capital utilization economies of scale and technical change in the growth of total factor productivity an explanation of south korean manufacturing growth abstract this paper presents a method of interpreting the growth of total factor productivity directly linking the productivity growth to key parameters of a specific cost function it shows that the productivity index can be decomposed into effects due to a technical change b non constant returns to scale and c change in capital utilization the decomposition framework was applied to data on south korean manufacturing during the 1961 1980 period in south korean manufacturing the total factor productivity was found to have grown at 3 per annum scale economies contributed about 38 of the growth of tfp the technical change 45 and the change in the capital utilization rate 17 the results of this study support of the view that for growing less developed economies the growth in capital utilization rate is a source of growth in total productivity that is too significant to be ignored

an aggregate consumption function for canada a cointegration approach this study utilizes cointegration theory and error correction models ecms to specify a candidate dynamiac formulation of the aggregate consumption function using quarterly canadian date the variables entering the long run equlibrium relationship are tested for unit roots using a variety of techniques such as the dickey fuller the augemented dickey fuller and the phillips perron test profedures the engle and granger cointegration test and the fully modified consistent and efficient estimator of phillips and hansen are used to estimate the cointegration relationship johansen s maximum likelihood approach is also used to determine the rank of the cointegrating matrix the error correction model which appears to be a tentatively adequate conditional characterization of the date generating process revelas that disposable income wealth government expenditures relative prices and liquidity constraints proxied by the unemployment rate are important variables non nested tests are carried out against

the influence of seasonal adjustment on the canadian consumption function 1947 1991 cointegration tests typically rely on seasonally adjusted data cointegration tests are applied in this paper to seasonally unadjusted data the main objective of the paper is to test the permanent income hypothesis using canadian data the authors find that the unit root at the zero frequency found in seasonally adjusted data is also present in seasonally unadjusted data however there is considerable evidence for the presence of seasonal unit roots although there is support for the permanent income hypothesis for seasonally adjusted data the same hypothesis is rejected for seasonally unadjusted data

efficient resource allocation on the basis of priorities many institutions allocate resources by non market mechanisms based on priorities in this paper we introduce a model of resource allocation on the basis of priorities and address the following questions is it possible to allocate resources on the basis of any priority structure if yes when can we do this pareto efficiently without creating incentives for manipulation and consistently across different groups of agents and resource levels we adopt a basic indivisible objects model with a finite number of object types and a finite quota of goods of each type some interesting examples are the determination of access to education allocation of graduate houses offices or tasks agents are assumed to have strict preferences over object types and remaining unassigned an assignment is an allocation of the objects to the agents such that every agent receives at most one object a rule associates an assignment to each preference profile we formalize a priority structure to be a collection of strict priority rankings of individuals indexed by the object types where i a j would be read as i has higher priority for object a than j we assume that the priority structure is exogenously fixed and allow the preferences of the agents to vary a rule is said to violate a priority of i for a if there is a preference profile under which i envies j who is assigned a and publication information econometrica 70 6 november 2002 2489 2497 the copyright to this article is held by the econometric society http www econometricsociety org it may be downloaded printed and reproduced only for personal or classroom use absolutely no downloading or copying may be done for or on behalf of any for profit commercial firm or other commercial purpose without the explicit permission of the econometric society for this purpose contact julie p gordon executive director of the society at jpg northwestern edu i would like to thank faruk gul wolfgang pesendorfer the co editor the four anonymous referees and the participants of the micro theory lunch seminar in princeton university for their comments and suggestions

liquidity constraints and housing prices theory and evidence from the va mortgage program abstract this paper employs a simple intertemporal model to show that presence of liquidity constraints can depress the price of a durable good below its net present rental value regardless of the overall supply elasticity the existence of price effects implies that the relaxation of liquidity constraints is not pareto improving and may in fact be regressive historical evidence which exploits the fact that a clearly identifiable group war veterans enjoyed the most favored access to mortgage credit after world war ii supports the model the results suggest that more recent mortgage market innovations have served primarily to increase prices rather than home ownership rates and that such innovations have the potential to exacerbate socioeconomic disparities in ownership rates

unit root tests and the statistical pitfalls of seasonal adjustment the case of u s postwar real gross national product unit root tests applied to the postwar seasonally adjusted quarterly gross national product series strongly support the null hypothesis of the presence of a unit root in the data generating process evidence reported here with seasonally unadjusted data is far less conclusive it is explained why seasonal adjustment procedures may alter the outcome of conventional tests

stable and efficient resource allocation under weak priorities abstract we study the indivisible object allocation problem without monetary transfer in which each object is endowed with a weak priority ordering over agents it is well known that stability is generally not compatible with efficiency we characterize the priority structures for which a stable and efficient assignment always exists as well as the priority structures that admit a stable efficient and group strategy proof rule while house allocation problems and housing markets are two classic families of allocation problems that admit a stable efficient and group strategy proof rule any priority augmented allocation problem with more than three objects admits such a rule if and only if it is decomposable into a sequence of subproblems each of which has the structure of a house allocation problem or a housing market

a multicountry characterization of the nonstationarity of aggregate output the authors compute the scaled varlogram the variances of kth differences scaled by the variance of first differences of the log of annual per capita real aggregate output gdp or gnp as measured by 1 the long series for the united states and united kingdom 2 angus maddison s 1982 long series for twelve countries and 3 the postwar ifs data for thirty two countries simulations show that the scaled varlogram of real output is nearly always more consistent with the data being generated by parsimonious difference stationary than trend stationary univariate processes in fact the data reveal some excess nonstationarity relative to parsimonious arima models the power of the scaled varlogram to discriminate between trend stationary and difference stationary processes is somewhat greater than that of a dickey fuller type f test copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

targeted saving by renters for housing purchase in japan abstract this paper examines the extent to which wealth accumulation for housing purchase increases household savings and suppresses consumption the study employs an estimation method based on simultaneous equations with limited dependent variables developed by nelson and olson to examine the relationship between wealth accumulation and housing purchase plans using data relating to young japanese renters the estimation results provide evidence that young japanese households severely reduce their consumption by around 30 40 percent

why have private savings rates in the united states and canada diverged abstract one of the central questions in macroeconomics for many years has been whether government policy can affect private saving rates and if so to what extent and through what channels the question has remained controversial because as with other macroeconomic questions experiments to check divergent hypotheses cannot be deliberately performed so economists must rely upon the often dubious evidence from the limited experiments with which nature and history have endowed us this paper discusses the results of an exceptionally good natural experiment that has been provided by canada and the u s over the past thirty five years after moving in tandem for almost twenty five years american and canadian private saving rates have diverged dramatically over the last decade the primary conclusion emerging from our analysis of this phenomenon is that tax policies can have a potent impact on private savings behavior differences in tax structures and in the interactions of taxation and inflation appear to be important factors explaining the divergent behavior of the american and canadian private savings rates recognizing the importance of asset revaluations caused partially but not entirely by tax effects also helps to explain the different behavior of u s and canadian savings there may also be a relationship between government deficits and the private savings differential

the estimation of surprise models and the surprise consumption function in the first part of the paper we outline a method for estimating a class of models in which news or surprises appear and expectations are formed rationally the method is an extension of the errors in variables method of mccallum and wickens as a by product some of pagan s results on the circumstances under which the commonly used two step method of estimating surprise models is efficient are shown to be a consequence of well known theorems on the efficiency of sub system estimation when a subset of equations are exactly identified in the second part of the paper the method is applied to hall s random walk model of consumption which is extended to allow for stochastic interest rates and for leisure and government spending to be substitutes for private spending the extended formulation is a great deal more successful at capturing the salient features of the data we also derive approximate restrictions across the parameters of the model due to the rational expectations hypothesis but find that they are marginally rejected by the data finally we evaluate the ability of the life cycle with rational expectations model to encompass alternative models

comparative productivity of korean manufacturing 1967 1987 this paper compares productivity levels in south korean manufacturing with those in the usa for 13 manufacturing branches the comparison is based on specific industry of origin purchasing power parities value added per hour worked in korean manufacturing rose from only 4 5 percent of the us level in 1967 to more than 18 percent in 1987 total factor productivity rose from only 9 percent in 1967 to 26 percent of the us level in 1987 at a more detailed level especially the leather metals and machinery industries have reached high productivity levels some of which approach levels in european manufacturing the considerable labour productivity gap between korea and the united states can partly be explained by capital intensity structural effects size effects and levels of education

matching markets with mixed ownership the case for a real life assignment mechanism we consider a common indivisible good allocation problem whose popular applications include on campus housing kidney exchange and school choice we show that the so called new house 4 nh4 mechanism which has been in use at mit since the 1980s is equivalent to a natural adaptation of the well known gale shapley gs mechanism we run two experiments comparing nh4 with the prominently advocated top trading cycles ttc mechanism and nh4 with gs we find that under nh4 the participation rate is significantly higher than under ttc based on a new ordinal test of efficiency nh4 is more likely to pareto dominate ttc

convergence scale and the relative productivity performance of canadian us manufacturing industries this research is a comparative investigation of productivity performance within the manufacturing sectors of canada and the united states labour and multifactor productivity levels and growth rates are measured and analysed for an exhaustive sample of two digit level manufacturing industries an aggregate analysis is conducted by grouping industries in accordance with their degree of capital intensity the findings generally suggest that productivity in canadian manufacturing industries initially converged upon but has more recently diverged from those level displayed by their us counterparts an empirical analysis focuses on the convergence hypothesis and scale effects in explaining differences in measured productivity growth rates

consumer durables and the real interest rate one important channel through which real interest rates affect aggregate demand is consumer expenditure on durable goods this paper examines empirically the link between interest rates and consumer durables solving for the decision rule relating income and interest rates to consumer demand is an intractable task this paper avoids this problem by examining the first order conditions necessary for maximization by the representative consumer structural parameters of there presentative utility function are thus recovered the estimated model suggests that expenditure on consumer durables is far more sensitive to changes in the interest rate than is expenditure on nondurables and services this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

excess sensitivity of consumption to current income liquidity constraints or myopia this paper asks whether the empirical rejection of the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis occurs because agents are myopic in the sense that the marginal propensity to consume out of transitory income is non zero or because some agents face liquidity constraints the finding that the estimate of the mpc out of transitory income is dramatically affected in both magnitude and statistical significance by the inclusion of a proxy for liquidity constraints suggests that liquidity constraints are an important part of the explanation of the observed excess sensitivity of consumption to current income la sensibilite excessive de la consommation au revenu courant contraintes sur la liquidite ou myopie ce memoire examine la question a savoir pourquoi l hypothese du revenu permanent avec anticipations rationnelles n est pas v6rifiee empiriquement est ce parce que les agents economiques sont myopes i e que leur propension marginale a consommer a partir de leur revenu transitoire n est pas nulle ou bien est ce que certains agents economiques font face a des contraintes sur leur liquidite le fait que l estimation de la propension marginale a consommer le revenue transitoire est affectee par l inclusion d une variable qui tente de capturer l importance des contraintes sur la liquidit6 tant dans l 6valuation de sa taille que dans sa signification statistique suggere que ces contraintes jouent un role important dans l explication de cette sensibilite excessive qu on observe de la consommation aux changements dans le niveau de revenu courant almost all the recent empirical tests of the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis re pih have rejected the hypothesis using a rich variety of data sets and estimation methods the empirical work indicates that the failure of the re pih is significant both statistically and quantitatively the null hypothesis in this empirical literature typically consists of the joint hypothesis that 1 agents expectations are formed rationally 2 desired consumption is determined by permanent income and 3 capital markets are perfect in the sense that agents can lend or borrow against 1 studies rejecting the re pih include blinder 1981 flavin 1981 hall and mishkin 1982 hayashi 1982 and sargent 1978 in his original paper hall 1978 did not reject the re pih decisively however flavin 1981 showed that with a minor alteration in the specification of the alternative hypothesis the re pih could be rejected using hall s test and data set bernanke 1981 studying panel data on automobile expenditures did not find evidence against the hypothesis for an extensive survey of the empirical literature on the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis see king 1983 canadian journal of economics revue canadienne d economique xviii no 1 february fevrier 1985 printed in canada imprime au canada 0008 4085 85 117 36 1 50 canadian economics association this content downloaded from 157 55 39 17 on wed 31 aug 2016 05 08 58 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms

precaution and liquidity in the demand for housing we exploit cross sectional mortgage data to investigate the importance of liquidity constraints and a precautionary motive in the demand for housing households that are not liquidity constrained consume housing services essentially as the life cycle hypothesis suggests but with a significant precautionary component households that are liquidity constrained in terms of not meeting standard loan to value or payments to income constraints are similar to unconstrained households in most respects including the precautionary motive but they respond somewhat less to fluctuations in their lifetime income suggesting some influence of bank induced liquidity constraints we additionally find however that banks enforce liquidity constraints only weakly jel d91 d12 r21 i introduction the benchmark theory in the economics of consumption is the life cycle or permanent income hypothesis lcpi based on the work of modigliani and brumberg 1954 and friedman 1957 its empirical validity is sometimes questionable especially when compared against alternatives that incorporate liquidity constraints or the precautionary motive for saving see for instance deaton 1992 for a survey rejection of the lcpi may however be just a manifestation of the poor quality of consumption data at the micro level these data are typically subject to the reporting biases and omissions inherent in consumer surveys there are further difficulties in measuring a desired stream of consumption services nondurable consumption goods are a small fraction of total consumption and in the case of food essentials hardly a consumer choice variable durable consumption goods have the feature that they are lumpy and that the consumption services at any point in time are hard to measure we propose to test the lcpi at the micro level with a quite different type of data the data are obtained from the residential mortgage finance database collected by the national association of realtors they are based on actual home purchases and the associated mortgage transactions reported by realtors and thus avoid some of the reporting biases of the consumer surveys more important they allow us to accurately identify households that in principle have instantaneous access to additional liquidity by lowering the down payment for the house purchase or increasing the size of the loan further the purchase of a house provides an accurate measure of a relatively large fraction of consumption services obtained for a medium to long horizon and measured at the time of the consumption decision although our data also have some serious shortcomings they allow a look at the lcpi from an unconventional vantage point perhaps the most influential study employing the standard consumer survey in testing the lcpi at the micro level is that of hall and mishkin 1982 it examines food expenditure from the panel study of income dynamics one of their key results is that consumption tracks income more closely than would be expected under the lcpi they demonstrate that this result could be explained by assuming a group of liquidity constrained consumers consuming their income at each point in time of 20 of the total sample some of the drawbacks of this study are the use of food expenditures to represent consumption the underreporting of income and absence of proper wealth data inherent in the consumer survey and the associated inability to individually separate liquidity constrained consumers from the rest of the sample several previous studies have attempted to improve on this way of testing the lcpi by examining other data sets bernanke 1984 used data on durable consumption goods automobiles to overcome the drawbacks of using food consumption in the hall and mishkin study his results support the lcpi but are still suspect because of possible reporting biases and the lack of good wealth and savings observations

consumption leisure and earnings related liquidity constraints a note abstract the life cycle model with liquidity constraints produces a euler equation with unobservable kuhn tucker multipliers if borrowing restrictions depend on earnings preferences are non separable between goods and leisure and individuals are employed we derive a euler equation involving only observable variables

effort wages and the international division of labor this paper embeds variable effort into a traditional two sector heckscher ohlin model of international competition effort enters a production function as total factor productivity and on the assumption that effort does not affect capital depreciation the capital cost savings from high effort operations are passed on to workers the labor market thus offers a set of contracts with higher wages compensating for higher effort this has implications for growth openness minimum wages collective bargaining public support of education efficiency of state enterprises the distribution of wealth childbearing and much more

house allocation with transfers we consider the shapley scarf house allocation problem where monetary transfers are allowed we characterize the class of mechanisms that are strategy proof ex post individually rational ex post budget balanced and collusion proof in these mechanisms the price of each object is fixed in advance and the objects are reallocated according to the unique core assignment of the shapley scarf economy associated with the prices the special case in which all prices are zero is the core mechanism studied by shapley and scarf our mechanisms are compelling alternatives to the groves mechanisms which satisfy neither budget balance nor our condition of collusion proofness journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c78 d71 d78 d89

house allocation with existing tenants an equivalence abstract we analyze two mechanisms designed to eliminate inefficiencies in house allocation problems where there are both existing tenants and newcomers the first mechanism chooses the unique core allocation of a sister exchange economy constructed by endowing each existing tenant with her current house and each newcomer with a random vacant house the second mechanism chooses an ordering from a given distribution and determines the final outcome as follows assign the agents the best available house one at a time following their ordering in the queue and whenever an agent demands the house of an existing tenant who is still in the line modify the queue by inserting the existing tenant at the top whenever a loop of existing tenants forms assign each of them the house she demands and proceed we show that the first mechanism is equivalent to an extreme case of the second which favors the newcomers

the demand for tourism in north east england with special reference to northumbria an empirical analysis abstract this paper examines the trends of tourism in north east england in particular we focus on the area of northumbria to show the potential of tourism for economic development in the region within this analysis we concentrate on the demand for tourism in the region and in particular we are concerned with tourism by uk residents in northumbria domestic tourism the long run relationship between domestic tourism demand and a number of economic factors effecting this demand is considered using the johansen and juselius 1990 1992 multivariate cointegration analysis an error correction model is then proposed for short run forecasting of domestic demand for tourism in northumbria

the effect of liquidity constraints on consumption a cross sectional analysis this paper examines the effect of liquidity constraints on consumption expenditures using a single year cross section data set a reduced form equation for consumption is estimated on high saving households by the tobit procedure to account for the selectivity bias since high saving households are not likely to be liquidity constrained the estimated equation is an appropriate description of how desired consumption that would be forthcoming without liquidity constraints is related to the variables available in the cross section data when the reduced form equation is used to predict desired consumption the gap between desired consumption and measured consumption is most evident for young households

real product real factor input and productivity in the republic of korea 1960 1973 abstract estimates of real output real input and total factor productivity are constructed for south korea for the period 1960 1973 the average annual growth rates are 9 7 5 5 and 41 respectively higher than the major developed countries also capital deepening is observed to contribute substantially less to growth in korea than elsewhere

strategyproof assignment by hierarchical exchange we give a characterization of the set of group strategyproof pareto optimal and reallocation proof allocation rules for the assignment problem where individuals are assigned at most one indivisible object without any medium of exchange although there are no property rights in the model the rules satisfying the above criteria imitate a trading procedure with individual endowments in which individuals exchange objects from their hierarchically determined endowment sets in an iterative manner in particular these assignment rules generalize gale s top trading cycle procedure the classical rule for the model in which each individual owns an indivisible good

productivity and employment in a developing country some evidence from korea summary the vast majority of the sizable empirical literature which examines the relationship between productivity and employment examines data from developed countries in this paper we contribute to the limited empirical literature on the productivity employment relationship in developing countries by applying structural vector autoregression var models on korean data we find that productivity enhancing technology shocks reduce hours worked in the short run such evidence is qualitatively similar to findings from developed countries and more consistent with sticky price models than the real business cycle theory although productivity enhancing technology shocks are an important source of economic growth in korea they may have exerted a negative impact on employment

dynamic kidney exchange we study how barter exchanges should be conducted through a centralized mechanism in a dynamically evolving agent pool with time and compatibility based preferences we derive the dynamically efficient two way and multi way exchange mechanisms that maximize total discounted exchange surplus recently several live donor kidney exchange programs were established to swap incompatible donors of end stage kidney disease patients since kidney exchange can be modeled as a special instance of our more general model dynamically efficient kidney exchange mechanisms are derived as corollaries we make policy recommendations using simulations

the seasonal unit root structure in new zealand macroeconomic variables adf unit root tests are generally applied to macroeconomic data prior to testing theoritical models to ensure that all relevant variables are integrated of the same order not only is it important to test that these variables are integrated of the same order but also that a cointegrating relationship exists failure to do so raise the specture of false inference associated with the spurious regression problem the seasonal nature of quarterly data adds a further proplem which has generally been overcome by seasonally adjusting the data using procedure such as the census x 11 rather than suppressing it have attempted to determine whether the seasonal component in each variable exhibits stochastic non stationary this paper analysisunit roots in a seasonal setting and compares the recently developed tests for seasonal unit roots as well as the standard augmented dickey fuller zerop frequency unit root tests of the variables tested relatively few paper to be integrated at the seasonal frequenciues and as

eliciting preferences to assign positions and compensation abstract we describe strategy proof rules for economies where an agent is assigned a position e g a job plus some of a divisible good for the 2 agent 2 position case we derive a robust characterization for the multi agent position case many arbitrary such rules exist so we consider additional requirements by also requiring coalitional strategy proofness or nonbossiness the range of a solution is restricted to the point that such rules are not more complex than those for the shapley scarf housing model no divisible good third we show that essentially only constant solutions are immune to manipulations involving bribes finally we demonstrate a conflict between efficiency and strategy proofness the results extend to models without externalities in which agents share positions journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d70

demand for money in sri lanka during the post 1977 period a cointegration and error correction analysis this paper investigates the long run demand for money and short run dynamics of the long run money demand function for sri lanka during the post 1977 period while m1 is cointegrated with real income nominal interest rate short term foreign interest rate and real effective exchange rate m2 is not this suggests that monetary authorities should emphasize the narrow definition of money for monetary control the one year fixed deposits rate is cointegrated with m1 indicating the opportunity cost of holding money although the inflation rate is not cointegrated with m1 it seems to be an important determinant of the demand for m1 in the short run results also suggest that the short term foreign interest rate and the exchange rate can have important implications for the effectiveness of monetary policy monetary authorities must consider the response of domestic money demand to these external factors when formulating future monetary policies

convergence of industry labor productivity among advanced economies 1963 1982 data are used for thirteen industrialized countries to investigate convergence of labor productivity levels in individual manufacturing industries over the 1963 82 period the authors find convergence in virtually every manufacturing industry among these countries the co efficient of variation of industry labor productivity declined in all but one of twenty eight industries however productivity convergenc e is stronger for all manufacturing than within individual industries especially heavy and high technology industries also variation in employment mix among countries plays little role in explaining cross country differences i n aggregate manufacturing productivity nor have changes in employment mixes been an important source of convergence copyright 1988 by mit press

the sensitivity of consumption to transitory income estimates from panel data on households we investigate the stochastic relation between income and consumption specifically consumption of food within a panel of about 2 000 households our major findings are 1 consumption responds much more strongly to permanent than to transitory movements of income 2 the response to transitory income is nonetheless clearly positive 3 a simple test independent of our model of consumption rejects a central implication of the pure life cycle permanent income hypothesis the observed covariation of income and consumption is compatible with pure life cycle permanent income behavior on the part of80 percent of families and simple proportionality of consumption and income among the remaining 20 percent as a general matter our findings support the view that families respond differently to different sources of income variations in particular temporary income tax policies have smaller effects on consumption than do other more permanent changes in income of the same magnitude this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the probabilistic serial mechanism with private endowments abstract a random assignment is ordinally efficient if it is not stochastically dominated with respect to individual preferences over sure objects when there are no private endowments the set of ordinally efficient random assignments is characterized by the eating algorithm bogomolnaia and moulin 2001 when there are private endowments the main requirement is individual rationality however the eating algorithm fails to deliver this property our contribution is the natural generalization of the eating algorithm for this general class of problems the family of this generalized eating algorithm characterizes the set of individually rational and ordinally efficient random assignments a special solution in this family the individually rational probabilistic serial ps ir also achieves a new fairness axiom no justified envy however it is not immune to strategic manipulation we show that individual rationality no justified envy and strategy proofness are incompatible

the seasonal cycle and the business cycle almost all recent research on macroeconomic fluctuations has worked with seasonally adjusted or annual data this paper takes a different approach by treating seasonal fluctuations as worthy of study in their own right our results show that seasonal fluctuations are an important source of variation in all macroeconomic quantity variables but are small or entirely absent in both real and nominal price variables the timing of the seasonal fluctuations consists of increases in the second and fourth quarters a large decrease in the first quarter and a mild decrease in the third quarter the paper demonstrates that with respect to each of several major stylized facts about business cycles the seasonal cycle displays the same characteristics as the business cycle in some cases even more dramatically than the business cycle that is we find that at seasonal frequencies as well as at business cycle frequencies output movements across broadly defined sectors move together the timing of production and the

fiscal policy with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets i undertake a quantitative investigation into the short run effects of changes in the timing of proportional income taxes for model economies in which heterogeneous households face a borrowing constraint temporary tax changes are found to have large real effects in the benchmark model a temporary tax cut increases aggregate consumption on impact by around 29 cents for every dollar of tax revenue lost comparing the benchmark incomplete markets model to a complete markets economy income tax cuts provide a larger boost to consumption and a smaller investment stimulus when asset markets are incomplete copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

coalitional strategy proof house allocation abstract we consider house allocation without endowments we show that there is a unique maximal domain including all strict preferences on which efficiency and coalitional strategy proofness are compatible a preference relation belongs to the unique maximal domain if it is a strict descending ranking of houses to a certain house and indifference holds over it and the remaining houses we also show that on this domain mixed dictator pairwise exchange rules are the only rules satisfying efficiency and coalitional strategy proofness journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 d63 d71

human capital and self enforcing contracts this essay analyzes labor contracts as a device for rearranging factor incomes over time under conditions of extreme adverse selection in particular the lack of verifiable public information about future compensation prevents finitely lived workers from borrowing against their earnings specific human capital is used as an incentive to implement intertemporal self enforcing contracts between workers and firms after proposing a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such contracts the resulting equilibrium earnings profiles are explored along with the effects of imperfections in the credit market on the way workers choose jobs and allocate time between current production and training copyright 1988 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

seasonal cointegration in macroeconomic systems case studies for small and large european countries abstract six variable vector autoregressive systems consisting of macroeconomic series are investigated parallel data series for four european countries are used austria germany federal republic finland and the united kingdom all data series are not seasonally adjusted the aim of the paper is to show that most of the series are better modeled using stochastic seasonality and seasonal unit roots models than simple deterministic models of seasonal structures as a second step seasonal cointegration in the systems is studied it is shown that all four economies display seasonal cointegration as well as usual cointegration

estimating the household consumption function in saudi arabia an error correction approach abstractwe estimate a micro founded life cycle consumption model for saudi arabia over the period 1970 2017 using error correction model procedures dynamic adjustments are significant and both in

an experimental study of house allocation mechanisms we report an experiment on three house allocation mechanisms under complete information random serial dictatorship with squatting rights and two variants of the top trading cycles mechanism results show that the latter two are significantly more efficient than the former d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

structural breaks and seasonal integration abstract we examine the effects of exogenous changes in the level or seasonal pattern of a series on the hegy test these changes bias both unit root and seasonal root tests new critical values for the hegy tests are presented

unit roots and seasonal unit roots in macroeconomic time series canadian evidence abstract unit root tests are conducted to determine whether the unit root found in seasonal adjusted data may be due to seasonal adjustment filters typically applied by government agencies i e arima x 11 we find that a unit root exists in both the raw and adjusted data except for the unemployment rate second we also find that the commonly used seasonal adjustment filter introduced by box and jenkins 1970 is generally inappropriate

incentive compatibility in a market with indivisible goods abstract in a market in which each trader s initial endowment is one unit of an indivisible good there exists an incentive compatible procedure for reaching a competitive allocation this contrasts with some recent results for similar problems

reclaim proof allocation of indivisible objects abstract we study desirability axioms imposed on allocations in indivisible object allocation problems the existing axioms in the literature are various conditions of robustness to blocking coalitions with respect to agents ex ante individual rationality and group rationality and ex post pareto efficiency endowments we introduce a stringent axiom that encompasses and strengthens the existing ones an allocation is reclaim proof if it is robust to blocking coalitions with respect to any conceivable interim endowments of agents this is an appealing property in dynamic settings where the assignments prescribed by an allocation to be implemented need to be made in multiple rounds rather than all in one shot we show that an allocation is reclaim proof if and only if it is induced by a yrmh igyt mechanism introduced by abdulkadiroglu and sonmez 1999 and if and only if it is a competitive allocation

unemployment insurance and quits in canada in two recent policy changes the canadian government acted to limit the eligibility of job quitters and those dismissed for cause for unemployment insurance ui we study the effects of these policy changes on separation behaviour we find no evidence that these policy changes induced a relabelling of separations towards ui eligible reasons but we do find quite different responses across demographic groups women and young men are inhibited from quitting their jobs by the new quit penalties but prime age males seem unaffected by the large increase in the cost of quitting imposed by the changes

convergence of south korean productivity on west german levels 1966 1978 abstract south korean labor productivity in manufacturing converged rapidly on the productivity level in west german manufacturing during the period 1966 1978 achieving two thirds of the german level by 1978 this convergence was more rapid at the industry level than for all manufacturing the capital labor ratio and total factor productivity in south korean manufacturing also converged on west german levels during this period with the former accounting for two thirds and the latter one third of the labor productivity convergence the source of labor productivity convergence however differed greatly across industries with capital deepening the dominant source in heavy industries and total factor productivity tfp convergence the main source in light industries

testing the stochastic implications of the life cycle permanent income hypothesis using uk regional time series data this paper applies exclusion tests of the pure life cycle permanent income hypothesis lcpih to time series data on each of the eleven standard regions of the uk data are annual and extend from 1975 to 1994 the results obtained suggest that there are considerable differences in consumption behaviour across the regions theory has indicated that a departure of consumption behaviour from that predicted by the lcpih can occur because of a change in unemployment consequently a comparison is undertaken of the empirical results obtained for the eleven regions and the respective unemployment movements following this comparison it is possible to conclude that the contrasting unemployment experiences of the regions of the uk have contributed significantly to yet cannot account for fully the observed differences in consumption behaviour

strategy proofness and the core in house allocation problems abstract we study house allocation problems introduced by l shapley and h scarf 1974 j math econ 1 23 28 we prove that a mechanism a social choice function is individually rational anonymous strategy proof and nonbossy but not necessarily pareto efficient if and only if it is either the core mechanism or the no trade mechanism where the no trade mechanism is the one that selects the initial allocation for each profile of preferences this result confirms the intuition that even if we are willing to accept inefficiency there exists no interesting strategy proof mechanism other than the core mechanism journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c78 d71 d78 d89