the macroeconomic news cycle and uncertainty resolution we examine the behavior of return volatility and trading at 5 minute intervals in the treasury bond futures market in the context of the monthly macroeconomic news cycle we advance and confirm the hypothesis that volatility and trading activity are higher in the first half of the month the data indicate that these patterns arise from at least two sources 1 a higher level of uncertainty regarding the value of news in announcements in the first half of the month and 2 improvement in efficiency of macroeconomic forecasts from the first to the second half of the month

order flow transaction clock and normality of asset returns the goal of this paper is to show that normality of asset returns can be recovered through a stochastic time change clark 1973 addressed this issue by representing the price process as a subordinated process with volume as the lognormally distributed subordinator we extend clark s results and find the following i stochastic time changes are mathematically much less constraining than subordinators ii the cumulative number of trades is a better stochastic clock than the volume for generating virtually perfect normality in returns iii this clock can be modeled nonparametrically allowing both the time change and price processes to take the form of jump diffusions the relations among trading volume stock prices and price volatility the subject of empirical and theoretical studies over many years have lately received renewed attention with the increased availability of high frequency data a vast amount of research has focused on issues such as news arrivals volume and price changes or volatility moves usually outside any framework of general or even partial equilibrium is the normality of returns a key issue for example in the mean variance paradigm for portfolio choice or the recent study of the problems of risk management e g in value at risk verified at any time horizon the evidence accumulated from a number of studies that document the presence of leptokurtosis and skewness in the distribution of returns of a wide variety of financial assets suggests that the answer is no studies as early as for example fama 1965 showed that daily returns are more long tailed than the normal density with the distribution of returns approaching normality as the holding period is extended to one month in the same manner volatility smiles and other observed

an economic analysis of the fisheries bycatch problem abstract bycatch is the incidental take of a species that has value to some other group this paper compares open access and individual transferable quota equilibria to the equilibrium in which the joint value of the fisheries is maximized the open access induced problems can be corrected by an individual transferable quota system only if both the target species and the bycatch species have tradable quotas and only if the bycatch species does not have existence value there exists a range of the bycatch to target species harvest levels for which the total harvest of each will be exactly taken by a given technology even under open access however there may not even exist a unique open access equilibrium if bycatch is allocated by rule of capture prohibitions on the sale of bycatch reduce the bycatch level but they also reduce social welfare

price formation and liquidity in the u s treasury market the response to public information the arrival of public information in the u s treasury market sets off a two stage adjustment process for prices trading volume and bid ask spreads in a brief first stage the release of a major macroeconomic announcement induces a sharp and nearly instantaneous price change with a reduction in trading volume demonstrating that price reactions to public information do not require trading the spread widens dramatically at announcement evidently driven by inventory control concerns in a prolonged second stage trading volume surges price volatility persists and spreads remain moderately wide as investors trade to reconcile residual differences in their private views how do financial markets form prices and provide liquidity when information arrives efforts to address this issue have led to an extensive microstructure literature on equity markets and to a lesser extent on the foreign exchange fx market relatively little work has focused on the u s treasury market however in spite of its importance in its own right and the advantages it offers as an alternative testing ground for microstructure hypotheses

sources of meteor showers and heat waves in the foreign exchange market abstract we examine the role that news and heterogeneous expectations play in the persistence of exchange rate volatility or so called meteor shower effects our empirical focus is on the u s trade balance news which is shown to have a significant and persisting effect on the exchange rate and its conditional variance furthermore the impact of u s trade balance news is not isolated to the u s foreign exchange market the degree to which u s trade balance news affects other geographical market locations is functionally related to heterogeneous priors

price discovery in the u s treasury market the impact of orderflow and liquidity on the yield curve we examine the role of price discovery in the u s treasury market through the empirical relationship between orderflow liquidity and the yield curve we find that orderflow imbalances excess buying or selling pressure can account for as much as 26 percent of the day to day variation in yields on days without major macroeconomic announcements the effect of orderflow on yields is permanent and strongest when liquidity is low all of the evidence points toward an important role of price discovery in understanding the behavior of the yield curve

economic news exchange rates and interest rates the paper esamines the post october 1979 response of exchange rates and interest rates to the new information contained in the first announcement of fifteen us macroeconomic series illarkets respond primarily to monetary news but also to news about the trade deficit domestic inflation and variables that reflect the state of the business cycle for all fifteen macroeconomic variables an increase decrease in interest rates is accompanied by an appreciation depreciation of the dollar which is consistent with models that stress price rigidity and absence of purchasing power parity the effect of economic news on asset prices has received increasing attention in the economic literature because an outcome of the efficient markets rational expectations hypothesis is that flesible asset prices change the moment new information about future fundamentals arrives in the market in the exchange rate literature the role of news has gained importance because structural models have failed to predict most of the variation in exchange rates during the 1970s see imeese and rogoff 1983 researchers were naturally led to investigate the types of news that make exchange rates so volatile and to utilize news in order to test which model of exchange rate determination is consistent with the floating eschange rate experience notable studies are those of dornbusch 1980 frenkel 1981 edwards 1982a b 1983 copeland 1984 and rose 1984 in this paper i also examine the effects of macroeconomic news on eschange rates but i adopt a different more direct strategy one that complements previous work avoids some of its shortcomings and promises interesting conclusions i examine the instantaneous response of exchange rates the moment a piece of economic news hits the market if one can isolate the exact time during a business day when news arrives it is straightforward to examine the response of exchange rates because financial data are continuously available the advantages of the present methodology are many first it is possible to identify the exact types of economic news and how they affect exchange rates second the simultaneity bias which plagues the previous literature on exchange rates and news is not present here the independent variables that represent news can be interpreted as causal the paper was presented at the 1985 meeting ofthe american economic association the author wishes to thank sebastian edwards r w hafer nicholas karamouzis andrew rose and two anonymous referees for helpful comments kim rupert of the money market services for providing the survey data soo kounne for able research assistance and barnard college for research support

the effects of macroeconomic news on high frequency exchange rate behavior this paper studies the high frequency reaction of the dem usd exchange rate to publicly announced macroeconomic information emanating from germany and the u s by us ing data sampled at a five minute frequency we are able to identify significant impacts of most announcements on the exchange rate change in the 15 minutes post announcement although the significance of these effects decreases rapidly as the interval over which the post announcement change in exchange rates is increased the direction of the exchange rate response conforms in general with a reaction function interpretation whereby reac tions to macroeconomic news are driven by the likely operations of monetary authorities in domestic money markets further we detect influences of german monetary policy deci sions on the reaction of the exchange rate and also differences between u s and german announcements in the exchange rate reaction time pattern i introduction this paper studies the high frequency reaction of the dem usd exchange rate to macroeconomic information emanating from germany and the u s specif ically we utilize exchange rate data covering the period 1 1 92 to 31 12 94 sam pled at a five minute frequency to investigate how the major monthly macroe conomic releases from these two countries impact the dem usd the infor mation contained in announcements over this three year period is extracted via a set of market expectation series supplied by money market services interna tional mms 1 our analysis improves on previous work in this area in two main respects first our study is conducted using very high frequency data whereas most earlier work has used exchange rate data sampled at a frequency of a number of hours or more this allows us to construct a very precise characterization of

illegal landings an aggregate catch self reporting mechanism to solve the problem of illegal landings this article proposes a new tax mechanism based on the regulator s own aggregate catch estimates and ex ante self reports of planned catch by fishermen we show that the mechanism avoids illegal landings while ensuring nearly optimal exploitation and generating nearly correct entry and exit incentives finally we simulate the mechanism for the danish cod fishery in kattegat to obtain a rough indicator of the size of the tax it turns out that the average tax payment as a percentage of profit is surprisingly low

an examination of the robustness of the weekend effect this paper analyzes the robustness of the day of the week dow and weekend effects to alternative estimation and testing procedures the results show that sample size can distort the interpretation of classical test statistics unless the significance level is adjusted down ward specification tests reveal widespread departures from ols assumptions hypothe sis tests results are reported using robust econometric methods and a garch model the strength of the dow and weekend effect evidence appears to depend on the estimation and testing method both effects seem to have disappeared by 1975

in defense of unanimous jury verdicts mistrials communication and strategic voting the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials is widely believed to reduce the likelihood of convicting the innocent this belief depends largely upon the assumption that jurors will vote nonstrategically based on their impression of the trial evidence recent literature however has questioned this assumption and feddersen and pesendorfer propose a model in which it is never a nash equilibrium for jurors to vote nonstrategically under unanimity rule and equilibrium behavior produces higher probabilities of both convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty under unanimity rule than under numerous alternatives i extend this work by incorporating two additional features of actual jury procedure the possibility of mistrial and communication among jurors under each circumstance i demonstrate that nonstrategic voting is a nash equilibrium under fairly general conditions and that unanimity performs better than any alternative rule in minimizing probability of trial error and maximizing expected utility

stock prices and economic news this paper examines the daily response of stock prices to announcements about the money supply inflation real economic activity and the discountrate except for the discount rate survey data on market participants expectations of these announcements are used to identify the unexpected component of the announcements in order to test the efficient markets hypothesis that only the unexpected part of any announcement the surprise moves stock prices the empirical results support this hypothesis and indicate further that surprises related to monetary policy significantly affect stock prices there is only limited evidence of an impact from inflation surprises and no evidence of an impact from real activity surprises on the announcement days there is also only weak evidence of stock price responses to surprises beyond the announcement day this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

some surprising properties of power indices abstract while it is troubling when power index values change with the index the problem is more severe different indices can generate radically different rankings for example a 15 player game exists with over a trillion different strict index rankings of the players in contrast with a fixed number of players certain indices always share the same ranking e g the shapley and banzhaf rankings agree with three players but they can have opposite rankings with more players it is explained why index outcomes can be sensitive to assumptions and to when players leave a game journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 d71

real time effects of central bank interventions in the euro market abstract this paper investigates the real time effects of sterilized foreign exchange intervention using official intraday intervention data provided by the danish central bank our analysis employs a two step weighted least squares estimation procedure we control for macro surprises address the issue of endogeneity and carry out an array of robustness tests only when the direction of intervention is consistent with the monetary policy stance do we find that intervention exerts a significant influence on exchange rate returns

the short run dynamics of the price adjustment to new information we examine how prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets adjust to the new information contained in scheduled macroeconomic news releases in the very short run using 10 second returns and tick by tick data we find that prices adjust in a series of numerous small but rapid price changes that begin within 10 seconds of the news release and are basically completed within 40 seconds of the release there is some evidence that prices overreact in the first 40 seconds but that this is corrected in the second or third minute after the release while volatility tends to be higher than normal just before the news release there is no evidence of information leakage in our analysis we correct for the biases created by bid ask spreads and tick by tick data

deutsche mark dollar volatility intraday activity patterns macroeconomic announcements and longer run dependencies this paper provides a detailed characterization of the volatility in the deutsche mark dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five minute returns the approach captures the intraday activity patterns the macroeconomic announcements and the volatility persistence arch known from daily returns the different features are separately quantified and shown to account for a substantial fraction of return variability both at the intraday and daily level the implications of the results for the interpretation of the fundamental driving forces behind the volatility process is also discussed the efficient market hypothesis contends that financial asset prices provide rational assessments of fundamental values and future payoffs by implication price changes should reflect the arrival and processing of all relevant new information however the proportion of return variability that can be ascribed to public news announcements is low for example cutler poterba and summers 1989 find that even the largest daily price changes in the stock market generally cannot be associated with any significant economic news 1 moreover proxies for the flow of public information e g the number of news items released by reuter s news service berry and hiowe 1994 or dow jones company mitchell and mulherin 1994 explain little of the overall variation thus if private information is ruled out proponents of rational price formation have to assert the existence of important news items

the impact of news and alternative theories of exchange rate determination over the last decade two of the more important developments in the area of exchange rate determination are the construction of the asset market model and the recognition that news is a key factor affecting exchange rates the asset market model has evolved as an alternative to the traditional flow model of exchange rate determination in contrast to the flow model where the exchange rate is determined by the flow demand for and flow supply of foreign exchange exchange rates adjust to allocate the total stock of foreign exchange in question in the asset market model this model may be presented in one of two forms the monetary approach or the portfolio balance approach the former is summarized in the work of bilson 1978a dornbusch 1976 frenkel 1976 johnson 1976 and mussa 1976 1979 while the latter stems from the efforts of branson 1981 branson halttunen and masson 1977 dooley and isard 1982 kouri 1976 kouri and de macedo 1978 and rodriguez 1980 while the logical consistency of these models has enhanced their popularity empirical support has been limited the importance of unanticipated shocks or news in explaining exchange rate behavior has been suggested by dornbusch 1980 frenkel 1981 isard 1983 and mussa 1979 the basis for this suggestion is the efelcient markets approach that suggests securities prices in a capital market should reflect all available information therefore the predominant cause of exchange rate movements is news that could

dissecting the tragedy a spatial model of behavior in the commons abstract much of the discussion of the tragedy of the commons focuses on aggregate impacts often in data poor developing country settings few non experimental empirical studies shed light on contextual circumstances driving the extent of rent dissipation and overexploitation we utilize a high resolution data set to estimate a behavioral model of fishermen s spatial choices a unique policy setting allows us to measure the degree to which individual fishermen s choices appear aimed at mitigating the tragedy of the commons in a small numbers setting we find evidence of partial mitigation in excess of what we would expect under pure self interest but short of what would occur under group maximizing behavior we also examine how contextual factors in the fishery shape the degree of cooperation within the fishing season and find evidence that competition for the common pool resource distorts fishermen s implicit cost of distance creating a form of common property inertia

social networks and non market valuations this paper considers the role of social networks in the non market valuation of public goods in the model individuals derive utility both from their own direct enjoyment of the public good and from the enjoyment of those in their network we find that network structure almost always matters both for utility and for valuation the network increases aggregate valuation when it assigns higher importance that is stronger connections to individuals with higher private values for the public good the model provides a theoretical foundation for the idea of opinion leaders who have disproportionate influence over their communities specifically opinion leaders are individuals assigned high importance by the network and projects favored by opinion leaders tend to be favored by the network as a whole the model can also guide future empirical studies by enabling a more structural approach to non market valuation in a socially connected group

how markets process information news releases and volatility we examine the impact of scheduled macroeconomic news announcements on interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets we find these announcements are responsible for most of the observed time of day and day of the week volatility patterns in these markets while the bulk of the price adjustment to a major announcement occurs within the first minute volatility remains substantially higher than normal for roughly fifteen minutes and slightly elevated for several hours nonetheless these subsequent price adjustments are basically independent of the first minute s return we identify those announcements with the greatest impact on these markets we examine the impact on interest rate and foreign exchange markets of scheduled macroeconomic news releases such as the employment report the consumer price index cpi and the producer price index ppi many market participants believe that such announcements have a major impact on financial markets indeed a small industry devoted to predicting the figures to be released in upcoming releases has evolved in recent years with the exception of the weekly money supply figures however the impact of such announcements on financial markets has received scant attention 1 this is doubly surprising given the considerable research interest in market volatility since these news releases are a potential source of much of this volatility consider for instance figure 1 as shown there prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets are much more volatile between 8 30 and 8 35 a m eastern time et than during any other five minute trading period including

marine ecosystem considerations and second best management we compare how the long run distribution of fishing activities is affected in multispecies fisheries when facing different second best control rules 1 species specific landing regulation and 2 global input regulation we show how this depends on the economic returns and on the type of ecological interaction considered we highlight specifically that fishing effort does not necessarily increase on nontargeted species and decrease on targeted species and that the characterization of second best efficient instruments may differ drastically depending on the nature of the interaction

economic prescriptions for environmental problems how the patient followed the doctor s orders o ne of the dangers with ivory tower theorizing is that it is easy to lose sight of the actual set of problems which need to be solved and the range of potential solutions as one who frequently engages in this exercise i can attest to this fact in my view this loss of sight has become increasingly evident in the theoretical structure underlying environmental economics which often emphasizes elegance at the expense of realism in this paper i will argue that both normative and positive theorizing could greatly benefit from a careful examination of the results of recent innovative approaches to environmental management the particular set of policies examined here involves two tools which have received widespread support from the economics community marketable permits and emission charges pigou 1932 dales 1968 kneese and schultze 1975 both tools represent ways to induce businesses to search for lower cost methods of achieving environmental standards they stand in stark contrast to the predominant command and control approach in which a regulator specifies the technology a firm must use to comply with regulations under highly restrictive conditions it can be shown that both of the economic approaches share the desirable feature that any gains in environmental quality will be obtained at the lowest possible cost baumol and oates 1975 until the 1960s these tools only existed on blackboards and in academic journals as products of the fertile imaginations of academics however some countries have recently begun to explore using these tools as part of a broader strategy for managing environmental problems

are survey forecasts of macroeconomic variables rational this article examines the rationality of forecasts of 11 macroeconomic variables among the nonstationary series only surveys of housing starts the unemployment rate and the trade balance are rational forecasts among the stationary series survey forecasts for only consumer prices and personal income are consistent with rational expectations lack of rationality in forecasts of durable goods industrial production leading indicators money supply and retail sales suggests that such forecasts do not fully exploit public information indeed survey forecasts for industrial production and retail sales can be improved significantly with past information copyright 1995 by university of chicago press

offsetting externalities in estimating mey in multispecies fisheries abstract the australian federal fisheries policy identifies maximising net economic returns as the primary objective of fisheries management this has largely been interpreted as maximising the net economic yield mey in fisheries more recently the influence of reducing yields to achieve mey on prices and the transfer of consumer surplus to producers has been raised as a potential issue achieving fishery mey may result in a reduction in net economic returns in a broader sense if the loss to consumers exceeds the gain to the industry the transfer of consumer surplus to producers is also potentially undesirable and may result in a dead weight loss similarly the disutility associated with bycatch in fisheries may also affect our interpretation of optimal yields if non monetary values are considered these externalities are generally not considered in determining mey in this paper we develop a generic multispecies bioeconomic model that is used to estimate the impact of broadening the consideration of net economic returns to include changes in consumer surplus as well as the inclusion of non market values associated with bycatch we find that traditional measures of mey may not achieve maximum returns to society overall if these externalities exist

do markets care who chairs the central bank this paper assesses the effects of central bank governor appointments on financial market expectations of monetary policy to measure these effects we assemble a new dataset of appointment announcements from 15 countries and conduct an event study analysis on exchange rates bond yields and stock prices our main findings are threefold first exchange rates and bond yields display a statistically significant response to the announcement of a new governor especially when the appointee s identity was not anticipated in advance second the reactions are especially pronounced for central banks lacking either independence or a clear nominal anchor third new governors are not generally perceived to lack credibility there is no tendency for announcements to be associated with jumps in inflation expectations

trade balance news and exchange rates is there a policy signal abstract contrary to earlier studies surprisingly large us trade deficits are shown to have a significant effect on exchange rates throughout the 1980s three possible reasons for the time varying effect are considered the evidence presented yields the following inference deficit news is likely to have changed expectations of fed intervention that moved exchange rates deficit news probably has an effect on revisions of future deficit expectations and exchange rates change as a result and deficit news may change expectations regarding us trade policy that is reflected in exchange rates

instrument choice in a fishery abstract this paper considers the choice of regulatory instruments in a fishery fishing captains consumers and input suppliers each attempt to influence the regulator s choice of instruments the regulator chooses among instruments such as input restrictions entry restrictions or individual transferable quotas itqs regulatory instruments that result in zero fishery rents can only occur if the regulator places an extraordinary weight on the welfare of input suppliers relative to fishing captains and consumers indeed heterogeneity of fishing captains is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain regulations that fail to generate fishery rents

conflicts and common interests in committees committees improve decisions by pooling members independent information but promote manipulation obfuscation and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences committee decision procedures transform continuous data into ordered ranks through voting this coarsens the transmission of information but controls strategic manipulations and allows some degree of information sharing each member becomes more cautious in casting the crucial vote than when he alone makes the decision based on own information increased quality of one member s information results in his casting the crucial vote more often committees make better decisions for members than does delegation

the reaction of exchange rates to economic news this paper examines the short run responses of spot exchange rates to several types of economic news survey data are used to divide economic announcements into expected and unexpected components with the latter measuring news the results indicate that exchange rates are systematically related to unexpected money announcements after the october 1979 switch in federal reserve operating procedures but not before this response does not appear to have changed however after the october 1982 federal reserve regime change short run exchange rate movements are not systematically related to news on inflation or real activity

optimal harvesting of ecologically interdependent fish species abstract the optimal exploitation of a two species predator prey system is considered using lotka volterra type equations due to the density dependence of ecological efficiency both species should be harvested simultaneously over a range of relative prices beyond the limits of this price range either the prey species should be utilized indirectly by harvesting the predator or the predator should be eliminated to maximize the prey yield neglecting harvesting costs the simultaneous harvest of prey and predators requires that a unit of prey biomass increase in value by being processed by predators certain results from single species fishery models are shown not to apply to multispecies models these are as follows i optimal regulation of a free access fishery may call for subsidizing instead of taxing the harvest of predator species ii increasing the discount rate may at moderate levels imply that the optimal standing stock of biomass increases instead of decreasing iii a rising price or a falling cost per unit fishing effort of a species may raise and not lower the optimal standing stock of that species

balance of trade announcements and asset prices influence on equity prices exchange rates and interest rates abstract this paper examines the informational impact of traded balance announcements on asset prices including equities currrencies long and short term debt instruments and financial futures this study finds that in the 1980s prior to the 1985 plaza agreement for international economic cooperation information in trade balance announcements seem to have influenced only interest rates however in the 1985 1987 period such announcements also influenced stock prices and currency values these influences intensity further in the 1987 1988 period thus asset prices are sensitive to news in trade balance announcements and this sensitivity seems to have increased significantly in recent years with important implications for asset pricing models and economic policy formulation jel f30

regulation of fisheries bycatch with common pool output quotas abstract many fisheries around the world are plagued with the problem of bycatch the inadvertent harvesting and discard of non targeted species bycatch occurs when targeted and non targeted species coincide in the same habitat and gear is imperfectly selective one of the prevailing methods of controlling bycatch is the common pool quota system under this system biologists set total allowable catches tacs for both the targeted and non targeted species and the fishing season is closed when one of these tacs binds we develop a predictive model of a renewable resource that is regulated with this kind of common pool quota system the model demonstrates that the equilibrium will generally be characterized by excessive discards shortened seasons and foregone target species harvest these results occur even with very efficient low bycatch fishing gear we examine the sensitivity of our predictions to changes in technological parameters and degrees of spatial correlation of target and non target species finally we derive the optimal bycatch penalty function and describe its significance in light of various policy options available to regulators

economic model of opec coalition efforts to formulate the economic behavior of opec are complicated because the coalition is made up of member countries each of which pursues a different objective arrives at its own optimum price and quantity and has an opportunity to participate in a group consensus this requires a new cartel model that will explain the coalitionary process yet remain flexible enough to consider the diverse objectives of individual members the author analyzes the possibility of realizing this consensus in relation to the differing politico economic structures of the members he concludes that the long run stability of opec requires reversing some historical patterns although offsetting effects may avoid a short term instability 19 references 3 figures 2 tables

stochastic bycatch informational asymmetry and discarding abstract the existing literature i examines bycatch and discard behavior in a static framework and ii treats bycatch as a deterministic process uniform across vessels using a dynamic representative agent model in a two stock resource this paper explores strategic interactions between a social planner and two groups of harvesters one of which imposes a stochastic technological externality bycatch on the other in addition to limitations on entry and the number of trips taken in each industry three bycatch control instruments are compared to the unconstrained case taxes trip limits and value based quotas implementation and enforcement costs aside taxes dominate both types of quota and value limits outperform trip limits by eliminating one type of discarding in simulations relative performance depends upon variance in the bycatch process differences in the ex vessel prices of stocks relative efficiency of the harvester types and fixed costs on the trip and industry margins

public regulation and the structure of production in multiproduct industries an application to the new england otter trawl industry this article considers the problem of managing multispecies fishing industries as one of regulating the production of individual multiproduct firms the multispecies new england otter trawl industry is examined within this framework empirical results derived from estimating a multiproduct profitfunction indicate that management consistent with the structures ofmultiproduct production and costs would directly regulate inputs little support is provided for applying the traditional bioeconomic model to the fishery studied

bioeconomies of scope and the discard problem in multiple species fisheries abstract we consider the problem of multi species fisheries management when targeting individual species is costly and at sea discards of fish by fishermen are unobserved by the regulator stock conditions ecosystem interaction technological specification and relative prices under which at sea discards are acute are identified a dynamic model is developed to balance ecological interdependencies among multiple fish species and scope economies implicit in a costly targeting technology three regulatory regimes species specific harvest quotas landing taxes and revenue quotas are contrasted against a hypothetical sole owner problem an optimal plan under all regimes precludes discarding for both very low and very high levels of targeting costs first best welfare is close to that achieved through any of the regulatory regimes in general however landing taxes welfare dominate species specific quota regulation a revenue quota fares the worst

contracting problems and regulation the case of the fishery the inefficiencies of common property fisheries are of continuing concern to economists the early work by scott gordon 1954 and anthony scott 1955 outlined the problem and later studies by james crutchfield and giulio pontecorvo 1969 and frederick bell 1972 provided empirical estimates of the losses that result those studies were followed by the dynamic models of colin clark 1976 and james quirk and vernon smith 1970 of optimal harvest rates and the use of corrective taxes or quotas to achieve them but in spite of a large and growing literature and the persuasiveness of the outlined efficiency criteria most fisheries retain common property aspects with overcapitalization and excessive labor input why those conditions persist and the failure of the regulatory response to them are the issues addressed in this paper we examine a number of fisheries but focus on the texas shrimp industry which is one of the nation s most valuable fisheries for a single species and which shares the common property characteristics observed elsewhere it is considered overcapitalized and catch per unit of effort is falling 2 examination of the fishery reveals the many margins along which rent dissipation occurs and the nature of the regulations necessary for controlling fishing effort to avoid those losses the regulatory environment in texas is complicated by conflict within the fishery between inshore and offshore fishermen the latter assert that bay shrimping reduces the number of shrimp that successfully migrate to the gulf the inshore fishery is highlighted by another issue the recent resettlement of some 30 45 000 vietnamese refugees including many fishermen along the texas coast marine advisory service paul starr their entry has been met by hostility and violence from existing shrimpers who recognize that they are in an environment characterized by the absence of property rights bay shrimpers have lobbied the texas legislature for broad limits on new entrants yet ironically the sale of additional boats by individual shrimpers to the vietnamese has facilitated entry of the refugees into the fishery regulations in the texas shrimp and other fisheries are incomplete leaving many options for rent dissipation uncontrolled because of high contracting costs among fishermen and political factors that mold government actions contracting costs are high among heterogeneous fishermen who vary principally with regard to fishing skill 3 montana state university and texas a m university respectively we benefitted from comments by terry anderson raymond c battalio gardner brown oscar burt micha gisser wade griffin john r moroney anthony d scott peter temin and participants in workshops at texas a m university and the university of washington research assistance was provided by scott barnhart and phil mizzi funding was provided by sea grant texas a m university throughout this paper we use the terms common property and open access interchangeably here the terms describe a situation where no property rights group or individual exist s for the resource 2catch per unit of effort in the inshore texas gulf and federal gulf waters is presented for 1963 77 by w l griffin c g tydlacka and w e grant they show catch per unit of effort generally falling in inshore and offshore waters while catch per unit of effort fluctuates from year to year it falls from approximately 360 kg shrimp per unit of effort to 220 kg from 1963 to 1977 the common property nature of the fishery is reflected in the following statistics since 1975 the number of vessels has grown by 23 percent nelson swartz for fish houses the record of entry is similar between 1970 a d 1977 the number of firms grew from 259 to 287 though during that period many left the industry as others entered the number of fish houses was calculated from license data supplied by the texas parks and wildlife department the record of entry by fish houses suggests that monopsony as discussed by colin clark and gordon munro is absent in the fishery 3there may be minor differences in labor leisure choices and capital but our statistical evidence and discussions with fishermen indicate that catch variations are largely due to skill government regulations in the texas bays restrict capital and our empirical evidence shows boats to be relatively homogeneous

votes based on protracted deliberations abstract we analyze group decision making in situations in which members discuss the value of a continuous random variable then take an up or down vote based on their assessments of the continuous variable applications include jury deliberations and tenure and promotion or partnership votes we determine conditions under which the group can reach a consensus on the value of the continuous variable conditions under which the group fails to reach an agreement on the up or down vote and when the outcome of a successful up or down vote matches the consensus on the continuous variable we also consider the impact of unanimous versus nonunanimous voting rules

consensus and uncertainty in economic prediction we define consensus as the degree of agreement among point predictions aimed at the same target by different individuals and uncertainty as the diffuseness of the corresponding probability distributions this distinction is made operational with the aid of the nber asa survey data on matched point and probabilistic forecasts of inflation and the rate of change in gross national product the means of the two sets of forecasts agree closely standard deviations of point forecasts tend to understate uncertainty as measured by standard deviations of the predictive probability distributions however these measures of consensus and uncertainty are on the whole positively correlated there is evidence that expectations of higher inflation generate greater uncertainty about inflation tests also favor the hypothesis that a rise in inflation uncertainty has adverse effects on real growth

is bad news cause of asymmetric volatility response a note this article uses a direct test of the impact of economic news on stock volatility the main interest is to test whether the asymmetric response of volatility can be due to the effect of bad news to do this this study takes items of news into account as exogenous variables the analysis is divided into two stages each of which uses different items of news as exogenous variables additional to the information provided by the residuals the first stage uses more exhaustively classified information whereas the second considers daily information as a global sign this study finds that bad news is responsible for most of the observed asymmetric behaviour of variance further this study detects that the gjr model adequately captures the impact of bad news when traders are not ready to carry out a time consuming analysis of the information

harvest efficiency and fishery discards under harvest uncertainty and trading restrictions abstract we study harvesting efficiency and the problem of discards under harvest uncertainty in a fishery that is managed with quotas with only idiosyncratic harvest uncertainty we show that frictionless post harvest quota trade can achieve full efficiency and eliminate quota overage discards completely in the absence of such trade we deduce an ad valorem tax subsidy that eliminates discards while delivering a desired aggregate harvest target alternatively we show that a hybrid policy i e a combined quota and landings fee can implement a manager s aggregate target harvest level efficiently and without discards when harvest shocks in addition have a fishery wide common component post harvest quota trading per se cannot eliminate discards policy intervention in the form of either landing taxes or a hybrid scheme is needed given the prevalence of trading restrictions in many quota managed fisheries worldwide our paper offers important policy advice

news from the u s and japan which moves the yen dollar exchange rate abstract intra daily movements in the yen dollar exchange rate are examined in four non overlapping segments within each business day from january 1980 to september 1985 the results indicate that the dollar tended to appreciate in the new york segment and depreciate in the european segment in three of the four subsamples considered the tokyo segment made virtually no contribution to annual yen dollar rate movements the volatility of the exchange rate also differed across markets finally in examining the relative effects of news from the u s and japan explicitly u s money announcement surprises had the most consistent effects

fishing technology and optimal distribution of harvest rates this paper examines the problem of the optimal management of a joint ownership fishing exploitation where agents use different fishing gears we consider a model in which the fishing activity may affect resource growth not only through the harvest function but also through the natural growth rate of the resource this allows us to capture the fact that some fishing gears alter the natural growth rate of the resource we find that when the natural growth of the resource is altered by the fishing technology the optimal stock is not independent of how harvest quotas are distribute among the agents as a result a fishing policy that firstly determines the optimum stock and secondly decides how to distribute the harvest among the different agents will not be efficient we also analyze the joint determination of optimal stock and harvest quotas and show that positive harvest quotas will only be optimal when countries are characterized by certain asymmetries