currency and credit in a private information economy in an environment with private information spatial separation and limited communication a currency like object and more standard named credits can be distinguished the credit objects can be used among agents in an enduring relationship that is among agents with known trading histories whereas the currency like object must be used among relative strangers in this environment collectively determined pareto optimal rules make the level of the currency like object and the mix of currency to named credits responsive to individual needs and to economywide states total indebtedness is determined by the number of lenders that is by preference or demand shocks and the mix of currency to credits is determined by transaction patterns among the agents

anonymous markets and monetary trading abstract we study infinite horizon monetary economies characterized by trading frictions that originate from random pairwise meetings and commitment and enforcement limitations we prove that introducing occasional trade in centralized markets opens the door to an informal enforcement scheme that sustains a non monetary efficient allocation all is required is that trading partners be patient and their actions be observable we then present a matching environment in which trade may occur in large markets and yet agents trading paths cross at most once this allows the construction of models in which infinitely lived agents trade in competitive markets where money plays an essential role

the political economics of austerity the 2007 8 financial crisis has reignited the debate about economic austerity with the aim of understanding why a government would pursue such a policy in the current context of persistent economic recession this article traces the social political and economic developments that have together shaped the evolution of ideas about austerity from the earliest theorizing by the classical political economists some three hundred years ago throughout the historical narrative important analytical themes revolve around the arguments used to justify austerity notably appeals to ethics and morality reinforced by misleading analogies drawn between government budgets and the accounts of firms and households these include concerns about inflation and the observed relationship between inflation and unemployment ricardian equivalence and non keynesian effects of austerity and the correlation between public debt levels and economic growth the class analytics of austerity who bears the burden of austerity and who benefits and the process by which alternative ideas penetrate the mainstream and reconstitute the conventional wisdom are also important analytical themes

demand for charity donations in private non profit markets the case of the u k abstract this paper presents estimates of the demand for donations for u k charities in 1985 these estimates make demand depend upon price fund raising expenditure a quality index and alternative revenue sources the price elasticity of donations found here shows for the most part an elastic response and is consistent with previous studies using u s data our empirical results suggest that non profits in the u k unlike their counterparts in the u s are net revenue maximisers we discovered no significant evidence that public donations crowded out private donations in our sample of 300 charities

public good provision and ancillary benefits the case of climate agreements several studies found ancillary benefits of the provision of public goods to be of considerable size if these additional private benefits were noticed they would imply not only higher cooperative but also non cooperative provision levels however beyond these largely undisputed important quantitative effects there would be qualitative and strategic implications associated with ancillary benefits public policy would no longer be a pure but an impure public good in this paper we investigate these implications in a setting of non cooperative coalition formation in the context of climate change in particular we address the following question would ancillary benefits if they were taken in consideration increase participation in international climate agreements and raise the success of these treaties in welfare terms

why do people give testing pure and impure altruism abstract researchers measure crowd out around one level of charity output to identify whether giving is motivated by altruism and or warm glow however crowd out depends on output implying first that the power to reject pure altruism varies and second that a single measurement of incomplete crowd out can be rationalized by many different preferences by instead measuring crowd out at different output levels we allow both for identification and for a novel and direct test of impure altruism using a new experimental design we present the first empirical evidence that consistent with impure altruism crowd out decreases with output jel d64 l31

monopolistic competition growth and public good provision a normal good in this article i develop a model of public good provision in which private goods are supplied in a monopolistically competitive market in this context increases in the size of the group are increases in the population of a society i find that increases in population lead to reduced public good provision the reason is quite simple as population increases the number of private goods available for consumption also increases this raises the marginal utility of income and increases the opportunity cost of contributing to the public good while the level of voluntary contributions falls in this model the optimal level of provision is shown to increase with population thus there is a growing divergence between the optimal and equilibrium levels of provision of the public good in the standard model with a pure public good individual welfare rises with an increase in population both because of the increase in the level of provision of the public good and the reduced contribution per person that results from the population increase furthermore in the model of monopolistic competition without a public good welfare also increases with population due to the wider of variety of goods which are available in a larger economy however when the models are combined an increase in popu lation has an ambiguous effect on welfare this stems from the reduction in the level of provision of the public good as the population increases the model of monopolistic competition in this article is based on krugman 1980 this model assumes a simple form of increasing returns to scale under which each good may be produced by incurring a fixed set up cost plus a constant marginal cost of production when the population increases the economy can support a broader range of goods and this leads to a higher real income for individuals in the economy thus economic growth arising from a scale effect leads to reduced contributions to the public good in this model economic growth can also be caused by increases in total factor productivity in the model of monopolistic competition used here this would be reflected by reductions the fixed and marginal cost of production it turns out that reductions in these parameters also lead to reduced public good provision

sine praejudicio economics and the 2014 scottish independence referendum the purpose of this paper is to analyse the contribution of expert economic opinion to the 2014 referendum campaigns on scottish independence we argue that the input from economics to both sides of the debate as well as to independent analysis was constrained by a mainstream economics framing the result was a focus on calculable outcomes predicated on unchanging institutions and behaviour and the question of currency arrangements that assumes the status quo is an optimal currency area as the consequences of constitutional change for institutions and behaviour are uncertain an equilibrium framework treats anything beyond calculable prediction as a shock inducing fear of the unknown in contrast a political economy approach is tailored to analysing uncertain developments and encompassing the broader issues relating to values democracy and power and is thus better suited to the analysis of constitutional change

public goods provision redistributive taxation and wealth accumulation this paper presents an extension of a static model of public goods provision with redistributional taxation as described by uler journal of public economics 93 3 4 pp 440 453 as a dynamic model of wealth accumulation intertemporal consumption and saving behavior strongly affect the relation between redistributive taxation and charitable contribution indeed the analyses presented herein reveal that more patience i e higher saving engenders a lower redistributional tax rate however the optimal redistributive tax rate is not zero because redistributive taxation improves the efficiency of providing public goods that are not improved by balanced growth this paper fills the gap separating static analysis and dynamic analysis and generalizes the results presented by static analysis

search evolution and money abstract this paper describes a search theoretic model that can be used to determine which objects serve as media of exchange or money existing versions of the model are generalized to allow arbitrary distributions of agents who specialize in different consumption production activities i characterize the way the numbers of consumers and producers of the various goods help determine which goods serve as money the distribution is then endogenized so that agents can choose their type this generates a unique equilibrium outcome ideas from evolutionary dynamics are employed as a way to interpret the model and to compute equilibria

fiat exchange in finite economies the state of the art of rendering fiat money valuable is either to impose a boundary condition or to make the boundary condition unimportant through an infinite sequence of markets so as to circumvent backward induction we show fiat exchange may nevertheless arise in finite economies if agents have incomplete information about their relative position in the trade cycle or when the barter and autarky equilibria of the one shot trading round support a monetary equilibrium with repeated trades

a theory of impact philanthropy this article develops a new model of altruism called impact philanthropy an impact philanthropist is someone who wants to personally make a difference while that motive is straightforward its logical implications are significantly different from other models of philanthropy for example the contributions of other donors can reduce an impact philanthropist s charitable fulfillment as a result cooperation among impact philanthropists can reduce aggregate giving in addition impact philanthropy can lead to a codependent relationship between givers and receivers in which both benefit from the other finally the model suggests a conflict between charitable organizations and its donors concerning the allocation of charitable gifts in particular a charitable organization prefers to spread a donor s contribution across many goods whereas a donor prefers to target his or her contribution at a specific good d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

retrospectives the lost art of economics economists generally divide economics into two distinct categories positive and normative but how applied economics fits within these categories is unclear this paper argues that applied economics belongs in neither normative nor positive economics instead it belongs in a third category the art of economics currently many economists are trying to use a methodology appropriate for positive economics to guide their applied work work that properly belongs in the art of economics this three part distinction is not mine but dates back to a classic book the scope and method of political economy 1891 by john neville keynes in his book keynes argued that economists failure to distinguish the art of economics as a separate branch from positive and normative economics would lead to serious problems one hundred years later he has turned out to be clairvoyant

assets general equilibrium and the neutrality of money when government liabilities including money are held in private portfolios only as stores of value and do not provide additional services such as liquidity real variables are not affected by changes in the money supply due to the government s trading in real assets open market operations this neutrality of monetary policy fails if the government either trades in nominal assets or it distributes subsidies and levies taxes the ability of monetary policy to affect real variables is an important issue and has been the subject of numerous theoretical and empirical studies the most useful theoretical framework within which to address the problem is a model of asset markets where the demand for money or other government liabilities is determined by rational portfolio choice tobin 1958 these assets may of course provide additional services such as transactions and liquidity we assume here however that these services do not exist the standard argument for the effectiveness of monetary policy goes as follows changes in the supply of money affect the price level and hence the distribution of returns to money as an asset as individuals realign their portfolios and prices adjust to maintain market clearing the equilibrium holdings of physical assets change in this case money is not neutral we shall argue however that as long as changes in the supply of money are effected through the government s trading in real assets this argument is in general not valid it is well known that the effectiveness of monetary policy depends on the method of injection of new money into the economy two procedures are used by the government to effect changes in the supply of money it either trades in assets nominal or real open market operations or it distributes subsidies and levies taxes we show here that open market operations in real assets capital or indexed bonds have no effects on real variables in a general equilibrium model with market clearing the argument which can also be applied to the management of the public debt is presented in a most general framework in the next section it does not depend on the existence of a complete system of contingent securities or on an operative bequest motive furthermore it is compatible with incomplete and differential information the result is similar to the modigliani miller theorem in corporate finance that an argument along these lines can be employed to demonstrate the irrelevance of open

can we improve the structure of financial systems 1993 the main theme of this paper is that several of the characteristics of our present western monetary and banking systems have been crucially dependent on the particular temporal process of historical development and are not an essential feature of more fundamental preferences or technological conditions they exist in part because we take them for granted it is the purpose of this paper to examine what might change in both theory and practice if some of these inessential characteristics were to be changed

public good provision in indian rural areas the returns to collective action by microfinance groups self help groups shgs are the most common form of microfinance in india the authors provide evidence that shgs composed of women only undertake collective actions for the provision of public goods within village communities using a theoretical model this paper shows that an elected official whose aim is to maximize re election chances exerts higher effort in providing public goods when private citizens undertake collective action and coordinate their voluntary contributions towards the same goods this effect occurs although government and private contributions are assumed to be substitutes in the technology of providing public goods using first hand data on shgs in india the paper tests the prediction of the model and shows that in response to collective action by shgs local authorities tackle a larger variety of public issues and are more likely to tackle issues of interest to shgs the findings highlight how the social behavior of shgs can influence the governance of rural indian communities

tax transfer policies and the voluntary provision of public goods abstract the purpose of this paper is twofold first it extends previous models of non cooperative private funding of pure public goods by allowing both for distortionary taxation of private goods and for subsidies based on contributions to the public goods second it clarifies the type of behavioral and informational assumptions which are needed to insure neutrality of both lump sum and distortionary policies the analysis is developed in the context of fiscal federalism

information asymmetry and equilibrium monitoring in education abstract we develop a theoretical and computational model of school choice and achievement that embeds information asymmetries in the provision of education because school effort is unobservable to households and policymakers schools have an incentive to under provide effort this moral hazard affects both public and private schools although public schools are subject to an additional distortion because of limited competition and fixed funding household monitoring of schools can mitigate moral hazard but some households may free ride on the monitoring of others using our calibrated model we simulate two policies aimed at raising achievement public monitoring of public schools and private school vouchers our results indicate that in large scale settings no single tool may suffice the reason is twofold a no tool raises achievement or welfare for all households and b since the extent of moral hazard is endogenous the application of each tool has unintended consequences that limit its own effectiveness results also indicate that setting the policy parameters for public schools at the levels preferred by the majority of households may mitigate the distortions nonetheless the current actual values of these parameters seem to match more closely the preferences of public schools than the preferences of parents

the second dividend and the demographic structure the demographic structure of a country influences economic activity the second dividend modifies growth accordingly in general equilibrium the second dividend and the demographic structure are interrelated this paper aims at assessing empirically the second dividend in a dynamic empirical and intertemporal setting that allows for measuring its impact on growth its intergenerational redistributive effects and its interaction with the demographic structure the paper uses a general equilibrium model with overlapping generations an energy module and a public finance module that distinguishes between non ageing related public spending and a pension regime policy scenarios compare the consequences of different scenarios of recycling a carbon tax through lower proportional income taxes rather than higher public lump sum expenditures they are computed for two countries with different demographics france and germany results suggest that the magnitude of the second dividend is significantly related with the demographic structure the more concentrated the demographic structure on cohorts with higher income and saving rate the stronger the effect on capital supply of the second dividend the second dividend weighs on the welfare of relatively aged working cohorts it fosters the wellbeing of young working cohorts and of future generations the more concentrated the demographic structure on aged working cohorts the higher the intergenerational redistributive effects of the second dividend

inventories and money holdings in a search economy the authors analyze a continuous time model with a walrasian labor market and a random search retail market with prices set on a take it or leave it basis the equilibrium distribution of money holdings is the asymptotic steady state of this stochastic process there is a unique uniform price steady state equilibrium the faster the search process the higher the absolute price wage and real wage the instantaneous effect of an equal per capita infusion of money is to raise the price wage real wage and transactions rate the immediate post infusion price and wage can overshoot their new asymptotic values copyright 1990 by the econometric society

ideals versus dollars donors charity managers and government grants this paper demonstrates how changes in untied lump sum government grants or income from unrestricted endowments will affect the behavior of charities operated by managers with strong philosophical or professional commitments an increase in such funds will reduce the charity s accountability to private donors and lower its fund raising activities the grant will not be spent entirely on raising the quantity of output instead it will permit the charity manager to reduce his or her dependence on the costly solicitation of donors who do not completely share the manager s preferences in order to understand nonprofit charities one must recognize both their diversity and the independent role of their managers in furthering this diversity we will miss much of their special character if we view them as mere conduits seeking faithfully to reify the wishes of their contributors in this paper i demonstrate how an increase or a fall in untied lump sum government grants or income from unrestricted endowments will affect the behavior of charities operated by managers with strong philosophical or professional commitments to some service mixes rather than others an increase in such funds will reduce the charity s accountability to private donors and lower its fund raising activities the grant will not be spent entirely on raising

fiat money and quality uncertainty the paper studies the role of money as a medium of exchange when barter trade is restricted not only by the double coincidence of wants requirement but also by private information about the quality of commodities for this purpose the model of kiyotaki and wright 1989 is extended to include commodities of both high and low quality it is shown that despite being intrinsically useless fiat money may have value in trade because it is of uniform quality moreover the introduction of a sufficiently small amount of fiat money proves to be welfare increasing

on endogenous competitive business cycles the belief that the long run equilibrium of a competitive monetary economy that does not experience any exogeneous shocks whether originating from the external environment or from policy should be modelled as a state that is stationary or perhaps growing at a constant rate seems to be deeply rooted in the mind of some economists

on money as a medium of exchange we analyze economies in which individuals specialize in consumption and production and meet randomly over time in a way that implies that trade must be bilateral and quid pro quo nash equilibria in trading strategies are characterized certain goods emerge endogenously as media of exchange or commodity money depending both on their intrinsic properties and on extrinsic beliefs there are also equilibria with genuine fiat currency circulating as the general medium of exchange we find that equilibria are not generally pareto optimal and that introducing fiat currency into a commodity money economy may unambiguously improve welfare velocity acceptability and liquidity are discussed

the evolution of monetary equilibrium abstract the hahn problem is that even if a monetary equilibrium with valued fiat money exists in general equilibrium a nonmonetary equilibrium with a zero price on money generally also exists why should we expect the former over the latter here i consider the preferences that will survive repeated trading in an exchange economy where agents compete in biological fitness with unobservable preferences and positive assortativity in matching evolutionarily stable preferences implement the competitive equilibrium that maximizes the sum of agents fitnesses in a standard bewley townsend model this implies selection of the monetary over the nonmonetary equilibrium and also implies the survival of agents with money in the utility function trust in fiat money is only a recent development and even today such faith is hardly universal cass and shell 1980

the challenge of monetary theory departing from custom i want to address a problem that needs to be solved rather than one that has been solved i do not have much to contribute to its solution but i believe that the problem is important and want to focus attention on it in general terms the problem is to find appropriate conceptual foundations for monetary economics i believe that we do not as yet have a suitable theoretical framework for studying the functioning of a monetary system the main obstacle to the development of such a framework is our habit of thinking in terms of frictionless organized i e walrasian markets the problem is partly a problem of language the central concepts of economics demand supply and price are concepts that presuppose a system of centralized walrasian markets we are used to thinking in terms of these concepts and we tend to apply them rather automatically to the market for money frequently without realizing that the market for money must be a rather non walrasian market if indeed it can be called a market at all more or less all the models of monetary economics that are being used in practice proceed in this way using artifical adaptations of the walrasian centralized markets model to accommodate money without actually giving an account of what the role of money in the economy is the problem is one of pure economic theory however it bears on many important questions of applied economics and economic policy to study the relation between money income and prices we need a framework which gives a satisfactory account of the relation between the monetary system and the price mechanism to study the effects of central bank open market

international monetary trade and the law of one price abstract we endogenize circulation of currencies and price formation in a decentralized trading environment with two countries and two currencies in equilibrium sellers of homogeneous goods may post prices in the national or also in the foreign currency given unobservable buyers valuations we prove that under different monetary regimes the absence of well integrated international goods markets doesn t necessarily imply a violation of the law of one price we also illustrate the behavior of prices across regimes characterized by different degrees of monetary integration

endogenous market formation and monetary trade an experiment the theory of money assumes decentralized bilateral exchange and excludes centralized multilateral exchange however endogenizing the exchange process is critical for understanding the conditions that support the use of money we develop a traveling game to study the emergence of decentralized and centralized exchange theoretically and experimentally players located on separate islands can either trade locally or pay a cost to trade elsewhere so decentralized and centralized markets can both emerge in equilibrium the former minimize trade costs through monetary exchange the latter maximizes overall surplus through nonmonetary exchange monetary trade emerges when coordination is problematic whereas centralized trade emerges otherwise this shows that to understand the emergence of money it is important to amend standard theory such that the market structure is endogenized

a price discrimination analysis of monetary policy monetary policy is analysed within a model that appeals to legal restrictions on private intermediation to explain the coexistence of currency and interest bearing default free bonds the interaction between such legal restrictions and monetary policy is illustrated in a version of the overlapping generations model the model shows that legal restrictions and the use of both currency and bonds permit the government to levy a nonlinear inflation tax and that such a tax may be better in terms of the pareto criterion than a linear inflation tax

media coverage and charitable giving after the 2004 tsunami author affiliation philip h brown department of economics colby college 5246 mayflower hill waterville me 04901 usa e mail phbrown colby edu corresponding author jessica h minty analysis group inc 111 huntington avenue 10th floor boston ma 02199 usa e mail jminty analysisgroup com acknowledgment we are grateful to claudio agostini michael donihue martin farnham rebecca graninger daniel hamermesh melanie siben tom tietenberg andreas waldkirch seminar participants at colby college and two anonymous referees for numerous helpful comments and suggestions we would also like to acknowledge reuters alertnet and chuck lakin for their assistance in identifying data sources and care usa catholic relief services mercy corps surfaid international and four other relief agencies for providing data for the purpose of this research finally philip h brown would like to thank the international food policy research institute for sabbatical support during the preparation of this manuscript 1 introductionrelief workers have long believed in the causal relationship between media coverage of humanitarian crises and charitable giving to relief agencies for example private donations to relief agencies during the early stages of the 1994 rwandan genocide were sufficient to support approximately one million displaced rwandans but after the tribulations of o j simpson and tanya harding eclipsed rwanda in the media funding for relief activities began to decline the perception among many aid workers in the camps for rwandan refugees including one of the authors was that the media had turned its back on the crisis with potentially dire consequences 1while anecdotal evidence abounds few studies have systematically assessed the relationship between media coverage and the behavior of private donors and those that do suffer from important analytical shortcomings for example an analysis undertaken by the institute for philanthropy finds that 14 of 15 surveyed british philanthropists believe that the media has the power to encourage private giving with 11 of the 15 being inspired to make charitable donations themselves breeze 2005 similarly olsen carstenson and hoyen 2003 find a high correlation between the total number of relevant articles in western newspapers and the total amount of humanitarian assistance allocated to victims of the flooding in mozambique in 2000 and the cyclone in eastern india in 1999 unfortunately neither sample is large enough to make generalizations nor is there any attempt to quantify the magnitude of the causal relationship in part the difficulty in quantifying the relationship stems from disentangling the effect of new developments in stories covered in the media from the pure effect of media coverage returning to the rwanda case the former is tantamount to asking what is the combined effect of 10 000 additional deaths and a five minute news story on donations to u s charities while the latter is equivalent to asking given that 10 000 people were killed what is the effect of increasing the news story from five minutes to six in this paper we use the december 26 2004 tsunami as a case study to quantify the causal effect of media coverage on donations to charity specifically we consider the effects of reporting on three nightly network news broadcasts and articles in two prominent newspapers on private donations to seven u s relief agencies to eliminate the time lag between when news reports are seen or read and when donations are received by relief agencies we focus exclusively on donations made via the internet we also control for donor fatigue tax incentives and weekends to better isolate the effect of media coverage finally to alleviate simultaneity concerns and omitted variable bias including new developments in the tsunami story itself we use announcements of casualties among u

pareto optimal redistribution comment occurs in the context of the hochmanrodgers scheme is a function of a people s rate of substitution between the satisfaction derived from retaining income and that derived from giving it and b the initial distribution of earnings which exists before giving occurs whatever the values of a the outcome will differ depending on b such at least will be the case unless everybody s rate of substitution is such that complete equality results pareto optimal redistribution thus constitutes a secondary redistribution which depends on the initial distribu

optimal tax treatment of private contributions for public goods with and without warm glow preferences abstract tax favored contributions for financing some public goods may be a useful part of optimal nonlinear income tax and expenditure policy there are two sides to the potential gain from subsidized donations first for a given level of public good provision higher private donations from high earners than low earners eases the incentive compatibility constraint for donors and so can raise social welfare this follows since considering a lower paid job includes a perception of a drop in public good provision second private donation reduces consumption easing the resource constraint this paper explores optimal policy using first a model with standard preferences and then a model with a warm glow of giving in addition to showing the conditions for the level of public goods the paper considers the pattern of optimal subsidization across earnings levels analysis of optimal taxation with warm glow preferences is sensitive to the choice of preferences that are relevant for a social welfare evaluation after considering optimal rules with formulations of social welfare which do and do not include warm glow utility the paper considers the choice of normative criterion like the earlier literature this paper assumes that organizing private donations is costless while tax collection has a deadweight burden since private charitable fundraising is very far from costless the paper is an exploration of economic mechanisms not a direct guide to policy

markets do not select for a liquidity preference as behavior towards risk tobin 1958 has argued that in the face of potential capital losses on bonds it is reasonable to hold cash as a means to transfer wealth over time it is shown that this assertion cannot be sustained taking into account the evolution of wealth of cash holders versus non cash holders cash holders will be driven out of the market in the long run by traders who only use a risky long lived asset to transfer wealth moreover bond holders do not survive in the presence of only stock holders even if the payofi of bonds dominates the dividend of stock

volunteer labor supply abstract we model the supply of volunteer labor which received an explicit wage of zero quantitatively important it constituted over 5 percent of the entire labor supply in the united states in 1980 both consumption and investment models are considered the former positing volunteering as an ordinary consumer good while the latter posits it as a means of obtaining on the job experience empirical estimation based on survey data discloses statistically significant effects of price and income variables on the supply of volunteer labor

interior matching equilibria in a public good economy an aggregative game approach abstract if the equilibrium generated by a matching mechanism is to be the desired pareto optimal outcome it is necessary for every player to be at an interior solution at that equilibrium using the aggregative game approach developed by cornes and hartley 2003 2007 this paper analyzes the conditions under which matching mechanisms in a public good economy lead to interior matching equilibria at which all agents make strictly positive flat contributions to the public good in particular we show that the distribution of income among the agents is crucial for both the existence of interior matching equilibria and warr neutrality in the case of matching

money and interest in a cash in advance economy the authors analyze an aggregative general equilibrium model in which the use of money is motivated by a cash in advance constraint applied to purchases of a subset of consumption goods the system is subject to both real and monetary shocks which are economy wide and observed by all they develop methods for verifying the existence of characterizing and explicitly calculating equilibria copyright 1987 by the econometric society

do government subsidies increase the private supply of public goods we study three different models in which public goods are supplied by private contributions in one of these models tax financed government subsidies to private contributions will definitely increase the equilibrium supply of public goods in the other two models government subsidies are neutralized by offsetting changes in private contributions we explain why it is that these models lead to opposite conclusions and we argue on the basis of our first model that a government that wants to use taxes and subsidies to increase total provision of public goods will be able to do so indeed our model yields a surprisingly decisive comparative statics result if public goods and private goods are both normal goods then an increase in the subsidy rate will necessarily increase the equilibrium supply of public goods

the intergenerational transmission of generosity abstract this paper estimates the correlation between the generosity of parents and the generosity of their adult children using regression models of adult children s charitable giving new charitable giving data are collected in the panel study of income dynamics and used to estimate the regression models the regression models are estimated using a wide variety of techniques and specification tests and the strength of the intergenerational giving correlations is compared with intergenerational correlations in income wealth and consumption expenditure from the same sample using the same set of controls we find the religious giving of parents and children to be strongly correlated as strongly correlated as are their income and wealth the correlation in the secular giving e g giving to the united way educational institutions for poverty relief of parents and children is smaller similar in magnitude to the intergenerational correlation in consumption parents religious giving is positively associated with children s secular giving but in a more limited sense overall the results are consistent with generosity emerging at least in part from the influence of parental charitable behavior in contrast to intergenerational models in which parental generosity towards their children can undo government transfer policy ricardian equivalence these results suggest that parental generosity towards charitable organizations might reinforce government policies such as tax incentives aimed at encouraging voluntary transfers

outside versus inside bonds a modigliani miller type result for liquidity constrained economies when agents are liquidity constrained two options exist sell assets or borrow we compare the allocations arising in two economies in one agents can sell government outside bonds and in the other they can borrow by issuing inside bonds all transactions are voluntary implying no taxation or forced redemption of private debt we show that any allocation in the economy with inside bonds can be replicated in the economy with outside bonds but that the converse is not true however the optimal policy in each economy makes the allocations equivalent

debt enforcement and the value of money this paper presents a framework in which fiat money has value in equilibrium even though a risk free higher return asset can be equally used as a medium of exchange in a limited commitment environment agents may prefer to borrow a low return asset because that results in a larger borrowing capacity thus a monetary equilibrium in which money is dominated in rate of return exists

do immigrants and their children free ride more than natives the main goal of this paper is to analyze the differences between immigrant and native households in their volunteer contributions and private transfer behavior as well as their receipt of assistance from nongovernment sources in addition we examine how the immigrant native differences evolve over time as immigrant households accumulate us experience finally we examine the voluntary contribution behavior of second generation immigrants and children in immigrant households to gain insight into the long term impact of immigration we do not find evidence that immigrant households free ride more than native born households first immigrant households when compared to similar native born households are less likely to receive assistance from nongovernment sources second immigrant status has no statistically significant impact on monetary contributions toward public good provision we also find that the immigrant native differences in monetary and time contributions tend to diminish over time as immigrants acquire us experience finally we find no significant differences between the second generation of immigrants and third or higher generations of americans in their voluntary contributions of money and time we obtain similar results for children in immigrant households they are not significantly different from children in native households in their time contribution and in their enrollment in federal meal programs the results are robust to various income and wealth controls do immigrants and their children free ride more than natives

do public grants to american theatres crowd out private donations this paper examines the relationship between public support and private donations by disaggregating the crowding effect into two components one determined by level of public support and one determined by changes in public support levels the analysis of a panel of american non profit theatres shows that the crowding effect induced by the level of public support takes an inverted u shape at low levels public support crowds in private donations while at higher levels it displaces them the change in total public support in the past year produces a constant crowding in effect on the level of private donations the paper finally illustrates how federal and state support have a crowding in effect at all levels while local support has a similar impact to total public support

moneyspots extraneous attributes and the coexistence of money and interest bearing nominal bonds it is folklore among monetary theorists that under laissez faire without ad hoc assumptions that favor money over bonds there do not exist equilibria in which government issued fiat money coexists with nominal default free interest bearing government bonds with similar physical characteristics this proposition is the basis for the strongest version of the rate of return dominance puzzle in this paper i show that if as has been the case throughout monetary history the physical object used as fiat money is heterogeneous in an extraneous attribute then there exist equilibria in which money coexists with interest bearing bonds

economics and underdetermination a case study of urban land and housing economics underdetermination associated with the duhem quine thesis is a familiar if under researched theme in economics in the light of this we examine the development of urban land and housing economics through its cartesian dualistic delineation of theory and data the contemporary mainstream approach appears unable to circumvent the problem of underdetermination in effect it employs the strong version of duhem quine in its retention of the assumption of a single unitary competitive market and associated access space trade off conversely we highlight the affinity of ely s and the later columbia school s approach to pragmatists dewey and peirce which provides a more fruitful basis for explanation

addressing uncertainty in economics and the economy this article explores the way society in general and economists in particular deal with fundamental uncertainty it is argued that uncertainty is interdependent with the evolution of institutions and behaviour including that designed to help society cope with uncertainty whilst some mainstream theory does address uncertainty it employs a much narrower concept than fundamental uncertainty generally in spite of the evident increase in fundamental uncertainty during the crisis most mainstream theory ignores it although ignoring uncertainty can sometimes be a successful coping mechanism it is argued that as a blanket coping mechanism ignoring uncertainty seriously limits the realism of theory and therefore also practice and policy it is concluded that economists should embrace uncertainty by tailoring methodologies and theories to address it this would provide a more fruitful basis for policy aimed at reducing uncertainty in the economy and also reducing our own uncertainty

strategic information acquisition and the mitigation of global warming abstract we consider the strategic role of uncertainty and information acquisition for the mitigation of global warming before the countries decide on their contribution to a mitigation of global warming they may invest in information about the country specific benefit of reductions of the emissions of greenhouse gases we show that information acquisition has a substantial strategic value countries may prefer not to learn their benefit of climate protection even if information acquisition does not involve a direct cost this strategic information choice may further decrease the efficiency of the public good provision

public goods hidden income and tax evasion some nonstandard results from the warm glow model abstract a large literature explores crowd out in situations where public goods are jointly provided work in this area typically depicts a tax system where individuals take taxes as given but in some settings such as those in developing economies efforts to evade or avoid taxes may be widespread using the canonical warm glow model this paper considers joint public good provision in a setting where individuals can evade taxes by hiding their income the model s implications change significantly in this setting with hidden income stronger warm glow will lead to greater crowd out not less using research on crowd out and inter family transfers i present suggestive evidence that the model s results may help to reconcile divergent estimates of crowd out in the literature

a signaling explanation for charity this article examines a novel but plausible motive for charitable giving charitable donations which are observable can signal wealth or income the signaling equilibrium of charitable donations has attractive properties donations increase proportionally with population size governmental funding for public goods affects private charity only through an income effect crowding out need not be complete income redistribution is generically nonneutral increasing the spread between the poorest and richest person in a community tends to increase private donations our theory are based on the assumption that people are willing to make charitable donations even if they will not increase provision of the public good the data on charitable giving support the hypothesis that donors donate at least partly for signaling purposes rather than only to aid the recipient or to obtain satisfactions unrelated to status though charitable organizations usually report donations within categories thus not allowing perfect revelation for analytical tractability we shall consider an equilibrium with perfect revelation and a continuum of types as characterized in george j mailath 1987 and norman j ireland 1994

altruism voluntary contributions and neutrality the case of environmental quality this paper develops an intertemporal model wherein production generates pollution which is viewed by consumers as a public bad there are two types of consumer those who are altruistic and leave bequests to their children and those who are pure life cyclers both types voluntarily contribute to the quality of environment through environmental groups it appears that if bequests by altruists and voluntary contributions by all are positive redistribution is neutral which does not mean that pollution abatement and capital accumulation are optimal to achieve optimality one needs a tax on inheritance and a differential subsidy on all consumer contributions

inflation and welfare in the steady state this is a paper on expected inflation and welfare in steady state equilibrium the demand for money is an inventory demand with an endogenous payment period the clower constraint is not imposed higher inflation reduces welfare by reducing consumption as people devote more of their real income to maintaining lower average money holdings high inflation does not necessarily promote an increase in the capital stock the mundell tobin effect is absent the policy conclusion is standard deflate at the rate of time preference because capital is held socially optimal consumption falls short of its golden rule level if inside money is allowed it drives out fiat money and welfare is again at a maximum

the isolation paradox and the discount rate for benefit cost analysis one argument used to justify a rate of discount for benefit cost analysis below the market rate is based on a divergence of private and collective behavior known as the isolation paradox in this paper we reexamine this argument using a three period general equilibrium model incorporating the intergenerational structure of benevolence assumed by earlier writers we show that in this model the appropriate rate of discount is the market rate regardless of the existence of the isolation paradox in the absence of other market distortions no shadow pricing of capital inputs is necessary in the calculation of net present value

the strategic advantage of being poor private and public provision of public goods when people know that a public good is to be privately provided in the future economic behaviour may change in periods before the one with the private provision game individuals have a distortionary incentive to reduce their disposable income so as to shift the burden of provision to others the incentive is eliminated if the government provides a sufficient amount of the public good in a second best world private provision of public goods has been claimed to be a reasonably good alternative to public provision this claim needs to be reconsidered in the light of these results

sub optimal saving and the shadow price of labor the public good argument abstract one argument for the incorporation of a premium on saving into calculations of the shadow price of labor has been the claim that aggregate inter generational savings are a public good and the individual savings decisions lead to sub optimal provision of savings this paper shows that even if this claim was true the incorporation of a premium on savings into benefit cost analysis calculations would be inappropriate the shadow price of labor relative to project output shoud still be set at the relative effects on aggregate income of hiring a worker on the one hand and producing output on the other

liquidity a new monetarist perspective this essay surveys the new monetarist approach to liquidity work in this literature strives for empirical and policy relevance plus rigorous foundations questions include what is liquidity is money essential in achieving desirable outcomes which objects can or should serve in this capacity when can asset prices differ from fundamentals what are the functions of commitment and collateral in credit markets how does money interact with credit and intermediation what can and should monetary policy do the research summarized emphasizes the micro structure of frictional transactions and studies how institutions like monetary exchange credit arrangements or intermediation facilitate the exchange process

additionality and reverse crowding out for pollution offsets in water quality trading market based environmental policies frequently include offset provisions that allow polluters who are not subject to a binding cap to participate in trading programs when offsets are used for compliance it is important that they are additional in the sense that the payment from the trading program induces environmental benefits that would not occur without the program in this paper we analyze a water quality trading program in ohio u s to estimate the extent to which the offsets are additional using data from the program and a farmer survey we estimate the number of additional conservation practices that are adopted by farmers who participated in the trading program relative to the counterfactual outcome without the program using matching methods we find no statistically significant increase in the number of conservation practices due to the trading program we also examine whether the trading program may have crowded out government funding we also do not find significant evidence for such crowding out instead finding some evidence that the trading program may have led to greater participation in federal cost share programs

a simple general equilibrium version of the baumol tobin model this paper presents a simple general equilibrium model that includes optimizing choices of the frequency of trips to the bank the model is used to analyze the effect of inflation on the capital stock the interest elasticity of money demand the optimum quantity of money and the welfare costs of inflationary finance

family policy with non cooperative families we consider a non cooperative model of a family s time allocation between market work and providing a home produced family public good such as child care or care for the elderly the model predicts underprovision of the public good because of crowding out this does not necessarily warrant public provision in contrast to other approaches in family economics we find that attempts to redistribute between spouses may alter the final distribution within the marriage and that such a policy may be pareto improving we also find that some degree of progressivity of the income tax can be welfare improving

pareto optimal redistribution and private charity abstract when private charity exists and is motivated by utility interdependence a non pareto optimal outcome the free rider problem typically arises nevertheless incremental fiscal redistribution cannot achieve a paretian welfare improvement so long as private charity continues at positive levels donors respond to incremental fiscal redistribution by reducing their voluntary contributions by exactly a dollar for every dollar transferred in this way no net transfer is achieved unless incremental fiscal redistribution is pursued to the point where private contributions have been driven to zero alternatively a net transfer may be achieved by fiscal measures which affect donors marginal incentives to donate

the nature of heterodox economics heterodoxy serves as an umbrella term to cover the coming together of separate projects or traditions in answering the question what distinguishes heterodoxy from the orthodoxy the author argues that matters of ontology are central in answering the question how are the various traditions that make up the modern heterodoxy to be distinguished from each other the author defends criteria other than varying commitments to specific substantive theories policy measures or techniques or basic units of analysis

on the efficiency of a global market for carbon dioxide emission permits type of externality and timing of policymaking we demonstrate that global permit markets are pareto efficient despite the externality type production or consumption when income redistribution occurs after regional environmental policymaking ex ante income redistribution is neutral if emissions affect production only but non neutral if emissions affect consumption 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved