gasoline demand in europe new insights abstract this study utilizes a panel data set from 14 european countries over the period 1990 2004 to estimate a dynamic model specification for gasoline demand previous studies estimating gasoline consumption per total passenger cars ignore the recent increase in the number of diesel cars in most european countries leading to biased elasticity estimates we apply several common dynamic panel estimators to our small sample results show that specifications neglecting the share of diesel cars overestimate short run income price and car ownership elasticities it appears that the results of standard pooled estimators are more reliable than common iv gmm estimators applied to our small data set

energy consumption and economic growth nexus in tanzania an ardl bounds testing approach abstract in this paper we examine the intertemporal causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in tanzania during the period of 1971 2006 unlike the majority of the previous studies we employ the newly developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach by pesaran et al 2001 bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships journal of applied econometrics 16 289 326 to examine this linkage we also use two proxies of energy consumption namely total energy consumption per capita and electricity consumption per capita the results of the bounds test show that there is a stable long run relationship between each of the proxies of energy consumption and economic growth the results of the causality test on the other hand show that there is a unidirectional causal flow from total energy consumption to economic growth and a prima facie causal flow from electricity consumption to economic growth overall the study finds that energy consumption spurs economic growth in tanzania

aggregate demand for electricity in south africa an analysis using the bounds testing approach to cointegration abstract electricity demand in south africa has grown at a very rapid rate over the past decade as part of reform initiatives to enhance long term sustainability of the country s electricity industry south africa s authorities have in recent years sought to develop an electricity pricing framework that is cost reflective and forms the cornerstone of demand management schemes meant to foster changes in consumption behaviour and enhance efficiency in resource use the effects of any pricing policy on aggregate electricity consumption will depend on a useful understanding of the factors that influence electricity demand and the magnitude to which electricity demand responds to changes in such factors in this context this paper applies the bounds testing approach to cointegration within an autoregressive distributed lag framework to examine the aggregate demand for electricity in south africa during the period 1960 2007 the results indicate that in the long run income is the main determinant of electricity demand with electricity prices having an insignificant effect on aggregate electricity demand future pricing policies will need to ensure that electricity prices are cost reflective and enhance efficiency of electricity supply and use

statistical efficiency of double bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation the statistical efficiency of conventional dichotomous choice contingent valuation surveys can be improved by asking each respondent a second dichotomous choice question which depends on the response to the first question if the first response is yes the second bid is some amount greater than the first bid while if the first response is no the second bid is some amount smaller this double bounded approach is shown to be asymptotically more efficient than the conventional singlebounded approach using data from a survey of californians regarding their willingness to pay for wetlands in the san joaquin valley we show that in a finite sample the gain in efficiency can be very substantial

market share market value and innovation in a panel of british manufacturing firms this paper examines the empirical relationship between technological innovations market share and stock market value new developments in the estimation of dynamic count data models are used to control for unobserved firm specific heterogeneity we find a robust and positive effect of market share on observable headcounts of innovations and patents although increased product market competition in the industry tends to stimulate innovative activity furthermore the impact of innovation on market value is larger for firms with higher market shares we argue that our results are consistent with models where high market share firms have incentives to pre emptively innovate

fuel taxes an important instrument for climate policy abstract this article shows that fuel taxes serve a very important role for the environment and that we risk a backlash of increased emissions if they are abolished fuel taxes have restrained growth in fuel demand and associated carbon emissions although fuel demand is large and growing our analysis shows that it would have been much higher in the absence of domestic fuel taxes people often assert that fuel demand is inelastic but there is strong research evidence showing the opposite the price elasticity is in fact quite high but only in the long run in the short run it may be quite inelastic which has important implications for policy makers had europe not followed a policy of high fuel taxation but had low us taxes then fuel demand would have been twice as large hypothetical transport demand in the whole oecd area is calculated for various tax scenarios and the results show that fuel taxes are the single most powerful climate policy instrument implemented to date yet this fact is not usually given due attention in the debate

dutch book arguments and learning in a nonexpected utility fremework if an individual follows maximin expected utility theory then a smart outsider cannot in general make a bet with him her that is certain to win in a single time period however the author shows that when there are many time periods this is possible in his model unless the decisionmaker uses strategic behavior there are some exceptions in particular for small deviations from expected utility profits may be less than the transactions costs copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

dynamically consistent beliefs must be bayesian abstract experimental evidence such as the ellsberg paradox contradicts the savage model of decision making under uncertainty since the representation of beliefs underlying preferces by a single probability measure leaves no room for the degree of imprecision in information to affect decisions proceeding axiomatically this paper shows that the existence of a bayesain prior is implied even if savage s sure thing principle is deleted if preferences i are based on beliefs and ii admit dynamically consistent updating in response to new information the result raises questions about the appeal of models of preference that feature a separation of tastes and beliefs journal of economic literature classification number d81

a bayesian model for benefit transfer application to national parks in spain valuing environmental goods through benefit transfer is based on information from the set of past empirical studies of similar or identical sites this paper proposes a bayesian approach to model prior information on mean consumer surplus the prior distribution is defined as a convex combination of the results from past empirical studies an advantage of the bayesian approach is that the prior distribution could be combined with on site sample information in order to improve predictions on the benefits of the policy site the model is applied to data from national parks in spain the results show that the benefits of policy sites are more sensitive to the prior information for smaller sample sizes this implies that the prior distribution can be seen as a substitute for on site sample information

survival ambiguity and welfare abstract nearly all life cycle models adopt yaari s 1965 assumption that individuals know the survival probabilities that they face given that an individual s exact survival probabilities are likely unknown we explore the implications of relaxing this assumption if there is no annuity market then the welfare cost of survival ambiguity is large and regressive ambiguity neutral individuals would pay as much as 1 of total lifetime consumption for immediate resolution of ambiguity and the bottom income quintile is 4 times worse off than the top quintile alternatively with the availability of competitive annuity contracts survival ambiguity is welfare improving because it allows competitive insurance companies to pool risk across survival types even though social security and annuities share some properties social security does not help to hedge survival ambiguity

uncertainty aversion and rationality in games of perfect information abstract this paper shows how uncertainty aversion can resolve ties in extensive games of perfect information and thereby refine subgame perfection in such games this is done by assuming that a players are rational with multi prior expected utility functions of gilboa and schmeidler 1989 journal of economic theory 48 221 237 and b a player s plan of the game corresponds to set valued acts at each of his decision nodes the so called strategy system in contrast to single valued act as specified in the traditional notion of strategy profile the effects of pre communication channels among players are studied and are reflected in each of the three proposed solutions finally existence of equilibria are established for each proposed solution concept as well as comparisons with other existing solutions

anomalies in intertemporal choice evidence and an interpretation research on decision making under uncertainly has been strongly influenced by the documentation of numerous expected utility eu anomalies behaviors that violate the expected utility axioms the relative lack of progress on the closely related topic of intertemporal choice is partly due to the absence of an analogous set of discounted utility du anomalies we enumerate a set of du anomalies analogous to the eu anomalies and propose a model that accounts for the anomalies as well as other intertemporal choice phenomena incompatible with du we discuss implications for savings behavior estimation of discount rates and choice framing effects

a bayesian approach to double bounded contingent valuation in this paper we propose a bayesian approach to model double bounded contingent valuation data the double bounded elicitation method is interpreted as a two tier iterated process in which the subject is allowed to have a second thought about his her valuation for the environmental good prior information is modelled from the answers to the first dichotomous choice question the model is quasi bayesian q b in that the prior distribution refers to mean willingness to pay while the likelihood function refers to the proportions of a multinomial distribution this model is applied to empirical data from a contingent valuation survey involving the valuation expressed by european tourists for access to natural areas in the canary islands results show that point estimate of consumer surplus computed with the q b model does not differ substantially from single bounded model estimation in addition double bounded seems to be quite robust to the choice of the prior model of willingness to pay responses comparison with open ended suggests that the q b model might be useful to control for strategic response and starting point biases

experiments on decisions under uncertainty a theoretical framework the analysis of lab data entails a joint test of the underlying theory and of subjects conjectures regarding the experimental design itself how subjects frame the experiment we provide a theoretical framework for analyzing such conjectures we use experiments of decision making under uncertainty as a case study absent restrictions on subjects framing of the experiment we show that any behavior is consistent with standard updating anything goes including those suggestive of anomalies such as overconfidence excess belief stickiness etc when the experimental protocol restricts subjects conjectures plausibly by generating information during the experiment standard updating has nontrivial testable implications

testing choice experiment for benefit transfer with preference heterogeneity benefit transfer is a cost effective method for estimating the value of environmental goods that relies on information obtained in previous studies the multiattribute approach of choice experiments should provide advantages in terms of benefit transfer allowing differences in environmental improvements between sites as well as differences in socioeconomic and attitude characteristics between respondent populations this article investigates the capability of choice experiment method to be used in environmental benefit transfer when a random parameters approach is used to allow for preference heterogeneity we find that the inclusion of respondents taste heterogeneity reduces the magnitude of the transfer error

gasoline demand revisited an international meta analysis of elasticities meta analysis is used to determine if there are factors that systematically affect price and income elasticity estimates in studies of gasoline demand four econometric models are estimated using long run and short run price and income elasticity estimates from previous studies as the dependent variables explanatory variables include functional form lag structure time span national setting estimation technique and other features of the model structure elasticity estimates are found to be sensitive to the inclusion or exclusion of some measure of vehicle ownership static models appear to overestimate short run elasticities underestimate long run price elasticities but pick up the full long run income responsiveness there is variation in the elasticity of demand across countries especially in the short run and gasoline demand appears to be getting more price elastic and less income elastic over time

extensive form games with uncertainty averse players abstract nash equilibrium presumes that the beliefs of a player are represented by a probability measure motivated by the ellsberg paradox and relevant experimental findings demonstrating that this representation of beliefs may be unrealistic this paper generalizes nash equilibrium in finite extensive form games to allow for preferences conforming to the multiple priors model developed by gilboa and schmeidler journal of mathematical economics 18 1989 141 153 the implications of this generalization for strategy choices and welfare are studied journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d81

induced preferences dynamic consistency and dutch books we assume that a decision maker has expected utility preferences over a large space which includes some variables not observable by the theorist these will induce preferences over observable variables which typically will not have the expected utility form this paper focuses on implications for multi period decisions we show that such preferences are not vulnerable to dutch books in particular we consider preferences arising from non additive subjective probabilities and show how they can arise as induced preferences

information processing and bounded rationality a survey this paper surveys recent attempts to formulate a plausible and tractable model of bounded rationality the author focuses in particular on models that view bounded rationality as stemming from limited information processing he discusses partitional models such as computability automata perceptions and optimal networks nonpartitional models and axiomatic approaches

a meta analysis on the price elasticity of energy demand abstract price elasticities of energy demand have become increasingly relevant in estimating the socio economic and environmental effects of energy policies or other events that influence the price of energy goods since the 1970s a large number of academic papers have provided both short and long term price elasticity estimates for different countries using several models data and estimation techniques yet the literature offers a rather wide range of estimates for the price elasticities of demand for energy this paper quantitatively summarizes the recent but sizeable empirical evidence to facilitate a sounder economic assessment of in some cases policy related energy price changes it uses meta analysis to identify the main factors affecting short and long term elasticity results for energy in general as well as for specific products i e electricity natural gas gasoline diesel and heating oil

meta analysis and benefit transfer for resource valuation addressing classical challenges with bayesian modeling abstract the use of meta regression models based on existing studies to estimate the value of resources at a new policy site has become a popular alternative to collecting original data in recent years there are two prevalent dilemmas associated with classical meta regression models the difference in the available set of regressors across source studies and the treatment of methodological explanatory variables in the construction of benefit transfer functions in this study we illustrate how these issues can be addressed efficiently within a bayesian meta regression framework we find that the bayesian model in contrast to its classical counterpart can estimate a relatively large set of parameters including indicators of unobserved study heterogeneity with reasonable accuracy even when the underlying meta sample is small the incorporation of information from regressor deficient source data in the specification of bayesian priors leads to a better model fit and tighter welfare estimates for benefit transfer in our application of freshwater angling

a note on kuhn s theorem with ambiguity averse players kuhn s theorem shows that extensive games with perfect recall can equivalently be analyzed using mixed or behavioral strategies as long as players are expected utility maximizers this note constructs an example that illustrates the limits of kuhn s theorem in an environment with ambiguity averse players who use a maxmin decision rule and full bayesian updating

gasoline and diesel demand in the eu implications for the 2030 emission goal abstract methodologically consistent demand estimates are necessary to analyze and forecast the effect of a common fuel policy across the eu 28 this study estimates short run and long run price and income elasticities for gasoline and diesel demands using the ardl bounds approach that also tests the existence of a long run relationship using data from 1978 to 2013 the results show that elasticity estimates between the eu 28 countries vary and the estimated long run elasticities are higher than their short run counterparts which is in line with expectations based on the existing literature the short run and long run income elasticities of gasoline and diesel demand are found to be more elastic than their price equivalents implying that if a charge on fuel is designed to decrease emissions by increasing the price the charge needs to rise at a higher rate than income an analysis of the eu s 2030 emission and fuel consumption reduction targets using the estimated long run elasticities shows that with the current tax scheme it cannot be guaranteed that emission targets will be achieved and thus a more stringent fuel tax policy is essential

strotz meets allais diminishing impatience and the certainty effect abstract decision makers tend to exhibit a higher degree of impatience when considering a delay to an immediate reward than when contemplating an identical delay to an equal future reward this work argues that diminishing impatience originates from the distinction between the certain present and the risky future a simple functional representation of preferences exhibiting time inconsistency when the future is uncertain is derived experimental evidence which is inconsistent with other formulations that account for diminishing impatience supports the proposed approach the new theory uncovers a tight relation between diminishing impatience and well known behavioral regularities in choice under risk and uncertainty jel d12 d81

asset pricing in a lucas fruit tree economy with the best and worst in mind this paper studies a lucas 1978 fruit tree economy under the assumption that the agents are choquet expected utility ceu rather than standard expected utility decision makers more speci cally the agents non additive beliefs about the economy s dividend payment process are modelled as neo additive capacities so that the agents decision behavior emphasizes the best respectively worst possible economic scenarios in contrast to existing models of lucas type economies with ambiguity averse agents epstein and wang 1994 which ensure dynamic consistency through heavy restrictions on admissible ambiguity attitudes my ap

quantile maximization in decision theory this paper introduces a model of preferences in which given beliefs about uncertain outcomes an individual evaluates an action by a quantile of the induced distribution the choice rule of quantile maximization unifies maxmin and maxmax as maximizing the lowest and the highest quantiles of beliefs distributions respectively and offers a family of less extreme preferences taking preferences over acts as a primitive we axiomatize quantile maximization in a savage setting our axiomatization also provides a novel derivation of subjective beliefs which demonstrates that neither the monotonicity nor the continuity conditions assumed in the literature are essential for probabilistic sophistication we characterize preferences of quantile maximizers towards downside risk we discuss how the distinct properties of the model robustness and ordinality can be useful in studying choice behaviour for categorical variables and in economic policy design we also offer applications to poll design and insurance problems

information cascades in the laboratory when a series of individuals with private information announce public predictions initial conformity can create an information cascade in which later predictions match the early announcements this paper reports an experiment in which private signals are draws from an unobserved urn subjects make predictions in sequence and are paid if they correctly guess which of two urns was used for the draws if initial decisions coincide then it is rational for subsequent decisionmakers to follow the established pattern regardless of their private information rational cascades formed in most periods in which such an imbalance occurred copyright 1997 by american economic association

environmental value transfer state of the art and future prospects abstract the main objectives of the paper are to 1 give an overview of the state of the art of environmental value transfer 2 discuss its prospects and potential role in cba as a decision support tool and 3 provide further guidelines for proper use and application environmental value or benefit transfer is a technique in which the results of studies on monetary environmental valuation are applied to new policy contexts the technique is controversial not least because of academic and political reservations over the usefulness and technical feasibility of economic valuation tools to demonstrate the importance of environmental values in project or programme appraisals testing of environmental value transfer so far has been unable to validate the practice taking into account the conditions set out in the literature for valid and reliable value transfer most transfers appear to result in substantial transfer errors this paper discusses why and addresses the question of which factors may have been overlooked it is argued that the problem is much more fundamental than previously acknowledged strict guidelines in terms of quantitative adjustment mechanisms to valid value transfer are meaningless if the more fundamental issue of differences in the very nature of the values elicited is not addressed at the same time

gasoline demand and car choice estimating gasoline demand using household information in recent years calls for carbon taxes as a policy tool to combat global warming have kept a discussion of the price and income elasticities of gasoline demand alive to date gasoline demand elasticity estimates are almost exclusively based on aggregate data that are subject to aggregation problems and make distributional concerns impossible to address by using household level data from the panel study of income dynamics psid and imputed fuel efficiency measures and gasoline prices i estimate household demand for gasoline and the corresponding price and income demand elasticities an attempt is made to include data on the car stock in the estimation since car portfolio and gasoline demand decisions are closely related empirical results from a selection corrected gasoline demand regression suggest low short run price and income elasticities and clear differences in gasoline demand across the population these results suggest that a gasoline tax is not likely to result in large decreases in gasoline consumption while potentially imposing hardship on identifiable segments of the population

the possibility of speculative trade between dynamically consistent agents it is shown that interim dynamically consistent trade may be supported among agents who have resolute non consequential choice preferences

prospects for the use of choice modelling for benefit transfer abstract many of the earliest studies that sought to test the validity of benefit transfer which typically involved the use of contingent valuation or travel cost applications produced negative findings one of the recommendations from this early testing was to trial alternative methods to produce source studies for benefit transfer including multi attribute techniques subsequently there have been a number of studies conducted that have sought to test the validity of benefit transfer using choice modelling the purpose of this paper is to review these studies and to assess the current state of knowledge regarding the validity of using choice modelling for the purpose of benefit transfer we also describe and consider the merits of an alternative approach for extending the use of choice modelling in benefit transfer bayesian benefit transfer

gasoline demand in the oecd an application of pooling and testing procedures abstract this study utilizes a pooled inter country data set finding the long run price elasticity falls in the range 0 55 to 0 9 depending on the choice of pooled estimators the estimators included the ols within and between country estimators plus five feasible gls estimators even allowing for a ten year distributed lag on price to reflect changes in auto efficiency characteristics the within country estimator yields appreciably more inelastic estimates than did the o s estimator which was heavily influenced by the between or inter country variation this difference raises intriguing questions for future research

a meta analysis of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a sur approach abstract automobile gasoline demand can be expressed as a multiplicative function of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership this implies a linear relationship between the price elasticity of total fuel demand and the price elasticities of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership in this meta analytical study we aim to investigate and explain the variation in empirical estimates of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a methodological novelty is that we use the linear relationship between the elasticities to develop a meta analytical estimation approach based on a seemingly unrelated regression sur model with cross equation restrictions this approach enables us to combine observations of different elasticities and thus increase our sample size furthermore it allows for a more detailed interpretation of our meta regression results the empirical results of the study demonstrate that the sur approach leads to more precise results i e lower standard errors than a standard meta analytical approach we find that with mean short run and long run price elasticities of 0 34 and 0 84 respectively the demand for gasoline is not very price sensitive both in the short and the long run the impact of a change in the gasoline price on demand is mainly driven by responses in fuel efficiency and mileage per car and to a slightly lesser degree by changes in car ownership furthermore we find that study characteristics relating to the geographic area studied the year of the study the type of data used the time horizon and the functional specification of the demand equation have a significant impact on the estimated value of the price elasticity of gasoline demand

valuing environmental goods and services using benefit transfer the state of the art and science abstract the purpose of this special issue of ecological economics is to elucidate the state of the art and science of environmental benefit transfer and to assist in the design and reporting of future benefit estimation research compiling the insights of thirty two international experts from seven countries the special issue reviews the latest developments in transfer techniques as well as ongoing efforts to standardize and validate them taken together the papers in this special issue provide fresh answers to some long standing questions offer original research insights on state of the art issues and identify fruitful areas for future research this introductory paper provides background and context for the issues addressed by the contributing authors its purpose is to place the interdisciplinary thinking contained here in a comparative context highlighting the need for integration and collaboration to maintain the momentum that has propelled environmental benefit transfer into a widely used approach for estimating the economic value of environmental goods and services worldwide

measuring global gasoline and diesel price and income elasticities abstract price and income elasticities of transport fuel demand have numerous applications they help forecast increases in fuel consumption as countries get richer they help develop appropriate tax policies to curtail consumption help determine how the transport fuel mix might evolve and show the price response to a fuel disruption given their usefulness it is understandable why hundreds of studies have focused on measuring such elasticities for gasoline and diesel fuel consumption in this paper i focus my attention on price and income elasticities in the existing studies to see what can be learned from them i summarize the elasticities from these historical studies i use statistical analysis to investigate whether income and price elasticities seem to be constant across countries with different incomes and prices although income and price elasticities for gasoline and diesel fuel are not found to be the same at high and low incomes and at high and low prices patterns emerge that allow me to develop suggested price and income elasticities for gasoline and diesel demand for over one hundred countries i adjust these elasticities for recent fuel mix policies and suggest an agenda of future research topics

ambiguity aversion games against nature and dynamic consistency abstract several papers adopting an axiomatic approach to study decision making under ambiguity aversion have produced conflicting predictions about how decision makers would behave in simple dynamic urn problems we explore the concepts of ambiguity aversion and dynamic consistency with examples of dynamic games against nature basically a malevolent nature puts balls into the urn and a fair nature draws them out depending on the game various choices that seem inconsistent with static notions of ambiguity aversion or dynamic consistency are consistent with subgame perfection in the dynamic 3 color ellsberg urn problem with 30 red balls and 60 blue or green balls the decision maker could strictly prefer to bet on blue green at time 0 and to switch to red green after learning that the ball is not green

decision theory under ambiguity we review recent advances in the field of decision making under uncertainty or ambiguity we start with a presentation of the general approach to a decision problem under uncertainty as well as the standard bayesian treatment and issues with this treatment we present more general approaches choquet expected utility maximin expected utility smooth ambiguity and so forth that have been developed in the literature under the name of models of ambiguity sensitive preferences we draw a distinction between fully subjective models and models incorporating explicitly some information we review definitions and characterizations of ambiguity aversion in these models we mention the challenges posed by some of the models presented we end with a review of part of the experimental literature and applications of these models to economic settings

a memory based model of bounded rationality in order to investigate the impact of limited memory on human behavior i develop a model of memory grounded in psychological and biological research i assume that people take their memories as accurate and use them to make inferences the resulting model predicts both over and underreaction but provides enough structure to predict when each effect dominates i then use this framework to study the consumption decision the results match empirical work on consumption predictability as well as differences in the marginal propensity to consume from different income streams most importantly because it ties the extent of bias to a measurable aspect of the stochastic process being forecasted the model makes testable empirical predictions

confidence enhanced performance there is ample evidence that emotions affect performance positive emotions can improve performance while negative ones may diminish it for example the fears induced by the possibility of failure or of negative evaluations have physiological consequences shaking loss of concentration that may impair performance in sports on stage or at school there is also ample evidence that individuals have distorted recollection of past events and distorted attributions of the causes of successes of failures recollection of good events or successes is typically easier than recollection of bad ones or failures successes tend to be attributed to intrinsic aptitudes or own effort while failures are attributed to bad luck in addition these attributions are often reversed when judging the performance of others the objective of this paper is to incorporate the first phenomenon above into an otherwise standard decision theoretic model and show that in a world where performance depends on emotions biases in information processing enhance welfare

strategic ignorance as a self disciplining device we analyse the decision of an agent with time inconsistent preferences to consume a good that exerts an externality on future welfare the extent of the externality is initially unknown but may be learned via a costless sampling procedure we show that when the agent cannot commit to future consumption and learning decisions incomplete learning may occur on a markov perfect equilibrium path of the resulting intra personal game in such a case each agent s incarnation stops learning for some values of the posterior distribution of beliefs and acts under self restricted information this conduct is interpreted as strategic ignorance all equilibria featuring this property strictly pareto dominate the complete learning equilibrium for any posterior distribution of beliefs

rational status quo abstract decision makers often stick to a status quo without explicitly reconsidering it yet their observed choices might be compatible with a fully rational model we ask when such a rationalization is possible we assume as observable only the choice of sticking to the status quo vs changing it as a function of a database of cases we state conditions on the set of databases that would make the decision maker change the status quo which are equivalent to the following representation the decision maker entertains a set of theories of which one is that her current choice is the best she is inert as long as that theory beats any alternative theory according to a maximum likelihood criterion

self confidence and personal motivation the maintenance and enhancement of self esteem has always been identified as a fundamental human impulse philosophers writers educators and of course psychologists have all emphasized the crucial role played by self image in motivation affect and social interactions the aim of this chapter is to bring these concerns into the realm of economic analysis and show that this has important implications for how agents process information and make decisions conversely the tools of economic modelling can help shed light on a number of apparently irrational behaviours documented by psychologists

the saving and investment nexus for china evidence from cointegration tests the saving and investment nexus as postulated by feldstein and horioka fh 1980 is revisited the saving investment correlation for china is estimated over the periods 1952 1998 and 1952 1994 the latter culminating in a period of fixed exchange rate regime amongst the key results it is found that saving and investment are correlated for china for both the period of the fixed exchange rate and the entire sample period with high saving investment correlation the results suggest that the chinese economy is in conformity with the fh hypothesis this is a valid outcome for in china capital mobility was fairly restricted over the 1952 1994 period as indicated by the relatively low foreign direct investment