a direct test of hyperbolic discounting using market asset data a b s t r a c t this paper introduces a framework that generalizes exponential discounting in a net present value model by including a quasi hyperbolic discount parameter in the asset valuation equation using observed market asset data a statistically significant quasi hyperbolic parameter is obtained thus rejecting exponential discounting

cost uncertainty and the rate of investment abstract this paper examines the effect of cost and price uncertainty on the optimal rate of investment by firms within a general equilibrium framework former works which have studied this issue like hartman 1972 and abel 1983 1984 1985 have come to the conclusion that this effect is positive since increased price uncertainty raises expected profitability but these studies assume a fixed discount rate which is equivalent to assuming that consumers are risk neutral this paper shows that if consumers are risk averse the effect of uncertainty may be reversed and investment may be depressed when price or cost uncertainty is increased

the effects of uncertainty on investment and the expected long run capital stock abstract this paper examines the effects of output price uncertainty on the optimal investment behavior of a risk neutral competitive firm with a constant returns to scale production function in the presence of convex costs of adjustment investment is an increasing function of q the shadow price of capital given the current price of output we find that increased uncertainty will raise the current rate of investment increased uncertainty will also increase the expected long run capital stock if the price of output is serially uncorrelated however if the price of output is serially correlated then the direction of the effect of increased uncertainty on the expected long run capital stock depends on the curvature of the marginal adjustment cost function in this case we obtain results which are directly opposite of the results in the literature and we locate the flaw in the existing analysis

optimal investment in learning curve technologies we study optimal investment in technologies characterized by the learning curve there are two investment patterns depending on the shape of the learning curve if the learning process is slow firms invest relatively late and on a larger scale if the curve is steep firms invest earlier and on a smaller scale we further demonstrate that learning investment differs greatly from investment in technologies without learning effects learning investments generate substantial initial losses and are very sensitive to downside risk we show that the most susceptible to losses and risk are technologies with intermediate speed of learning

accuracy of response in labor market surveys evidence and implications this paper examines the extent of response errors in labor market survey data and explores the implications of such errors for economic analysis explicitly examined are responses to questions on industry occupation union status hours worked and wages analyses are based on two sources 1 a special supplement to the january 1977 current population survey that obtained data from workers and their employers and 2 an exact match of workers and their employers interviewed in the employment opportunity pilot project survey the dual nature of these surveys provides a basis for analyzing the effect of response error on a variety of economic analyses including the trade off between wages and risk the wage impact of unionism and the sensitivity of wage determination models to alternative responses to earnings questions

multiperiod sales production decisions under uncertainty abstract this paper studies the behavior of an expected profit maximizing multiperiod firm under uncertainty in output and demand the firm s problem is to determine in each period the level of sales and inventory and the expected output for the coming period the optimal policy is derived in an explicit closed form and is proved to be myopic it is shown that the observed phenomenon of downward price inflexibility can be explained and further specified by using the results of our model

measurement error in human capital and the black white wage gap proxy variables are frequently used in economics to control for unavailable variables in a linear regression setting for example afqt scores have been used to control for human capital accumulati

the effect of unions on the structure of wages a longitudinal analysis this paper studies the effects of unions on the structure of wages using an estimation technique that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status and potential correlations between union status and unobserved productivity the econometric model is estimated separately for five skill groups using a large panel data set formed from the u s current population survey the results suggest that unions raise wages more for workers with lower levels of observed skills in addition the patterns of selection bias differ by skill group among workers with lower levels of observed skill unionized workers are positively selected whereas union workers are negatively selected from among those with higher levels of observed skill despite a large and sophisticated literature there is still substantial disagreement over the extent to which differences in the structure of wages between union and nonunion workers represent an effect of trade unions rather than a consequence of the nonrandom selection of unionized workers over the past decade several alternative approaches have been developed to control for unobserved heterogeneity between union and nonunion workers 2 one method that has been successfully applied in other areas of applied microeconometrics is the use of longitudinal data to measure the wage gains or losses of workers who change union status unfortunately longitudinal estimators are highly sensitive to measurement error even a small fraction of misclassified union status changes can lead to significant biases if the true rate of mobility between union and nonunion jobs is low this sensitivity led lewis 1986 to essentially dismiss the longitudinal evidence in his landmark survey of union wage effects in this paper i present some new evidence on the union wage effect based on a longitudinal estimator that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status the estimator uses external information on union status misclassification rates along with the reduced form coefficients from a multi variate regression of wages on the observed sequence of union status indicators to isolate the causal effect of unions from any selection biases introduced by a correlation between union status and the permanent component of unobserved wage heterogeneity recognizing that unions may raise wages more or less for

evaluating natural resource investments notwithstanding impressive advances in the theory of finance over the past 2 decades practical procedures for capital budgeting have evolved only slowly the standard technique which has remained unchanged in essentials since it was originally proposed see dean 1951 bierman and smidt 1960 derives from a simple adaptation of the fisher 1907 model of valuation under certainty under this technique expected cash flows from an investment project are discounted at a rate deemed appropriate to their risk and the resulting present value is compared with the cost of the project this standard textbook technique reflects modern theoretical developments only insofar as estimates of the discount rate may be obtained from crude application of single period asset pricing theory but see brennan 1973 bogue and roll 1974 turnbull 1977 constantinides 1978 the inadequacy of this approach to capital budgeting is widely acknowledged although not widely discussed its obvious deficiency is its the evaluation of mining and other natural resource projects is made particularly difficult by the high degree of uncertainty attaching to output prices it is shown that the techniques of continuous time arbitrage and stochastic control theory may be used not only to value such projects but also to determine the optimal policies for developing managing and abandoning them the approach may be adapted to a wide variety of contexts outside the natural resource sector where uncertainty about future project revenues is a paramount concern

dynamic decisions under risk application of ito stochastic control in agriculture in agricultural economics most studies of dynamic decisions under risk have been empirical with less emphasis on theory in finance resource economics and general economics however ito stochastic control is popular for theoretical work optimal decisions can be characterized using the powerful ito stochastic calculus this paper describes the assumptions and methods of ito control constructs a dynamic model of agricultural decisions under risk and illustrates with four examples

the impact of perceived expectations and uncertainty on firm investment this paper analyses the differential impact of perceived expectations and uncertainty on investment spending in small and large firms we analyse two types of investment viz aggregate investment and investment in energy saving technologies using dutch firm level data the results show that expectations and uncertainty about input and output prices and domestic demand have sub stantial but different effects on investment spending in firms of different sizes furthermore we find evidence at least for small firms that there are important differences between the effects of uncertainty about input and output variables

the union membership wage premium for employees covered by collective bargaining agreements using current population survey data for 1983 93 this article analyzes whether there is a union membership wage premium among full time private sector employees covered by union contracts ordinary least squares estimates of the membership wage premium are 12 14 and allowing membership to be endogenous yields larger estimates differences in job tenure unobservable characteristics and measurement error cannot fully explain the estimated premium significant differences in this premium as well as in membership rates conditional upon coverage across various demographic subgroups are also documented in general free riders do not appear to be free riding

house price uncertainty timing of development and vacant land prices evidence for real options in seattle abstract recent theoretical work suggests that land development exercises a real option this paper utilizes a rich data set of parcel characteristics and real property transactions for the seattle area to tests two predictions of real options with respect to land markets greater price uncertainty should delay the timing of development and raise land prices i find evidence in support of both predictions a one standard deviation increase in uncertainty lowers the likelihood of development by 11 percent and raises vacant land prices by 1 6 percent these findings suggest that developers consider their real option to future buildings when deciding to invest

the effect of direct to consumer television advertising on the timing of treatment i introduction in august 1997 the food and drug administration fda relaxed the rules governing television advertising of prescription pharmaceutical products before that time broadcast ads were permitted only to mention either the name of a drug or a disease against which a drug was effective but not both after august 1997 pharmaceuticals were allowed to mention both the disease and the drug brand name as long a a brief list of side effects was mentioned and 1 800 number or world wide web site was provided with more detailed information spending for direct to consumer advertising dtca for prescription drugs went from 985 million in 1996 to approximately 4 2 billion for 2005 donohue cevasco and rosenthal 2007 this has led to a great deal of debate in the medical profession and among health care insurer and managed care organizations and an ongoing review of advertising rules by the fda however very little is actually known about the effects of dtca for the efficient allocation o prescription drugs we will examine how dtca affects physician prescribing patterns and courses of care for patients suffering from a representative chronic condition osteoarthritis oa this condition is of special significance as one of the major products in this area merck s vioxx cyclooxygenase 2 cox 2 inhibitor was forced to withdraw from the market in october 2004 due to side effects on patients with heart conditions the side effects of vioxx have caused considerable criticism of merck s advertising strategy for vioxx see e g editorials from the new england journal of medicine mukherjee nissen and topol 2001 topol 2004 the primary goal of this paper was to determine what effect local and national television advertising on behalf of the two main cox 2 inhibitors had on the treatment decisions that patients made in collaboration with their physicians in particular we will examine the impact of dtca on the time patients wait after diagnosis with oa and before initiating treatment with a cox 2 inhibitor the paper will proceed by first reviewing the literature on dtca in section ii section iii will present a theoretical model of optimal delay to treatment section iv will present details of the data and empirical model we implement empirical results are presented in section v and section vi concludes with a discussion about future research ii background and literature a advertising for cox 2 inhibitors historically pharmaceutical advertising was done largely through detailing promotion directly from the manufacturer to the physician either through visits by representatives or contacts by pharmacists or through advertisements in professional journals since the mid 1980s however drug companies in the united states have increasingly turned their marketing strategies directly toward the consumer this advertising largely takes place through television media and in newspapers this change in advertising approach has its share of both critics and advocates the pharmaceutical industry in the united states is large accounting for more than 132 billion in retail sales in 2000 alone nihcm 2001 in 2000 celebrex celecoxib the leading cox 2 inhibitor had sales of approximately 2 6 billion pharmacia has setback for parecoxib 2001 while vioxx rofecoxib sold more than 1 2 billion in the first half of 2000 knight ridder news 2001 in support of vioxx merck spent almost 161 million in dtca in 2000 schumann 2001 which was the most spent on dtca for any prescription pharmaceutical making it the 39th most advertised brand of any kind in 2000 top brands in network primetime 2000 2001 over the same time periods pharmacia and pfizer jointly spent 78 million in dtca supporting celebrex we have chosen to examine the role of dtca in the context of the market for cox 2 inhibitors during the period spanned by our data 1999 2002 the two available cox 2 inhibitors were vioxx and celebrex

hourly earnings in the united states another look at unionization schooling sickness and unemployment using psid data this paper makes use of panel data to consider the effects of unionization schooling sickness and unemployment on individual earnings our results may be summarized as follows the unionization effect is around 15 20 this measure is consistently estimated controlling for both fixed individual attributes and serially uncorrelated measurement error sickness has little immediate impact but there is some indication that after 4 years earnings have fallen permanently by around 8 consequent on a 10 week spell of sickness a spell of unemployment on the other hand leads to a sharp fall in earnings but this effect decays rapidly leaving the possibility of a small permanent impact finally controlling for all fixed individual attributes we are unable to pin down the schooling effect with any accuracy owing to the absence of instruments that are both valid and effective within the data set

the joint determination of union status and union wage effects some tests of alternative models the problems of estimation and interpretation of union wage differentials are examined the properties of cross section and longitudinal estimators are compared estimates are presented and those in the literature summarized conflicting results are obtained longitudinal estimators typically produce results smaller than those of ols while cross section methods instrumental variables or inverse mills ratio raise the estimate the paper offers a reconciliation of these results it supports a more optimistic conclusion than that reached in reviews by freeman and lewis who argued that little has been learned from attempts to deal with the endogeneity issue comparisons between estimators are used to throw light on the process governing union status and to suggest interpretations of union differentials consistent with the current evidence

a dynamic q model of investment financing and asset pricing an empirical test for the agricultural sector the u s agricultural sector is experiencing a financial crisis this crisis has been brought about by a decline in the real price of farm products and rising real interest rates since 1980 declining incomes have eroded farmers ability to service debt and falling land values have reduced the collateral necessary to support the debt the relationship between farm income and real estate values has recently been described by melichar 9 11 he argued that increases in income and capital gain or losses are capitalized into land values using national aggregate data from the u s agricultural sector he demonstrated that the rate of return to investment was relatively stable over time because land values respond within a short period of time to changes in income and capital gains or losses the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model incorporating this capitalization process in order to explain the evolution of asset values in agriculture over time this explanation is important in understanding the nature of the current financial crisis in the agricultural sector and its relation to past cyclical behavior a present value model of the growing firm is developed that incorporates both investment and financing decisions it is an extension of the well known dynamic q model developed by uzawa 20 yoshikawa 22 hayashi 5 pappas 16 pindyck 17 and abel 1 the original q model was developed by tobin 18 dynamic q models rely on an adjustment or growth cost function to limit the firm s rate of investment the major innovation of the model developed here is to extend the previous work to include the financing decision this involves

spatial growth and redevelopment with perfect foresight and durable housing abstract in this paper i present a theoretical model of the spatial growth of an urban area with durable housing i combine several assumptions that typically complicate the analysis i housing developers have perfect foresight ii the initial development and many waves of redevelopment are considered in each developer s plan and iii the closed city assumption is made so that the time path of population is exogenous and that of consumer utility is endogenous i still obtain explicit solutions for the spatial pattern of urban growth and for the timing of the initial residential development and each successive redevelopment at each distance from the urban center i compare perfect foresight growth to growth with static expectations and i examine the comparative statics of both

options uncertainty and sunk costs an empirical analysis of land use change abstract in a real option model of land conversion incorporating return uncertainty and sunk costs optimal conversion thresholds are significantly higher than those from expected net present value models not accounting for these factors empirical tests of conversion from agriculture to forest suggest that landowners value the option to convert when making conversion decisions higher uncertainty in returns to all potential uses and lower correlation between shocks to agricultural and forest returns decreases the likelihood of conversion estimates indicate a significant impact on conversion decisions with approximations of option values ranging from 7 to 81 of the expected value of the land asset

hedonic pricing with redevelopment options a new approach to estimating depreciation effects abstract the standard hedonic model of durable assets is a special case of a more general model that contains two additive terms 1 use value of the existing hedonic vector and 2 the value of the option to reconfigure hedonic characteristics one empirical implication is that the two parts of value are related e g use value increases with interior area whereas option value decreases with intensity the ratio of structure value divided by land value increases in building age reduce use value but increase option value data from greenwich connecticut indicate that intensity has the expected negative effect coefficients on building age are shown to be better measures of depreciation when intensity variables are included in the regression

investment under alternative return assumptions comparing random walks and mean reversion abstract many recent theoretical papers have come under attack for modeling prices as geometric brownian motion this process can diverge over time implying that firms facing this price process can earn infinite profits we explore the significance of this attack and contrast investment under geometric brownian motion with investment assuming mean reversion while analytically more complex mean reversion in many cases is a more plausible assumption allowing for supply responses to increasing prices we show that cumulative investment is generally unaffected by the use of a mean reversion process rather than geometric brownian motion and provide an explanation for this result

behaviors and housing inertia are key factors in determining the consequences of a shock in transportation costs this paper investigates the consequences of a sudden increase in transportation costs when household behaviors and building inertia are accounted for a theoretical framework is proposed capturing the interactions between behaviors transportation costs and urban structure numerical simulations show that changes in households and landowners choices reduce significantly the long term adverse effects of a shock in transportation costs indeed the shock translates over the long run into a more concentrated housing that limits households utility losses and maintains landowners income but because of building inertia the shock leads first to a long transition during which the adjustment is constrained by a suboptimal housing supply structure then households support larger losses than in the final stage though lower than with no behavior adjustment and landowners experience a large decrease in their aggregate income and an important redistribution of wealth thus behaviors and building inertia are key factors in determining the vulnerability to transportation price variability and to the introduction of climate policies our policy conclusions are that i if a long term increase in transportation costs is unavoidable because of climate change or resource scarcity a smooth change prevents to some extent the negative transition effects and ii fast growing cities of the developing world can reduce their future vulnerability to shocks in transportation costs through the implementation of policies that limit urban sprawl

patterns of growth in chinese cities implications of the land lease abstract a special feature of china s housing market is land use rights in the form of land leasehold contracts granted by the government we consider an equilibrium model in which a representative developer may choose to redevelop existing centrally located housing or to develop new housing at the periphery of the city we show that as the city grows the land leasehold system results in the city center being developed less intensely and more land being used on the outskirts of the city when compared to a fee simple environment thus cities in china are likely to be relatively more spread out with city centers relatively older than would be the case with fee simple ownership our model suggests that excess residential land use is about 6 percent in addition compared with the ownership case housing supply will grow more quickly in the near future but more slowly later on during the transition of the chinese economy parallel to the supply growth pattern equilibrium price grows relative slowly in the near future but more quickly later on while we focus on residential uses we believe our model can be applied to other land uses

optimal sequential investment when capital is not readily reversible when investment opportunities arrive one at a time and are reviewed sequentially a corporation s optimal policy differs from a standard net present value rule if the corporation exercises control over an industry state variable and control is costly the first condition presupposes a degree of market power for the firm the second occurs if corporate investment decisions are imperfectly reversible to address the problem of optimal investment in this context a firm s investment decisions are modeled as a markov reward process the causes of economic irreversibility are discussed and general propositions concerning the optimal investment policy are derived these propositions are then applied to the optimization of an exploration program by an oligopolistic firm a price leader under particular demand and distributional assumptions solutions for the optimal decision rule and the value of the exploration program are obtained and their properties examined current investment may affect future opportunities by creating growth opportunities as defined by myers 16 see also spence 25 or by reducing the value of an existing opportunity set despite the known potential for these interactions capital budgeting techniques such as net present valuation scenario planning and monte carlo simulation focus exclusively on the stand alone value of an investment the capacity for modeling interactions is present in the multiperiod models of merton 16 bogue and roll 5 and others the absence of applications however is evidence that actual economic interactions between current and future opportunities are not well understood this paper develops a model of a firm facing a sequence of interdependent growth opportunities opportunities have positive net present values because the firm exercises market power in its product market current investment changes the value of future opportunities through its effect on a product market variable the model is used to examine the impact of demand industry structure and technology on optimal investment rules and on the value of aggregate growth

energy price shocks household location patterns and housing crises theory and implications abstract the u s housing collapse in 2007 is widely blamed for inducing a financial crisis that spread to the real economy and caused a severe and prolonged downturn this paper develops a model to investigate the role of gasoline price shocks in triggering the housing market collapse and identifies a new channel through which energy price shocks affect the financial market and the macro economy results suggest that unanticipated gasoline price shocks increase the cost of work commutes lower the value of homes away from the city center and increase foreclosure rates as homeowners either cannot afford mortgage payments amid elevated gas expenditures or seek to abandon underwater homes the model predicts that gasoline price shocks disproportionately affect suburban households that face greater exposure due to longer commutes and lower incomes empirical evidence from the 2007 08 housing collapse is presented to corroborate this theory

adjustment costs uncertainty and the behavior of the firm this paper examines the effects of demand and cost uncertainty on a firm s investment output and pricing decisions but unlike most earlier studies in which demand and cost are simply not known at the time an output or pricing decision is made here i consider uncertainties over future demand and costs it will be seen that the effects of such uncertainties depend critically on the characteristics of the firm s adjustment costs i treat demand uncertainty in a dynamic context by letting the market demand function shift randomly but continuously through time according to a stochastic process this means that today s demand is known exactly but future demand may be larger or smaller and has a variance that increases with the time horizon likewise uncertainty over factor costs is characterized by treating those variables as stochastic processes i combine this characterization of uncertainty with a dynamic model of the firm in which some factor inputs can be adjusted freely in response to stochastic demand changes but other factors are quasi fixed in that adjustment costs are incurred when they are changed in this model the firm s price and output are random processes but we can examine the firm s behavior in expected value terms of interest is whether the presence of uncertainty should cause competitive or monopolistic firms to invest and produce more or less than they would otherwise how the effects of uncertainty are influenced by the presence of risk aversion and how the use of inventories can alter the impact of uncertainty on capacity and sales of course these questions have been addressed by others in the past among the earliest studies of demand uncertainty are those of edwin mills 1959 1962 and samuel karlin and charles carr 1962 mills examined a single period monopolistic firm that sets both output and price and showed that additive demand uncertainty i e the demand function is of the form q q p u where u is a random variable leads to a lower price if marginal cost is constant so that the firm reduces the expected loss from discarding unsold production karlin and carr confirmed for both the static case and the multiperiod case with inventory carryover that additive uncertainty tends to reduce the price and increase the output of a risk neutral firm while multiplicative uncertainty does the opposite other papers have been concerned with the way in which the error term enters the demand function additively multiplicatively or nonlinearly the implications of choosing price ex ante instead of output the implications of risk aversion and the use of inventories for example agnar sandmo 1971 and david baron 1970 showed that a risk averse competitive firm will produce less when the price is a random variable or subject to an additive error term but a riskneutral firm will not alter its production hayne leland 1972 extended these results to a monopolistic firm whose demand can depend in a general way on a random error term for example q q p u and showed that uncertainty reduces the production of a

new housing supply and the dilution of social capital this paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment using an instrumental variables approach and data from the social capital community benchmark survey it is documented that the positive link between homeownership and individual social capital investment is largely confined to more built up neighborhoods with more inelastic supply of new housing the empirical findings provide support for the proposition that in these localities house price capitalization provides additional incentives for homeowners to invest in social capital the findings are also largely consistent with the proposition that built up neighborhoods provide protection from inflows of newcomers that could upset a mutually beneficial equilibrium involving reciprocal cooperation however the results do not appear to be driven by selection based on inherent differences in social aptitudes or by tiebout sorting

urban growth controls transitional dynamics of development fees and growth boundaries abstract this paper investigates how development fees and urban growth boundaries affect urban development when the short run construction supply function is upward sloped i e convex development costs whereas the policies are equivalent in the traditional static model dynamic analysis reveals important differences out of the steady state in particular the development fee that is efficient in the steady state is also dynamically efficient in contrast the long run efficient urban growth boundary generates inefficiently fast development out of the steady state the results are robust with or without location rents and perfect or myopic foresight assumptions

interest rates irreversibility and backward bending investment this paper studies the effect of interest rates on investment in an environment where firms make irreversible investments with uncertain pay offs in this setting changes in the interest rate affect both the cost of capital and the cost of delaying investment to acquire information these two forces combine to generate an aggregate investment demand curve that is a backward bending function of the interest rate at low rates increasing the interest rate raises investment by increasing the cost of delay how does an increase in interest rates affect capital investment by firms the answer to this question has important implications for monetary and fiscal policies the neoclassical theory of investment gives a simple answer increasing the interest rate reduces investment by raising the cost of capital haavelmo 1960 jorgenson 1963 this paper shows that the answer to this question is different when firms make irreversible investments with uncertain pay offs in this environment investment is a backward bending function of the interest rate to see the intuition consider a pharmaceutical company deciding how quickly to proceed with investments in operations to produce new drugs the firm is uncertain about drugs that will be successful and can acquire further information via rd bertola and caballero 1994 dixit and pindyck 1994 abel and eberly 1996 in the model analysed here expected profits grow at a rate g 0 when firms delay investment because the information acquired by delay reduces the probability of investing in an unsuccessful venture profits earned in subsequent periods are discounted at the interest rate r therefore firms invest immediately only if the expected profit from investment is positive and the expected growth in profits from delaying g is less than the interest rate the backward bending shape of the aggregate investment demand curve i r arises from this optimality condition if r is low g is likely to exceed r compelling many firms to delay investment rather than investing

the intensity and timing of investment the case of land the authors model the decision to replace durable capital when intensity is variable decisions of this type include land redevelopment decisions where the density of residential or commercial development is a choice variable as well as capital replacement decisions where capacity is variable the authors provide a general yet simple formation of the problem using an optimal stopping framework they characterize the value of the project the timing of investment and the intensity of development the authors show that intensity interacts in important ways with timing taxes and project values the ability to vary intensity raises hurdle rents and delays development decisions copyright 1994 by american economic association

real options with ex post division of the surplus abstract this paper examines a real option model where two vertically related firms are involved in a specific investment project that is subject to an uncertain payoff while ex post bargaining between a seller and a buyer leads to underinvestment by the seller in a standard model where timing of the seller s investment is exogenous we show that this need not be the case when the seller s timing of investment is endogenous however bargaining with a buyer leads to excessive waiting more severe holdup and higher uncertainty will lead to vertical integration of activities to avoid timing inefficiencies

option valuation of claims on real assets the case of offshore petroleum leases this paper extends financial option theory by developing a methodology for the valuation of claims on a real asset an offshore petroleum lease several theoretical and practical problems not present in applying option pricing theory to financial assets are addressed most importantly we show the necessity of combining option pricing techniques with a model of equilibrium in the market for the underlying asset petroleum reserves the advantages of this approach over conventional discounted cash flow techniques are emphasized the methodological development provides important insights for both company behavior and government policy promising empirical results are reported

technical efficiency within the us postal service and the postal reorganization act of 1970 1988 technical efficiency within the us postal service and the postal reorganization act of 1970 applied economics vol 20 no 9 pp 1185 1197

the spillover effects of biofuel policy on participation in the conservation reserve program abstract this paper studies the spillover effects of rising biofuel production on participation in the conservation reserve program landowner participation decisions are modeled using a real options framework we develop a land use decision model that captures biofuel driven structural changes in market demand and derive threshold conditions that trigger participation in the program we then quantify the impacts of biofuel production on participation at both the national and state levels using monte carlo simulations the model is also used to analyze how changes in the persistence of the biofuel production boom and in the volatility of farming returns affect conservation participation decisions policy implications of the results are discussed

an empirical examination of the timing of land conversions in the presence of farmland preservation programs using a panel of parcel level data we estimate a hazard model and find strong evidence that the mere existence of an option to preserve farmland delays decisions to convert farmland to developed uses by about six years a reduction in median conversion time of 12 to 43 depending on parcel size where such delays allow local governments to improve infrastructure or implement stricter growth control measures benefits of a preservation option may be even more long term also increases in the variance of returns to development tended to slow conversion for parcels with all but the highest lot capacities copyright 2008 oxford university press

the dynamic effects of land title systems abstract the question of title concerns which specific individual enjoys the property rights to a particular parcel of land when there are competing claims this paper examines how the title system affects urban development in a market economy it considers two alternative title systems recording and registration both hasten the development pace relative to the social planner benchmark but the registration system is generally closer than the recording system to the benchmark the effects of the two systems on the capital land ratio depend on whether the demanded capital land density is rising or falling over time

passive firm learning and employment projection error this paper analyzes establishment error in estimating employment targets in business startups and expansions passive firm learning models provide a testable hypothesis that other things being equal old establishments more accurately predict future employment targets than young businesses empirical evidence from 442 ohio establishments implies that an increase of ten years in establishment age is associated with a decrease in employment projection error rate of between 11 and 13 percentage points

estimating technology in the postal sector a bayesian approach abstractthe aim of this article is to study the technology of the sector represented by the spanish national post office and telegraph service sociedad estatal correos y telegrafos s a trading as correos and denominated as such hereafter concretely we analyse economic efficiency technical and allocative and scale economies of the production units cost centres of correos to do this we employ a methodology based on an input distance function which is the dual of the cost function moreover and applying duality theory we develop an economic model to assess the effect of postal infrastructures on the operators costs in order to carry out the empirical model bayesian econometrics is applied to estimate the parameters in the input distance function and the technical and allocative efficiency terms

the stochastic city abstract this paper analyzes a simple model of an urban area with growth and uncertainty household income rents and prices for land follow stochastic processes even though investors are risk neutral uncertainty affects both land rents and land prices in equilibrium because the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use is irreversible growth on the other hand affects urban and agricultural land prices but not the level of rents we show that uncertainty i delays the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use ii imparts an option value to agricultural land iii causes land at the boundary to sell for more than its opportunity cost in other uses and iv reduces equilibrium city size

growth controls real options and land development abstract many urban growth controls attempt to check sprawl by restricting allowable new housing densities however land may be undeveloped to preserve its real option value real options in land markets arise from uncertainty as to the optimum use of a site by limiting allowable development choices growth controls can narrow real options and potentially accelerate investment this paper examines the effect of price volatility a generator of option value on the timing of development after the imposition of an urban growth boundary ugb around seattle while the net effect of the ugb is to lower the likelihood of new housing outside the boundary by between 28 and 39 price volatility is no longer a deterrent to development

unions wages and skills studies uniformly conclude that union wage effects are largest for workers with low measured skills longitudinal analysis using 1989 90 1994 95 cps matched panels produces union premium estimates equivalent across skill groups following appropriate sample restrictions and control for worker specific skills nlsy evidence on aptitude scores confirms that union workers with high measured skills have relatively low unmeasured skills differential selection by skill class and skill homogeneity in union workplaces result from employer and employee sorting in response to wage standardization union organizing where skills are homogeneous and unionized employers reluctance to hire the most as well as least able workers

a dynamic model of the firm with uncertain earnings and adjustment costs abstract in this paper a stochastic dynamic model of the firm developed by bensoussan and lesourne is extended to allow for adjustment costs the optimal solution is derived for different scenarios dependent on the shapes of the expected earnings function and the adjustment cost function and on the different parameters of the model it turns out that besides pure investment dividend and saving policies mixed policies can also be optimal for the firm the latter do not occur in the solution of the bensoussan and lesourne model and therefore the solutions derived in this paper come closer to reality

adjustment costs uncertainty and the theory of investment the case of non renewable natural resources abstract this paper examines the effects of mineral price and extraction cost uncertainty on the investment program of a competitive resource extracting industry that faces convex costs of adjustment the results show that depletion of mineral reserves will slow down if the marginal adjustment cost function is concave or linear whereas the effect will be ambiguous if the function is convex

infrastructure financing and urban development abstract historically additions to public infrastructure necessitated by urban growth have been financed under a cost sharing approach in the last several decades however financing of growth has increasingly relied on land use exactions where new residents pay for the cost of incremental infrastructure despite the emergence of a formal growth control literature there has been virtually no formal analysis of the connection between infrastructure financing and urban development to provide such an analysis this paper investigates three different schemes for financing incremental infrastructure within an urban growth model the analysis compares an impact fee scheme to two types of cost sharing schemes deriving the effects on urban growth and land values of switching to the impact fee scheme the efficient financing scheme is also identified

asset value enhancement of singapore s public housing main upgrading programme mup policy a real option analysis approach the main upgrading programme mup is a major policy implemented by the singapore housing development board hdb since the 1990s this heavily subsidised policy is highly targeted in order to enhance the social and economic value of public housing in singapore it benefits hdb households residing in the older hdb housing estates in terms of both an enhanced asset value of the household s flat and a quality living environment an hdb flat owner whose precinct is selected for upgrading under the mup policy is envisaged to be holding a call option to upgrade his flat as this option to upgrade is valuable and it has an opportunity to command a higher price in the hdb resale market this paper estimates the option premiums for upgrading by utilising the intuitive and explicit numerical method solution of the binomial real option pricing model and the samuelson mckean closed form solution the embedded real option premiums under the mup policy are estimated at s 10 300 and s 2 000 for the popular three room h

uncertainty and stepwise investment we analyze the optimal investment strategy of a firm that can complete a project either in one stage at a single freely chosen time point or in incremental steps at distinct time points the presence of economies of scale gives rise to the following trade off lumpy investment has a lower total cost but stepwise investment gives more flexibility by letting the firm choose the timing individually for each stage our main question is how uncertainty in market development affects this trade off the answer is unambiguous and in contrast with a conventional real options intuition higher uncertainty makes the single stage investment more attractive relative to the more flexible stepwise investment strategy

regulation competition and liberalization in many countries throughout the world regulators are struggling to determine whether and how to introduce competition into regulated industries this essay examines the complexities involved in the liberalization process while stressing the importance of case specific analyses this essay distinguishes liberalization policies that generally are procompetitive from corresponding anticompetitive liberalization policies

union nonunion differentials membership or coverage economists have long suggested that labor unions suffer a free rider problem the argument is that since union set wages are available to all workers covered by unions irrespective of their union status and union membership entails costs workers will

investing in electricity production under a reliability options scheme abstract reliability options ros are used to enhance the security of supply in electricity systems when a power producer writes a ro s he agrees to set a cap on the price of electricity that s he cashes in return the system operator i e the party that is buying the option pays to the option issuer a fixed premium in this paper we analyze how ros affect the timing and value of investments in the energy sector and we show under what conditions they can be used as investment stimuli we prove that contrarily to what is expected ros can potentially harm the security of supply by delaying the adoption of new capacity and by reducing the value of investing in it to avoid such a result a careful setting of the relevant parameters is needed

implications of a land value tax with error in assessed values land value taxation has numerous potential advantages compared to conventional property taxes on capital and land the models that establish these advantages however are grounded in the unlikely assumption that land values are assessed without error this paper demonstrates that levying taxes based on land values assessed with error is equivalent to the application of one tax rate to the true value of land and a different effective tax rate to capital the model demonstrates that a land value tax will have at most the distortion effects of a property tax even with the worst possible land value assessment errors

switching to perennial energy crops under uncertainty and costly reversibility we study a farmer s decision to convert traditional cropland into land for growing dedicated energy crops taking into account sunk conversion costs and uncertainties in crop returns the optimal decision rules differ significantly from the expected net present value rule which ignores uncertainties and from real options models that allow only one way conversion into energy crops these models also predict drastically different patterns of land conversions into and out of energy crops over time using corn soybean rotation and switchgrass as examples we show that the model predictions are sensitive to assumptions about stochastic processes of the returns government policies might have unintended consequences subsidizing conversion costs into switchgrass may not much affect proportions of land in switchgrass in the long run

the decline of unionization in the united states what can be learned from recent experience the dramatic decline in unionization over the last decade is investigated in the context of a supply demand model of union status determination using data from surveys of workers conducted in 1977 and 1984 along with data from the national labor relations board on representation elections it is concluded that the decline in unionization since 1977 is accounted for largely by 1 an increase in employer resistance to unionization probably due to increased product market competitiveness and 2 a decrease in demand for union representation by nonunion workers due to an increase in the satisfaction of nonunion workers with their jobs and a decline in nonunion workers beliefs that unions are able to improve wages and working conditions

behaviour of non renewable natural resource firms under uncertainty optimizing or ad hoc abstract this paper tests the assumption of optimizing behaviour by natural resource firms in the framework of an intertemporal model of non renewable resource development and production using data from the petroleum industry it is argued that the presence of geological and price uncertainty presents a situation in which standard objections to non optimizing behaviour may not hold as an alternative it is proposed that firms use an ad hoc rule of thumb to update decisions as the values of variables change econometric results support ad hoc behaviour as opposed to intertemporal profit maximization

use value assessment tax expenditures in urban areas abstract use value assessment is the practice of valuing land for property tax purposes in its current use rather than at its full market value this practice is widespread in the u s and is intended to reduce the property tax burden on agricultural land near urban areas and slow the pace of land development we examine the foregone property tax revenue or tax expenditure due to use value assessment data sets for two case studies are employed in empirical estimation of spatial models of the difference between market value and use value providing the analytic basis for estimates of tax expenditures

estimation of a doubly heteroscedastic stochastic frontier cost function this article extends the results obtained by caudill ford and cropper in estimating and testing stochastic frontier cost functions in the presence of heteroscedastic inefficiency using cross section data it suggests the estimation of the model under the assumption of heteroscedasticity in both random terms this avoids any possible misspecification bias and the use of incorrect tests the same data as used by caudill et al supports the new specification moreover we find that firm specific inefficiency measures are extremely sensitive to the proposed correction for heteroscedasticity

technical efficiency of european railways a distance function approach this study has two principal objectives the first objective is to measure and compare the performance of european railways the second objective is to illustrate the usefulness of econometric distance functions in the analysis of production in multioutput industries where behavioural assumptions such as cost minimization or profit maximization are unlikely to be applicable using annual data on 17 railways companies during 1988 1993 multioutput distance functions are estimated using corrected ordinary least squares cols the resulting technical efficiency estimates range from 0 980 for the netherlands to 0 784 for italy with a mean of 0 863 the distance function results are also compared with those obtained from single output production functions where aggregate output measures are formed using either total revenue or a tornqvist index the results obtained indicate substantial differences in parameter estimates and technical efficiency rankings casting significant doubt upon the reliability of

house prices development costs and the value of waiting abstract this paper demonstrates that new house prices can exceed direct development costs by considerable margins in competitive housing markets with finite price elasticities of demand and no restrictive land use regulation the premium reflects the value of the option to delay developing the marginal piece of undeveloped land competition amongst landowners reduces the option value relative to the standard open city framework but as long as undeveloped land is heterogeneous does not reduce it to zero calibrating a special case of the model to us data suggests that the premium is economically significant in addition to proving that prices can exceed costs without regulation this paper shows that the relationship between volatility and the rate of investment is more complicated than previously thought

does it matter who responded to the survey trends in the u s gender earnings gap revisited studies have shown a decreasing trend in the u s gender earnings gap since the 1980s the authors work with a framework established by blau and kahn 1997 jole 2006 ilrr who used the michigan panel of income dynamics psid to decompose that gap into observable and unobservable components in order to determine which contributing factors are gender specific and which can be attributed to the wage structure they extend the blau and kahn framework to consider measurement error due to the use of proxy representative respondents of the survey s earnings variable first they find a trend toward more females in the gender composition of the household respondents and second they estimate the impact of that change on blau and kahn s decomposition they determine that some of the changes in the gender earnings gap could actually be attributed to whether the surverys were self or proxy responded that is the actual reduction in the gender pay gap may be smaller than what the estimates without taking into account the measurement error might indicate the authors suggest the need for a careful validation study to ascertain the extent of the spurious measurement error effects

wage effects of unionization and occupational licensing coverage in the united states recent estimates in standard models of wage determination for both unionization and occupational licensing have shown wage effects that are similar across the two institutions these cross sectional estimates use specialized data sets with small sample sizes for the period 2006 to 2008 the authors analysis examines the impact of unions and licensing coverage on wage determination using new data collected on licensing statutes that are then linked to longitudinal data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy79 from 1979 to 2010 they develop several approaches using both cross sectional and longitudinal analyses to measure the impact of these two labor market institutions on wage determination the estimates of the economic returns to union coverage are greater than those for licensing statutes

adjustment costs and investment in a stochastic endogenous growth model abstract this paper introduces costly investment into a stochastic equilibrium macro model investment is determined by an endogenously determined tobin q that depends upon the structural parameters of the economy the model permits a sequence of economies allowing for an increasing role of government to be studied the effects of both a structural change taking the form of a higher variance of productivity shocks and fiscal policy on the equilibrium is analyzed paying particular attention to the impact on the growth rate and its variability the role of the tobin q in determining the response of the mean growth rate and its variance is emphasized

can the land tax help curb urban sprawl evidence from growth patterns in pennsylvania abstract urban sprawl has become a policy concern of national prominence one tool that has been suggested for combating sprawl is the land or split rate tax in theory such taxes can raise the ratio of housing capital to land this in turn can raise the density of housing units where it is applied if the average size of housing units does not increase enough to offset an effect on the number of housing units this research explores these issues looking at a panel of land uses and demographics in pennsylvania we confirm the theoretical prediction that the split rate tax raises the capital land ratio we also find that the primary effect is in more housing units rather than bigger units suggesting the split rate tax is potentially a powerful anti sprawl tool we find adoption of the split rate tax increases the number of housing units and that these units follow a more dense pattern of development

time to build option value and investment decisions abstract investment decisions and outlays are often made sequentially for example the rate at which construction proceeds is usually flexible and can be adjusted with the arrival of new information traditional discounted cash flow methods which treat the pattern of investment as fixed ignore this flexibility and understate the value of the project this paper uses contingent claims analysis to derive optimal decision rules and to value such investments we determine the effects of time to build opportunity cost and uncertainty on the investment decision for reasonable parameter values we show how a simple npv rule can lead to gross errors

housing markets and vacant land the paper examines land use in an urban zone we propose a partial equilibrium model of housing markets with both vacant and built up land the existing literature precluding physical decay of housing stocks assumes building decisions to be irreversible and treats any given stock of vacant land as an exhaustible resource in contrast we argue that vacant land is built upon in finite time rather than asymptotically and reduces to a temporary phenomenon only when housing stocks depreciate the continued replacement of existing structures allows to adjust the average structural intensity even if all land is built upon

optimal land development decisions abstract this research models the development decision when net rents are growing geometrically and uncertainly and capital intensity is variable we derive simple rules for the optimal timing of land development projects based on the commonly used internal rate of return and net present value criteria we show that even under certainty projects are optimally delayed beyond the point where net present value becomes nonnegative if expected cash flows are growing the ability to vary capital intensity also raises the specter of perverse responses where increases in interest rates accelerate investment decisions the positive responses occur when growth rates are high or uncertainty is high

response error and the union wage differential broad variation in estimates of the union wage gap has perplexed labor economists one specification error that is consistent with the observed variation is measurement error in reported union status this article applies results of bollinger 1996 to estimate a range for the union wage gap both a cross sectional model and a fixed effects model are estimated in order for the true coefficient in the fixed effects model to be bounded below the true coefficient in the cross sectional estimates measurement error would have to be less than 0 8 the difference between the fixed effects estimates and the cross sectional estimates is primarily due to measurement error rather than to unobserved heterogeneity an examination of differences in returns to union membership by industry occupation and educational level shows that these differences are largely robust to measurement error many of these differences would be found even if error rates were as high as 10 or more an array of empirical estimates for the union wage differential has resulted from the variety of approaches to estimation lewis 1986 reviews the vast literature that attempts to estimate the union wage effect two extremes are represented by mincer 1983 who estimates the wage differential to be 0 01 while farber 1990 reports an estimate of 0 26 clearly specification error is the root cause of these differences the literature has focused upon unobserved heterogeneity in worker status as the main specification error frequently estimation approaches based on within estimators applied to fixed effects models using panel data are used to account for the possibility of unobserved heterogeneity as would be predicted by unobserved heterogeneity lewis 1986 p 94 reports that the panel wage gap estimates surveyed in the chapter on the average are roughly half as large as the corresponding cross section estimates this is often taken as evidence for bias in the cross section estimates due to the presence of fixed effects however these results are also consistent with measurement error in the report of the union status indeed chapter 5 in lewis 1986 focuses upon this possibility the difference might be the result of union status measurement error p 94 this article applies results of bollinger 1996 to compare the effect of measurement error on cross sectional estimates and panel estimates of the union wage differential bollinger 1996 establishes bounds for the slope coefficients of a linear regression when a binary regressor is thought to have measurement error the results here do not identify a point estimate of the union wage differential they relax many of the assumptions that are required to obtain the point estimates these bounds serve the purpose of sensitivity analysis as called for by leamer 1985