assets its rivals hold prior to the race. We use NBER evidence from pharmaceutical patents awarded between 1975 and 1999 in the US, patent citations, and COMPUSTAT to measure the effect of all the racing firms’ cash holdings on the equilibrium winning probabilities. The empirical findings support our theoretical predictions.

Vítor Castro

The Taylor rule establishes a simple linear relation between the interest rate, inflation and output gap. However, this relation may not be so simple. To get a deeper understanding of central banks’ behaviour, this paper asks whether central banks are indeed following a linear Taylor rule or, instead, a nonlinear rule. At the same time, it also analyses whether that rule can be augmented with a financial conditions index containing information from some asset prices and financial variables. A forwardlooking monetary policy reaction function is employed in the estimation of the linear and nonlinear models. A smooth transition model is used to estimate the nonlinear rule. The results indicate that the European Central Bank and the Bank of England tend to follow a nonlinear Taylor rule, but not the Federal Reserve of the United States. In particular, those two central banks tend to react to inflation only when inflation is above or outside their targets. Moreover, our evidence suggests that the European Central Bank is targeting financial conditions, contrary to the other two central banks. This lack of attention to the financial conditions might have made the United States and the United Kingdom more vulnerable to the recent credit crunch than the Eurozone.

Nikolaus Wolf

When did Germany become economically integrated? Within the framework of a gravity model, based on a new data set of about 40,000 observations on trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 – 1933, I explore the geography of trade costs across Central Europe. There are three key results. First, the German Empire before 1914 was a poorly integrated economy, both relative to integration across the borders of the German state and in absolute terms. Second, this internal fragmentation resulted from cultural heterogeneity, from administrative borders within Germany, and from geographical barriers that divided Germany along natural trade routes into eastern and western parts. Third, internal integration improved, while external integration worsened after World War I and again with the Great Depression, in part because of border changes along the lines of ethno-linguistic heterogeneity. By the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933, Germany was reasonably well integrated.

Michael P Clements

A comparison of the point forecasts and the central tendencies of probability distributions of in‡ation and output growth of the SPF indicates that the point forecasts are sometimes optimistic relative to the probability distributions. We consider and evaluate a number of possible explanations for this finding, including the degree of uncertainty concerning the future, computational costs, delayed updating, and asymmetric loss. We also consider the relative accuracy of the two sets of forecasts

Michael P. Clements

We consider the possibility that respondents to the Survey of Professional Forecasters round their probability forecasts of the event that real output will decline in the future. We make various assumptions about how forecasters round their forecasts, including that individuals have constant patterns of responses across forecasts. Our primary interests are the impact of rounding on assessments of the internal consistency of the probability forecasts of a decline in real output and the histograms for annual real output growth, and on the relationship between the probability forecasts and the point forecasts of quarterly output growth.

Andreas Park and Daniel Sgroi

We undertook the first market trading experiments that allowed heterogeneously informed subjects to trade in endogenous time, collecting over 2000 observed trades. Subjects’ decisions were generally in line with the predictions of exogenous-time financial herding theory when that theory is adjusted to allow rational informational herding and contrarianism. While herding and contrarianism did not arise as frequently as predicted by theory, such behavior occurs in a significantly more pronounced manner than in comparable studies with exogenous timing. Types with extreme information traded earliest. Of those with more moderate information, those with signals conducive to contrarianism traded earlier than those with information conducive to herding.

Nicholas Crafts

When Economic Development was published in 1958, Ireland was a growth failure but thirty years later it became the Celtic Tiger. This paper places this remarkable development in the context of long-run economic growth in Western Europe and establishes the distinctive features of Irish experience and policy. This enables an assessment of the diagnosis and policy proposals that Whitaker provided fifty years ago. The central roles in the Celtic Tiger of foreign direct investment, ICT production, and an elastic labour supply are highlighted while the importance of globalization and the abandonment of misguided autarchic policies is made clear.

Francesca Busetto, Giulio Codognato and Sayantan Ghosal

In this paper, we study three prototypical models of noncooperative oligopoly in markets with a continuum of traders: the model of Cournot-Walras equilibrium of Codognato and Gabszewicz (1991), the model of Cournot-Nash equilibrium of Lloyd S. Shapley, and the model of Cournot-Walras equilibrium of Busetto et al. (2008). We argue that these models are all distinct and only the Shapley's model with a continuum of traders and atoms gives an endogenous explanation of the perfectly and imperfectly competitive behavior of agents in a one-stage setting. For this model, we prove a theorem of existence of a Cournot-Nash equilibrium.

Jesús Otero, Jeremy Smith and Monica Giulietti

This paper generalises the monthly seasonal unit root tests of Franses (1991) for a heterogeneous panel following the work of fiIm, Pesaran, and Shin (2003), which we refer to as the F-IPS tests. The paper presents the mean and variance necessary to yield a standard normal distribution for the tests, for different number of time observations, T, and lag lengths. However, these tests are only applicable in the absence of cross-sectional dependence. Two alternative methods for modifying these F-IPS tests in the presence of cross-sectional dependency are presented: the first is the cross-sectionally augmented test, denoted CF-IPS, following Pesaran (2007), the other is a bootstap method, denoted BF-IPS. In general, the BF-IPS tests have greater power than the CF-IPS tests, although for large T and high degree of cross-sectional dependency the CF-IPS test dominates the BF-IPS test.

Frederic Payot and Dezsö Szalay

We analyze a two-stage patent race. In the first phase firms seek to develop a research tool, an innovation that has no commercial value but is necessary to enter the second phase of the race. The firm that completes the second phase of the race first obtains a patent on the final innnovation and enjoys its profits. We ask whether patent protection for the innovator of the research tool is beneficial from the ex ante point of view. We show that there is a range of values of the final innovation such that firms prefer to have no Intellectual Property Rights for research tools.

Dezsö Szalay

I reconsider Stiglitz’s (1977) problem of monopolistic insurance with a continuum of types. Using a suitable transformation of control variables I obtain an analytical characterization of the optimal insurance policies. Closed form solutions and comparative statics results for special cases are provided.

Emanuel Kohlscheen

A demand based theory of sub-national debt bailouts is presented. It is shown that revenue sharing (RS) arrangements alter the demand for bailouts among politicians with regional constituencies as a bailout usually implies a shift of taxation to the federal tier. Automatic RS may lead to the formation of pro-bailout coalitions formed by indebted states and states that are net recipients of the RS arrangement. Also, RS can act as a commitment device for compensating payments among state representatives, making a bailout politically rational. The model shows that the state debt bailouts approved by the Brazilian Senate prior to the enactment of the Fiscal Responsibility Act were fully consistent with politicians that maximize the proceeds accruing to their constituencies.

Dennis Novy

Barriers to international trade are known to be large but due to data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem I derive a micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs that indirectly infers trade frictions from observable trade data. I show that this trade cost measure is consistent with a broad range of leading trade theories including Ricardian and heterogeneous firms models. In an application I show that U.S. trade costs with major trading partners declined on average by about 40 percent between 1970 and 2000, with Mexico and Canada experiencing the biggest reductions.

Vítor Castro

One widespread idea in the business cycles literature is that the older is an expansion or contraction, the more likely it is to end. This paper tries to provide further empirical support for this idea of positive duration dependence and, at the same time, control for the effects of other factors like leading indicators, the duration of the previous phase, investment, price of oil and external influences on the duration of expansions and contractions. This study employs for the first time a discrete-time duration model to analyse the impact of those variables on the likelihood of an expansion and contraction ending for a group of industrial countries over the last fifty years. The evidence provided in this paper suggests that the duration of expansions and contractions is not only dependent on their actual age: the duration of expansions is also positively dependent on the behaviour of the variables in the OECD composite leading indicator and on private investment, and negatively affected by the price of oil and by the occurrence of a peak in the US business cycle; the duration of a contraction is negatively affected by its actual age and by the duration of the previous expansion.

Brian Mitchell, David Chambers and Nicholas Crafts

This paper provides new estimates of the return on capital employed (ROCE) for major British railway companies. It shows that ROCE was generally below the cost of capital after the mid-1870s and fell till the turn of the century. Addressing cost inefficiency issues could have restored ROCE to an adequate level in the late 1890s but not in 1910. Declines in ROCE hit share prices and investors made little or no money in real terms after 1897. Optimal portfolio analysis shows that, whilst railway securities were attractive to investors before this date, they would have been justified in rushing to the exits thereafter.

Charles Blackorby and Dezsö Szalay

We study the regulation of a firm with unknown demand and cost information. In contrast to previous studies, we assume demand is influenced by a quality choice, and the firm has private information about its quality capacity in addition to its cost. Under natural conditions, asymmetric information about the quality capacity is irrelevant. The optimal pricing is weakly above marginal costs for all types and no type is excluded.

Claudio Mezzetti

Many empirical studies of auctions show that prices of identical goods sold sequentially follow a declining path. Declining prices have been viewed as an anomaly, because the theoretical models of auctions predict that the price sequence should either be a martingale (with independent signals and no informational externalities), or a submartingale (with affiliated signals). This paper shows that declining prices, the afternoon effect, arise naturally when bidders are averse to price risk. A bidder is averse to price risk if he prefers to win an object at a certain price, rather than at a random price with the same expected value. When bidders have independent signals and there are no informational externalities, only the effect of aversion to price risk is present and the price sequence is a supermartingale. When there are informational externalities, even with independent signals, there is a countervailing, informational effect, which pushes prices to raise along the path of a sequential auction. This may help explaining the more complex price paths we observe in some auctions.

Ashwin Moheeput

This paper reviews and categorises the literature on micro-systemic risks and on optimal policies designed to mitigate these risks. Micro-systemic risks are risks to the financial system that occur when the interaction of a bank with other banks or with financial markets, can propagate an initially localised shock to the whole financial system and can prevent the latter from fulfilling its intermediation and distributional roles. The severe episodes of financial crises that have plagued economies - developed and emerging markets alike - have made more compelling, the need for policymakers such as central banks, to develop prudential tools as part of crisis prevention and crisis management policies. We review the success of these policies under different theoretical paradigms. The paper ends with a brief synopsis of financial accelerator models which stress on how imperfections in financial markets may magnify the swings and intensity of business cycles and have a more entrenched impact on the macroeconomy.

Ashwin Moheeput

Currency boards have often been at the heart of monetary reforms proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF): they have been instrumental either as a short term crisis management strategy that successfully restores financial order for many countries seeking stabilization in the aftermath of prolonged economic crisis or as a way of importing monetary credibility as part of a medium / long term strategy for conducting monetary policy. As backbone of a credible exchange-rate based stabilisation programme, they have also been the linchpin of several heterodox or orthodox programmes aimed at mitigating hyperinflation. This paper attempts to synthetize our thinking about currency boards by reviewing their strengths and weaknesses and endeavours to seek real world examples to rationalise their applicability as opposed to alternative exchange rate regimes. Architects of international financial stability at the IMF or at central banks often ponder about the prerequisites for such programme to work well. These are also reviewed using
appropriate economic theory where necessary. Finally, this paper sheds light on the best exchange rate regime that may be adopted in the intermediate term by those countries wishing to adopt a currency board, not as a quick fix solution to end an economic chaos but rather, as integral part of a long term monetary strategy.

Andreas Park and Daniel Sgroi

While herding has long been suspected to play a role in financial market booms and busts, theoretical analyses have struggled to identify conclusive causes for the effect. Recent theoretical work shows that informational herding is possible in a market with efficient asset prices if information is bi-polar, and contrarianism is possible with single-polar information. We present an experimental test for the validity of this theory, contrasting with all existing experiments where rational herding was theoretically impossible and subsequently not observed. Overall we observe that subjects generally behave according to theoretical predictions, yet the fit is lower for types who have the theoretical potential to herd. While herding is often not observed when predicted by theory, herding (sometimes irrational) does occur. Irrational contrarianism in particular leads observed prices to substantially differ from the efficient benchmark. Alternative models of behavior, such as risk aversion, loss aversion or error correction, either perform quite poorly or add little to our understanding.

Ashwin Moheeput

We consider banking panic transmission in a two-bank setting, in which the main propagator of a shock across banks is the informational spillover channel. Banks are perceived to be positively connected to some unobserved acroeconomic fundamental. Depositors in each bank are assumed to noisily observe their bank’s idiosyncratic fundamental. The game takes a dynamic bayesian setting with depositors of one bank, making their decision to withdraw after observing the event in the other bank. We show that, if this public event is used for bayesian inference about the state of the common macroeconomic fundamental, then, in the equilibrium profile of the game, contagion and correlation both occur with positive probability, with contagion modeled as a state-contingent change in the cross-bank correlation. Such endogenous characterisation of probabilistic assessments of contagion and correlation, has the appealing feature that it enables us to distill between these two concepts as equilibrium phenomena and to assess their relative importance in a given banking panic transmission setting. We show that contagion is characterised by public informational dominance in depositors’decision set.

Stephen Broadberry, Sayantan Ghosal and Eugenio Proto

We provide a model of the links between commercialisation and technological progress, which is consistent with the historical evidence and places market relations at the heart of the industrial revolution. First, commercialisation
raised wages as a growing reliance on impersonal labour market transactions in place of customary relations with a high degree of monitoring led to the adoption of efficiency wages. Second, commercialisation lowered interest rates as a growing reliance on impersonal capital market transactions in place of active investor involvement in investment projects led investors to allow borrowers to keep a larger share of the profits. Third, the resulting rise in the wage/cost of capital ratio led to the adoption of a more capital-intensive technology. Fourth, this led to a faster rate of technological progress through greater learning by doing on the capital intensive production technology. Fifth, the rate of technological progress was raised further by the patent system, which allowed the commercialisation of property rights in innovations embodied in machinery.

Asako Ohinata

The introduction of the 1999 Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) in the UK encouraged low income families with children to enter the labor market. The tax credit, however, may have had the unintended side effect of increasing the childbearing of these households. While many studies have looked at the importance of WFTC on the female labor supply, only few have estimated the impact it had on fertility decisions of British families. This paper employs the 1995 to 2003 British Household Panel Survey and identifies the policy impact of WFTC by observing the change in the
probability of birth as well as the timing of birth using the difference in differences estimator. The main findings of this paper suggest that single women responded to the policy introduction by reducing the probability of birth and prolonging the birth intervals across all birth parity. For women with partners, on the other hand, the estimates indicate that financial incentives did not encourage them to enter motherhood but it rather induced women to have their second birth quicker

Jan Frait and Luboš Komárek

The paper aims to enrich the debate on the overvaluation/undervaluation of China yuan Renminbi (CNY) against USD and JPY by applying the concept of the Debt-Adjusted Real Exchange Rate (DARER). This approach is offering to monetary policy makers another indicator for more responsive management of this important economic variable.
The general motivation for constructing DARER is the fact that long-term current account surplus (deficits) is linked with capital outflows (inflows), which often leads to real undervaluation (overvaluation) of domestic currency. DARER can signal to the authorities that the real exchange rate is becoming unsustainable in the medium term. Based on the DARER approach we also introduce three indicators of exchange rate misalignment

Jan Babecký, Luboš Komárek and Zlatuše Komárková

The paper considers the empirical dimension of financial integration among stock markets in four new European Union member states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in comparison with the euro area. The main objective is to test for the existence and determine the degree of the four states’ financial integration relative to the euro currency union. The analysis is performed at the country level (using national stock exchange indices) and at the sectoral level (considering banking, chemical, electricity and telecommunication indices). Our empirical evaluation consists of (1) an analysis of alignment (by means of standard and rolling correlation analysis) to outline the overall pattern of integration; (2) the application of the concept of beta convergence (through the use of time series, panel and state-space techniques) to identify the speed of integration; and (3) the application of so-called sigma convergence to measure the degree of integration. We find evidence of stock market integration on both the national and sectoral levels between the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the euro area.

Stephen Broadberry and Carsten Burhop

This paper offers a critical appraisal of the claim of Ritschl (2008) to have found a “possible resolution” to what he calls the “Anglo-German industrial productivity puzzle”.

Ben Lockwood and Giuseppe Migali

The introduction of the Single Market resulted in a switch from destination to origin-based taxation of cross-border transactions by individuals. The theory of commodity tax competition predicts that this change should give rise to
excise tax competition and thus intensify strategic interaction in the setting of excise taxes. In this paper, we provide an empirical test of this prediction using a panel data set of 12 EU countries over the period 1987-2004. We find that for all excise duties that we consider (still and sparkling wine, beer, ethyl alcohol, and cigarettes), strategic interaction between countries significantly increased after 1993, consistently with the theoretical prediction. Indeed, for all these products except for cigarettes, there is no evidence of strategic interaction prior to 1993, so our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the single market caused tax competition. For beer and ethyl alcohol, there is evidence that the minimum taxes, also introduced in 1993, have intensified strategic interaction.

Mustafa Caglayan and Rebeca Muñoz Torres

This paper, considering revenue and cost exposure channels, investigates the effects of exchange rate behaviour on fixed capital investment in Mexican manufacturing sector over 1994-2002. We find that i) currency depreciation has a positive (negative) effect on fixed investment through the export (import) channel; ii) exchange rate volatility impacts mostly export oriented sectors; iii) the sensitivity of investment to exchange rate movements is stronger in non-durable goods sectors and industries with low mark-up ratios.

Claudio Mezzetti and Ilia Tsetlin

We study auctions of a single asset among symmetric bidders with affiliated values. We show that the second-price auction minimizes revenue among all efficient auction mechanisms in which only the winner pays, and the price only depends on the losers’bids. In particular, we show that the k-th price auction generates higher revenue than the second-price auction, for all k > 2. If rationing is allowed, with shares of the asset rationed among the t highest bidders, then the (t + 1)-st price auction yields the lowest revenue among all auctions with rationing in which only the winners pay and the unit price only depends on the losers’ bids. Finally, we compute bidding functions and revenue of the k-th price auction, with and without rationing, for an illustrative example much used in the experimental literature to study …first-price, second-price and English auctions.

Sayantan Ghosal and Eugenio Proto

This paper studies the conditions under which intra-elite conflict leads to a democracy. There are two risk averse elites competing for the appropriation of a unit of social surplus, with an ex-ante uncertainty about their future relative bargaining power, and a large non-elite class unable to act collectively. We characterize a democracy as consistng of both franchise extension to, and lowering the cost of collective political activity for, individuals in the non-elite. In the absence of democracy, the stronger elite is always able to appropriate the entire surplus. We show that in a democracy, the newly enfranchised non-elite organize and always prefer to form a coalition with weaker elite against the stronger resulting in a more balanced surplus allocation between the two elites. Accordingly, the elites choose to democratize if they are sufficiently risk averse. Our formal analysis can account for stylized facts that emerge from a comparative analysis of Indian and Western European democracies.

Gianluca Grimalda, Anirban Kar and Eugenio Proto

We study the impact on payo¤ distribution of varying the probability (opportunity) that a player has of becoming the proposer in an ultimatum game (UG). Subjects’assignment to roles within the UG was randomised before the interactions. Subjects played 20 rounds anonymously and with random re-matching at each round. We compare the outcomes of four di¤erent settings that di¤ered according to the distribution of opportunities between the pair of players in each round, and across the whole 20 rounds. The results clearly point to the existence of a discontinuity in the origin of the opportunity spectrum. Allowing a player a 1% probability of becoming the proposer brings about signicantly lower o¤ers and higher acceptance rates with respect to the benchmark case where a player has no such a chance. As such probability is raised to 20% and 50%, this same trend continues, but the effects are generally no longer signicant with respect to the 1% setting. In one case the monotonic pattern is violated. We conclude that subjects in our experiment appear to be motivated mostly by the purely symbolic aspect of opportunity rather than by the actual fairness in the allocation of opportunities.

Peter J. Hammond

Consider an \isolation paradox" game with many identical players. By definition, conforming to a rule which maximizes average utility is individually a strictly dominated strategy. Suppose, however, that some players think \quasi-magically" in accordance with evidential (but not causal) decision theory. That is, they act as if others' disposition to conform, or not, is aeffected by their own behavior, even though they do not actually believe there is a causal link. Standard game theory excludes this. Yet such \rational folly" can sustain \rule utilitarian" cooperative behavior. Comparisons are made with Newcomb's problem, and with related attempts to resolve prisoner's dilemma.

Andrew J Oswald and Hilda Ralsmark

This short paper collects and studies the CVs of 112 assistant professors in the top-ten American departments of economics. The paper treats these as a glimpse of the future. We find evidence of a strong brain drain. We find also a predominance of empirical work.

Paul W. Dobson and Michael Waterson

Retail chains essentially practice one of two broad strategies in setting prices across their stores. The more straightforward is to set a chain- or country- wide price. Alternatively, managers of retail chains may customize prices to the store level according to local demand and competitive conditions. For example, a chain may price lower in a location with lower demand and/or more competition. However, despite having the ability to customize prices to local market conditions, some choose instead to commit to uniform pricing with a “one price policy” across their entire store network. As an illustration, we focus on UK supermarket chains. Is there an advantage to be gained from deliberately choosing not to price discriminate across locations? We show generally and illustrate through means of a specific model that there exists a strategic incentive to soften competition in competitive markets by committing not to customize prices at the store level and instead adopt uniform pricing across the store network, and to raise overall profits thereby. Furthermore, we characterize quite precisely the circumstances under which uniform pricing is, and is not, profitable and illustrate that under a range of circumstances uniform pricing may be the preferable strategy.

Andrew J Oswald

I suggest the idea of a reporting function, r(.), from reality to feelings. The ‘happiness’ literature claims we have demonstrated diminishing marginal utility of income. I show not, and that knowing r(.)’s curvature is crucial. A quasiexperiment on heights is studied.

Priscillia Hunt

In this paper, the immigrant-native wage differential is explained through quantile regression estimations. Using repeated cross-sections of the British Labour Force Survey from 1993-2005, we analyse the returns to covariates across the conditional earnings distribution. We estimate a pooled model with an immigrant dummy and separate models for immigrants and natives of the UK. Our results show that the positive wage gap in favour of immigrants is attributed to those at higher quantiles. Returns to education and experience vary wider for natives than for immigrants. We decompose the wage gap in the Blinder-Oaxaca framework and apply quantile regression techniques to see if immigrants simply have more viable labour market characteristics than natives or if there is a preference for immigrant workers (reverse discrimination). Our findings suggest immigrants should actually be earning more and there is sufficient evidence of discrimination. This finding is, however, not symmetric across the conditional wage distribution and immigrants at the bottom face more discrimination than those at the top.

Francesca Busetto, Giulio Codognato, and Sayantan Ghosal

In this paper, we investigate the problem of the strategic foundation of the Cournot-Walras equilibrium approach. To this end, we respecify µa la Cournot-Walras the mixed version of a model of simultaneous, noncooperative exchange, originally proposed by Lloyd S. Shapley. We show, through an example, that the set of the Cournot-Walras equilibrium allocations of this respecification does not coincide with the set of the Cournot-Nash equilibrium allocations of the mixed version of the original Shapley's model. As the nonequivalence, in a one-stage setting, can be explained by the intrinsic two-stage nature of the Cournot-Walras equilibrium concept, we are led to consider a further reformulation of the Shapley's model as a two-stage game, where the atoms move in the first stage and the atomless sector moves in the second stage. Our main result shows that the set of the Cournot-Walras equilibrium allocations coincides with a specific set of subgame perfect equilibrium allocations of this two-stage game, which we call the set of the Pseudo-Markov perfect equilibrium allocations.

Shurojit Chatterji and Sayantan Ghosal

We study banking with ex ante moral hazard. Resolving the misalignment of the incentives between banks and depositors requires early liquidation with positive probability: efficient risk-sharing between depositors is no longer implementable. In a closed region with a single bank, we show that (i) with costless and perfect monitoring, contracts with bank runs off the equilibrium path of play improve on contracts with transfers, (ii) when the bank’s actions are non-contractible, equilibrium bank runs driven by incentives are linked to liquidity provision by banks. With multiple regions linked via an interbank market, with local moral hazard, we show that implementing second-best allocations requires both ex-ante trade in inter-bank markets and contagion after realization of liquidity shocks.

Peter Hammond

Von Neumann (1928) not only introduced a fairly general version of the extensive form game concept. He also hypothesized that only the normal form was relevant to rational play. Yet even in Battle of the Sexes, this hypothesis seems contradicted by players' actual behaviour in experiments. Here a rened Nash equilibrium is proposed for games where one player moves first, and the only other player moves second without knowing the first move. The refinement relies on a tacit understanding of the only credible and straightforward perfect Bayesian equilibrium in a corresponding game allowing a predictable direct form of cheap talk.

Patricio Dalton and Sayantan Ghosal

We study decision problems where (a) preference parameters are defined to include psychological/moral considerations and (b) there is a feedback effect from chosen actions to preference parameters. In a standard decision problem the chosen action is required to be optimal when the feedback effect from actions to preference parameters is fully taken into account. In a behavioural decision problem the chosen action is optimal taking preference parameters as given although chosen actions and preference parameters are required to be mutually consistent. Our framework unifies seemingly disconnected papers in the literature. We characterize the conditions under which behavioural and standard decisions problems are indistinguishable: in smooth settings, the two decision problems are generically distinguishable. We show that in general, revealed preferences cannot be used for making welfare judgements and we characterize the conditions under which they can inform welfare analysis. We provide an existence result for the case of incomplete preferences. We suggest novel implications for policy and welfare analysis.

E. Kohlscheen and S. A. O’Connell

We present a unified model of sovereign debt, trade credit and international reserves. Our model shows that access to short-term trade credit and gross international reserves critically affect the outcome of sovereign debt renegotiations. Whereas competitive banks do optimally lend for the accumulation of borrowed reserves that strengthen the bargaining position of borrowers, they also have incentives to restrict the supply of short-term trade credit during renegotiations. We first show that they effectively do so and then derive propositions that: I) establish the size of sovereign debt haircuts as a function of economic fundamentals and preferences; II) predict that defaults occur during recessions rather than booms, contrary to reputation based models; III) provide a rationale for holding costly borrowed reserves and, IV) show that the stock of borrowed international reserves tends to increase when global interest rates are low

Claudio Mezzetti and Ilia Tsetlin

Theoretical models of multi-unit, uniform-price auctions assume that the price is given by the highest losing bid. In practice, however, the price is usually given by the lowest winning bid. We derive the equilibrium bidding function of the lowest-winning-bid auction when there are k objects for sale and n bidders with unit demand, and prove that it converges to the bidding function of the highest-losing-bid auction if and only if the number of losers n - k gets large. When the number of losers grows large, the bidding functions converge at a linear rate and the prices in the two auctions converge in probability to the expected value of an object to the marginal winner.

Serguei Kaniovski and Dennis Leech

We propose an empirically informed measure of the voting power that relaxes the assumptions of equally probable and independent votes. The behavioral power index measures the voter’s ability to swing a decision based on the probability distributions of the others’ behavior. We apply it to the Supreme Court of the United States using roll-call data to estimate voting probability distributions, which lead us to refute the assumption of equally probable and independent votes, and estimate the equivalent number of independent Justices for the Warren, Burger and Rehnquist benches, which turns out to be very low.

Andrew J Oswald

In this interview, which was recorded in 2007 to celebrate the receipt of an honorary doctorate from Warwick University, Avinash Dixit of Princeton University discusses why he is an economist and how he approaches economic research. He argues, among other things, for doing what you enjoy rather than what you feel you ought to do.

Andrei Markevich

In hierarchies, agents’ hidden actions increase principals' transactions costs and give rise to a demand for monitoring and enforcement. The fact that the latter are costly raises questions about their scope, organisation, and type. How much control is enough? The paper uses historical records to examine Stalin’s answers to this question. We find that Stalin's behaviour was consistent with his aiming to maximise the efficiency of the Soviet system of control subject to the loyalty of his inspectors and the risk of a “chaos of orders” arising from parallel centres of power.

David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J Oswald

In surveys of well-being, countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands emerge as particularly happy while nations like Germany and Italy report lower levels of happiness. But are these kinds of findings credible? This paper provides some evidence that the answer is yes. Using data on 16 countries, it shows that happier nations report systematically lower levels of hypertension. As well as potentially validating the differences in measured happiness across nations, this suggests that blood-pressure readings might be valuable as part of a national well-being index. A new ranking of European nations’ GHQ N6 mental-health scores is also given.

Andrew J Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be used in tort cases to calculate compensatory damages for emotional harm and pain-and-suffering. We examine alternative well-being variables, discuss adaptation, consider the possibility that bereavement affects someone’s marginal utility of income, and suggest a procedure for correcting for the endogeneity of income. Although the paper’s contribution is methodological, and further research is needed, some illustrative compensation amounts are discussed.

David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J Oswald

We present evidence that psychological well-being is U-shaped through life. A difficulty with research on this issue is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). First, using data on 500,000 randomly sampled Americans and West Europeans, the paper designs a test that can control for cohort effects. Holding other factors constant, we show that a typical individual’s happiness reaches its minimum -- on both sides of the Atlantic and for both males and females -- in middle age. Second, evidence is provided for the existence of a similar U-shape through the life-course in East European, Latin American and Asian nations. Third, U-shape in age is found in separate well-being regression equations in 72 developed and developing nations. Fourth, using measures that are closer to psychiatric scores, we document a comparable well-being curve across the life cycle in two other data sets: (i) in GHQ-N6 mental health levels among a sample of 16,000 Europeans, and (ii) in reported depression and anxiety levels among 1 million U.K. citizens. Fifth, we discuss some apparent exceptions, particularly in developing nations, to the U-shape. Sixth, we note that American male birth-cohorts seem to have become progressively less content with their lives. Our paper’s results are based on regression equations in which other influences, such as demographic variables and income, are held constant.

Showkat Ali, Giles Carden, Benjamin Culling, Rosalind Hunter, Andrew J Oswald, Nicola Owen, Hilda Ralsmark, Natalie Snodgrass

There are signs – one is world university league tables – that people increasingly think globally when choosing the university in which they wish to work and study. This paper is an exploration of data on the international brain drain. We study highly-cited physicists, highly-cited bio-scientists, and assistant professors of economics. First, we demonstrate that talented researchers are being systematically funnelled into a small number of countries. Among young economists in the top American universities, for example, 75% did their undergraduate degree outside the United States. Second, the extent of the elite brain drain is considerable. Among the world’s top physicists, nearly half no longer work in the country in which they were born. Third, the USA and Switzerland are per capita the largest net-importers of elite scientists. Fourth, we estimate the migration ‘funnelling coefficient’ at approximately 0.2 (meaning that 20% of top researchers tend to leave their country at each professional stage). Fifth, and against our prior expectations, the productivity of top scientists, as measured by the Hirsch h-index, is similar between the elite movers and stayers. Thus it is apparently not true that it is disproportionately the very best people who emigrate. Sixth, there is extreme clustering of ISI Highly Cited Researchers into particular fields in different universities. Seventh, we debate the questions: are the brain drain and this kind of funnelling good or bad for the world, and how should universities and
governments respond?

Dennis Leech and Haris Aziz

The Double Majority rule in the Treaty is claimed to be simpler, more transparent and more democratic than the existing rule. We examine these questions against the democratic ideal that the votes of all citizens in whatever member country should be of equal value using voting power analysis considering possible future enlargements involving candidate countries and then to a number of hypothetical future enlargements. We find the Double Majority rule to fails to measure up to the democratic ideal in all cases. We find the Jagiellonian compromise to be very close to this ideal.

Haris Aziz, Mike Paterson and Dennis Leech

Weighted voting games are ubiquitous mathematical models which are used in economics, political science, neuroscience, threshold logic, reliability theory and distributed systems. They model situations where agents with variable voting weight vote in favour of or against a decision. A coalition of agents is winning if and only if the sum of weights of the coalition exceeds or equals a specified quota. We provide a mathematical and computational characterization of multiple weighted voting games which are an extension of weighted voting games1 . We analyse the structure of multiple weighted voting games and some of their combinatorial properties especially with respect to dictatorship, veto power, dummy players and Banzhaf indices. An illustrative Mathematica program to compute voting power properties of multiple weighted voting games is also provided.

Mark Harrison and Andrei Markevich

Military market places display obvious inefficiencies under most arrangements, but the Soviet defense market was unusual for its degree of monopoly, exclusive relationships, intensely scrutinized (in its formative years) by a harsh dictator. This provided the setting for quality versus quantity in the delivery of weapons to the government. The paper discusses the power of the industrial contractor over the defense buyer in terms of a hold-up problem. The typical use that the contractor made of this power was to default on quality. The defense ministry’s counter-action took the form of deploying agents through industry with the authority to verify quality and reject substandard goods. The final compromise restored quality at the expense of quantity. Being illicit, it had to be hidden from the dictator.

Tommaso Gabrieli

The reason why the social contract is so different in two otherwise comparable societies like the United States and continental Western European countries represents a challenging question. Large empirical evidence shows that the difference in the political support for redistribution appears to reflect a difference in the social perceptions regarding the determinants of individual wealth and the underlying sources of income inequality. I present a model of beliefs and redistribution which explains this evidence through multiple politico-economic equilibria. Differently from the recent literature which obtains multiple equilibria by modeling agents characterized by psychological biases, my model is based on standard assumptions. Multiple equilibria originate from multiple optimal levels of information for the society. Multiple optimal levels of information exist because increasing the informativeness of an economy produces a trade-off between a decrease in adverse selection and an increase in moral hazard. The framework allows the analysis of various comparative statics in order to answer to policy questions.

Wiji Arulampalam, Robin A. Naylor and Jeremy Smith

We exploit a rich administrative panel data-set for cohorts of Economics students at a UK university in order to identify causal effects of class absence on student performance. We exploit the panel properties of the data to control for unobserved heterogeneity across students and hence for endogeneity between class absence and academic performance of students stemming from the likely influence of effort and ability on both absence and performance. Our estimations also exploit features of the data such as the random assignment of students to classes and information on the timetable of classes, which provides potential instruments in our identification strategy. Among other results we find, from a quantile regression specification, that there is a causal effect of absence on performance for students: missing class leads to poorer performance. There is evidence that this is particularly true for better-performing students, consistent with our hypothesis that effects of absence on performance are likely to vary with factors such as student ability.

Bhaskar Dutta

A long tradition in welfare economics and moral philosophy, dating back at least to Sidgwick(1907) is the idea that all generations must be treated alike. Perhaps, the most forceful assertion of this idea comes from Ramsey (1928) who declared that any argument for preferring one generation over another must come “merely from the weakness of the imagination”. The “equal treatment of all generations” or the intergenerational equity principle has been formalised in the subsequent literature as the axiom of Anonymity, which requires that two infinite utility streams be judged indifferent to one another if one can be obtained from the other through a permutation of utilities of a finite number of generations. Since it also seems “natural” to require that any social evaluation of infinite utility streams respond positively to an increase in the utility of any generation, the Pareto Axiom is also desirable. Unfortunately, Diamond(1965) showed that there is no social welfare function satisfying these axioms along with a continuity axiom. In a more recent paper, Basu and Mitra( 2003) prove a more general result by showing that the continuity axiom is superfluous

Stephen Broadberry

This paper offers a historical appraisal of recent developments in the theory of very long run growth, focusing on three main areas: (1) linkages between wages, population and human capital (2) interactions between institutions, markets and technology and (3) sustaining the process of economic growth once it has started. Historians as well as economists have recently begun to break away from the traditional practice of using different methods to analyse the world before and after the industrial revolution. However, tensions remain between the theoretical and historical literatures, particularly over the unit of analysis (the world or particular countries) and the role of historical contingency.

Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta

Overall labour productivity in India was already only around 15 per cent of the UK level between the early 1870s and the late 1920s. Between 1929 and 1950 India fell further behind and remained at around 10 per cent of the UK level until the 1970s. India has been catching-up since the 1970s, but by the end of the twentieth century was still further behind than in the late nineteenth century. Agriculture has played an important role in India’s relative decline to 1950 and subsequent delay in catching up, since comparative India/UK labour productivity in this sector has declined continuously and agriculture still accounts for around two-thirds of employment in India. Comparative India/UK labour productivity in industry has fluctuated around a level of around 15 per cent. The only sector to exhibit trend improvement in comparative India/UK labour productivity over the long run is services, rising from around 15 per cent to around 30%. India’s recent emergence as a dynamic service-led economy appears to have long historical roots.

Andrei Markevich

A dictator issues an order, but the order is not carried out. The dictator does not know whether the order failed because the agent behaved opportunistically, or because his order contained some mistake. Imperfect information creates his dilemma: whether to punish the agent, or assist her or both. This paper models the dictator’s intervention when an order fails. The analysis links the dictator’s coercive policy with the softness of budget constraints. The model is verified against the history of Stalin’s dictatorship, using statistical evidence extracted from the formerly secret records of the Communist Party's "control commission".

Natalie Chen, Paola Conconi and Carlo Perroni

We examine gender differences in intergenerational patterns of social mobility for second-generation migrants. Empirical studies of social mobility have found that women are generally more mobile than men. Matching theory suggests that this may be because the importance of market characteristics (financial wealth and earning power) relative to non-market characteristics in the marriage market is lesser for women than men, and market characteristics can be intergenerationally more persistent than non-market characteristics. According to this interpretation, the mobility gender gap should be wider for second-generation migrant households, where gender roles remain more pronounced than in the non-migrant population. We explore this conjecture using data from the US General Social Survey. Our results show that daughters of first-generation migrants are intergenerationally more mobile than migrants’ sons, and more so than it is the case for non-migrants’ children.

Pablo F. Beker

The purpose of this paper is to explain how the choice between distributing cash through dividends or shares repurchases affects the firm’s ability to raise capital in the financial market. I assume investors have quadratic preferences over wealth but different prior beliefs about the likelihood a distribution takes place. At date zero agents purchase shares given their expectation about the firm’s payout method. At date 1 the firm announces whether the payout takes place that period. As in Brennan and Thakor [3], investors with different shareholdings have different incentives to gather information and, therefore, heterogeneous preferences about payout methods at date 1. I assume the firm adopts the payout method preferred by the majority of shareholders at date 1 under the one share/one vote rule. At date 2 the firm is liquidated and the remaining output is distributed among its shareholders. If at date zero agents disagree but not too much on the probability a distribution takes place, I show that a firm expected to pay dividends raises strictly more financial capital than an otherwise identical firm which is expected to repurchase shares. Therefore, a larger fraction of cash is distributed as dividend than through repurchases. One concludes that even in the presence of a small tax disadvantage financial markets favor dividend paying firms

Pablo F. Beker

In the early stages of the process of industry evolution, firms are financially constrained and might pay different wages to workers according to their expectations about the prospects for advancement offered by each firm’s job ladder. This paper argues that, nevertheless, if the output market is competitive, the positive predictions of the perfectly competitive model are still a good description of the long run outcome. If firms maximize the discounted sum of constrained profits, financing expenditure out of retained earnings, profits are driven down to zero as the perfectly competitive model predicts. Ex ante identical firms may follow different growth paths in which workers work for a lower entry-wage in firms expected to grow more. In the steady state, however, workers performing the same job, in ex-ante identical firms, receive the same wage. I explain when the long run outcome is efficient, when it is not, and why firms that produce inefficiently might drive the efficient ones out of the market even when the steady state has the positive properties of a Walrasian equilibrium. To some extent, it is not technological efficiency but workers’ self-fulfilling expectations about their prospects for advancement within the firm that explains which firms have lower unit costs, grow more, and dominate the market.

Natalie Chen, Paola Conconi and Carlo Perroni

Household migration can affect labor market opportunities differently for the two spouses, both because of gender-specific differences between the skills of migrants and the skills that are in demand in the host country, and because of differences in the extent of gender-based labor market discrimination between the country of origin and the host country. Standard bargaining theory suggests that, if household migration leads to a comparative improvement in labor market opportunities for married women, it should be beneficial to them. We show that, if renegotiation possibilities for migrant women are limited, the opposite may be true, particularly if women are specialized in household activities and the labor market allows more flexibility in their labor supply choices. Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel indeed shows that, holding everything else constant, improvements in relative wages for migrant women do not translate into better outcomes for them.

Marko Koethenbuerger and Ben Lockwood

This paper considers the relationship between tax competition and growth in an endogenous growth model where there are stochastic shocks to productivity, and capital taxes fund a public good which may be for final consumption or an infrastructure input. Absent stochastic shocks, decentralized tax setting (two or more jurisdictions) maximizes the rate of growth, as the constant returns to scale present with endogenous growth implies “extreme” tax competition. Stochastic shocks imply that households face a portfolio choice problem, which may dampen down tax competition and may raise taxes above the centralized level. Growth can be lower with decentralization. Our results also predict a negative relationship between output volatility and growth, consistent with the empirical evidence.

Natalie Chen & Liam Graham

Nearly all post-war recessions have been preceded by oil-price shocks, but is this because spikes in the price of petroleum cause economic downturns? Most research has ignored an identification problem: oil prices and the state of the world economy are endogenously determined. This paper uses terrorist incidents as an instrumental variable. In an international panel of industries, we show that after correction for simultaneity bias — though not before — the price of oil has large negative effects upon profitability. Our results seem to lend support to the claim that oil-price spikes can be a source of recessions.

Peter J. Hammond

In an intertemporal Arrow–Debreu economy with a continuum of agents, suppose that the auctioneer sets prices while the government institutes optimal lump-sum transfers period by period. An earlier paper showed how subgame imperfections arise because agents understand how their current decisions such as those determining investment will influence future lump-sum transfers. This observation undermines the second efficiency theorem of welfare economics and makes “history” a widespread externality. A two-period model is used to investigate the constrained efficiency properties of different kinds of equilibrium. Possibilities for remedial policy are also discussed.

Sayantan Ghosal and Eugenio Proto

This paper studies how intra-elite conflict results in transition to democracy, characterized as both franchise extension to, and lowering the individual cost of collective political action for, an initially disorganized non-elite. Two risk averse elites compete for the appropriation of a unit of social surplus with initial uncertainty about their future relative bargaining power. Both elements of a democracy are necessary to ensure that the two elites credibly commit to a mutually fairer share of the surplus and we derive sufficient conditions for democracy to emerge in equilibrium. Our formal analysis accounts for stylized facts that emerge from an analysis of Indian and West European democracies

Peter J Hammond and Yeneng Sun

An extensive literature in economics uses a continuum of random variables to model individual random shocks imposed on a large population. Let H denote the Hilbert space of square-integrable random variables. A key concern is to characterize the family of all H-valued functions that satisfy the law of large numbers when a large sample of agents is drawn at random. We use the iterative extension of an infinite product measure introduced in [6] to formulate a “sharp” law of large numbers. We prove that an H-valued function satisfies this law if and only if it is both Pettis-integrable and norm integrably bounded.

Vítor Castro

Several studies have identified the factors that cause public deficits in industrial democracies. They consider that economic, political and institutional factors play an important role in the understanding of those deficits. However, the study of the determinants of excessive deficits remains practically unexplored. Since excessive deficits can have large negative spillover effects when countries are forming a monetary union without a centralised budget – as it is the case for a group of European countries – this paper tries to explore that gap in the literature by identifying the main causes of excessive deficits and the ways of avoiding them. Binary choice models are estimated over a panel of 15 European Union countries for the period 1970-2006, where an excessive deficit is defined as a deficit higher than 3% of GDP. Results show that a weak fiscal stance, low economic growth, the timing of parliamentary elections and majority left-wing governments are the main causes of excessive deficits in the EU countries. Moreover, the institutional constraints imposed after Maastricht over the EU countries’ fiscal policy have succeeded in reducing the probability of excessive deficits in Europe, especially in small countries. Therefore, this study concludes that supranational fiscal constraints, national efforts to reduce public debts, growth promoting policies and mechanisms to avoid political opportunism and partisan effects are essential factors for an EU country to avoid excessive deficits. Finally, the results presented in this paper raise the idea that a good strategy for the EU countries to avoid excessive deficits caused by the opportunistic behaviour of their policymakers would be to schedule elections for the beginning or the end of the year.

Peter J. Hammond

Social choice theory concerns itself with the proper choice of a social state from a given feasible set of social states. The main question the theory addresses is how that social choice should depend on the profile of individual preferences. Early work by Arrow and various predecessors, including Condorcet, Borda, Dodgson and Black, was about the construction of a social preference ordering — i.e., a binary relation of weak preference that is complete and transitive. Later, Sen (1971, 1982, 1986) in particular initiated an investigation of more general social choice rules (SCRs) which may not maximize any binary relation, even one that may not be complete or transitive.

Peter J. Hammond and Yeneng Sun

In large random economies with heterogeneous agents, a standard stochastic framework presumes a random macro state, combined with idiosyncratic micro shocks. This can be formally represented by a random process consisting of a continuum of random variables that are conditionally independent given the macro state. However, this process satisfies a standard joint measurability condition only if there is essentially no idiosyncratic risk at all. Based on iteratively complete product measure spaces, we characterize the validity of the standard stochastic framework via Monte Carlo simulation as well as event-wise measurable conditional probabilities. These general characterizations also allow us to strengthen some earlier results related to exchangeability and independence.

Charles Blackorby and Dezsö Szalay

We solve a class of two-dimensional screening problems in which one dimension has the standard features, while the other dimension is impossible to exaggerate and enters the agent's utility only through the message but not the true type. Natural applications are procurement and regulation where the producer's ability to produce quality and his costs of producing quantity are both unknown; or selling to a budget constrained buyer. We show that under these assumptions, the orthogonal incentive constraints are necessary and sufficient for the full set of incentive constraints. Provided that types are affiliated and all the conditional distributions of types have monotonic inverse hazard rates, the solution is fully separating in both dimensions.

Michael Keen and Ben Lockwood

Almost unknown in 1960, the value added tax (VAT) is now found in more than 130 countries, raises around 20 percent of the world’s tax revenue, and has been the center piece of tax reform in many developing countries. This paper explores the causes and consequences of the remarkable rise of the VAT. A key question is whether it has indeed proved, as its proponents claim, an especially effective form of taxation. To address this, it is first shown that a tax innovation—such as the introduction of a VAT—reduces the marginal cost of public funds if and only if it also leads an optimizing government to increase the tax ratio. This observation leads to the estimation, on a panel of 143 countries for 25 years, of a system of equations describing both the probability of VAT adoption and the revenue impact of the VAT. The results point to a rich set of determinants of VAT adoption, this being more likely, for example, if a country has a program with the IMF and the less open it is to international trade. In the revenue equation, the presence of a VAT does indeed have a significant impact, but also a complex one, with a negative intercept effect counteracted by positive effects that are greater the higher are per capita income and, more tentatively, openness. While the sign of the revenue impact of the VAT is thus in general ambiguous, most countries that have adopted a VAT seem to have gained a more effective tax instrument in doing so (though this is less apparent in subSaharan Africa), and most without it seem likely to gain from its adoption.

Natalie Chen, Paola Conconi and Carlo Perroni

Bargaining theory predicts that married women who experience a relative improvement in their labor market position should experience a comparative gain within their marriage. However, if renegotiation possibilities are limited by institutional mechanisms that achieve long-term commitment, the opposite may be true, particularly if women are specialized in household activities and the labor market allows comparatively more flexibility in their labor supply responses. Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel indeed shows that, as long as renegotiation opportunities are limited, comparatively better wages for women exacerbate their “double burden” of market and household work.