investor preference for large firms new evidence on economies of size in the last several decades industrial organization literature has been replete with studies demonstrating a systematic relationship between accounting rates of return and firm size in the direction of greater and more stable accounting profits for larger firms these studies have been subject to criticism for an alarming number of statistical and conceptual problems the most important of which alleges a serious bias in accounting profit measures as proxies for economic profit 2 the criticisms have resulted in a stalemate in the interpretation of empirical evidence on firm size and performance nevertheless there is continued interest in the area ostensibly resulting from policy concerns with large firm advantages in both product and capital markets this paper provides new evidence concerning the industrial organization literature controversy of the connection between firm size and performance stock market data are used to examine the relationship between capital market returns risk and firm size the findings suggest that even if there were no advantages of large size in the product market equal rates of operating profit large firms would still have a substantial capital raising advantage over small firms this advantage is unrelated to the widely recognized floatation cost economies even after controlling for nondiversifiable risk using the capital asset pricing model capm investors still demonstrate a statistically significant and economically important preference for the securities of larger firms investors apparently place a premium on large firms which is not attributable to large firms observed lower risk as captured by the widely used measure of nondiversifiable risk beta risk this finding a fresh contribution to the

testing preference stability between couples and singles identification of some collective models of consumer demands requires that preferences of singles are representative of preferences of couples i test whether dependence between selection into marriage and consumption preferences invalidates this assumption the data reject the preference stability assumption

a new year a new you within individual variation in food purchases abstract we document that within individual variation in food choices is substantial and has potentially important consequences for nutrition and hence well being we develop an approach that allows us to study the determinants of this within individual variation within an economic framework and allow for across individual preference heterogeneity we show that around one fifth of within individual fluctuations in diet quality is explained by standard economic variables prices and budgets along with advertising and weather the residual fluctuations are important and are larger for lower income and younger people and individuals who state they are impulsive we propose a two selves model of food purchase behavior to structurally interpret these empirical patterns we use nonparametric revealed preference techniques to show that this model rationalizes our food purchase data

the effect of gender targeted conditional cash transfers on household expenditures evidence from a randomized experiment this paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non durables we study a policy intervention in the republic of macedonia offering cash transfers to poor households conditional on having their children attending secondary school the recipient of the transfer is randomized across municipalities to be either the household head or the mother using data collected to evaluate the conditional cash transfer program we show that the gender of the recipient has an effect on the structure of expenditure shares targeting transfers to women increases the expenditure share on food by about 4 to 5 to study the allocation of expenditures within the food basket we estimate a demand system for food and we find that targeting payments to mothers induces for different food categories not only a significant intercept shift but also a change in the slope of the engel curve

intra household allocation of time and money across siblings abstract how work and consumption are allocated within the family has important consequences for the welfare of individual household members using data on time use and assignable goods for individual siblings across india peru ethiopia and vietnam aged 5 17 i show that there is substantial within sibling variation in leisure as well as consumption allocations i then test whether there is evidence for favoritism in the joint allocation of leisure and consumption toward a particular gender i find that boys with a younger sister have substantially more relative leisure compared to girls with a younger sister in all four countries consumption allocations are relatively higher for older siblings of mixed gender sibling pairs irrespective of the sex of the child i reject that favoritism in consumption equals favoritism in leisure in three of the four countries finally i show suggestive evidence on the role of reward and preferences for allocations of time and money in the household

efficient intra household allocations and distribution factors implications and identification this paper provides an exhaustive characterization of testability and identifiability issues in the collective framework in the absence of price variation it thus provides a theoretical underpinning for a number of empirical works that have been developed recently we first provide a simple and general test of the pareto efficiency hypothesis which is consistent with all possible assumptions on the private or public nature of goods all possible consumption externalities between household members and all types of interdependent individual preferences and domestic production technology the test is proved to be necessary and sufficient we then provide conditions for the identification of the sharing rule and the engel curves of individual household members for a variety of different observational schemes

semiparametric estimation and consumer demand this paper considers the implementation of semiparametric methods in the empirical analysis of consumer demand the application is to the estimation of the engel curve relationship and uses the british family expenditure survey household composition is modelled using an extended partially linear framework this is shown to provide a useful method for pooling non parametric engel curves across households of different demographic composition c 1998 john wiley sons ltd

intrahousehold distribution and poverty evidence from cote d ivoire poverty measures often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption in this paper we estimate the allocation process and adult economies of scale in households from cote d ivoire using a collective model of household consumption identification relies on the observation of adult specific goods as in the rothbarth method and a joint estimation on couples and singles our results show that men and women s shares of total expenditure are of the same order of magnitude and children s shares are small scale economies are large and affect poverty measures

issuing costs to existing shareholders in competitive and negotiated underwritten public utility equity offerings abstract this paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of whether there is any difference in the cost incurred by public utilities if they issue new equity through a negotiated or competitive underwriting we conclude that the expected cost of a competitive offer is less than the expected cost of a negotiated offer but that the variance of the cost is substantially greater with a competitive offer these results are interesting because most public utilities use negotiated underwriting unless forced by regulation to use competitive offers this paper is also an addition to the growing agency theory literature

a note on lead time reduction strategies in a single vendor single buyer integrated inventory model with lot size dependent lead times and stochastic demand glock 2012 lead time reduction strategies in a single vendor single buyer integrated inventory model with lot size dependent lead times and stochastic demand international journal of production economics 136 37 44 recently presented an integrated inventory model where the lead time can be reduced by crashing the setup and transportation time by increasing the production rate or by decreasing the lot size in this note we introduce a more realistic lead time crashing cost and propose a modified integrated inventory model by adding the transportation time as a decision variable and assuming that there are two different safety stocks furthermore we give some numerical examples to illustrate the advantages of the modified model

a note on integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time abstract ben daya and hariga 2004 integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time international journal of production economics 92 75 80 recently proposed the paper about integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time the lead time is proportional to the lot size produced by the vendor in addition to a fixed delay due to the transportation setup and nonproductive time the end customers accept backorders when the shortage occurs at the buyer side an order to the vendor is placed each time the inventory level reaches the reorder point in this note a modified model is proposed under a different assumption that there are two different reorder points and service levels

convertible bond underpricing renegotiable covenants seasoning and convergence we investigate the long standing puzzle on the underpricings of convertible bonds we hypothesize that the observed underpricing is induced by the possibility that a convertible bond might renegotiate on some of its covenants e g an imbedded put option in financial difficulties consistent with our hypothesis we find that the initial underpricing is larger for lower rated bonds the underpricing worsens if the issuer experiences subsequent financial difficulties however conditional on no rating downgrades our main empirical result shows that convertible bond prices do converge to their theoretical prices within two years this seasoning period is shorter for higher rated convertible bonds

on the diversification observability and measurement of estimation risk this paper reexamines how risk return relationships are affected by investor uncertainty about the exact parameters of the joint rate of return distribution we attempt to clarify results relating to three central issues first we address the issue of diversification focusing on an apt factor model framework second we discuss the observability of estimation risk and describe research experimental designs that should encompass the existence of estimation risk and reveal it in the data finally we suggest exploiting contemporaneous return observations on high and low information securities to aid in the measurement of return parameters for low information securities

equilibrium pricing and portfolio composition in the presence of uncertain parameters abstract we analyze the effect of parameter uncertainty on equilibrium asset prices for the symmetric case when the amount of estimation risk is the same for all securities the existing literature argues that parameter uncertainty is largely irrelevant for equilibrium our results differ we find that symmetric estimation risk affects equilibrium values of relative asset prices expected returns market weights and betas

information and diversity of analyst opinion this paper examines problems in the use of divergence of analyst opinion as a proxy for estimation risk in empirical studies of security returns and asset pricing models we demonstrate that diversity of opinion can increase even though the amount of private information increases and we show that diversity of opinion may overstate estimation risk if the capital market aggregates the information held by investors we produce empirical results consistent with our conclusions specifically we find that divergence of opinion can produce measures of estimation risk that are inconsistent with a received proxy for estimation risk and with observed common stock returns

consumption inequality and intra household allocations the current literature on consumption inequality treats all adults within the household equally making the implicit assumption that all consumption inequality is between not within households however increased marital sorting on earnings and the subsequent rise in the share of women s income in the household may have important implications for consumption inequality measured at the individual level we use an extension of the collective framework of chiappori to estimate a rule for assigning resources to individual household members we then construct a measure of individual level inequality by looking at implied changes in intra household allocations and explore the implications of our framework for the measurement of individual level versus household level consumption inequality our analysis which is based on households comprising one or two adults suggests that the conventional approach of ignoring intra household allocations underestimates the level of cross sectional consumption inequality by 30 and overstates the trend by two thirds our findings also indicate that increases in marital sorting on wages and hours worked can simultaneously explain virtually all of the decline in within household inequality and a substantial fraction of the rise in between household inequality in the uk since the 1970s

opening the black box of intra household decision making theory and non parametric empirical tests of general collective consumption models we provide revealed preference tests of general collective consumption models that account for public consumption and externalities within the household we further propose a novel approach to model special cases of this model which imply alternative assumptions regarding the sharing rule our application uses the panel data from the russia longitudinal monitoring survey we find that the general model together with a large class of special cases cannot be rejected by contrast we do reject the standard unitary model since our tests are entirely nonparametric this provides strong evidence in favor of models focusing on intrahousehold decision making

on the seasoning process of new bonds some are more seasoned than others in recent years there have been a number of studies investigating the yield spread phenomena between new and seasoned bonds 1 2 3 4 8 10 13 this literature focuses upon two aspects of the equilibrium pricing of new versus seasoned bonds l analysis of the microeconomic determinants of new issue seasoned issue yield spreads such as specific differences in coupon rates call features maturity features and the like and 2 analysis of macroeconomic determinants of yield spreads such as economic growth interest rate cycles changing marginal tax rates and the like

integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time abstract in this paper we consider the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem we relax the assumption of deterministic demand and assume that the lead time is varying lineraly with the lot size the lead time is composed of a lot size dependent run time and constant delay times such as moving waiting and setup times a solution procedure is suggested for solving the proposed model and numerical examples are used to illustrate the benefit of integration a sensitivity analysis is also performed to explore the effect of key parameters on lot size reorder point and expected total cost

the optimal spread and offering price for underwritten securities abstract the paper develops the net proceeds maximization theory explaining how the spread and offering price are determined in all underwritten offerings in the u s the theory yields solutions for the optimal spread and offering price for all underwritten securities and it yields comparative statics that explain the cross sectional variation in actual spreads and initial returns across different types of underwritten securities the theory also suggests two alternative explanations to the ones offered by chen and ritter j finance 55 2000 1105 for the clustering of unseasoned equity offerings spreads at 7

disagreement portfolio optimization and excess volatility disagreement a key factor inducing trading has been receiving ever increasing attention in recent years most research has focused on disagreement about the expected returns several authors have shown that if the average belief coincides with the true expected return in the portfolio context prices are unaffected by disagreement in this paper we study the pricing effects of disagreement about return variances we show that i disagreement about variances has systematic and significant pricing effects more disagreement leads to higher prices and ii prices are very sensitive to the degree of disagreement even if the average belief about the variance is constant tiny fluctuations in the disagreement about the variance lead to substantial price fluctuations this second result may offer an explanation for the excess volatility puzzle when small changes in the degree of disagreement occur they induce relatively large price changes yet the changes in disagreement may be hard to directly detect empirically leading to apparent excess volatility

recovering individual preferences for non market goods a collective travel cost model traditional recreation demand models do not make a distinction between a household and an individual as the reference decision making unit thus assuming that a family maximizes a single utility function even if the family consists of different individuals such models ignore the possibility of family members divergent preferences for non market goods this study proposes a novel approach the collective travel cost model ctcm to eliciting individual preferences for a non market good such as a recreation site by using revealed preference data this approach accounts for the intra household resource allocation and the role of each household member s preferences we show that the collective travel cost model can be applied to estimating a recreation demand model that yields individual welfare estimates appropriate for policy analysis of non market goods such as the willingness to pay to access a recreation site we find that how resources are distributed within the household reflects significant differences in welfare measures

estimating consumption economies of scale adult equivalence scales and household bargaining power how much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married what percentage of a married couple s expenditures are controlled by the husband how much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart we propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these we model households in terms of the utility functions of its members a bargaining or social welfare function and a consumption technology function we demonstrate generic non parametric identification of the model and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call indifference scales as well as consumption economies of scale the household s resource sharing rule or members bargaining power and other related concepts copyright 2013 oxford university press

the revealed preference approach to collective consumption behaviour testing and sharing rule recovery we present a revealed preference methodology for empirically analysing collective consumption behaviour first we introduce an integer programming ip methodology for testing data consistency with collective consumption models that account for publicly as well as privately consumed goods this ip methodology can include information on assignable quantities for private goods next we show that the ip methodology allows for recovering the personalized lindahl prices for the public goods and the personalized quantities for the private goods in turn this implies recovery of the sharing rule i e personalized income share levels an empirical application demonstrates the practical usefulness of the

identification of random resource shares in collective households without preference similarity restrictions abstractresource shares defined as the fraction of total household spending going to each person in a household are important for assessing individual material well being inequality and poverty

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

the microeconomics of efficient group behavior identification1 consider a group consisting of s members facing a common budget constraint p 1 any demand vector belonging to the budget set can be privately or publicly consumed by the members although the intragroup decision process is not known it is assumed to generate pareto efficient outcomes neither individual consumptions nor intragroup transfers are observable the paper analyzes when to what extent and under which conditions it is possible to recover the underlying structure individual preferences and the decision process from the group s aggregate behavior we show that the general version of the model is not identified however a simple exclusion assumption whereby each member does not consume at least one good is sufficient to guarantee generic identifiability of the welfare relevant structural concepts

gary becker s a theory of the allocation of time becker s 1965 paper a theory of the allocation of time revolutionised the modelling of household behaviour by unifying marshallian demand functions for goods with labour supply and related time use decisions within the household in this article we first summarise becker s time allocation model and associated key contributions then we show how his original framework extends to modern collective household models

looking for boy girl discrimination in household expenditure data the ability to test for discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls is hampered by a lack of data on intrahousehold distribution the analysis presented here allows inferences about intrahousehold allocation to be made from householdlevel expenditure data for a given level of income families with children will spend less on adult goods in order to purchase children s goods if household purchasing favors boys over girls smaller expenditures on adult goods would be made by families with boys as compared with those with girls a method for determining adult goods is described and the procedure for detecting gender bias is applied to data from c6te d lvoire and thailand the data show no evidence of discriminatio n between boys and girls in c6te d lvoire and a small and statistically insignificant bias in favor of boys in thailand how commodities are allocated among the members of a household has recently occasioned a good deal of interest assessments of poverty and income distribution based on household incomes or expenditures will be misleading if allocation within the household is unequal the position of women and girls has been of particular concern and there is a considerable amount of empirical evidence much of it from the indian subcontinent that documents discrimination against females see in particular bhagwati 1973 sen 1984 sen and sengupta 1983 miller 1981 bardhan 1982 and kynch and sen 1983 as well as survey papers by behrman 1987 and harriss 1987 much of the evidence is concerned with measurements of nutritional outcomes mortality and health status rather than with the direct allocation of goods by gender the difficulty in trying to determine the intrahousehold allocation of goods is that household budget surveys the obvious source of data record consumption not of individuals but of households and while attempts can be made to the author is a professor of public affairs and of economics and international affairs at princeton university and is a consultant to the population and human resources department of the world bank the author thanks dwayne benjamin who provided for excellent research assistance he is grateful to him and to members of the economic growth center at yale university for helpful comments this is a revised and shortened version of living standards measurement study working paper 39 the allocation of goods within the household adults children and gender june 1987 the results from thailand were not included in the working paper 1989 the international bank for reconstruction and development the world bank

household consumption when the marriage is stable we develop a novel framework to analyze the structural implications of the marriage market for household consumption we de ne a revealed preference characterization of e cient household consumption when the marriage is stable stability means that the marriage matching is individually rational and has no blocking pairs we characterize stable marriage with intrahousehold consumption transfers but without assuming transferable utility we show that our revealed preference characterization generates testable conditions even with a single consumption observation per household and heterogeneous individual preferences across households the characterization also allows for identifying the intrahousehold decision structure including the sharing rule under the same minimalistic assumptions an application to dutch household data demonstrates the usefulness of our theoretical results we nd that the female gets a higher income share when her relative wage increases which we can give a structural interpretation in terms of outside options from marriage that vary with individual wages

a simple approach to investigate intrahousehold allocation of private and public goods abstract we adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior with egoistic agents and assume that household consumption is either private or public we then show that 1 household demand functions have to satisfy testable constraints and 2 some elements of the decision process can be retrieved from observed behavior these results are based on a conditional demand m demand framework in which household demand functions are directly derived from the individual marginal rates of substitution finally we present an empirical illustration of these theoretical results using the u s consumer expenditure survey

misspecification of capital asset pricing this study documents empirical anomalies which suggest that either the simple one period capital asset pricing model capm is misspecified or that capital markets are inefficient in particular portfolios based on firm size or earnings price e p ratios experience average returns systematically different from those predicted by the capm furthermore the abnormal returns persist for at least two years this persistence reduces the likelihood that these results are being generated by a market inefficiency rather the evidence seems to indicate that the equilibrium pricing model is misspecified however the data also reveals that an e p effect does not emerge after returns are controlled for the firm size effect the firm size effect largely subsumes the e p effect thus while the e p anomaly and value anomaly exist when each variable is considered separately the two anomalies seem to be related to the same set of missing factors and these factors appear to be more closely associated with firm size than e p ratios

food counts measuring food consumption and expenditures in household consumption and expenditure surveys this special issue presents new evidence on the impact of survey design choices on the quality and availability of data collected in household consumption and expenditure surveys hces the 13 studies in this issue analyze how different survey design options affect the quality of the data being collected and the implications for statistical inference and policy analysis the studies offer practical insights into survey design for national statistical offices and survey practitioners worldwide and also provide policymakers with improved tools and a better understanding of poverty food security and nutrition for effective policymaking

static and intertemporal household decisions we discuss the most popular static and dynamic models of household behavior our main objective is to explain which aspects of household decisions different models can account for using this insight we describe testable implications identification results and estimation findings obtained in the literature particular attention is given to the ability of different models to answer various types of policy questions

taking prices seriously in the measurement of inequality abstract in the measurement of inequality adjustments for differences across households in their demographic composition and in the price regimes they face are usually very simple often nominal expenditure or income is adjusted with an expenditure independent price deflator and a price independent equivalence scale i show that using more flexible expenditure dependent price deflators and price dependent equivalence scales affects the level of and trend in measured family expenditure inequality in canada over 1969 1997 for example standard methods show a significant decrease in inequality between 1969 and 1978 but more flexible methods show a significant increase in inequality over this period

opportunities welfare and social justice a review of fishkin s bottlenecks in his bottlenecks a new theory of equal opportunity joseph fishkin claims he presents an entirely new way of thinking about equality of opportunity the core of the new theory is the call for opportunity pluralism which consists in enlarging the range of opportunities available to people at every stage in life in this essay we discuss how successful fishkin is at shaking the way economists think about equality of opportunity we identify two aspects of fishkin s theory that deeply conflict with economic theories of equality of opportunity those aspects have to do with the way economists interpret the ethical values of respect for preferences and responsibility we also argue that the way fishkin suggests to look at opportunities can help economists fill gaps in the way they define well being and social justice

sharing rule identification for general collective consumption models we propose a method to identify bounds i e set identi cation on the shar ing rule for a general collective household consumption model unlike the eects of distribution factors it is well known that the level of the sharing rule cannot be uniquely identi ed without strong assumptions on preferences across households of dierent compositions our new results show that though not point identi ed without these assumptions narrow bounds on the sharing rule can be obtained we get these bounds by applying revealed preference restrictions implied by the collective model to the household s continuous aggregate demand functions we obtain informative bounds even if nothing is known about whether each good is public private or assignable within the household though having such infor mation tightens the bounds we apply our method to us 1999 2009 psid data this application obtains tight sharing rule bounds that yield useful conclusions regarding the eects of income and wages on intrahousehold resource sharing and on the prevalence of individual as opposed to household level poverty

children s resources in collective households identification estimation and an application to child poverty in malawi children s resources matter but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea sured at the household level modern collective household models permit some identication of indi vidual household member resources but these models typically either ignore children or treat them as attributes of adults we propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions possibly assigned to them by parents extending the frameworks of browning chiappori and lewbel 2007 and lewbel and pendakur 2008 we show identication of children s resource shares within households we invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual s resource share within the household we show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household further we obtain identication using only engel curves and so do not require ob served price variation in the data we estimate our model using data from malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows women s resource shares fall and children s resource shares rise and men s resource shares are basically unchanged we alsond evidence of gender bias against girls and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in malawi

the rise and demise of the convertible arbitrage strategy this article analyzes convertible arbitrage one of the most successful hedge fund strategies the aim of the strategy is to exploit underpricing of convertible bonds by taking a long position in a convertible and a short position in the underlying asset the authors find that convertible bonds are underpriced at the issuance dates at the same time short sales of underlying equity increase significantly both effects are stronger and more persistent for equity like convertibles than for debtlike convertibles furthermore short sale pressures negatively affect stock returns around the announcement and issuance dates of convertibles all these factors have likely contributed to the shift toward issuing more debtlike convertibles in recent years which in turn has substantially lowered the returns from convertible arbitrage

collective household models principles and main results in the traditional approach to consumer behaviour it is assumed that households behave as if they were single decision making units this approach has methodological empirical and welfare economic deficiencies a valuable alternative to the traditional model is the collective approach to household behaviour the collective approach explicitly takes account of the fact that multi person households consist of several members which may have different preferences among these household members an intrahousehold bargaining process is assumed to take place in addition to providing an introduction to the collective approach this survey intends to show how different collective household models each with their own aims and assumptions are connected

price stabilization in the market for new issues abstract this study examines price stabilization in new equity issues stabilizationtruncates the distribution of post issue prices at a floor price lowering the risk of adverse price moves and hence in a competitive dealer market reducing the bid ask spread using 1 523 nasdao traded firm commitment initial public offerings issued between 1982 and 1987 we find that spreads narrow when the market price is close to the offer price and stabilization is most likely moreover significant negative returns are documented after the hypothesized termination of stabilizing activities suggesting that stabilization and its cessation affect market prices

entrepreneurship as a solution to poverty individuals living in poverty remain a critical issue this special issue focuses on how entrepreneurship can help to solve such poverty rather than viewing those in poverty as a market for goods the solution lies in understanding how to help those living in poverty create their own businesses ultimately entrepreneurship among those in poverty will create a long lasting solution to their poverty herein we initially examine the extant knowledge about entrepreneurship we then examine where future research on this important topic should move finally we introduce the five articles that make up this special issue these five articles came from the initial 71 submissions and enhance our knowledge about entrepreneurship as a pathway to reducing poverty

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

married with children a collective labor supply model with detailed time use and intrahousehold expenditure information we propose a collective labor supply model with household production that generalizes an original model of blundell chiappori and meghir 2005 in our model adults individual preferences not only depend on own leisure and individual private consumption of market goods they also depend on the consumption of domestic goods which are produced by combining goods bought on the market with individuals time we apply our model to new and unique data on dutch couples with children the data contains detailed information about the spouses time use and the intrahousehold allocation of all expenditures our application uses a novel estimation strategy that builds upon the familiar two stage allocation representation of the collective model we obtain interesting and plausible empirical results spouses preferences depend on the consumption of domestically produced goods including children s welfare in addition pareto weights depend on variables like the individual wages and the share in the household s nonlabor income finally and perhaps surprisingly we do not nd evidence that mothers care more for their children than fathers this paper draws on data of the liss panel of centerdata special thanks go to marika de bruijne and arthur van soest who helped to construct the questionnaire and to guillaume schollier

efficient intra household allocations a general characterization and empirical tests the neoclassical theory of demand applies to individuals yet in empirical work it is usually taken as valid for households with many members this paper explores what the theory of individuals implies for households that have more than one member we make minimal assumptions about how the individual members of the household resolve conflicts all we assume is that however decisions are made outcomes are efficient we refer to this as the collective setting we show that in the collective setting household demands must satisfy a symmetry and rank condition on the slutsky matrix we also present some further results on the effects on demands of variables that do not modify preferences but that do affect how decisions are made we apply our theory to a series of surveys of household expenditures from canada the tests of the usual symmetry conditions are rejected for two person households but not for one person households we also show that income pooling is rejected for two person households we then test for our collective setting conditions on the couples data none of the collective setting restrictions are rejected we conclude that the collective setting is a plausible and tractable next step to take in the analysis of household behavior

underpricing of newly issued bonds evidence from the swiss capital market the pricing of newly issued bonds on the swiss capital market is investigated over the years 1980 1982 the results reveal a slight underpricing of new bonds at the issue date that is roughly equal to the difference in transactions costs between the markets for new and seasoned bonds underpricing is no longer observed when the new bonds start to be traded on the stock exchange that is after about two days tests of several hypotheses show that unexpected changes in interest rates over the offering period explain part of the underpricing the capital acquisition process of firms has been the subject of intensive research in finance 1 the pricing of newly issued securities is one of the central topics in this area several studies for the bond market find systematic and partly persistent underpricing and therefore higher returns for new bonds relative to seasoned bonds the term seasoning process is generally used to describe this phenomenon 2 typically yields to maturity or holding period returns of either individual new bonds or portfolios of new bonds are compared to portfolios of existing bonds so far only data from the united states have been evaluated this study extends previous research by investigating observations from the swiss capital market due to different institutional characteristics various hypotheses can be tested in a more revealing way in order to allow a reliable identification of the seasoning process individual new and seasoned bonds are selected so that they are identical in as many relevant characteristics as possible holding periods are defined over shorter time spans than commonly used in the literature leading to a more exact estimate of the persistence of systematic differences in returns the paper is organized as follows the methodology underlying the empirical work is developed in section i section ii discusses the institutional setting and the data base the empirical importance of the seasoning process is documented in section iii various explanations and their respective test results are presented in sections iv and v some conclusions complete the paper study center gerzensee foundation of swiss national bank and bank pictet co geneva respectively the comments by j williams as well as by participants at the 13th annual meeting of the european finance association dublin 1986 are gratefully acknowledged the unusually detailed suggestions by two referees resulted in a significant improvement of the paper

the engel curves of non cooperative households we provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a system of engel curves to have been generated by a non cooperative model of family behaviour these conditions fully characterise the local behaviour of household level consumption in the cross section i e as a function of total income and distribution factors in this setting any demand system compatible with a non cooperative model is also compatible with a collective model but the converse is not true we describe how these nested conditions may be tested using standard instrumental variables strategies

economic well being and poverty among the elderly an analysis based on a collective consumption model we apply the collective consumption model of browning chiappori and lewbel 2006 to analyse economic well being and poverty among the elderly the model focuses on individual preferences a consumption technology that captures the economies of scale of living in a couple and a sharing rule that governs the intra household allocation of resources the model is applied to a time series of dutch consumption expenditure surveys our empirical results indicate substantial economies of scale and a wife s share that is increasing in total expenditures we further calculated poverty rates by means of the collective consumption model collective poverty rates of widows and widowers turn out to be slightly lower than traditional ones based on a standard equivalence scale poverty among women men in elderly couples however seems to be heavily underestimated overestimated by the traditional approach finally we analysed the impact of becoming a widow er based on cross sectional evidence we nd that the drop increase in material well being following the husband s death is substantial for women in high low expenditure couples for men the picture is reversed

the pricing of convertible debt offerings abstract we present the first empirical evidence on the pricing of convertible debt offerings using a sample of 91 convertible debt offerings from the period 1988 1992 we show a significant mean initial excess return of 1 11 our underpricing result is invariant to zero nonzero coupons maturity issue size or bond ratings further analysis reveals that various types of risk inherent in the new convertible issues are useful in explaining the cross sectional variation in the initial excess returns we offer an explanation for our results based on the arguments of the differential information model

inventory control in a lost sales setting with information about supply lead times abstract supply chain collaboration using advancements in information technology is on the rise and this includes sharing of information between suppliers and buyers in this paper we study the value of information about the development of supply lead times from a buyer s perspective we consider a periodically reviewed single item inventory system in a lost sales setting where at most one order can be outstanding at a time we compare the performance of an inventory model assuming informed lead times to a model assuming uninformed independent and identically distributed lead times we employ the dynamic programming approach to find the best state dependent ordering policy to minimize the expected average total cost per time unit our numerical results show that acquiring information about the development of supply lead times is of value in general the best policy suggested by the model assuming informed lead times causes lower average cost than the model assuming uninformed lead times

fertility at work children and women s labor market outcomes in urban ghana abstract while it is commonly assumed that fertility decreases female labor supply i show theoretically that fertility can increase female labor supply if returns to financial inputs in children are sufficiently high compared to returns to time investments using six rounds of a panel survey from urban ghana i find evidence of countervailing effects behind a net zero effect of young children on women s hours of work labor supply on the extensive margin drops but women who remain in the labor force increase their hours in response to a child women s labor supply particularly increases in response to a young child if there are older siblings or other adults in the household by contrast men s labor supply does not change in response to young children

underwriter price support and the ipo underpricing puzzle abstract this paper reassesses the apparent systematic underpricing of initial public offerings ipos investigation of the distribution of initial returns following ipos shows that positive mean initial returns may reflect the existence of a partially unobserved left negative tail moreover most ipos with zero one day returns subsequently fall in price suggesting that underwriter price support may account for the skewed distribution and hence the phenomenon of positive average initial ipo returns even if offering prices are set at expected market value this paper thus challenges the presumption underlying previous research that positive average initial ipo returns result primarily from deliberate underpricing

expenditure on children a rothbarth type method consistent with scale economies and parents bargaining abstract we suggest a new methodology to estimate the share of household income accruing to children the household behavior is represented according to the collective approach that is each household member is characterized by specific preferences following the principle of the rothbarth approach the identification of the children s share requires the observation of adult specific goods our method differs from this traditional approach in that it is compatible with economies of scale as well as with parents bargaining we illustrate the method with an application to the french household budget survey

differential information and security market equilibrium we propose a simple model of equilibrium asset pricing in which there are differences in the amounts of information available for developing inferences about the returns parame ters of alternative securities in contrast with earlier work we show that parameter uncer tainty or estimation risk can have an effect upon market equilibrium under reasonable conditions securities for which there is relatively little information are shown to have relatively higher systematic risk when that risk is properly measured ceteris paribus the initially very limited model is shown to be robust with respect to relaxation of a number of its principal assumptions we provide theoretical support for the empirical examination of at least three proxies for relative information period of listing number of security returns observations available and divergence of analyst opinion

marital matching economies of scale and intrahousehold allocations we propose a novel nonparametric method to empirically identify economies of scale in multiperson household consumption we assume consumption technologies that define the public and private nature

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

canadian contributions to family economics canadian scholars have made substantial contributions to the relatively new field of family economics these include new models of how men and women match in marriage markets and of how decisions are made in multi person households several were early contributors to the literature on married women s labour supply and labour supply in a family context and helped to develop empirical methods in this area a particular focus has been on the impacts of policy relevant parameters such childcare costs on family labour supply and child well being new work on child development the impact of early life conditions and the processes of intergenerational transmission also highlight the importance of family context in determining economic well being

the joint economic lot size problem a review abstract this article reviews lot size models which focus on coordinated inventory replenishment decisions between buyer and vendor and their impact on the performance of the supply chain these so called joint economic lot size jels models determine order production and shipment quantities from the perspective of the supply chain with the objective of minimizing total system costs this paper first describes the problem studied introduces the methodology of the review and presents a descriptive analysis of the selected papers subsequently papers are categorized and analyzed with respect to their contribution to the coordination of different echelons in the supply chain finally the review highlights gaps in the existing literature and suggests interesting areas for future research

equivalence versus indifference scales comparing income levels across families with different composition is a central issue for most welfare indicators and policies currently the dominant method relies on income based equivalence scales which raise a host of theoretical empirical and normative difficulties however a new approach based on the notion of indifference scales avoids most of these problems while leading to empirically tractable estimation methods i submit that time has come to abandon the traditional view in favour of the new concept

lead time reduction strategies in a single vendor single buyer integrated inventory model with lot size dependent lead times and stochastic demand this paper studies alternative methods for reducing lead time and their impact on the safety stock and the expected total costs of a q s continuous review inventory control system we focus on a single vendor single buyer integrated inventory model with stochastic demand and variable lot size dependent lead time and assume that lead time consists of production and setup and transportation time as a consequence lead time may be reduced by crashing setup and transportation time by increasing the production rate or by reducing the lot size we illustrate the benefits of reducing lead time in numerical examples and show that lead time reduction is especially beneficial in case of high demand uncertainty further our studies indicate that a mixture of setup time and production time reduction is appropriate to lower expected total costs

collective labour supply with children we extend the collective model of household behavior to allow for the existence of public consumption we show how this model allows the analysis of welfare consequences of policies aimed at changing the distribution of power within the household our setting provides a conceptual framework for addressing issues linked to the targeting of specific benefits or taxes we also show that the observation of the labor supplies and the household demand for the public good allow one to identify individual welfare and the decision process this requires either a separability assumption or the presence of a distribution factor

control of resources bargaining power and the demand of food evidence from progresa abstract i use a structural model of households to recover how much resources each individual controls in the context of the mexican progresa program i find that the eligibility to receive the cash transfers induces a redistribution of resources from the father to both the mother and children although the mother is the one benefiting the most with these information i compute individual poverty rates and quantify to what extent the program reduces within household inequality i also combine these measures to construct a proxy for women s bargaining power and using causal identification techniques i estimate its direct effects on household demand for food exploiting random assignment of the cash transfers as an instrumental variable for the treatment of interest i show that mothers having majority control of household resources relative to fathers increase food consumption as a share of the household budget by 6 5 8 3 i use these estimates to argue that by knowing i the distribution of pre program resources inside the household and ii how much influence each decision maker can have on the desired policy outcome a policymaker can improve the cost effectiveness of a cash transfer program by targeting the cash to resource shares in addition to gender

welfare analysis when people are different inequality and poverty estimation indeed all welfare analysis must deal with the fact that people are heterogeneous equivalence scales and indifference scales are tools that may be used for this an equivalence scale gives the relative costs faced by different people an indifference scale gives the relative cost of living for people in different types of households equivalence scales and indifference scales can be estimated using off the shelf household level consumer expenditure data and standard econometric techniques for nonlinear equation systems i offer a short introduction to the identification estimation and use of equivalence scales and indifference scales and argue that these are complementary tools in the analysis of inequality and poverty the methods are illustrated with canadian household expenditure data from the surveys of household spending 20042009 estimated equivalence scales for disability are presented along with estimated household model parameters and an analysis of consumption poverty

a model of constructing the poverty line abstract this paper proposes a model which defines the poverty line as that level of expenditure at which all caloric and nutrient shortfalls are eliminated where requirements with respect to these are tailored to the age sex occupation characteristics of each household the methodology avoids all the allegations of subjectivity and conceptual circularity levelled against the traditional methods an application of the model to the nss data for indian punjab demonstrates the computational simplicity and easy identifiability of the poverty line

the labeling effect of a child benefit system child benefit systems exist in many countries while they show a lot of differences in terms of eligibility rules amounts involved and implementation tax deduction tax credit or direct benefit the common motivation for their existence is to increase children s welfare in the dutch child benefit system the case i focus on in this paperone of the parents usually the mother is entitled to an untaxed child benefit amount which only depends on the child s age and the number of children in the household thus child support does not depend on household income marital status or labor market status as a result child benefit is exogenous to the household given the presence of children this is in contrast with the situation in many other countries including germany france the united kingdom and the united states where government provided child support is partly means tested see jonathan bradshaw et al 1993 in the netherlands child benefit is generally a nonnegligible addition to the household income the median share of child benefit in the total net income of households with children is 8 percent on the national level expenditures on child benefits amount to 1 2 percent of gnp the use of the child benefit is completely at the discretion of the parent there are no legal requirements that a certain amount be spent on particular goods or services nor does the government provide any guidelines regarding expenditure on children a policy question that arises is to what extent children benefit from child benefits standard microeconomic demand theory allows no role for effects of the composition of income given the fungibility of income sources it is only the sum of income components that is relevant in explaining expenditure patterns thus within that framework the answer would be that the marginal propensity to consume child goods from one guilder of child benefits is no different than from one guilder of any other income source in the more general class of gametheoretic models of household behavior however the composition of household income will generally affect expenditure patterns see e g shelly j lundberg and robert a pollak 1993 and martin browning et al 1994 if fathers and mothers have different preferences and mothers have control over child benefits the effect of child benefits on expenditures will differ from the effect of other income sources lundberg et al 1997 provide empirical evidence showing that a transfer of control over child benefits from fathers to mothers in the united kingdom due to a change in legislation resulted in a significant increase in expenditures on child clothing daniela del boca and christopher j flinn 1994 have analyzed the effect of income composition on expenditure decisions of divorced mothers they find that the coefficients associated with child support and alimony income differ from those for other income in engel curves for expenditures on childspecific goods their results can be explained in terms of a noncooperative nash model in which the child support transfer decisions of the noncustodial father and the expenditure decisions of the mother are determined simultaneously in contrast to del boca and flinn s analysis in which child support is a decision variable the present paper focuses on the possible differential effect of government provided child support which is truly exogenous in this paper i analyze the effects of child benefits on expenditures by running regressions in which child benefit enters as a separate explanatory variable the enipirical analysis is based on a time series of 17 cross section consumer expenditure surveys in the netherlands covering the period 1978 through 1994 it is important to note that in a single cross section it department of economics university of groningen p o b 800 9700 av groningen the netherlands e mail p kooreman eco rug nl i am indebted to two anonymous referees for constructive comments helpful comments were also provided by rob alessie maarten allers chris bojke werner de bondt bert schoonbeek and tom wansbeek i thank vincent linderhof for organizing the data financial support was provided by the dutch organization for scientific research nwo homes project grant

individual welfare analysis for collective households abstract we propose novel tools for the analysis of individual welfare on the basis of aggregate household demand behavior the method assumes a collective model of household consumption with the public and private nature of goods specified by the empirical analyst a main distinguishing feature of our approach is that it builds on a revealed preference characterization of the collective model that is intrinsically nonparametric we show how to identify individual money metric welfare indices from observed household demand along with the intrahousehold sharing rule and the individuals willingness to pay for public consumption i e lindahl prices the method is easy to use in practice and yields informative empirical results which we demonstrate through both a simulation exercise and an empirical application to labor supply data drawn from the panel study of income dynamics

investment incentives debt and warrants abstract this paper models and characterizes investment incentive problems associated with debt financing the decision problem of residual claimants is explicity formulated and their investment policies are characterized the paper also analyzes the use of conversion features and warrants to control distortionary incentives these claims reverse the convex shape of levered equity over the upper range of the firm s earnings and this mitigates the incentive to take risk it is shown that under certain conditions such claims can be constructed to restore net present value maximizing incentives and simultaneously meet the financing requirements of the firm

erratum to lead time reduction strategies in a single vendor single buyer integrated inventory model with lot size dependent lead times and stochastic demand international journal of production economics 136 2012 37 44

income and outcomes a structural model of intrahousehold allocation there is evidence from several sources that one cannot treat many person households as a single decision maker if this is the case then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household we develop a method of identifying how incomes affect outcomes given conventional family expenditure data the basic assumption we make is that household decision processes lead to efficient outcomes we apply our method to a sample of canadian couples with no children we find that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner depend significantly on their relative incomes and ages and on the level of lifetime wealth

new global estimates of child poverty and their sensitivity to alternative equivalence scales this paper uses micro data from household surveys from 89 countries to estimate the rate of extreme poverty among children in the developing world 19 5 of children are estimated to live on less than 1 90 per day as opposed to 9 2 of adults poverty rates for children remain above 17 and are greater than adult poverty rates for all reasonable two parameter equivalence scales

inequality poverty and the intra household allocation of consumption in senegal intra household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design but there is very little evidence the current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels as well as to the misclassification of some individuals as regards to their poverty status using a novel survey for senegal in which consumption data were collected at a disaggregated level this paper quantifies these various effects in total two opposing effects one on mean and one on inequality compensate each other in terms of the overall poverty rate but individual poverty statuses are affected intra household consumption inequalities accounts for 14 percent of inequality in senegal the authors uncover the fact that household structure and organization are key correlates of intra household inequality and individual risk of poverty

altruism in the family and selfishness in the market place adam smith argued in a famous passage that people are selfish in their market transactions it is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest we address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self love and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages 1937 p 14 in an earlier study he said with irony we are not ready to suspect any person of being defective in selfishness 1853 p 446 selfishness in market transactions has been assumed in practically all subsequent discussions of the economic system objections were dismissed with vague allusions to human nature or with an assertion that altruism loses out to selfishness in the struggle to survive in the market sector yet altruism is generally recognized to be important within a family again adam smith said