examining the relationship between visual attention and stated preferences a discrete choice experiment using eye tracking abstract we examine the relationship between visual attention and stated preferences derived from a discrete choice experiment focussing on consumer preferences regarding country of origin food labels we employ a bayesian infinite mixture logit to derive results that reveal patterns of respondent heterogeneity that would not be captured assuming that random parameters take a specific distributional form our results reveal weak relationships between the eye tracking data our stated preference results and various attribute use questions although respondents with higher levels of visual attendance value specific attributes more highly the strength of the relationship is fairly weak therefore whilst we maintain that eye tracking is useful we argue that there needs to be greater clarity about the aims and purpose of using eye tracking in stated preference research

an economic theory of self control the concept of self control is incorporated in a theory of individual intertemporal choice by modeling the individual as an organization the individual at a point in time is assumed to be both a farsighted planner and a myopic doer the resulting conflict is seen to be fundamentally similar to the agency conflict between the owners and managers of a firm both individuals and firms use the same techniques to mitigate the problems which the conflicts create this paper stresses the implications of this agency model and discusses as applications the effect of pensions on saving saving and the timing of income flows and individual discount rates

stochastic equilibria existence spanning number and the no expected financial gain from trade hypothesis stochastic equilibria under uncertainty with continuous time security trading and consumption are demonstrated in a general setting a common question is whether the current price of a security is an unbiased predictor of the future price of the security plus intermediate dividends this is the hypothesis of no expected financial gains from trade the relevance of this hypothesis in multi good economies is called into question by the following demonstrated fact for each set of probability assessments there exists a corresponding equilibrium one with the original agents original equilibrium allocations and no expected financial gains from trade under the given probability assessments the spanning number of the economy is defined as the fewest number of security markets required to sustain a complete markets equilibrium in a dynamic sense made precise in the paper the spanning number is linked directly to agent primitives in particular the manner in which new information resolves uncertainty over time the spanning number is shown to be invariant under bounded changes in expectations several examples are given in which the spanning number is finite even though the number of potential states of the world is infinite

asset pricing in multiperiod securities markets the intertemporal models developed in this paper have been stimulated by the capital asset pricing model capm of sharpe and lintner and the role of factor structure in ross arbitrage pricing theory apt suppose that some one dimensional stochastic process s provides a sufficient statistic for aggregate consumption then a heuristic dynamic programming argument shows that s market wealth and the wealth derivative of the value function for any agent are all locally perfectly correlated it follows from merton s work that there is a linear relationship between the local mean return on a security and the local covariance of that return with the return on the market portfolio the formal development uses martingale representation and martingale projection to obtain an intertemporal capm the history of a scalar brownian motion plays the role of a sufficient statistic we motivate the assumption of a sufficient statistic for aggregate consumption by considering a countable set of securities whose payoffs have an approximate factor structure where the factor components are in the information set generated by an n dimensional brownian motion and the idiosyncratic components are weakly correlated the approximate factor structure on the security payoffs implies that the rates of return have locally an approximate factor structure the role of the market portfolio can now be played by a set of n well diversified portfolios

global warming and hyperbolic discounting the use of a constant discount rate to study long lived environmental problems such as global warming has two disadvantages the prescribed policy is sensitive to the discount rate and with moderate discount rates large future damages have almost no effect on current decisions time consistent quasi hyperbolic discounting alleviates both of these modeling problems and is a plausible description of how people think about the future we analyze the time consistent markov perfect equilibrium in a general model with a stock pollutant the solution to the linear quadratic specialization illustrates the role of hyperbolic discounting in a model of global warming

consensus consumer and intertemporal asset pricing with heterogeneous beliefs le fichier attache est egalement edite dans les cahier de la chaire les particuliers face aux risques de l institut de finance de dauphine cahier n 7 mars 2007

discounting values and decisions how do discount rates affect agents decisions and valuations this paper provides a general method to analyze this question allowing stochastic and managed cash flows stochastic discount rates and time inconsistency and including arbitrary learning and payoff or utility processes we show that some of these features can lead to counterintuitive answers e g a more patient agent stops earlier but we also establish under simple conditions theorems yielding robust predictions concerning the impact of discount rates on control and stopping decisions and on valuations we apply our theory to models of search experimentation bankruptcy optimal growth investment and social learning

a general equilibrium model of portfolio insurance this article examines the effects of portfolio insurance on market and asset price dynamics in a general equilibrium continuous time model portfolio insurers are modeled as expected utility maximizing agents martingale methods are employed in solving the individual agents dynamic consumption portfolio problems comparisons are made between the optimal consumption processes optimally invested wealth and portfolio strategies of the portfolio insurers and normal agents at a general equilibrium level comparisons across economies reveal that the market volatility and risk premium are decreased and the asset and market price levels increased by the presence of portfolio insurance article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

search theoretic models of the labor market a survey we survey the literature on search theoretic models of the labor market we show how this approach addresses many issues including the following why do workers sometimes choose to remain unemployed what determines the lengths of employment and unemployment spells how can there simultaneously exist unemployed workers and unfilled vacancies what determines aggregate unemployment and vacancies how can homogeneous workers earn different wages what are the tradeoffs firms face from different wages how do wages and turnover interact what determines efficient turnover we discuss various modeling choices concerning wage determination and the meeting process including recent models of directed search

a theory of intergenerational altruism modeling intergenerational altruism is crucial to evaluate the long term consequences of current decisions and requires a set of principles guiding such altruism we axiomatically develop a theory of pure direct altruism altruism is pure if it concerns the total utility rather than the mere consumption utility of future generations and direct if it directly incorporates the utility of all future generations our axioms deliver a new class of altruistic forward looking preferences whose weight put on the consumption of a future generation generally depends on the consumption of other generations the only preferences lacking this dependence correspond to the quasi hyperbolic discounting model which our theory characterizes our approach provides a framework to analyze welfare in the presence of altruistic preferences and addresses technical challenges stemming from the interdependent nature of such preferences

effects of financial innovations on market volatility when beliefs are heterogeneous abstract consider a model with two logarithmic utility maximizer agents that observe aggregate consumption but disagree about its expected rate of change markets are incomplete we first show that volatility of the interest rate in an economy with additional information is higher in a complete markets economy with no additional information there are two differences in volatility with the previous the first one due to the increase in volatility of the wealth share of the individuals is always positive the second difference is the change in covariance between the components of the interest rate volatility and can be positive or negative

general equilibrium when economic growth exceeds discounting abstract after dropping the standard general equilibrium assumption that preference orders discount future consumption faster than the economy grows and dropping continuity and weakening utility representation we establish commodity prices and consumptions that approach approximate equilibrium to within any practical tolerance the weizacker overtaking criterion defines the best known non standard discounting orders we admit over discrete time deterministic consumption paths and over continuous time stochastic consumption processes we also perturb preferences to qualify all approximate equilibrium as full equilibrium thus showing some well known non existence examples are singular and so are inadequate defence of standard assumptions journal of economic literature classification numbers c60 c62

linking economic and ecological models for a marine ecosystem increasingly economists and ecologists have begun to recognize the value to public policy of combining information and results from each discipline into multidisciplinary studies here we present a methodological approach that links economic and ecological analyses we develop an economic ecological model by merging an input output model of a coastal economy with a model of a marine food web we describe distinct linear system sub models of the economy and the ecosystem and we develop a method for linking the two our method extends the work of earlier researchers by incorporating an ecosystem matrix into resource multipliers and by showing how these multipliers may be calculated we present a numerical example for the new england region using coastal economic and marine ecological data from the region for a restricted set of industry sectors and food web trophic levels we calculate resource multipliers for the example and we simulate the economic impacts of changes in primary production in the ecosystem on final demands for fishery products the results illustrate the effects of incorporating the impacts of habitat destruction and ecosystem structure on resource multipliers our approach can be extended to incorporate the full range of sectors in the economy and trophic levels in a linked ecosystem 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

an economic approach to influence activities in organizations members of organizations spend considerable time effort and ingenuity attempting to influence decision makers such influence activities may bring benefits to the organization but they also involve real costs this essay offers an economic rationale for such influence activity as representing rational self interested behavior in the presence of informational asymmetries and an analysis of how the design of the organization s structure and policies should respond to the incentives for attempting influence it is posited that information valuable for the organization s decision making is directly available only to members of the organization who have some personal stake in the decisions these individuals may then have an incentive to try to manipulate the information they develop and provide in order to influence the resulting decisions to their benefits this can be costly both in degrading the quality of decision making and in diverting the attention and effort of the organization s members from more productive activities the organization has three different methods it can employ to discourage excessive influence activities and to encourage more directly productive uses of time and effort it can limit access to decision makers and participation in decision making it can alter its decision making criteria to favor those performing well in productive activities and it can provide direct financial incentives to encourage the desired allocation of effort it is shown that an efficiently designed organization will use such financial incentives only as a last resort instead it will always first alter its decision participation policies and decisionmaking criteria

dynamic equilibrium with liquidity constraints this article studies an intertemporal economy with liquidity constrained and unconstrained individuals we use a stopping time approach to solve the finite horizonconstrained consumption portfolio problem with constant relative risk aversion and to examine the structure of equilibrium the impact of the constraint on the optimal consumption and the financing portfolio is assessed the equilibrium state price density is related to the exercise boundary of an american style contingent claim with nonlinear payoff this stopping time characterization enables us to prove the existence of an equilibrium and can be implemented numerically properties of equilibrium bond and stock returns are examined copyright 2003 oxford university press

smoking cessation a model of planned vs actual behavior for time inconsistent consumers we offer a simple model of intertemporal choice to characterize how planned versus actual behaviors evolve for time inconsistent smokers our results suggest that smokers participation and cessation decisions are governed by the interplay between three effects the cessation effect leads smokers to advance their plans to quit smoking whereas the procrastination effect leads them to consecutively revise their planned quitting age upwards consequently the duration of smoking is effectively governed by which one of these two effects is dominant finally for certain consumer segments a threshold effect causes an all or nothing type of extreme smoking behavior based on certain critical values of present biased preferences our results provide some preliminary evidence that both marketing efforts by tobacco firms and public policy initiatives can have a significant influence on smoking behavior in particular we find that reductions in the age at which individuals start smoking may not only vastly extend their duration of smoking but also convert potential never smokers into lifetime smokers finally we estimate a hazard model using survey data from over 800 smokers to provide evidence in support of our theoretical model

on equilibrium prices in continuous time abstract state prices are the fundamental building block for dynamic asset pricing models we provide here a general continuous time setup that allows to derive non trivial structural properties for state prices from economic fundamentals to this end we combine general equilibrium theory and theorie generale of stochastic processes to characterize state prices that lead to continuous price systems on the consumption set we also show that equilibria with such state prices exist

discounting and altruism to future decision makers is discounting of future decision makers consumption utilities consistent with pure altruism toward those decision makers that is a concern that they are better off according to their own likewise forward looking preferences it turns out that the answer is positive for many but not all discount functions used in the economics literature in particular hyperbolic discounting of the form used by phelps and pollak rev econ studies 35 1968 201 and laibson quart j econ 112 1997 443 is consistent with exponential altruism towards future generations more generally we establish a one to one relationship between discount functions and altruism weight systems and provide sufficient as well as necessary conditions for discount functions to be consistent with pure altruism

weighted discounting on group diversity time inconsistency and consequences for investment abstract this paper presents the class of weighted discount functions which contains the discount functions commonly used in economics and finance weighted discount functions may describe the discounting behavior of groups uncertainty about what discount rate to use present biased time preferences and all of these simultaneously as an application we study investment behavior under weighted discounting and come up with the following general result greater group diversity greater parameter uncertainty and more present biased time preferences lead to delayed investment or equivalently more risk taking

pinocchio s pupil using eyetracking and pupil dilation to understand truth telling and deception in sender receiver games we conduct laboratory experiments on sender receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate such as security analyst s painting a rosy picture about earnings prospects our results show that overcommunicati on messages are more informative of the true state than they should be in equilibri um is consistent with a level k model eyetracking shows that senders look much more on the payoff rows corresponding to the true state and much less at receiver payoffs than at their own payoffs senders pupils also dilate more when their deception is larger in magnitude together these data are consistent with the hypothesis that figuring out ho w to deceive another player is cognitively difficult as assumed in the level k mod el a combination of sender messages and lookup patterns predicts the true state about t wice as often as predicted by equilibrium using these measures would enable receiver subjects to hypothetically earn up to 16 21 percent more than they actually do

learning while voting determinants of collective experimentation this paper combines dynamic social choice and strategic experimentation to study the following question how does a society a committee or more generally a group of individuals with potentially heterogeneous preferences experiment with new opportunities each voter recognizes that during experimentation other voters also learn about their preferences as a result pivotal voters today are biased against experimentation because it reduces their likelihood of remaining pivotal this phenomenon reduces equilibrium experimentation below the socially efficient level and may even result in a negative option value of experimentation however one can restore efficiency by designing a voting rule that depends deterministically on time another main result is that even when payoffs of a reform are independently distributed across the population good news about any individual s payoff increases other individuals incentives to experiment with that reform due to a positive voting externality

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

stop go monetary policy we propose and estimate several discrete choice models of monetary policy decision making that feature time varying inertia the models permit us to account for three stylized facts characterizing monetary policymaking in the united states 1 target interest rates are gradually adjusted in small discrete movements 2 there are some long stretches of time in which rates are repeatedly moved and 3 there are other long stretches in which the policy rate does not change our models are used to account for the fed s failure to adopt promptly an easier policy stance during the recession of 2001 they are also used to explain delay in tightening the policy stance during the 2003 2006 period that featured a bubble in house prices and was followed by a financial crisis in 2008

continuous time methods in finance a review and an assessment i survey and assess the development of continuous time methods in finance during the last 30 years the subperiod 1969 to 1980 saw a dizzying pace of development with seminal ideas in derivatives securities pricing term structure theory asset pricing and optimal consumption and portfolio choices during the period 1981 to 1999 the theory has been extended and modified to better explain empirical regularities in various subfields of finance this latter subperiod has seen significant progress in econometric theory computational and estimation methods to test and implement continuous time models capital market frictions and bargaining issues are being increasingly incorporated in continuous time theory the roots of modern continuous time methods in finance can be traced back to the seminal contributions of merton 1969 1971 1973b in the late 1960s and early 1970s merton 1969 pioneered the use of continuous time modeling in financial economics by formulating the intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem of an investor in a stochastic dynamic programming setting merton 1973b also showed how such a framework can be used to develop equilibrium asset pricing implications thereby significantly extending the asset pricing theory to richer dynamic settings and expanding the scope of applications of continuous time methods to study problems in financial economics 1 within a span of about 30 years from the publication of merton s inf luential papers continuous time methods have become an integral part of financial economics indeed in certain core areas in finance such as e g asset pricing derivatives valuation term structure theory and portfolio selection continuoustime methods have proved to be the most attractive way to conduct research and gain economic intuition the continuous time approach in these areas has produced models with a rich variety of testable implications the econometric theory for testing continuous time models has made rapid strides in the last decade and has thus kept pace with the impressive progress on the theoretical front one hopes that the actual empirical investigations and estimation using the new procedures will follow suit soon

an intertemporal general equilibrium model of asset prices this paper develops a continuous time general equilibrium model of a simple but complete economy and uses it to examine the behavior of asset prices in this model asset prices and their stochastic properties are determined endogenously one principal result is a partial differential equation which asset prices must satisfy the solution of this equation gives the equilibrium price of any asset in terms of the underlying real variables in the economy in this paper we develop a general equilibrium asset pricing model for use in applied research an important feature of the model is its integration of real and financial markets among other things the model endogenously determines the stochastic process followed by the equilibrium price of any financial asset and shows how this process depends on the underlying real variables the model is fully consistent with rational expectations and maximizing behavior on the part of all agents our framework is general enough to include many of the fundamental forces affecting asset markets yet it is tractable enough to be specialized easily to produce specific testable results furthermore the model can be extended in a number of straightforward ways consequently it is well suited to a wide variety of applications for example in a companion paper cox ingersoll and ross 7 we use the model to develop a theory of the term structure of interest rates many studies have been concerned with various aspects of asset pricing under uncertainty the most relevant to our work are the important papers on intertemporal asset pricing by merton 19 and lucas 16 working in a continuous time framework merton derives a relationship among the equilibrium expected rates of return on assets he shows that when investment opportunities are changing randomly over time this relationship will include effects which have no analogue in a static one period model lucas considers an economy with homogeneous individuals and a single consumption good which is produced by a number of processes the random output of these processes is exogenously determined and perishable assets are defined as claims to all or a part of the output of a process and the equilibrium determines the asset prices our theory draws on some elements of both of these papers like merton we formulate our model in continuous time and make full use of the analytical tractability that this affords the economic structure of our model is somewhat similar to that of lucas however we include both endogenous production and

to be consumed with moderation abstract we study the optimal behavior of a hyperbolic discounting agent who has incomplete information about his own preferences and can only learn them through consumption we show that even if moderate current consumption and moderate future consumption always dominates abstinence the agent may optimally decide not to consume as a commitment device against inefficient learning that would lead to future excesses this provides a rationale for why smokers gamblers or compulsive buyers stick to second best personal rules of behavior such as abstinence without invoking standard habit formation arguments we also study how urges modify the strategy of the individual

how do contribution limits affect contributions to tax preferred savings accounts abstract contributions to tax preferred savings accounts are typically constrained by a contribution limit these limits influence contributions not only for taxpayers currently constrained by the limit but also for those contributing less than the limit i develop a simple life cycle model in which taxpayers exhibit use it or lose it contribution behavior this connects current contributions to future contribution limits and implies that an increase in contribution limits can decrease contributions empirical evidence from microdata provides support for the model using variation from canadian limit reforms i find that larger future contribution room is associated with smaller contributions

are emily and greg more employable than lakisha and jamal a field experiment on labor market discrimination we study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help wanted ads in boston and chicago newspapers to manipulate perceived race resumes are randomly assigned african american or white sounding names white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for white names than for african american ones the racial gap is uniform across occupation industry and employer size we also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the u s labor market jel j71 j64

gain loss framing in interdependent choice abstract framing influences choice however little is known about the underlying mechanisms behind framing effects we study gain loss framing in binary modified dictator games subjects choose the selfish option more often in the loss frame compared to the gain frame recording visual fixations with eye tracking we find that dictators focus more on their own outcomes when facing losses this suggests that losses to the own outcome are weighted more than losses to another player

a theory of rational addiction we develop a theory of rational addiction in which rationality means a consistent plan to maximize utility over time strong addiction to a good requires a big effect of past consumption of the good on current consumption such powerful complementarities cause some steady states to be unstable they are an important part of our analysis because even small deviations from the consumption at an unstable steady state can lead to large cumulative rises over time in addictive consumption or to rapid falls in consumption to abstention our theory also implies that cold turkey is used to end strong addictions that addicts often go on binges that addicts respond more to permanent than to temporary changes in prices of addictive goods and that anxiety and tensions can precipitate an addiction

competitive equilibria in production economies with an infinite dimensional commodity space the existence of competitive equilibrium is established for economies with a produc tion sector and an infinite dimensional space of commodities the cru cial assumptions which are required beyond those required in the fin ite dimensional setting are bounds on marginal rates of substitution and marginal rates of transformation copyright 1987 by the econometric society

on the fluctuations in consumption and market returns in the presence of labor and human capital an equilibrium analysis abstract we examine the effects of human capital on consumption stock market and other fluctuations in a general equilibrium continuous time model a representative consumer worker investor derives utility from consumption and leisure a representative firm demands labor as the sole input to a stochastic production technology driven by general possibly nonmultiplicative shocks for cobb douglas utility and multiplicative shocks labor is nonstochastic and consumption and stock market volatility are equated as under no human capital deviations from this are analyzed for logarithmic utility and constant elasticity of substitution production technology cases are identified where the presence of labor causes consumption to be smoother than the stock market

environmental costing for agriculture will it be standard fare in the farm bill of 2000 this paper starts by discussing and estimating the environmental costs of agricultural production the author uses a separate benefit transfer intended to expose methodological issues to construct each cost category of agricultures s external effects this is followed by a simple description of the framework for production decisions that account for environmental costs included are attribution of environmental externalities and measurement of environmental costs finally the author discusses research implications of environmental costing including tqm and environmental policy analyses environmental services and their unit values strategies for measuring environmental values and prognosis for agricultural adders 42 refs 1 fig 1 tab

how does the spirit of capitalism affect stock market prices bakshi and chen 1996 suggest that the spirit of capitalism affects stock prices by increasing society s aversion to risk in this article i show that the way in which the spirit of capitalism impinges upon asset prices depends on the interaction of impatience willingness to substitute over time and ordinal preferences between consumption and status in addition to risk aversion i develop a general model that charts the channels through which the spirit of capitalism affects asset prices an increase in the capitalist spirit may increase or decrease risk aversion and may actually decrease the prices of risky assets article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the power of eye tracking in economics experiments abstract eye tracking is a technology that tracks eye activity including how long and where a participant is looking as eye tracking technology has improved and become more affordable its use has expanded we discuss how to design implement and analyze an experiment using this technology to study economic theory using our experience fielding an experiment to study hiring decisions we guide the reader through how to choose an eye tracker concerns with participants and set up types of outputs limitations of eye tracking data management and data analysis we conclude with suggestions for combining eye tracking with other measurements

procrastination and obedience in this lecture i shall focus on situations involving repeated decisions with time inconsistent behavior although each choice may be close to maximizing and therefore result in only small losses the cumulative effect of a series of repeated errors may be quite large thus in my examples decision makers are quite close to the intelligent well informed individuals usually assumed in economic analysis but cumulatively they make seriously wrong decisions that do not occur in standard textbook economics this lecture discusses and illustrates several pathological modes of individual and group behavior procrastination in decision making undue obedience to authority membership of seemingly normal individuals in deviant cult groups and escalation of commitment to courses of action that are clearly unwise in each case individuals choose a series of current actions without fully appreciating how those actions will affect future perceptions and behavior the standard assumption of rational forwardlooking utility maximizing is violated the nonindependence of errors in decision making in the series of decisions can be explained with the concept from cognitive psychology of undue salience or vividness for example present benefits and costs may have undue salience relative to future costs

the consumption based capital asset pricing model the paper provides conditions on the primitives of a continuous time economy under which there exist equilibria obeying the consumption based capital asset pricing model ccapm the paper also extends the equilibrium characterization of interest rates of cox ingersoll and ross 1985 to multi agent economies we do not use a markovian state assumption this work provides sufficient conditions on agents primitives for the validity of the consumption based capital asset pricing model ccapm of breeden 1979 as a necessary condition breeden showed that in a continuous time equilibrium satisfying certain regularity conditions one can characterize returns on securities as follows the expected instantaneous rate of return on any security in excess of the riskless interest rate the security s expected excess rate of return is a multiple common to all securities of the instantaneous covariance of this excess return with aggregate consumption increments this common multiple is the arrow pratt measure of risk aversion of a representative agent rubinstein 1976 published a discrete time precursor of this result the exis tence of equilibria satisfying breeden s regularity conditions had been an open issue we also show that the validity of the ccapm does not depend on breeden s assumption of markov state information and present a general asset pricing model extending the results of cox ingersoll and ross 1985 as well as the discrete time results of rubinstein 1976 and lucas 1978 to a multi agent environment since the ccapm was first proposed much effort has been directed at finding sufficient conditions on the model primitives the given assets the agents preferences the agents consumption endowments and in a production econ omy the feasible production sets conditions sufficient for the existence of continuous time equilibria were shown in duffie 1986 but the equilibria demonstrated were not shown to satisfy the additional regularity required for the ccapm in particular breeden assumed that all agents choose pointwise interior consumption rates in order to characterize asset prices via the first order conditions of the bellman equation interiority was also assumed by huang 1987 in demonstrating a representative agent characterization of equilibrium an approach exploited here the use of dynamic programming and the bellman equation aside from the difficulty it imposes in verifying the existence of interior 1 financial support from the national science foundation is gratefully acknowledged we thank

national accounts and environmental resources in the paper optimal growth theory is used to derive the appropriate definition of the net national product concept when there are environmental resources and environmental damage to take into account the basic conclusions are that conventional defined np should be corrected by deducting environmental damage and adding the value of the net change of all resources

quadratic concavity and determinacy of equilibrium one of the central features of classical models of competitive markets is the generic determinacy of competitive equilibria for smooth economies with a finite number of commodities and a finite number of consumers almost all initial endowments admit only a finite number of competitive equilibria and these equilibria vary locally smoothly with endowments thus equilibrium comparative statics are locally determinate this paper establishes parallel results for economies with finitely many consumers and infinitely many commodities the most important new condition we introduce quadratic concavity rules out preferences in which goods are perfect substitutes globally locally or asymptotically our framework is sufficiently general to encompass many of the models that have proved important in the study of continuous time trading in financial markets trading over an infinite time horizon and trading of finely differentiated commodities

a comparative study of portfolio insurance abstract this paper undertakes a comparative study of portfolio insurance under a variety of modeling strategies specifically we focus on portfolio insurers who derive utility from horizon wealth with marginal utility tending smoothly to infinity at some pre specified floor we solve for the optimal consumption portfolio wealth of these portfolio insurers and compare with constrained portfolio insurers and normal agents general equilibrium conditions are contrasted under pure exchange and production type models while the market price level is unambiguously increased under pure exchange under production the effect on market level is state dependent in both models the market volatility and risk premium are decreased by portfolio insurance the paper also investigates the possible relationship between portfolio insurance type trading strategies and market volatility

one sector nonclassical optimal growth optimaility conditions and comparative dynamics the authors consider a one sector nonclassical model of optimal economic growth characterized by a convex concave production function they provide in a dynamic programming context a characterization of all local interior maximum of the miximand of the bellman equation these conditions are the euler equation and a second order condition namely that the marginal propensity to consume is less than one an example is used to illustrate these conditions also several comparative dynamic results are derived in particular it is shown that the maximum and minimum selections out of the optimal consumption correspondence shift down as the discount factor increases copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

time preference and real investment abstract this paper studies the investment timing problem of an entrepreneur with a non tradable real option with undiversifiable risk we find that the time preference can have a significant impact on the risk attitude toward the idiosyncratic risk which results from the wealth effect on the implied option value if the agent is impatient patient an increase in idiosyncratic volatility increases decreases the agent s value and delays hastens investment this finding suggests several important implications and empirical predictions for investment decisions in private firms and public firms with concentrated ownership

why a stubborn conservative would run a deficit policy with time inconsistent preferences a conservative government in favor of a low level of public consumption knows that it will be replaced by a government in favor of a larger level of public consumption we show that the resulting level of public consumption is in between the levels the two governments would choose if each were in power both in the present and in the future in particular we show that if the conservative government is more stubborn in a particular sense than the succeeding government the conservative government will borrow more than it would had it remained in power in the future

agriculture natural resources and environmental accounting in this paper we develop atheoretically consistent framework to incorporate theenvironmental effects of agricultural production andthe depletion of natural capital caused byagricultural production into the existing incomeaccounts we apply the framework and adjust theincome attributed to the agricultural sector andeconomy wide net national product nnp for the unitedstates estimated adjustments to the incomeattributed to agriculture are in the range of 4billion and have declined as a percentage of net farmincome since 1982

implicit prices of soil characteristics for farmland in iowa arguments have long persisted that purchasers pay too much for poor land i e less productive more erosive relative to the higher quality counterpart in other words purchasers are either irrational or poorly informed relative to the differences in land productivity between poor and good farmland similar arguments have been advanced concerning the willingness to pay rent on the part of tenant operators little empirical evidence exists to support or reject this hypothesis farmland appraisals are sometimes cited as evidence to support the contention but such empiricism may indicate more about the quality and biases of appraisers than about the behavior or efficient functioning of the farmland market resolution of this issue is extremely important to the formation of soil conservation policy designed to protect soil productivity irrational behavior on the part of land purchasers may lead one to infer that the market system is failing to recognize adequately the soil productivity consequences of soil erosion if this oversight consistently leads to excessive soil erosion from society s perspective then some form of government intervention may be necessary to protect the welfare of society assuming that such intervention is capable of correcting the market failure

life cycle consumption of a harmful and addictive good david goldbaum this article demonstrates that the endogenous desire to quit smoking can result from a rational consumption path chosen at the time the consumer begins smoking this result is obtained without relying on hidden costs or unknown preferences a finite lived agent chooses a path of consumption of a harmful and addictive good to maximize present discounted utility the consumer chooses his consumption rate to account for the future health consequence of smoking and the withdrawal costs of quitting a consumer may choose to smoke even if it means a lowered utility level for the majority of the time spent smoking jel d91 c61 i12 i introduction some of what we consume for pleasure can be harmful economists assume that consumers take measure of the potential harm and balance it against the pleasure derived from consumption when both the pleasure and the harm occur at the time of consumption the decision is straightforward some goods though impose a cost borne at some future date requiring intertemporal planning these present a greater challenge to the consumer and to the economist trying to explain the consumer s behavior at times observed behavior implores us to question whether the consumer is properly weighing the costs and benefits in a manner that maximizes his or her utility theoretically for each item under consideration the rational consumer properly balances the lifetime benefits derived from the consumption against the lifetime costs some observed behavior seems to contradict this rational approach to consumption in particular it is common for people to begin smoking cigarettes during their youth only to endogenously make a decision to quit at a future date to integrate this behavior with rationality modelers have proposed hidden costs multiple selves changing preferences or other strategies that limit the decision making ability of the youth in all of these cases for some consumers the decision to smoke is a mistake made during youth that has to be reversed at some cost as a middle aged adult this article aims to demonstrate that a lifetime path of consumption in which a person consumes a harmful and addictive good while young and quits at some later date is a path that is perfectly consistent with rational behavior it is not necessary to assume that mid life quitters are displaying irrational or time inconsistent behavior if all information regarding a good s harmful properties is revealed some consumers will still choose a path that requires quitting mid life this paper primarily examines the consumption of cigarettes but also includes analysis of a nonaddictive unhealthy good both of these harmful goods provide the consumer with immediate pleasure but at the cost of decreasing life expectancy background becker and murphy 1988 bm introduced the concept of rational addiction the idea that addicts are forward looking rational consumers present consumption choices reflect not only current utility considerations and budget constraints but also incorporate the anticipated impact of present consumption on future utility and budget constraints bm examine the behavior response of addicts to exogenous shocks changes from a steady state including the desire to quit originate only from exogenous shocks such as a change in the relative price of the good or a revelation about the detrimental health consequences of the addictive good that alters the consumer s utility derived from consumption the model offers no mechanism by which smokers may choose to alter behavior endogenously in contrast to bm s smokers many of today s smokers appear to quit in absence of an external shock anyone who began smoking after 1966 has been subjected to the legislated health warnings appearing on cigarette packages since that time 1 antismoking messages in radio and television advertisements during the 1950s and 1960s also helped to make the health consequences of smoking common knowledge

an intertemporal general equilibrium asset pricing model the case of diffusion information this paper provides sufficient conditions for the equilibrium price system and a vector of exogenously specified state variable processes to form a diffusion process in a pure exchange economy the conditions involve smoothness of agents utility functions and certain nice properties of the aggregate endowment process and the dividend processes of traded assets in place of the dynamic programming a martingale representation technique is utilized to characterize equilibrium portfolio policies this technique is useful even when there does not exist a finite dimensional markov structure in the economy and thus the markovian stochastic dynamic programming is not applicable a gents are shown to hold certain hedging mutual funds and the riskless asset in contrast to earlier results the market portfolio does not have a special role in hedging since the markets are dynamically complete when there exists a finite dimensional markov system in the economy the dimension of the hedging demand identified through the markovian dynamic programming may be much larger than that identified by the martingale method copyright 1987 by the econometric society

equilibrium asset prices and exchange rates abstract in a two country two good world we construct an intertemporal international general equilibrium for two logarithmic representative agents financial markets are fully integrated and independently incomplete the equilibrium expected rate of change of the exchange rate increases with the differential of interest rates and the volatility of the domestic equity markets and decreases with the covariance between domestic and foreign equity markets the equilibrium volatility of the exchange rate is the sum of the volatilities due to idiosyncratic factors in the financial markets and a term that represents the difference of weights in the common international factor

a model of focusing in economic choice we present a generally applicable theory of focusing based on the hypothesis that a person focuses more on and hence overweights attributes in which her options dier more our model predicts that the decisionmaker is too prone to choose options with concentrated advantages relative to alternatives but maximizes utility when the advantages and disadvantages of alternatives are equally concentrated in intertemporal choice because the relative concentrations of an option s costs and benets can be dierent from the perspective of a single period and the perspective of the entire choice problem the decisionmaker often exhibits a form of time inconsistency she is present biased when the costs of current misbehavior are distributed over many future dates such as in harmful consumption but future biased when the benet of many

choice and procrastination author s o donoghue ted rabin matthew abstract recent models of procrastination due to self control problems assume that a procrastinator considers just one option and is unaware of her self control problems we develop a model where a person chooses from a menu of options and is partially aware of her self control problems this menu model replicates earlier results and generates new ones a person might forego completing an attractive option because she plans to complete a more attractive but never to be completed option hence providing a non procrastinator additional options can induce procrastination and a person may procrastinate worse pursuing important goals than unimportant ones

differences of opinion endogenous liquidity and asset prices this paper studies how investors differences of opinion affect liquidity and asset prices in our economy excessively optimistic investors are subject to an endogenous funding constraint that prevents default due to ex ante limited commitment when the funding constraint binds optimists use their savings to increase their consumption share deterring default this allows them to place speculative trades increasing market liquidity their losses on these trades make them prone to default leading to a renewed binding of the funding constraint this feedback between funding illiquidity disagreement and market liquidity is consistent with several empirical features of liquidity and financial asset prices

decreasing impatience a criterion for non stationary time preference and hyperbolic discounting despite recent interest in hyperbolic discounting there has been little discussion of exactly what property of time preferences is instantiated by hyperbolic or quasi hyperbolic functional forms the paper revives an earlier proposal in prelec 1989 that the key property is prattarrow convexity of the log of the discount function which corresponds to decreasing impatience di at the level of preferences di provides a natural criterion for assessing the severity of departure from stationarity in that greater di is equivalent to more choices of dominated options in two stage decision problems as well as greater convexity of the log of the discount function inefficient choices may arise as intentional precommitments or as unintended reversals of preference by naive agents

the intertemporal dynamics of consumer lock in this article examines how dynamic changes in information cost structure and time preferences affect consumers search and switching behavior over time and lead to lock in the information cost structure is conceptualized as a trade off of initial setup costs and ongoing usage costs lock in is defined as consumers decreased propensity to search and switch after an initial investment which is determined both by a preference to minimize immediate costs and by an inability to anticipate the impact of future switching costs the results of three experiments support the proposed mechanism experiment 1 shows that a small initial investment is sufficient to produce lock in experiment 2 shows that the results of a prior investment on lock in are not due to psychological commitment but to a shift in relative costs of incumbent and new options experiment 3 shows that respondents fail to anticipate how their prior investment will lock them in

natural resources national accounting and economic depreciation abstract the current value hamiltonian in an aggregate optimal growth problem with heterogeneous capital stocks including exhaustible renewable and environmental stocks is the nnp function routine substitutions reveal that the using up of natural resource stocks is representable as easy to interpret economic depreciation magnitudes we obtain true nnp inclusive of natural resource stock diminution implications for actual national accounting practices are also discussed

approximating the asset pricing kernel this article tests a simple consumption based asset pricing model by approximating the true asset pricing kernel using low order orthonormal polynomials based on the model s state variables approximated kernels based solely on next period s consumption growth are not rejected by overall measures of model fit but they produce statistically and economically large pricing errors approximated kernels based on two quarters of future consumption growth and technology shocks have substantially improved overall fit in particular the best of these kernels are capable of eliminating the small firm effect a conventional approach to examining the implications of dynamic asset pricing models is to assume that markets are complete the economy is in equilibrium and that the unique state price deflator can be interpreted as the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution of a representative consumer given assumptions about the form of this unobservable utility function and on the observability of aggregate consumption the model can be tested by examining the conditional or unconditional covariation of estimated intertemporal marginal rates of substitution with measured asset returns the fact that this method of testing dynamic models requires strong assumptions is in and of itself not particularly troubling however the fact that these attempts have been almost uniformly inconsistent with the data on asset returns and consumption is problematic for example when the utility function is assumed to be time and state separable the absolute and relative levels of the real returns on risk free and risky securities see for example mehra and prescott 1985 and weil 1989 are inconsistent with the model s predictions the primary finding from a large literature testing consumption based models is that measured consumption is too smooth to rationalize the observed level and variability of asset returns for reasonable parameterizations of time separable utility functions an alternate approach pursued in this paper is to approximate the stateprice deflator or asset pricing kernel using orthonormal polynomials in a

pricing continuously resettled contingent claims abstract this paper is a study of continuously resettled contingent claims prices in a stochastic economy as special cases the relationship between futures and forward prices is analyzed and a preference free expression is derived for these prices as well as the price of a continuously resettled futures option whose formula differs from black s futures option pricing formula due to the effects of marking to market the changes in the futures option premium

positive prices in capm some equilibrium prices in capm may be negative because of nonmonotonicity of preferences we identify several sets of sufficient conditions for prices to be positive the central conditions impose bounds on the investors risk aversion these bounds do not need to hold globally but only in a relevant range of portfolios or combinations of mean and standard deviation the relevant range is specified on the basis of exogenous parameters and variables and it must contain any endogenously determined equilibrium the bounds on risk aversion ensure that the preferences for assets are sufficiently well behaved within the relevant range the two period mean variance capital asset pricing model capm has the peculiar property that preferences may not be monotone the expected return to an investor s portfolio increases as he holds more and more shares of the assets but so does the variance of return it may be that at some point the additional expected return gained from adding more shares to the portfolio is not sufficient to compensate for the increase in variance if so then the induced preferences for assets are not monotone nonmonotonicity of preferences in the mean variance model is analyzed in nielsen 1987 because portfolio preferences are not necessarily monotone equilibrium asset prices may be negative or zero in fact it is possible that the value of the market portfolio of risky assets is negative this is demonstrated in nielsen 1985 1990a and in two examples in the present paper when the capm is used as a model of the prices of stocks which in reality have limited liability it is of course disturbing that it may predict negative prices it can be seen as a symptom of the fact that mean variance preferences are not always a good approximation to reality this paper analyzes various conditions on the exogenous parameters which ensure that the preferences are sufficiently realistic to yield positive prices the exogenous parameters in question are the expectations variances and covariances of total returns the initial allocations of the assets endowments and the investors utility functions for mean and variance of return the analysis applies to the classical version of the capm with a riskless asset as developed by sharpe 1964 lintner 1965 and mossin 1966 as well as the capm with risky assets only which was introduced by black 1972 and has been much used in empirical work under the name the zero beta or two factor capm

what accounts for the variation in retirement wealth among u s households even among households with similar socioeconomic characteristics saving and wealth vary considerably life cycle models attribute this variation to differences in time preference rates risk tolerance exposure to uncertainty relative tastes for work and leisure at advanced ages and income replacement rates these factors have testable implications concerning the relation between accumulated wealth and the shape of the consumption profile using the panel study of income dynamics and the consumer expenditure survey we find little support for these implications the data are instead consistent with rule of thumb mental accounting or hyperbolic discounting theories of wealth accumulation jel di d91 e21

expectations bond yields and monetary policy through explicitly incorporating analysts forecasts as observable factors in a dynamic arbitrage free model of the yield curve this research proposes a framework for studying the impact of shifts in market sentiment on interest rates of all maturities an empirical examination reveals that survey expectations about inflation output growth and the anticipated path of monetary policy actions contain important information for explaining movements in bond yields estimates from a forward looking monetary policy rule suggest that the central bank exhibits a preemptive response to inflationary expectations while accommodating output growth and monetary policy expectations forecasted gdp growth plays a significant role in explaining time variation in the market prices of risk the sensitivity of long yields is linked to the persistence of expected inflation under the risk neutral measure models of this type may provide traders and policymakers with a new set of tools for formally assessing the reaction of bond yields to shifts in market expectations the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

voting on the budget deficit this paper analyzes a model in which a group of rational individuals votes over the composition and time profile of public spending all voters agree that a balanced budget is ex ante optimal however if there is disagreement between current and future majorities a balanced budget is not a political equilibrium under majority rule under certain conditions a majority of the voters favors a budget deficit and the equilibrium deficit is larger the greater is the polarization among voters copyright 1990 by american economic association

natural resources national accounting and economic depreciation stock effects abstract hartwick s analysis of incorporating resource depletion in standard national income accounting is extended to the consideration of stock effects under both certainty and uncertainty

symposium on organizations and economics m t r ost production in modern economies occurs within organizations and this production is regulated only to a limited extent by prices the size of some of the largest organizations like general motors or ibm or att if managers didn t they would be replaced and firms that didn t maximize value wouldn t survive accordingly what went on inside the black box was mere detail the behavior of the firm could be described completely without knowledge of those details

stochastic multi agent equilibria in economies with jump diffusion uncertainty abstract we study a multi agent dynamic production economy that is subject to diffusive as well as shock sources of uncertainty using the theory of martingales and point processes we establish existence of an equilibrium in the economy the equilibrium commodity price asset prices and optimal policies of the individual agents are explicitly characterized we also establish the general existence of a risk neutral measure for equilibrium asset prices in the presence of jump risk