are contributions of time and money substitutes or complements abstractthis article empirically investigates the relationship between donations of time and money using canadian tax policy reforms that changed the tax price of charitable donations the 1988 reform where a charitable tax deduction was converted to a credit and the 2000 reform in provincial income taxes provide tax price variations plausibly exogenous to individuals unobserved heterogeneity our estimates on cross price effects imply that individuals make more time donations as the tax price of charitable donations increases and hence money and time donations are substitutes as some theories would imply this contrasts with earlier findings using cross sectional data

the effectiveness of keynes tobin transaction taxes when heterogeneous agents can trade in different markets a behavioral finance approach abstract we develop a model in which boundedly rational agents apply technical and fundamental analysis to identify trading signals in two different speculative markets whether an agent trades and if so in which market with which strategy depends on profit considerations as it turns out an ongoing evolutionary competition between the trading strategies causes complex price dynamics which closely resembles the behavior of actual speculative prices moreover we find that if the agents have to pay a transaction tax in one market price variability decreases in this market but increases in the other market however the imposition of a uniform tax on all transactions stabilizes both markets our results suggest that if regulators of a market introduce a transaction tax other markets are likely to follow

have trading rule profits in the currency markets declined over time abstract previous studies have reported mixed results regarding the success of technical trading rules in currency markets abnormal returns were observed in many studies using data up to the mid 1980s while more recent studies generally report less success for technical trading rules this paper tests whether moving average trading rule profits have declined over the period from 1971 to 2000 if so previous profits may represent a temporary inefficiency that has since been eliminated in the currency markets the hypothesis is tested using 18 exchange rate series over a longer time period than in previous studies rules are optimized for successive 5 year in sample periods from 1971 to 1995 and tested over subsequent 5 year out of sample periods results show that risk adjusted trading rule profits have declined over time from an average of over 3 in the late 1970s and early 1980s to about zero in the 1990s thus market inefficiencies reported in previous studies may have been only temporary inefficiencies

methodical madness technical analysis and the irrationality of exchange rate forecasts substantial empirical research documents that exchange rate forecasts are not formed rationally this paper identifies a common technical trading signal the head and shoulders pattern as a potential source of departures from rationality in exchange rate forecasts forecasts based on this pattern are evaluated for daily dollar exchange rates over 1973 to 1994 using two criteria for rationality profitability and efficiency resulting profits replicable in real time are tested for statistical significance using a bootstrap technique we find that the rule is profitable but not efficient since it is dominated by simpler trading rules

the who and why of lottery empirical highlights from the seminal economic literature lotteries operate today in many countries around the world this type of gambling is usually run by governments and is sometimes described as regressive lottery is an unfair bet so explaining the purchase of lottery tickets by risk averse consumers has been a challenge for economic theory lotteries can be analysed from either of two economic perspectives as a source of public revenue or as a consumer commodity in this paper the state of economic research on lotteries is reviewed focusing on its main empirical findings

modeling charitable giving using a box cox standard tobit model there is a large literature investigating the determinants of charitable giving in particular price and income elasticities we find that many of the most often reported results from this literature rely on a model specification that is inappropriate when applied to recent federal tax file data we develop a standard tobit model with a box cox transformation parameter that nests a number of other specifications the box cox model yields estimates of price elasticities and expected charitable contributions that differ from those obtained using the typical specification additionally we find that the use of sample weights provides potentially important policy insights copyright 1991 by mit press

economic dimensions of household gift giving the purpose of this research was to explore economic dimensions of a consumer gift giving model two dimensions of extrahousehold gift expenditures were modeled the probability of giving and the expected value of the corresponding expenditures data were from 4 139 households in the quarterly interview component of the 1984 1985 u s continuing consumer expenditure survey the results demonstrated that both the probability of giving and the value of annual expenditures for gifts given outside the consumer unit are related to total expenditures a proxy for income family size life cycle stage and education in addition the probability of gift giving is related to the number of female adults ethnicity and urbanization and the value of gift expenditures is related to region extrahousehold gift expenditures appear to be a luxury as income increases gift expenditures increase more rapidly

exchange rate economics 1986 in the past fifteen years key exchange rates have moved in larger and more persistent ways than advocates of flexible rates in the late 1960s would have left anyone free to imagine certainly there was no expectation of constancy for nominal exchange rates but real exchange rate movements of 30 or forty percent were definitely not suggested as a realistic possibility moreover where these large movements did occur they did not obviously appear to be connected with fundamentals and hence seemed difficult to explain in terms of the exchange rate theories at hand the persistence of rate movements was as surprising as the rapid unwinding of apparent misalignments when they did ultimately occur the past fifteen years provide a natural dividing line between the keynesian and monetary approaches of the 1960s and the more recent analysis that takes into account exchange rate expectations and portfolio issues which took off in the early 1970s as well as the brand new approaches that concentrate on partial equilibrium microeconomics to review these ideas the paper starts with a brief look at the u s experience with flexible exchange rates from there it proceeds to the mundell fleming model as a comprehensive framework of analysis the following sections deal with persistent effects of policy disturbances links between exchange rates and prices the political economy of exchange rate movements and the question of policies toward excess capital mobility this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the use of flow analysis in foreign exchange exploratory evidence abstract this paper provides questionnaire evidence on the role of flow analysis for professional traders and fund managers this evidence suggests that besides fundamental information and technical analysis the analysis of flows provides an independent third type of information for professionals the view that flows can be used to learn about fundamentals is not consistent with the data instead evidence indicates that flows more likely provide insight into semi fundamental private information

money and financial markets introduction money and financial markets mark p taylor part 1 assessing the literature money demand analysis an outline keith cuthbertson david barlow financial market analysis an outline ronald macdonald and mark p taylor part 2 money demand studies money demand in five major countries estimating and interpreting error correction models james m boughton modelling broad and narrow money a study using cointegration martin brookes et al endogenous financial innovation and the demand for mo peter westaway and david walton money demand in high inflation countries a south american perpsective kate phylakis and mark p taylor the demand for money in four countries in the interwar period a study using monthly data jonathan slow et al part 3 money and financial markets some news on covered interest arbitrage mark p taylor patricia fraser monitoring bank risk a market based approach david miles stephen hall information interest rates and the volatility of asset prices laurence copeland richard c stapleton the decision to disclose research and development expenditure in the presence of a takeover threat jane black ian tonks persistence in stock market returns a disaggregated perspective roanld macdonald david power global capital market integration and the current account michael artis tamim bayoumi financial disorder and the theory of crisis e p davis part 4 new directions in financial market analysis neural networks and asset prices paul ormerod chartists fundamentalists and the transmission of opinion alan kirman

the effect of group size on public good provision in a repeated game setting abstract the ability to cooperate in the provision of a pubic good is analyzed in a repeated game holding the level of provision fixed with quasi linear utility we find that the critical value of the discount parameter converges to 0 in the limit thus cooperation is feasible in a large market next we allow the level cooperation to be adjusted optimally as the group size increases both for a specific form of quasi linear utility and for cobb douglas utility in each case we find that there are admissible values of the discount parameter such that cooperation may be maintained in the limit

the estimation of models of labour market behaviour in this paper we view the labour market experience of individuals as a process of movement between the states of employment and unemployment we note that there are three main ways of sampling members of the labour force namely sampling the members of a specific state sampling the people entering or leaving a state and sampling the population regardless of state the joint distribution of observable and unobservable characteristics of individuals depends on the mode of sampling adopted we examine this dependence and its implications for the interpretation of estimates of models of labour market behaviour

strategy switching in the japanese stock market abstract this paper investigates the expectation formation process of japanese stock market professionals by utilizing a monthly forecast survey dataset on the topix distributed by quick corporation we sort forecasters into buy side and sell side professionals we empirically demonstrate that the buy side and sell side professionals use either fundamental or trend following strategies throughout their expectation formation processes and that they switch between fundamental and trend following strategies over time we also discuss that strategy switching can be key in understanding the persistent deviation of the topix from the fundamentals

market structure and corporate charitable donations some canadian evidence for 1976 and 1981 the business of business not charity say eleemosynary its more confusing whatever as long as we don t given em any cash harv antione the buzz words of entrepreneurship in apocryphal northern tales this paper investigates the general determinants of corporate charitable donations in canada and in particular the impact of imperfectly competitive market structure we utilize a profit maximizing model and assume that charitable donations occur only if by performing an advertising public relations function they increase revenue or if by acting as a fringe benefit they result in a reduction in wage costs in this context because only firms in imperfect markets generate the rents from which donations can be made we anticipate a positive relationship between donations and a measure of imperfect competition concentration the data is a cross section sample of 38 3 and 4 digit sic manufacturing industries pooled for 1976 and 1981 the major findings are that the results are generally compatib

understanding preference for egalitarian policies in health are age and sex determinants this article presents an empirical assessment of the relevance of different factors when understanding preferences for outcome egalitarian policies in health in particular respondent age and sex a representative sample of the spanish population was interviewed n 1209 after being informed that those from the higher social class have longer life expectancy at birth than those from the lower social class respondents were required to choose between two programmes to increase life expectancy of the two groups by the same amount the distribution neutral programme and to target the lowest social class group thereby reducing current health inequalities the targeting or egalitarian programme two variants one with and the other without visual aid are used majority 69 of respondents support targeting an effect of age was observed where younger and older individuals are less likely to target the egalitarian policy than those in middle age however individual s sex was not associated wit

market efficiency of brazilian exchange rate evidence from variance ratio statistics and technical trading rules abstract this study utilizes the variance ratio test to examine the behavior of brazilian exchange rate we show that adjustments for multiple tests and a bootstrap methodology must be employed in order to avoid size distortions we propose a block bootstrap scheme and show that it has much nicer properties than the traditional chow denning chow k v denning k c 1993 a simple multiple variance ratio test journal of econometrics 58 3 385 401 multiple variance ratio tests overall the method proposed in the paper provides evidence refuting the random walk behavior for the brazilian exchange rate for long investment horizon but consistent with the random walk hypothesis for short run horizon additionally we also test for the predictive power of variable moving average vma and trading range break trb technical rules and find evidence of forecasting ability for these rules nonetheless the excess return that can be obtained from such rules is not significant suggesting that such predictability is not economically significant

an econometric analysis of charitable giving with interdependent preferences in practice we are in a situation where one s own contribution is expected to influence the contributions of others a will expect that b and c may also be induced by his gifts to the same or similar objectives vickrey 1962 p 40 the estimates provide no support for the view that the total amount that an individual contributes is a function of the amount that is given by others although these results are clearly not definitive evidence against the notion of such interdependence among individuals we believe that the burden of proof now rests with those who support a theory of interdependent giving feldstein and clotfelter 1976 p 19 i introduction it is widely believed that one person s charitable contributions can be significantly influenced by the contributions of others the national survey of philanthropy for instance indicates that a sizable fraction of the population believes that people pay attention to what others give when determining their own contribution 1 fundraisers also feel that large leadership contributions by wealthy individuals can be influential in encouraging more and larger contributions by others bakal 1979 moreover interdependence among givers is central to social scientists outside of economics who study altruistic or charitable behavior psychologists for instance have learned that those who have recently witnessed an altruistic act are more likely to be altruistic and that people will be more altruistic the more others contribute 2 sociologists studying reference groups have shown that choices individuals make often depend on the choices of others who are similar in age education social status and other characteristics and that such reference groups appear to be important in determining altruistic and charitable activity 3 economic theorists have also made interdependent preferences the focus of their theoretical models of giving in some of the earliest writing on philanthropy vickrey 1962 gives an extensive discussion of the role of neighborhood effects on contributions formal models of altruism beginning with becker 1974 also assume any one contributor s choice depends on the contributions of all others largely because of the public goods aspect of charity 4 other models have generalized becker s approach to include impurely altruistic motives for giving such as a desire for acclaim status or simply a warm glow from giving where the impure altruism also depends on the contributions of others andreoni 1989 1990 outside of the literature on charity there is a long history beginning with duesenberry 1949 of economic models that assume the consumption choices of one agent are directly affected by the choices and characteristics of other agents 5 yitzhaki 1982 stark 1990 and stark and yitzhaki 1988 have shown the importance of relative deprivation in understanding economic phenomena and in related reasoning frank 1984 1985a b has shown that there is a theoretical and empirical basis for assuming that individuals care about how their consumption ranks relative to some group of peers in addition manski 1993a has shown the importance of role models and reference groups in the study of dynamic choice despite this emphasis on interdependent preferences elsewhere the empirical literature on charitable giving has been unsuccessful at finding any empirical relevance of interdependence feldstein and clotfelter 1976 are the only economists who have attempted to include variables to capture the interdependence of preferences their effort was unsuccessful as a result a large literature has developed in which equations for charitable contributions have been estimated without accounting for interdependence this method has led to a consensus that the tax price of charitable contributions and donor s income are both important in determining gifts

stock and flow sampling abstract this letter is concerned with the joint distribution of variables that effect the duration of stay in a given state for example unemployment it deals with the difference in the joint distribution between the population of residents of the state the stock and the population of entrants or leavers the flow and with the implications of this difference for econometric inferences

the foreign exchange market a random walk with a dragging anchor this paper explores some anomalies in the foreign exchange market it is hard to find evidence of either short term overshooting or of longer term reversion to an equilibrium the forward exchange rate contains virtually no information on future spot rates discussions with practitioners indicate that longer term speculation based on fundamentals is strictly limited and survey data and other evidence suggest that expectations and speculation are based on a variety of models the interplay between speculation based on fundamentals and on a random walk or chartist approach influences the outcome this endorses the prior model of j a frankel and k a froot copyright 1988 by the london school of economics and political science

estimation of financial agent based models with simulated maximum likelihood abstract this paper proposes a general computational framework for empirical estimation of financial agent based models for which criterion functions have unknown analytical form for this purpose we adapt a recently developed nonparametric simulated maximum likelihood estimation based on kernel methods in combination with the model developed by brock and hommes 1998 which is one of the most widely analysed heterogeneous agent models in the literature we extensively test the properties and behaviour of the estimation framework as well as its ability to recover parameters consistently and efficiently using simulations key empirical findings indicate the statistical insignificance of the switching coefficient but markedly significant belief parameters that define heterogeneous trading regimes with a predominance of trend following over contrarian strategies in addition we document a slight proportional dominance of fundamentalists over trend following chartists in major world markets

a discrete continuous choice approach to residential water demand under block rate pricing reply waldman is quite correct in noting that the microeconomic theory of block rate pricing in hewitt and hanemann hh 1995 is given for the general case of a k block rate structure whereas the econometric theory is largely confined to the case of exactly two blocks the extension in waldman to the more general case of k blocks is correct although the extension itself could be even more general if it addressed the nonnegativity of demand as is demonstrated below that no apparent attention was paid to the nonnegativity of demand in hh may be attributed to the fact that the need to do so was negated by a fortuitous assumption in the earlier work although that assumption that the errors are multiplicative and lognormally distributed was only maintained and not tested in hh i now estimate two models with the more common assumptions of linear demand and additive and normally distributed errors both with and without a modification for

family model of contributions to non profit organizations and labour supply in this article a model is presented in which the family decides the labour supply of both spouses and their time donations to non profit organizations for the estimation spanish data was used which showed that family size and pre school children influence decisions made about time distribution of husband and wife women with fewer family responsibilities work longer hours and donate more time whilst the effect on men is the contrary also monetary donations by the family are directly related to time donations by the spouses

the impact of tax deductibility on charitable giving by covenant in the uk the 1985 86 survey of personal incomes is used to estimate the impact of tax deductibility on giving by covenant estimates are based on two models a generalized tobit model and reece and zieschang s 1985 model that allows for a nonlinear budget constraint the results suggest that the latter is not appropriate for the u k tax system in the tobit models the income effects on participation and expenditure are well determined and similar to those in previous work for the united kingdom and in many u s studies there is no robust evidence of a tax price effect on participation or expenditure copyright 1991 by royal economic society

charitable donations by uk households evidence from the family expenditure survey this paper reports estimates based on both standard tobit and generalized tobit techniques of the determinants of charitable giving in the uk using 1984 family expenditure survey data this is the first such study using uk data separate estimates are presented of the determinants of participation and of the level of donations by giving households participation is seen to be sensitive to income the tax price of giving and a range of demographic variables while the level of donations varies primarily with income donations are found to be inelastic with respect to changes in disposable income

determinants of charitable donations in canada a comparison over time two issues are examined the statistical significance of a number of socio economic factors that affect the level of charitable giving are evaluated family wealth and age of the head of household tend to be significant determinants of charitable giving regardless of whether it is to all charities or to religious charities only such is not the case for the price of giving for instance the price of giving is an important determinant of all charitable contributions but almost non existent as a determinant for religious donations results such as this suggest that changes in marginal tax rates prompted by a switch to a tax credit as a substitute for a deduction and hence a change in the price of giving may have virtually no impact on contributions to religious organizations but may affect conntributions to other charitable organizations the extent to which some socio economic factors changed in relative importance as determinants of charitable giving from 1982 to 1986 is also reviewed

the econometrics of piecewise linear budget constraints a survey and exposition of the maximum likelihood method in this article maximum likelihood techniques for estimating consumer demand functions when budget constraints are piecewise linear are exposited and surveyed consumer demand functions are formally derived under such constraints and it is shown that the functions are themselves nonlinear as a result the econometric problems in estimating such functions are exposited and the importance of the stochastic specification is stressed in particular the specification of both unobserved heterogeneity of preferences and measurement error econometric issues in estimation and testing are discussed and the results of the studies that have been conducted to date are surveyed

sample selection and biases in local house value indices abstract analysis of cross sectional or intertemporal variations in house values among localities requires reliable house value indices however prior studies applying the hedonic method to transaction data have reported price series that may be biased our paper investigates a possible cause of bias and uses a censored regression technique extended to an intertemporal model to derive an unbiased index we apply our method to 1971 1991 data from the miami florida msa and find evidence in time varying amounts of bias our results suggest that prior studies using the hedonic method and samples consisting only of sold houses have understated the intertemporal variability of house prices

private behaviour and government policy in interdependent economies this is a comprehensive survey of the macroeconomic co ordination of international economies subjects covered include monetary policies and exchange rates abolishing exchange controls policy co ordination and the international monetary system assessing monetary shocks and exchange rate variability ems stability economic interactions and fiscal policies the contributors are anthony s courakis ronald macdonald mark p taylor peter n smith michael r wickens jeffrey a frankel kenneth a froot michael j artis giorgio radaelli shaziye gazioglu michael j moore neil rankin s mansoob murshed somnath sen paul r masson malcolm knight patrick minford emanuel pikoulakis david currie ullrich hoffmeyer and frederick van der ploeg this book is intended for international monetary economists and macroeconomists graduate and third year undergraduate students

expectation formation in the foreign exchange market a time varying heterogeneity approach using survey data using consensus economics survey data on jpy usd and gbp usd exchange rate expectations for the 3 and 12 month horizons over the period november 1989 december 2012 we first show that expectations fail the conventional tests of unbiasedness and do not exhibit a learning process towards rationality our approach is consistent with the economically rational expectations theory feige and pearce 1976 which states that information costs and agents aversion to misestimating future exchange rates determine the optimal amounts of information on which they base their expectations the time variability of the cost aversion ratios justifies at the aggregate level a representation of expectations as a linear combination of the traditional extrapolative adaptive and regressive processes augmented by a forward market component whose parameters are allowed to change over time this mixed expectation model with unstable heterogeneity is validated by our kalman filter estimation results for the two currencies and

the private provision of public goods altruism and voluntary giving abstract a unique data set on exact giving by individual households for the support of a rural health care facility is used to examine the determinants of charitable giving including the role of altruism we examine whether a household s decision to give or not give and the amount it gives are influenced in the same or different ways by the household s characteristics and economic circumstances we also examine whether a household s altruistic history affects its current giving decisions

an accurate measurement of the crowd out effect income effect and price effect for charitable contributions in the past empirical research on charitable contributions has focused on two issues estimating the income and price elasticities of contributions and estimating the extent to which government funding crowded out private contributions the two fundamental problems in all these studies are the differences in the underlying conceptual models and the use of imperfect data for empirical analysis this paper addresses both of these problems

intraday technical analysis of individual stocks on the tokyo stock exchange abstract this paper conducts an intraday technical analysis of individual stocks listed on the nikkei 225 in addition to the price based technical rules popularly examined in the literature we uniquely propose and statistically investigate technical rules that utilize information regarding 1 the order flow imbalance and 2 the order book imbalance technical analysis using the imbalance based trading rules is motivated by the evidence presented first in this paper that short term returns can be predicted from the information regarding the order flow and order book imbalances for more than half of nikkei 225 listed stocks however we demonstrate that no strategies including limit order trading where trading signals are derived from the order book imbalance beat the buy and hold strategy within our sample the results imply that past prices and demand supply imbalances do not contribute to profiting in intraday trading and that non execution and picking off risks are too large for limit order trading to be profitable in our sample

consistent estimation of the impact of tax deductibility on the level of charitable contributions when charitable contributions are tax deductible the marginal price of charitable giving in other consumption foregone per dollar of contributions is generally less than unity further if the income tax schedule is a progressive step function the marginal price of contributions is generally a rising step function of the level of contributions the problem of estimating a contributions demand function for individuals is therefore complicated by the spurious correlation between the level of contributions and the observed marginal price we take this econometric problem into account in estimating a contributions demand function using data from the 1972 73 consumer expenditure survey after comparing our results with those of estimation techniques used by other authors we provide evidence on the impacts of alternative tax policies on charitable giving using our estimates of the model parameters

order aggressiveness pre trade transparency and long memory in an order driven market abstract recent empirical research has documented that the state of the limit order book influences stock investors strategies investors place more aggressive orders when the same side of the order book is thicker and less aggressive orders when it is thinner we conjecture and demonstrate that this behavior is related to long memories of trading volume volatility and order signs in stock markets we investigate our conjecture in two types of artificial stock markets a transparent market in which agents observe all limit orders on both sides of the book and order volumes at those prices before they trade and a less transparent market in which agents observe only the best five bid and ask quotes with the depth available at these limit prices the first market structure resembles certain actual stock exchanges in the level of pre trade transparency such as the australian stock exchange nyse openbook and the london stock exchange whereas the second market structure is consistent with stock exchanges such as euronext paris the toronto stock exchange the tokyo stock exchange and hong kong exchanges and clearing we demonstrate that our long memory results are robust with different levels of pre trade transparency implying that the strategy constructed by the state of the order book is key for explaining long memories in many actual stock exchanges

on the economics of state lotteries s tate lotteries can be evaluated from either of two perspectives familiar to economists as a consumer commodity or as a source of public revenue l as a commodity the lottery is notable for its broad market penetration and rapid growth sixty percent of the adults in lottery states play at least once in a year the annual growth in real per capita sales in lottery states has averaged 12 percent rising in 1989 dollars from 22 in 1975 to 108 in 1989 as a source of public revenue lotteries account for a rather modest fraction of revenue in states that run them 3 3 percent in 1986 but they are nonetheless one of the most visible state government activities lottery sales exceed those of all other products sold directly by state governments to the public and are larger than all but three major activities of state government education public welfare and highways clotfelter and cook 1989 table 2 5 moreover lotteries are a qualitatively new activity for state governments in that they are a business operated in effect for profit state liquor stores are perhaps the closest analog but they were created to encourage temperate drinking practices and do not engage in the sales promotion and marketing activities that are characteristic of the lotteries lotteries enjoy an honored place in american history as a device for raising funds for public purposes funding for such institutions as the jamestown settlement harvard college and the continental army as well as hundreds of bridges fire houses and schools came from lotteries but after the

price trends and patterns in technical analysis a theoretical and empirical examination while many technical trading rules are based upon patterns in asset prices we lack convincing explanations of how and why these patterns arise and why trading rules based on technical analysis are profitable this paper provides a model that explains the success of certain trading rules that are based on patterns in past prices we point to the importance of confirmation bias which has been shown to play a key role in other types of decision making traders who acquire information and trade on the basis of that information tend to bias their interpretation of subsequent information in the direction of their original view this produces autocorrelations and patterns of price movement that can predict future prices such as the head and shoulders and double top patterns the model also predicts that sequential price jumps for a particular stock will be positively autocorrelated we test this prediction and find that jumps exhibit statistically and economically significant positive autocorrelations

the economic value of fundamental and technical information in emerging currency markets abstract we measure the economic value of information derived from macroeconomic variables and from technical trading rules for emerging markets currency investments our analysis is based on a sample of 21 emerging markets with a floating exchange rate regime over the period 1997 2007 and explicitly accounts for trading restrictions on foreign capital movements by using non deliverable forward data we document that both types of information can be exploited to implement profitable trading strategies in line with evidence from surveys of foreign exchange professionals concerning the use of fundamental and technical analysis we find that combining the two types of information improves the risk adjusted performance of the investment strategies

the short run residential demand for electricity the model of short run residential demand for electricity combines price schedule information obtained from the federal energy regulatory commission with household specific data from the 1972 73 consumer expenditure survey to determine the household s level of electricity consumption and relate it to the household s demographic profile and appliance stock the overall short run price elasticity estimate of 0 550 supports existing findings that short run residential electricity demand is price inelastic however the variation in elasticities across end use categories suggests that the overall response is made up of a complex set of responses that vary substantially and significantly across appliances this implies that it may be more efficient to tailor conservation policies to the stock configuration of the population 17 references 6 tables

the use of technical analysis in the foreign exchange market abstract technica or chartist analysis of financial markets involves providing forecasts or trading advice on the basis of largely visual inspection of past prices without regard to any underlying economic or fundamental analysis this paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey conducted on behalf of the bank of england among chief foreign exchange dealers based in london in november 1988 amongst other findings it is revealed that at least 90 per cent of respondents place some weight on this form of non fundamental analysis when forming views at one or more time horizons there is also a skew towards reliance on technical as opposed to fundamentalist analysis at shorter horizons which becomes steadily reversed as the length of horizon considered is increased a very high proportion of chief dealers view technical and fundamental analysis as complementary forms of analysis and a substantial proportion suggest that technical advice may be self fulfilling jel f31

exchange rate dynamics central bank interventions and chaos control methods abstract we use a simple chartist fundamentalist model developed by day and huang to explore recent chaos control algorithms as potential candidates for central bank intervention rules we find that methods such as delayed feedback control ogy and constant feedback have in principle the potential to reduce exchange rate variability and deviations from fundamentals even in the presence of large dynamic noise

heterogeneous expectations exchange rate dynamics and predictability abstract this paper proposes a simple chartist fundamentalist model in which we allow for nonlinear time variation in chartists extrapolation rate estimation of the model using monthly data for the major currencies vis a vis the us dollar shows that the model is significant in sample and that it has out of sample predictive power for some of the currencies we investigate the power of tests of the random walk model to detect predictability against the alternative of the proposed model we find that the evidence of short term unpredictability and the long term predictability are consistent with our model

financing public goods public goods can be financed by direct taxation or a subsidy to private spending this paper examines the relative efficiency and distributional consequences of the two methods efficiency is shown to depend on the price elasticity of private spending and the trade off between public and private spending when this trade off is dollar for dollar however a subsidy is always more efficient than direct taxation the gains from a subsidy are larger for a mixed good than for a pure public good looking a t distributional effects the author shows when richer taxpayers may prefer a tax credit to deductibility even though they face lower prices with deductibility and also shows when richer taxpayers prefer direct taxation to either type of subsidy copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

residential demand for electricity under inverted block rates evidence from a controlled experiment block rate structures are used extensively in public utility pricing including residential electricity estimating price elasticities in this context is complicated by the resulting nonlinearity of the consumer s budget constraint this article estimates the demand for electricity under inverted block rates using data from a residential rate experiment the study provides an opportunity to obtain short run price elasticities in an experimental setting and to compare alternative estimators developed for nonlinear budget constraints elasticities of demand with respect to individual components of the block rate are developed using a modification of the structural maximum likelihood estimator

learning with misspecification in an artificial currency market abstract agents evolve their forecast rules over time via a modified genetic algorithm in a simple artificial currency market these forecast rules can be nonlinearly misspecified when the misspecification is suppressed learning tends to be complete when it is not suppressed learning can generate persistent exchange rate dynamics

evidence on taxation and charitable giving from the 1983 u s treasury tax model file we have applied our model of taxation and charitable giving developed in reece and zieschang 1985 to the 1983 treasury tax model file and found no response of giving to marginal tax rates and a small response to income

a generalized double hurdle model of swedish gambling expenditures this article estimates the relationship between demand for swedish gambling income and the other socioeconomic variables using empirical models of participation and gambling expenditure it also indirectly attempts to account for the effect of a recent recession on gambling behaviour by examining gambling behaviour when the economy was growing versus the period immediately after a major recession the aim of the article is to analyse the factors influencing gambling decisions this is done using the double hurdle method adjusted for the problems of heteroscedasticity and nonnormality using an approach that can handle extreme values and address skewness the empirical results ruled out tobit type models and normally distributed double hurdle models the pattern on income elasticities across income classes implies that implicit swedish gaming taxes are regressive income elasticities become smaller after the recession and the decision to participate changed with respect to the several of the demographic va

the measurement of individual utility and social welfare it has been suggested by a number of economists that decisions about how to allocate scarce health care resources should be informed by the cost per quality adjusted life years qalys of the different alternatives one of the criticisms of the qaly approach is that it is based on the measurement of individual utility yet the values elicited are used to inform social choice in this respect it is argued that the qaly approach fails to take account of distributional issues that are known to be important in the context of health care this paper addresses this issue and presents an approach grounded in microeconomic theory that is flexible enough to deal with a wide range of efficiency equity trade offs while making the nature of the trade off transparent in addition it is an approach that is relatively simple to investigate empirically and the results of a preliminary study are presented as illustration of this

explaining dispersion in foreign exchange expectations a heterogeneous agent approach this paper combines survey forecasts with a heterogeneous agent model to examine the dispersion of expectations of participants in the foreign exchange market we find distinct variations in the level of dispersion and document that dispersion arises because of the combined effect of market participants holding private information and attaching different weights to fundamental technical and carry trade analyses we estimate a heterogeneous agent model on the survey forecasts and show that the weight attached to the three forecast rules is adjusted over time in response to the relative importance of the rules in the actual foreign exchange market the weights are related to market circumstances the switching model is finally shown to outperform the random walk model in an out of sample forecast exercise

the adaptive markets hypothesis evidence from the foreign exchange market we analyze the intertemporal stability of excess returns to technical trading rules in the foreign exchange market by conducting true out of sample tests on previously studied rules the excess returns of the 1970s and 1980s were genuine and not just the result of data mining but these profit opportunities had disappeared by the early 1990s for filter and moving average rules returns to less studied rules also have declined but have probably not completely disappeared high volatility prevents precise estimation of mean returns these regularities are consistent with the adaptive markets hypothesis lo 2004 but not with the efficient markets hypothesis

lottery expenditures in canada a regional analysis of determinants and incidence this article examines two issues first it evaluates the statistical significance of a number of socio economic and demographic variables on the level of household lottery expenditures in the six regions of canada while some household characteristics vary in the extent to which they significantly affect the level of lottery expenditures across regions wealth age occupation mother tongue and urban location for example others are significant in every region regional consistency exists in the statistical significance of after tax household income sex and education of the head of household lottery expenditures increase as incomes increase lottery expenditures are significantly lower for female heads of households than for their male counterparts lottery expenditures decline as the education level of the head of household increases second lottery expenditures are found to be regressive although the degree of regressivity is less than for lotteries in the united states

an empirical test of neutrality and the crowding out hypothesis this paper tests warr s neutrality hypothesis that the voluntary provision of a public good is independent of the distribution of income specifically i test the null hypothesis of neutrality against the alternative that total contributions to a public good will be larger the less equally income is distributed to test this hypothesis a new data set is constructed by merging data on total voluntary contributions to individual public radio stations with 1990 census data on the income distribution in each station s listening area i find that voluntary contributions increase as income inequality rises

international public goods and contribution productivity differentials abstract this paper investigates the impacts of productivity differentials in contributing to the public good on national welfare in the context of non cooperative voluntary provision of a pure public good a country with high productivity does not necessarily enjoy high welfare subsidizing the other country in a contribution game may lead to a strong paradoxical result while a lump sum transfer will lead to a weak paradoxical result we also explore the relationship between the price of the public good and the size of an open club in a multi club model

temporal patterns in foreign exchange returns and options although the foreign exchange market is believed to be one of the most efficient financial markets in the world there is significant evidence that technical analysis is profitable in this market in this study we investigate the ability of information from the options market to supplement the commonly used information on past prices to predict temporal patterns in foreign exchange returns we find that information from the options market improves the performance of technical trading strategies strategies using information from at the money options were more consistently profitable than the most commonly used strategies based on only historical spot exchange rates past prices our results hold out of sample as well as in the late nineties a period when few sources of information have proven reliable consequently options appear to contain valuable information regarding future spot exchange rate movements

marginal tax rates and tax favoured pension savings of the self employed evidence from sweden in recent years the study of how individuals respond to policies that aim at promoting pension savings has emerged as a vital area of economic research this paper adds to this body of literature by estimating the tax price elasticity of contributions to tax favoured pension savings accounts on a population of self employed individuals i exploit a unique total database over the swedish population that covers the years 19992005 using instrumental variables i obtain a tax price elasticity estimate of 0 51 and an income elasticity estimate of 0 13 whereas ordinary least squares ols produces estimates that conflict with consumer theory

the use of fundamental and technical analyses by foreign exchange dealers hong kong evidence abstract this article reports the results of a questionnaire survey conducted in february 1995 on the use by foreign exchange dealers in hong kong of fundamental and technical analyses to form their forecasts of exchange rate movements our findings reveal that 85 of respondents rely on both fundamental and technical analyses for predicting future rate movements at different time horizons at shorter horizons there exists a skew towards reliance on technical analysis as opposed to fundamental analysis but the skew becomes steadily reversed as the length of horizon considered is extended technical analysis is considered slightly more useful in forecasting trends than fundamental analysis but significantly more useful in predicting turning points interest rate related news is found to be a relatively important fundamental factor in exchange rate forecasting while moving average and or other trend following systems are the most useful technical technique