monetary policy coordination under fixed and floating exchange rates this paper studies monetary policy coordination in a familiar fixed price perfect capital mobility multicountry model it is shown that under fixed exchange rates countries can coordinate their policies and reach pareto efficient outcomes with rules closely related to the nash based mechanisms that have been designed to overcome free riding in standard public good economies the coordination rules defined in this paper do not make countries lose the control of their own policies it is also shown that nash implementation of pareto efficient states with similar rules is in general not possible under floating exchange rates copyright 1990 by royal economic society

economics of a bottleneck abstract drawing on vickrey amer econ rev 59 251 261 1969 and subsequent literature this paper provides a thorough economic analysis of the simplest bottleneck model of road congestion with peak load demand in the morning rush hour a fixed number of identical individuals one per car must travel from home to work between which is a bottleneck of given capacity the costs of travel include queuing time and schedule delay time early or late for work the frequency distribution of departure times adjusts so that in equilibrium all individuals have the same travel costs the paper extends the previous literature by examining a coarse toll and solving for optimal capacities the application of congestion tolls can generate efficiency gains by altering the frequency distribution of departure times previous estimates of the efficiency gains from congestion tolling are likely to be substantially downward biased because they have ignored this effect

models of stock returns a comparison in this paper a discrete mixture of normal distributions is proposed to explain the observed significant kurtosis fat tails and significant positive skewness in the distribution of daily rates of returns for a sample of common stocks and indexes stationarity tests on the parameter estimates of this discrete mixture of normal distributions model revealed significant differences in the mean estimates that can explain the observed skewness and significant differences in the variance estimates that can explain the observed kurtosis an alternative explanation for the observed fat tails is the symmetric student model the result of a comparison between the models is that the discrete mixture of normal distributions model has substantially more descriptive validity than the student model for many years both financial economists and statisticians have been concerned with the description of stock market returns the form of the distribution of stock returns is a crucial assumption for mean variance portfolio theory theoretical models of capital asset prices and the prices of contingent claims for example understanding the behavior of the variance is essential to option pricing models empirical tests of asset pricing models and the efficient markets hypothesis draw statistical inferences that are also conditional on distributional assumptions the most convenient assumption for financial theory and empirical methods is that the distribution of security rates of return be multivariate normal with parameters that are stationary over time since the normal distribution is stable under addition any arbitrary portfolio of stocks will also be normally distributed with the additional assumption of risk aversion mean variance theory follows furthermore the assumptions of normality and parameter stationarity are required for most of the econometric techniques typically used in empirical research tests of the normality hypothesis on the daily returns of the dow jones industrial stocks by fama 121 revealed more kurtosis fatter tails than that predicted from a sample of independent and identically distributed normal variates fama concluded from this evidence that the distribution of price changes conforms better to the stable paretian distribution with characteristic exponent

dynamic implementation in two agent economies abstract the dynamic mechanisms that implement pareto efficient and individually rational allocations in standard public good economies suppose that agents communicate by exchanging as messages their marginal rates of substitution in some familiar models such as economies with non monotonic preferences marginal rates of substitution are not well defined or do not characterize preferences and therefore cannot play the role of communication messages we define a dynamic mechanism that implements pareto efficient and individually rational allocations in a general two agent economy

the impossibility of efficient decision rules for firms in competitive stock market economies considerable attention has been focused recently on models of firms under uncertainty in which there is an incomplete set of securities markets in these models each firm can issue only one security and consumers can generate consumption plans only through the purchase of firms securities consequently if the economy is competitive each stockholder of a firm will impute the same value to the firm in equilibrium where this value is given by the market price of the firm s security however stockholders will not in general have the same implicit prices for state contingent consumption since the financial market is said to be incomplete if the number of independent securities is less than the number of states of nature consumers cannot hedge perfectly whichimplies that unconstrained pareto optimal allocations are not generally attainable see 2 and 3 finally it is unclear what firms objectives should be in these models because profit maximization is not well defined firms profits in different states cannot be aggregated into a single index it is still generally accepted however that firms should operate in their own stockholders interests a necessary condition for allocative efficiency

a simple auctioneerless mechanism with walrasian properties abstract a simple mechanism for reallocating holdings is described in which no auctioneer is required outcomes are determined solely from traders actions and without any requirement that the mechanism be in equilibrium the mechanism is shown to exactly duplicate the performance of the walrasian auctioneer both in its equilibria and in its disequilibrium path if individuals are price takers and if the number of individuals is large to approximately duplicate the auctioneer s performance even when individuals behave strategically each taking account of his own influence on prices

changes in the financial market welfare and price effects and the basic theorems of value conservation this paper analyzes the impact on both welfare and equilibrium prices of changes in the financial market in a general equilibrium two period context previous papers have focussed on the securities effect tending to essentially ignore the equally important endowment effect that arises when market structure changes are implemented two forms of endowment neutrality and market structure changes which either preserve expand or shift allocational feasibility differentiate the main theorems which are based on arbitrary preferences and beliefs and substantially extend and modify extant results in particular earlier statements identified with value conservation are sharply moderated very roughly the paper yields the following implications for some of the more common changes in the market nonsynergistic corporate spinoffs and the opening of option markets have on balance strongly positive welfare effects nonsynergistic mergers tend to have strong negative welfare effects while the welfare effects of alternative risky debt structures tend to be ambiguous all of the preceding however may under plausible conditions be redistributive changes in the structure of the financial market have long been of interest to financial economists while such changes may take many forms it is perhaps surprising that only a few of the more common ones have been systematically studied foremost among these are changes which involve the firm s capital structure the relative amounts of debt and equity mergers and other special recapitalizations this paper analyzes the impact on both welfare and equilibrium prices of changes in the financial market in a two period context it differs from previous studies primarily in that it is based on a fully integrated general equilibrium approach similar to that employed in international trade analysis thus while the resulting mosaic contains previous studies as clearly recognizable fragments such as the classic paper of modigliani and miller 33 it also provides the necessary framework and tools for an evaluation of market structure changes of any type such as changes involving subordinated debt convertibles warrants mergers spinoffs and the opening of option markets

learning dynamics for mechanism design an experimental comparison of public goods mechanisms in a repeated interaction public goods economy incomplete information and dynamic behavior may affect the realized outcomes of mechanisms known to be efficient in a complete information oneshot game an experimental test of five public goods mechanisms indicates that subjects with private information appear to best respond to recent observations this provides predictions about which mechanisms will generate convergence to their efficient equilibrium allocations these predictions match the experimental result that globally stable efficient mechanisms realize the highest efficiency in practice the simplicity of the suggested best response model makes it useful in predicting stability of mechanisms not yet tested

private versus public production of information abstract this paper re examines a recent article by grossman and stiglitz 1980 where information production is shown to be fundamentally incompatible with decentralized market systems based upon their model public production of information is discussed as a natural alternative three main implications of the analysis are i the market can be informationally efficient with public production of information ii there exists an informational equilibrium and the resulting allocation is pareto efficient and iii although the optimal level of information critically depends upon information users preferences and endowments their complete knowledge t the societal level is not necessary for public production of information

continuous and feasible implementation of rational expectations lindahl allocations abstract in this paper we consider bayesian implementation of rational expectations lindahl allocations for economic environments with public goods when agents are incompletely informed about environments we construct a continuous and feasible mechanism whose bayesian equilibrium allocations coincide with rational expectations lindahl allocations we not only allow the types of individuals to be unknown but also allow both the preferences and the initial endowments to be unknown to the designer in addition we allow some types of boundary equilibrium allocations and a continuous information structure journal of economic literatureclassification number c72 d71 d82 h41

negative externalities and evolutionary implementation in this paper we model externality abatement as an implementation problem our model incorporates techniques from evolutionary game theory assuming that agents dynamically adjust their choices in response to the incentives they currently face we offer a simple condition on aggregate payoffs under which a planner with limited information about preferences can nevertheless ensure that efficient behaviour is globally stable finally we present a series of applications that show that our sufficient condition holds in a variety of models involving negative externalities

examining the patterns of innovation in low carbon energy science and technology publications and patents of asian emerging economies this paper focuses on selected asian emerging economies the study employs publications and patents as proxies for science and technology and its analysis is divided into three main parts production trends catching up trends and patterns of convergence the findings resulted in four salient points to be considered by policy makers 1 asean 4 lagged significantly behind the more advanced economies korea taiwan and china even though their performance was identical in the early 1990s china has forged ahead in terms of scientific publications and patents production but lags behind in patents quality 2 compared to the world average the region as a whole has high potential to forge ahead in low carbon energy scientific production 3 advanced economies in asia kicked off their low carbon energy science and technology development more from technological rather than scientific production with no straightforward co evolution between the two competencies this demonstrates the need for a strong science based technological foundation and a high level of dynamism for low carbon energy technology development and 4 the economies demonstrated contrasting development trends in their focus between the supply and demand sides of energy technology development the performance of the advanced economies is higher in demand side low carbon energy innovations

renewable energy investment by the world bank world bank group lending for renewable energy accelerated in the 1990s and resulted in 17 approved projects with 700 million in bank loans and 230 million in grants by the global environment facility the bank s 1999 energy sector strategy fuel for thought charted new directions for renewable energy investment the present paper considers the implementation challenges of fuel for thought strategies and the opportunities for carrying them out the paper distinguishes between agendas in the energy and rural development sectors and reviews limitations to implementing these agendas lessons from projects are just emerging but suggest ve areas of support for renewable energy by the bank in the future renewable energy nancing electric power policy frameworks rural energy enterprises regulated rural energy concessions and domestic technology manufacturing interviews with the private sector suggest additional forms of support assist with business plans nance pre feasibility studies reduce commercial risks support joint ventures build market volume and stability and pilot and test innovative business models the e ectiveness of the bank in following through on its ambitious agenda fundamentally rests on the willingness and commitment of developing countries to pursue these strategies and the degree to which renewable energy applications are seen to serve countries development priorities 2001 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

out of equilibrium performance of three lindahl mechanisms experimental evidence abstract we describe an experimental comparison of the out of equilibrium performance of three allocation mechanisms designed to achieve lindahl outcomes as nash equilibria the mechanisms due to walker 1981 kim 1993 and chen 2002 we find that chen s mechanism which is supermodular converges closest and most rapidly to its equilibrium however we find that the properties that move subjects toward equilibrium in chen s mechanism typically generate sizeable taxes and subsidies when not in equilibrium and correspondingly large budget surpluses and deficits which typically far outweigh the surplus created by providing the public good the kim mechanism on the other hand converges relatively close to its equilibrium and exhibits much better out of equilibrium efficiency properties

secure implementation experiments do strategy proof mechanisms really work strategy proofness requiring that truth telling is a dominant strategy is a standard concept used in social choice theory saijo et al 2003 argue that this concept has serious drawbacks in particular announcing one s true preference may not be a unique dominant strategy and almost all strategy proof mechanisms have a continuum of nash equilibria for only a subset of strategy proof mechanisms do the set of nash equilibria and the set of dominant strategy equilibria coincide for example this double coincidence occurs in the groves mechanism when preferences are single peaked we report experiments using two strategy proof mechanisms where one of them has a large number of nash equilibria but the other has a unique nash equilibrium we found clear differences in the rate of dominant strategy play between the two

equilibrium binding agreements abstract we study equilibrium binding agreements the coalition structures that form under such agreements and the efficiency of the outcomes that result we analyze such agreements in a context where the payoff to each player depends on the actions of all other players thus a game in strategic form is a natural starting point unlike the device of a characteristic function explicit attention is paid to the behavior of the complementary set of players when a coalition blocks a proposed agreement a solution concept and its applications are discussed journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

surplus sharing with a two stage mechanism in this article we consider environments where agents jointly produce a private output good by contributing privately owned resources an efficient outcome may not be realized due to strategic behavior and conflicting interests of the agents we construct a two stage mechanism building on a varian mechanism the modified mechanism ensures an equilibrium for a large class of preferences and guarantees the feasibility of outcomes

a direct test of roll s conjecture on the firm size effect empirical research indicates that small firms earn higher average rates of return than large firms even after accounting for beta risk roll conjectured that the small firm effect might be attributed to improper estimation of security betas the evidence shows that while the direction of the bias in beta estimation is consistent with roll s conjecture the magnitude of the bias appears to be too small to explain the firm size effect

non excludable public good experiments we conduct a two stage game experiment with a non excludable public good in the first stage two subjects choose simultaneously whether or not they commit to contributing nothing to provide a pure public good in the second stage knowing the other subject s commitment decision subjects who did not commit in the first stage choose contributions to the public good we found no support for the evolutionary stable strategy equilibrium and the ratio of subjects who did not commit to contributing nothing increased as periods advanced that is the free riding rate declined over time furthermore this behavior did not arise due to altruism or kindness among subjects but from spiteful behavior of subjects

a voluntary participation game with a non excludable public good faculty of economics tokyo metropolitan university hachioji tokyo 192 0397 japanyamato takehiko c metro u ac jpreceived november 14 1997 revised august 21 1998in the previous mechanism design on public goods it was implicitly assumed thatevery agent must participate in the mechanism that the designer provides thisapproach neglects non excludability of public goods we explicitly incorporatenon excludability and examine a two stage game with voluntary participation inthe first stage each agent simultaneously decides whether she participates in themechanism or not and in the second stage knowing the other agents participationdecisions the agents who selected participation in the first stage choose theirstrategies participation of all agents is not an equilibrium in many situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d71 d78 h41

ratio lindahl equilibria and an informationally efficient and implementable mixed ownership system abstract in this paper we formalize an informationally efficient and implementable mixed ownership economic institutional framework by using the ratio lindahl equilibrium that yields pareto efficient and individually rational allocations for public goods economies with general variable returns we consider the incentive aspects of the system by giving an incentive compatible informationally efficient and privacy preserving mechanism whose nash allocations coincide with ratio lindahl allocations moreover the mechanism is well behaved in the sense that it uses an individually feasible balanced and continuous outcome function and further has a message space of minimal dimension

implementation in undominated nash equilibria without integer games a mechanism which uses neither integer games nor modulo games is shown to implement any social choice function in a production economy with private and excludable public goods more precisely th

efficient allocation of a prize king solomon s dilemma abstract a planner is interested in allocating an indivisible good a prize to one of many agents in the economy his objective is to give the prize to the agent who values it most without any payments being made by the recipient the planner however does not know the identity of this agent while the agents themselves do this paper shows how the planner can construct simple multistage mechanisms with a unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome at this outcome the agent who values the prize most gets it without any transfer of money being made by any of the agents or the planner

stable implementation of lindahl allocations abstract the resource allocation mechanisms using nash equilibrium as the solution concept in economies with incomplete information rely on the assumption that agent s disequilibrium messages converge to a nash equilibrium the mechanisms implementing lindahl allocations are however extremely unstable under the most used process to represent disequilibrium behaviour in games of incomplete information the cournot process we provide a new mechanism overcoming the instability difficulty in the case of quasi linear preferences

the pricing of when issued common stock a note a basic postulate of the theory of finance is that two equivalent financial claims will sell at the same price in a competitive financial market an occasion for testing this single price law of markets arises when new shares created as a result of a stock split are traded on a when issued basis since one old share entitles the holder to the same cash flow stream as a proportional number of when issued split shares the price of the old shares should be the same as the price of the when issued shares adjusted for the stock split factor however casual empiricism suggests that these two prices are seldom equal and that in virtually all cases the when issued share sells at a higher price adjusted for the split factor than the old share a possible explanation of this apparent price discrepancy lies in the transaction settlement procedures the settlement of when issued trading is not made until six business days after the new shares are distributed whereas trades in the old shares are settled five business days after the trade date in this note we investigate whether the price differential can be explained solely by the different settlement procedures and find that it cannot section i describes trading in when issued securities on the new york stock exchange nyse and discusses possible causes of this price discrepancy section ii describes the data used in this study and presents the empirical results additional discussion is in section iii and section iv contains concluding remarks

ex dividend returns the mexican puzzle abstract we study ex dividend returns in mexico where an imputation system entitles individual investors to a net dividend tax credit based on taxation we expect ex day abnormal returns to be negative or at most zero in mexico however they are significantly positive because ex day returns are positive even for stocks restricted to mexican nationals they are not attributable to foreign stockholders tax considerations none of the market microstructure based hypothesis in the literature can explain these positive ex day returns ex day returns in mexico are a puzzle

information asymmetry valuation and the corporate spin off decision we empirically analyze the information hypothesis that the separation of a rm s divisions into independently traded units through a spin o enhances value because it mitigates information asymmetry about the rm consistent with this hypothesis we nd that rms that engage in spin o s have higher levels of information asymmetry compared to their industry and size matched counterparts and the information problems decrease signi cantly after the spin o the gains around spin o s are positively related to the degree of information asymmetry and this relation is more pronounced for rms with fewer negative synergies between divisions finally rms with higher growth opportunities and rms in need of external capital show a higher propensity to engage in spin o s they also raise more capital following a spin o which is consistent with the view that

economies with public projects efficiency and decentralization the article deals with the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics for production economies with a finite set of agents infinitely many private goods and a set of public projects the problem of efficiency and decentralization is addressed under the following very general assumptions a the commodity price duality is endowed with a consistent locally convex topology b the set of public projects is without any mathematical structure moreover any agent is characterized by a nonordered preference relation depending on consumption goods and public projects approximate and exact welfare theorems are discussed throughout the article

excess payoff dynamics and other well behaved evolutionary dynamics abstract we consider a model of evolution in games in which agents occasionally receive opportunities to switch strategies choosing between them using a probabilistic rule both the rate at which revision opportunities arrive and the probabilities with which each strategy is chosen are functions of current normalized payoffs we call the aggregate dynamics induced by this model excess payoff dynamics we show that every excess payoff dynamic is well behaved regardless of the underlying game each excess payoff dynamic admits unique solution trajectories that vary continuously with the initial state identifies rest points with nash equilibria and respects a basic payoff monotonicity property we show how excess payoff dynamics can be used to construct well behaved modifications of imitative dynamics and relate them to two other well behaved dynamics based on projections

the groves ledyard mechanism an experimental study of institutional design the groves ledyard mechanism theoretically can solve the free rider problem in public good provision in certain environments two questions are of overriding importance in implementing the mechanism the first is related to the actual performance of the mechanism in general the second is the choice of a punishment parameter which is the only parameter that is available for those who may want to actually use the mechanism thus the determination of the role of this variable on mechanism performance is fundamental for any advances along the lines of actual implementation in studying the groves ledyard mechanism we show that the punishment parameter plays a crucial role in the performance of the mechanism by using 1 and 100 we show that under the higher punishment parameter the groves ledyard equilibrium is chosen much more frequently a higher level of the public good is provided and efficiency is higher by examining two behavioral models we show that a higher leads to an increase in the probability of an individual choosing a best response predicted by the model the parameter alone explains nearly 70 of the data in both the cournot and the carlson auster behavioral model we also found that convergence to cournot behavior is faster and more stable under a high than under a low

complexity and economic policy a paradigm shift or a change in perspective a review essay on david colander and roland kupers s complexity and the art of public policy in their recent book colander and kupers 2014 argue that viewing the economy as a complex adaptive system should change the way in which we make economic policy this would necessitate a paradigm shift economics has over time tried to produce a coherent model to underpin the dominant laissez faire liberal approach but we have never proved in that model that left to their own devices the participants in an economy will self organize into a satisfactory state this is an assumption complex interactive systems with direct interaction between heterogeneous agents may show no tendency to self equilibrate and will undergo endogenous crises economists should concentrate on the emergence of certain patterns colander and kupers suggest that we may be able to nudge the system into good basins of attraction a more radical view is that there are no fixed basins of attraction these change with the evolution of the system and it is illusory to believe that we can choose good basins we may be able to recognize and influence the emergence of certain states of the economy but we are far from leon walras s dream of economics as a science like astrophysics

lindahl mechanisms and free riders several authors have proposed mechanisms whose nash equilibria yield lindahl tax allocations however as is well known so does the lindahl procedure with an auctioneer moreover the game forms of all these mechanisms and of any as yet undiscovered such mechanism all have the same normal form as does the lindahl procedure without an auctioneer the manipulative nash equilibria are consequently the same for all these mechanisms so that all have the traditional free rider problem and all have the same outcome under strategic behavior

evolutionary implementation and congestion pricing we consider an implementation problem faced by a planner who manages a roadway network the problem entails both hidden information and hidden actions we solve the planner s problem by introducing a new class of mechanisms and a new notion of implementation the mechanisms called price schemes attach transfers to the available routes they do not involve direct revelation the method of implementation is evolutionary requiring that players who follow any reasonable myopic adjustment process eventually learn to behave as the planner desires we show that efficient behaviour can be guaranteed using simple decentralized price schemes

implementation of lindahl allocations with nontotal nontransitive preferences abstract the purpose of this paper is to present a mechanism the nash allocations of which coincide with the lindahl allocations even when preferences are nontransitive or nontotal this extension to include nontotal nontransitive preferences is potentially very important since preferences of agents are nontransitive nontotal in many cases in particular in the case where the players are groups of individuals besides the mechanism presented here uses outcome functions that are individually feasible balanced not merely weakly balanced continuous differentiable around nash equilibria and furthermore almost everywhere differentiable moreover the mechanism has a message space of minimal dimension

why do stock prices drop by less than the value of the dividend evidence from a country without taxes abstract it is well documented that stock prices on ex dividend days drop by less than the value of the dividend on average this has commonly been attributed to the effect of tax clienteles we examine data from the hong kong stock market where neither dividends nor capital gains are taxed as in the u s the average stock price drop is less than the value of the dividend specifically the average dividend for the period 1980 1993 is hk 0 12 and the average price drop is hk 0 06 we are able to account for this both theoretically and empirically through market microstructure arguments

a note on feasible implementations abstract this paper is concerned with the problem of individually feasible outcomes in decentralized allocation mechanisms we consider a well known mechanism which achieves efficient allocations in equilibrium this mechanism however may leave agents bankrupt if they fail to reach equilibrium it is shown that the bankruptcy problem can be avoided if a voting stage is added to the original mechanism

implementation of balanced linear cost share equilibrium solution in nash and strong nash equilibria abstract this paper considers the incentive aspect of the balanced linear cost share equilibrium blcse which yields an endogenous theory of profit distribution for public goods economies with convex production technologies we do so by presenting an incentive compatible mechanism which doubly implements the blcse solution in nash and strong nash equilibria so that nash allocations and strong nash allocations coincide with blcse allocations the mechanism presented here allows not only preferences and initial endowments but also coalition patterns to be privately observed in addition it works not only for three or more agents but also for two agent economies

primes and scores an essay on market imperfections this paper investigates the reported relative mispricing of primes and scores to the underlying stock given transaction costs we establish arbitrage based bounds on prime and score prices we then develop a new nonparametric statistical technique to test whether prime and score prices violate these bounds we find that prime and score prices do exceed stock prices and often by a considerable amount we demonstrate that this increased value is most likely due to the score s ability to save on the costs of dynamic hedging we also show how short sale and trust size constraints impede the ability to arbitrage price disparities in an efficient market the price of a security reflects the value of its underlying assets it should not be possible therefore to create value simply by splitting a security into different parts since the underlying assets are unchanged the packaging of the cash flows should not matter the recent introduction of primes and scores suggests that this is not always the case by separating a security s cash flows into a dividend based component the prime and an appreciation or option based component the score developers of these securities have seemingly created two assets whose value separately exceeds that of the original stock since the prime and the score are based on the same underlying asset this raises a puzzling question about the actual efficiency of securities markets this paper investigates this anomaly by examining whether primies and scores are actuauy mispriced and if so why given the costs of transacting in the prime score and stock we establish bounds on prime and score prices that are consistent with no arbitrage opportunities we then develop a new nonparametric statistical technique to test whether prime and score prices violate these bounds this nonparametric procedure is designed both to confront the measurement error problems plaguing the literature i e nonobservable bid ask prices and nonsimultaneous prices see phillips and smith 1980 bhattacharya 1983 and bookstaber 1981 and to avoid the estimation of round trip transaction costs commissions we find the surprising result that prime and score prices exceed the price of the underlying stock often by a considerable amount using time series data we de monstrate that significant price differentials exist for each firm in our sample

on the existence of optimal truth dominant mechanisms abstract the existence of optimal dominant strategy mechanisms has been shown only for quadratic valuation functions this paper shows that non trivial pareto efficient and truth dominant mechanisms exist for a slightly larger set of valuation functions

differential interpretation of public signals and trade in speculative markets most models of trade in speculative markets assume that agents interpret public information identically we provide empirical evidence on the relation between the volume of trade and stock returns around public announcements and we argue that the evidence is inconsistent with this assumption we then develop a model of trade around public announcements that incorporates differential interpretations and is consistent with the observed volume return relation then we test the standard model of belief revision underlying most models of trade using stock brokerage research analysts earnings forecasts the hypthesis of identical interpretations seems inconsistent with the forecast revisions in these data

generalized groves ledyard mechanisms abstract groves and ledyard 1977 construct a mechanism for public goods procurement that can be viewed as a direct revelation groves mechanism in which agents announce a parameter of a quadratic approximation of their true preferences the mechanism s nash equilibrium outcomes are efficient the budget is balanced because groves mechanisms are balanced for the announced quadratic preferences tian 1996 subsequently discovered a richer set of budget balancing preferences we replicate the groves ledyard construction using this expanded set of preferences and uncover a new set of complex mechanisms that generalize the original groves ledyard mechanism the original mechanism however remains the most appealing in terms of both simplicity and stability

evolutionary implementation in a public goods game abstract we consider implementation of the efficient state in a large population public goods game due to positive externalities the efficient state is different from the nash equilibrium of the game we apply a transfer scheme equal to the externality in the game the externality adjusted public goods game is a potential game with a unique nash equilibrium which is the efficient state of the original game it is also a continuous strategy aggregative game we introduce the best response dynamic for such aggregative potential games to show evolutionary implementation agents converge to the efficient state under this dynamic in the externality adjusted game we extend this result to other prominent evolutionary dynamics the pure externality price scheme however causes a budget deficit a modification of this scheme solves this problem while evolutionarily implementing efficiency

subgame perfect implementation of bargaining solutions abstract this paper provides simple four stage game forms that fully implement a large class of two person bargaining solutions in subgame perfect equilibrium the solutions that can be implemented by our game forms are those that maximize a monotonic and quasi concave function of utilities after normalizing each agent s utility function so that the maximum utility is 1 and the utility of the disagreement outcome is 0 this class of solutions includes the nash kalai smorodinsky and relative utilitarian solutions the game forms have a structure of alternating offers and contain no integer device

sharing costs in highways a game theoretic approach this paper introduces a new class of games highway games which arise from situations where there is a common resource that agents will jointly use that resource is an ordered set of several indivisible sections where each section has an associated fixed cost and each agent requires some consecutive sections we present an easy formula to calculate the shapley value and we present an efficient procedure to calculate the nucleolus for this class of games

tax induced trading around ex dividend days abstract this paper investigates trading volume around ex dividend days for taxable distributions cash dividends it is found that trading volume increases significantly around the ex dividend day this increase is more pronounced for high yield actively traded stocks and after brokerage commissions became negotiable the results are consistent with the hypothesis that short term traders have an impact on ex day price behavior at least for taxable distributions for non taxable distributions stock splits and stock dividends we find negative abnormal volume around ex day

the geography of energy and education leaders laggards and lessons for achieving primary and secondary school electrification even though large scale electricity networks have existed for more than a century thousands of primary and secondary schools have no electricity more than 80 percent of children in sub saharan africa attend primary schools that lack electricity more than a quarter of village schools in india lack electricity access and fewer than half of peruvian schools are electrified collectively nearly 200 million children attend schools not connected to any type of electricity supply a number greater than the populations of nigeria bangladesh russia or japan throughout the globe certain countries and regions lead the way in school electrification while others lag behind through the lens of energy and education geography this article identifies a series of interconnected challenges to electrifying schools obstacles span financing and technical reliability to bias in educational and energy funding to inability of electrification to yield net positive learning outcomes despite these challenges solutions do exist as the activities of emerging energy leaders demonstrate high upfront costs can be mitigated by tapping into diverse financing streams and distributing risk through public private partnerships technical problems can be countered by stable policy frameworks with strong technical standards and certification schemes electrification efforts can be coupled with household and cooking programs that build community this article shows that schools can provide students with the light heat and modern tools of teaching they deserve if planners investors and policymakers make determined coordinated efforts at providing energy for education

the need for improved financial reporting of a developing country energy utility abstract some consideration has been given to regulatory and institutional reforms to facilitate sustainable development in electricity usage in papua new guinea but little attention has been paid to bringing about full compliance of financial reporting expectations of the country s main energy utility examining documentary evidence of the audit reports of the auditor general s office of papua new guinea this study considers the financial reporting compliance of png power for the period 2007 2013 and the means by which compliant reporting may be improved the results of the study reveal that the financial statements of png power are late and receive disclaimers of opinion from the auditor general s office which suggest that png power s stakeholders are not receiving accurate and reliable financial information to make informed decisions about sustainable development of electricity usage and planning in papua new guinea the study reveals that it would take little resources to improve png power s reporting which in turn could enhance national energy policy decision making and energy utility accountability

the impact of ceo turnover on equity volatility this study investigates the effect on stock price volatility of a significant event in the life of the firm a change in its ceo we find significant long lived increases in volatility following ceo turnover after controlling for firm characteristics and marketwide volatility these increases are larger after forced departures and outside successions following voluntary departures stock prices also respond more strongly to earnings announcements following turnovers these results are consistent with more informative signals of value driving the increased volatility helping resolve two sources of uncertainty possible changes in the firm s strategy and doubt about the successor ceo s ability

decisions and optimality in competitive stock ownership economies reexamination of the decision theoretic structure of a diamond dreze stock market economy reveals that general lack of optimal equilibrium allocations is an informational problem prices of firms shares and observed production convey information sufficient for weak form market efficiency but is inadequate for investors to select socially optimal portfolios which constitute strong form market efficiency revising the optimality concept to accommodate information constraints yields a notion of information constrained pareto optimality this concept reflects general application of the principle of semistrong form market efficiency our approach subsumes the bayesian approach

investment banker reputation and two stage combination carve outs and spin offs abstract this study examines whether investment banker reputation impacts the initial period returns of two stage combinations carve outs followed by spin offs all prior literature regarding investment banker reputation is based on single stage events ipos an analysis is conducted of all completed two stage carve outs spin offs from 1981 to 2002 findings indicate that underwriters for two stage combinations retain their reputation in contrast with the single stage findings of carter et al carter r b dark f h piwowar m s 2002 ipos and underwriter reputation redeeming the value of reputation working paper iowa state university that investment bankers redeemed cashed in their reputation also this study finds that the carter et al reputation factors dominate the loughran and ritter loughran t ritter j r 2002 why don t issuers get upset about leaving money on the table in ipos the review of financial studies 15 2 413 443 reputation factors

sharing the cost of a public good an incentive constrained axiomatic approach we study the problem of provision and cost sharing of a public good in large economies where exclusion complete or partial is possible we search for incentive constrained efficient allocation rules that display fairness properties population monotonicity says that an increase in population should not be detrimental to anyone demand monotonicity states that an increase in the demand for the public good in the sense of a first order stochastic dominance shift in the distribution of preferences should not be detrimental to any agent whose preferences remain unchanged under suitable domain restrictions we give an explicit characterization of all incentive constrained efficient allocation rules we then show that there exists a unique incentive constrained efficient and demand monotonic allocation rule the so called serial rule in the binary public good case the serial rule is also the only incentive constrained efficient and population monotonic rule

predictable events and excess returns the case of dividend announcements abstract this paper hypothesizes that the risk per unit of time and the required rate of return are higher than normal during an event period whose timing can be predicted consistent with this hypothesis this paper presents empirical evidence indicating that the unconditional mean rate of return the variance of stock returns and their systematic risk are higher than usual during dividend announcement periods however the documented increases in the systematic risk are not large enough to fully explain the excess returns this finding is puzzling and hard to reconcile with existing theory

pigouvian pricing and stochastic evolutionary implementation abstract we study the implementation of efficient behavior in settings with externalities a planner would like to ensure that a group of agents make socially optimal choices but he only has limited information about the agents preferences and can only distinguish individual agents through the actions they choose we describe the agents behavior using a stochastic evolutionary model assuming that their choice probabilities are given by the logit choice rule we prove that there is a simple price scheme with the following property regardless of the realization of preferences a group of agents subjected to the price scheme will spend the vast majority of time in the long run behaving efficiently the price scheme defines a game that may possess multiple equilibria but we are able to obtain a unique and efficient selection from this set because of the stochastic nature of the agents choice rule we conclude by comparing the performance of our price scheme with that of vcg mechanisms

instability in the implementation of walrasian allocations abstract the existence of game forms which implement walrasian allocations as cournot nash equilibrium outcomes is well known however if the equilibria are also required to be locally dynamically stable at least for environments with unique walrasian allocations this paper shows that the requisite game forms do not exist our definition of a game form entails certain regularity conditions and requires the cournot equilibrium to be unique when the walrasian equilibrium is unique the main result is that for such a game form there does not exist a continuous time strategy adjustment process which ensures the local stability of cournot equilibria throughout a certain class of environments having unique walrasian equilibria each trader adjusts his strategy in response to his own characteristics and the observed current strategies of others but the direction and magnitude of adjustments are not constrained by any behavioral assumptions the definitions permit the inclusion of an artificial player such as an auctioneer so the well known tatonnement instability emerges as a special case

the spinoff and merger ex date effects this article shows that some of the wealth gains from financial decisions involving changes in security form occur on predictable ex dates for a sample of 113 spinoffs during 1964 to 90 we document an average excess return of 3 0 percent on ex dates roughly the same magnitude as the average announcement date return we conjecture that the spinoff ex date return arises because the parent and subsidiary stocks attract different investors who prefer to buy the separated shares after the ex date we also document that on average the target shareholders in stock for stock mergers earn an excess return of 1 5 percent on merger ex dates recent years have witnessed a large increase in restructuring programs that include divestitures for example kaplan and weisbach 1992 report that 44 percent of a sample of large acquisitions completed in the 1970s and early 1980s had already been divested by the end of the 1980s most divestitures are accomplished by selling an unwanted subsidiary or division to another company or a group of investors for cash based on a casual survey of transactions reported in the mergers and acquisitions magazine this divestiture form is commonly known as a selloff in many cases however the parent company relinquishes control of a subsidiary by simply distributing the subsidiary shares as a nontaxable stock dividend to current stockholders this latter divestiture form is known as a spinoff and has been gaining

record date when issued and ex date effects in stock splits negative abnormal stock returns of about 1 occur near record dates of stock splits fur ther the lower the returns the more positive are ex date returns and when issued premi ums a possible explanation of these related phenomena is that trading hindrances asso ciated with record dates create trading inconvenience that is reflected in lower prices near record dates in turn anomalous positive ex date returns arise in part from the abnormally low prices of unsplit shares caused by the negative record date returns

experiments with the pivot process for providing public goods interest in demand revealing mechanisms for providing public goods has both waned and then renewed over the past two decades the possibility of using such mechanisms in different venues than originally anticipated sparked the research reported here the specific motivation for this paper is to conduct a series of simple direct tests of one version of the class of mechanisms failure of demand revelation was much more expensive than we had expected even when compared to previous research with related mechanisms the reason for this remains an open question

implementing the efficient allocation of pollution we provide simple mechanisms to implement the efficient allocation of pollution first assuming complete information across firms and then allowing for incomplete information both mechanisms operate by inducing firms to monitor one another using firms reports to determine pollution allotments and transfers the complete information mechanism determines a firm s transfer according to a linear pollution price set by other firms both mechanisms can be modified to be budget balanced in and out of equilibrium the complete information mechanism implements the efficient allocation even when firms are allowed to use mixed strategies under a single crossing condition the same holds for the incomplete information mechanism this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a qualitative factor analysis of renewable energy and sustainable energy for all se4all in the asia pacific this study assesses the factors responsible for the success and failure of renewable energy access programs in bangladesh china laos mongolia nepal sri lanka india indonesia malaysia and papua new guinea based on 441 research interviews over the course of four years site visits to 90 renewable energy facilities and focus groups with almost 800 community members in 10 countries this study develops a series of overarching qualitative factors that correlate with programs that met their targets sometimes ahead of schedule and produced measurable benefits exceeding costs the inverse of these factors is associated with programs that did not meet their targets were behind schedule and or produced measurable costs exceeding benefits it concludes by offering 10 lessons for energy analysts and development practitioners concerning appropriate technology income generation financing political leadership capacity building programmatic flexibility marketing and awareness stakeholder engagement community ownership and technical standardization

a mechanism for the allocation of corporate investment corporate investment in an economy without a complete set of contingent claims markets has the characteristic of a public good in the sense that the stockholders consumption planscannot be separated from but depend on the specific investment plans of the firms dreze 4 has shown that a constrained pareto optimal cpo allocation of investment in a stock market economy must satisfy a generalization of the samuelson 24 condition for efficient production of public goods the investment plan should maximize a weighted sum of the stockholders personal valuations of future output minus current input cost however except for those special cases in which cpo investment plans are unanimously supported by stockholders see 17 20 and 2 the theory of the firm in incomplete markets lacks a suitable maximization criterion although the dreze samuelson condition is a most appealing candidate it is not unanimously preferred by stockholders each of whom prefers that his or her own valuation of future output receives all the weight in the investment decision furthermore the application of the dreze samuelson condition depends on the correct revelation of stockholders preferences which in the absence of special inducements cannot be expected from economic agents

fair divisions as attracting nash equilibria of simple games abstract we give a mechanism fully implementing envy free divisions such that strategy spaces are symmetric the set of nash equilibria is a global attractor for the best reply dynamics as a byproduct undesired mixed strategy equilibria are weeded out by the adjustment process

event studies in management research theoretical and empirical issues we examined the use of event studies in management research and found that there was inadequate attention paid to theoretical and research design issues this lack of attention may lead to false in

security price reactions around corporate spin off announcements abstract we examine security price reactions around the announcements of 123 voluntary spin offs by 116 firms between 1963 and 1981 involving a pro rata distribution of the common stock of a subsidiary to the stockholders of the parent firm the median spin off in the sample is 6 6 of the original equity value and is associated with an abnormal return of 7 0 from 50 days prior to the announcement through completion of the spin off no evidence is found to indicate the gains to stockholders represent wealth transfers from senior securityholders over the entire event period we find positive gains for firms engaging in spin offs to facilitate mergers or to separate diverse operating units but negative returns to firms responding to legal and or regulatory difficulties in the two day interval surrounding the first press announcement we find positive average excess returns for all groups

a note on allocations attainable through nash equilibria abstract this note reexamines the issue of attaining efficient resource allocations as noncooperative equilibria of a strategic game contrary to the spirit of earlier work on this subject it is shown that there is an entire class of choice rules aside from the walrasian one which are implementable in nash equilibrium stategies

alternative framework for renewable energy planning in the philippines abstract like many countries striving to be responsible consumers of energy and conscious of the need to mitigate the impact of climate change the philippines has in both policy and practice shown a bias towards renewable energy re sources the country s proportion of re production in primary energy and distribution in electricity is significantly higher than those of many asian and european countries however the philippine national re program has adopted a strategy of aggressively amassing re capacity to the extent of tripling the capacity over the period 2011 to 2030 the preoccupation with more megawatts rather than the value of re beyond clean energy has erected a bias against off grid re applications off grid re applications can displace more expensive diesel generation and can enhance the livelihood opportunities for communities the insistence on focusing on megawatts is threatening to bloat the current feed in tariff structure by causing large grid connected applications to be seriously oversubscribed this paper reviews the current re status in the philippines and presents a simple alternative planning paradigm in which the ability of re technology to affect the livelihood of the residents and the effectiveness of its energy delivery are used to distinguish the utility of different re technologies in off grid and grid connected areas the authors also describe an actual kw scale off grid application that addresses both energy and economic poverty

an experiment on nash implementation we perform an experimental test of a modification of the controversial canonical mechanism for nash implementation using three subjects in non repeated groups as well as three outcomes states of nature and integer choices we find that this mechanism successfully implements the desired outcome a large majority of the time providing empirical evidence for the feasibility of such implementation in addition the performance is further improved by imposing a fine on a dissident so that the mechanism implements strict nash equilibria while our environment is stylized our results offer hope that experiments can identify reasonable features for practical implementation mechanisms

the dynamic instability of dispersed price equilibria abstract we adopt an evolutionary framework to explain price dispersion as a time varying phenomenon by developing a finite strategy analogue of the burdett and judd 1983 price dispersion model we show that all dispersed price equilibria are unstable under the class of perturbed best response dynamics instead numerical simulations using the logit dynamic show that price dispersion manifests itself as a limit cycle we verify that limit cycles persist even when the finite strategy model approaches the original continuous strategy model for a particularly simple case of the model we prove the existence of a limit cycle

factors impacting diverging paths of renewable energy a review abstract considered an essential factor for countries development energy demand is growing worldwide unlike conventional sources the use of renewable energy sources has multiple benefits including increased energy security sustainable economic growth and pollution reduction in particular greenhouse gas emissions nevertheless there is a considerable difference in the share of renewable energy sources in national energy portfolios this study conducts a systematic literature review to identify drivers and barriers which could help understanding the diverging paths of renewable energy deployment for countries among a total of 1431 academic studies 60 qualitative and quantitative studies were identified using a multistage selection process designated manuscripts were explored in detail including publication years length of the studies countries represented and renewable energy sources referenced factors explaining countries renewable energy deployments were defined and organized into seven main categories economic environmental political regulatory social technical potential and technological within these categories economic considerations appeared most frequently across manuscripts while environmental factors were least represented these categories were then classified as drivers barriers or undetermined towards renewable energy deployment based on a one sample proportion statistical test economic environmental and social factors were found to be drivers whereas political regulatory technical potential and technological factors were not classified as either a driver or a barrier i e undetermined each main category contains several subcategories among which only national income was found to have a positive impact whereas all other subcategories were considered undetermined no significant barriers to the deployment of renewable energy sources were found over the analyzed period

trading behavior and the unbiasedness of the market reaction to dividend announcements this article examines the price formation process during dividend announcement day using daily closing prices and transactions data we find that the unconditional positive excess returns first documented by kalay and loewenstein 1985 are higher for small firm and low priced stocks price volatility and trading volume also increase during this period examination of trade prices relative to the bid ask spread and volume of trades at bid and asked prices shows that the excess returns cannot be attributed to measurement errors or to spillover effects of tax related ex day trading rather the price behavior is related to the absorption of dividend information

learning efficient nash equilibria in distributed systems abstract an individual s learning rule is completely uncoupled if it does not depend directly on the actions or payoffs of anyone else we propose a variant of log linear learning that is completely uncoupled and that selects an efficient welfare maximizing pure nash equilibrium in all generic n person games that possess at least one pure nash equilibrium in games that do not have such an equilibrium there is a simple formula that expresses the long run probability of the various disequilibrium states in terms of two factors i the sum of payoffs over all agents and ii the maximum payoff gain that results from a unilateral deviation by some agent this welfare stability trade off criterion provides a novel framework for analyzing the selection of disequilibrium as well as equilibrium states in n person games

stability of the groves and ledyard mechanism abstract it is shown that the nash equilibria of the game defined by the groves and ledyard mechanism in a public good economy can be made locally stable under cournot best replay behavior and general assumptions on preferneces

from a bundled energy capacity pricing model to an energy capacity ancillary services pricing model in this paper we extend the chilean power generation pricing mechanism with capacity and energy payments to one where ancillary services as as frequency regulation and voltage control are explicitly recognized adequacy and security attributes of the electric system and the public good characteristics of as are set within the payment structure to distribute the financing of as among those who benefit from their provision the contribution to finance the provision of as is determined assessing the value assigned to the system security by each agent following what s an efficient pricing mechanism in the presence of public goods