relative wealth concerns and entrepreneurship we develop a model of entrepreneurship in which market frictions limit the possibilities for diversifying entrepreneurial risk a concern for relative standing arises even though individuals consume only standard commodities in contrast to complete markets an increase in sector specific aggregate risk increases entrepreneurship due to relative wealth concerns a change in the profile of the economy to include more risk averse people results in an even greater increase in entrepreneurship thus relative wealth concerns mitigate the reduction in entrepreneurship arising from the non diversifiability of entrepreneurial risk we examine the effects of uncertainty about economic policies such as market based reforms on entrepreneurship

asymmetric promotion effects and brand positioning several studies have shown that promotions of national brands yield more effect than those of store brands e g allenby and rossi 1991 blattberg and wisniewski 1989 however the evolution of price quality data available from consumer reports over the last 15 years seems to reveal a reduction of the quality gap between store brands and national brands while price differences remain substantial simultaneously the share of private label brands has increased progressive grocer 1994 in this context we study whether we can maintain a view of the world where national brands may easily attract consumers from store brands through promotions whereas store brands are relatively ineffective in attracting consumers from national brands by such means we analyze consumer reactions to price discounts in a parsimonious preference model featuring loss aversion and reference dependence along dimensions of price and quality hardie johnson and fader 1993 tversky and kahneman 1991 the key result of our analysis is that given any two brands there is an asymmetric promotion effect in favor of the higher quality higher price brands if and only if the quality gap between the brands is sufficiently large in comparison with the price gap thus the direction of promotion asymmetry is not unconditional it depends uniquely on the value of the ratio of quality and price differences compared to a category specific criterion which we call if the ratio of quality and price differences is larger than this criterion the usual asymmetry prevails if such is not the case the lower quality lower price brands promote more effectively more precisely our model predicts that cross promotion effects depend on two components of brand positioning in the price quality quadrant first we define a variable termed positioning advantage that indicates whether relative to the standards achieved by another brand a given brand is underpriced positive advantage or overpriced negative advantage promotion effectiveness is increasing in this variable second cross promotion effects between two brands depend on their distance in the price quality quadrant this variable impacts promotion effectiveness negatively and symmetrically for any pair of brands positioning advantage and brand distance are orthogonal components of brand positioning irrespective of the degree of correlation between available price and quality levels in the market empirically we investigate the role of brand positioning in explaining cross promotion effects using panel data from the chilled orange juice and peanut butter categories we compute the independent positioning variables positioning advantage and brand distance from readily available data on price and quality positioning after obtaining our estimates of we next measure promotion effectiveness by estimating choice share changes in response to a price discount using a choice model that does not contain any information about quality price ratios finally we test the relation between the two positioning variables and the promotion effectiveness measures the data reveal that in the orange juice category lower quality lower price brands generally promote more effectively than higher quality higher price brands in the peanut butter data the opposite asymmetry holds in both cases inter brand promotion patterns are well explained by the positioning variables an attractive feature of our model is that in addition to the direction of promotion asymmetries it also explains the extent of those asymmetries a further interesting aspect of this approach is that we go beyond a categorization of brands into price tiers for instance lower tier brands in our data may promote more effectively than one national brand but less effectively than another consistent with our theoretical predictions the data presented here seem to confirm that such cases occur because the lower tier brand offers a favorable trade off of price and quality differences compared with one national brand and a less favorable trade off compared with the other the content of this paper is potentially relevant for brand managers or retailers concerned with predicting the impact of their promotions the paper is of particular interest to marketing scientists who study the performance of store brands versus national brands and may also appeal to those who wish to explore the marketing implications of behavioral decision theory finally our investigation does not reject blattberg and wisniewski s 1989 finding shared by allenby and rossi 1991 and hardie johnson and fader 1993 that national brands have a principle advantage in promotion effectiveness rather it formalizes when this principle advantage is overruled by positioning disadvantages of such brands

labour market assimilation of foreign workers in italy this is the first paper to analyse the labour market assimilation of foreign i e non citizen workers in italy it considers the daily wages and the days of employment of male workers in whip a matched employer employee panel dataset from 1990 to 2003 the traditional human capital approach is augmented by a control for the probability of staying abroad modelled by aggregate variables of the origin country the human capital variables considered are age and experience both in and out of employment what emerges from the empirical analysis is discouraging foreigners who are able to get higher wages are the least likely to stay but assimilation profiles do not change when return migration is taken into account foreigners employed in the private sector earn the same wages as natives upon entry into employment but the two wage profiles diverge with on the job experience neither do foreigners assimilate from an employment perspective a differential in employment between foreign and native workers is found even upon entry which increases over time in the construction sector the wage and employment differential is even larger while manufacturing and services follow the aggregate trend africans immigrants have the fewest career prospects while eastern european and asian workers are less far behind the general pattern for foreign workers appears to be a fragmented career either restricted to seasonal or temporary jobs or alternating between legal and illegal employment

asset prices and institutional investors empirical evidence indicates that trades by institutional investors have sizable effects on asset prices generating phenomena such as index effects asset class effects and others it is difficult to explain such phenomena within standard representative agent asset pricing models in this paper we consider an economy populated by institutional investors alongside standard retail investors institutions care about their performance relative to a certain index our framework is tractable admitting exact closed form expressions and produces the following analytical results we find that institutions optimally tilt their portfolios towards stocks that comprise their benchmark index the resulting price pressure boosts index stocks while leaving nonindex stocks unaffected by demanding a higher fraction of risky stocks than retail investors institutions amplify the index stock volatilities and aggregate stock market volatility and give rise to countercyclical sharpe ratios trades by institutions induce excess correlations among stocks that belong to their benchmark index generating an asset class effect institutions finance their additional purchases of index stocks by taking on leverage a policy prescription that calls for a reduction in leverage while reducing the riskiness of institutional portfolios would also reduce the ability of institutions to tilt their portfolios towards index stocks depressing the index level

tastes and technology in a two country model of the business cycle explaining international trade on international financial markets allows people to insure country specific risk and smooth consumption intertemporally equilibrium models of business cycles with trade on global financial markets typically yield international consumption correlations near one and excessive volatility of investment the authors incorporate nontraded goods in the model and find that the implications for aggregate consumption investment and the trade balance are consistent with business cycle properties of industrialized countries however the model driven by technology shocks alone yields counterfactual implications for comovements between consumption and prices at the sectoral level taste shocks produce price quantity relationships more consistent with the data copyright 1995 by american economic association

growth with endogenous migration hump and the multiple dynamically interacting effects of aid in poor developing countries we show empirically that aid given to poor developing countries enhances growth and reduces emigration once several dynamically interacting effects of aid are taken into account in a system of equations we estimate equations for net immigration flows as a share of the labour force and gdp per capita growth and also for all their regressors including remittances and official development aid we use dynamic panel data methods for a sample of poor countries with gdp per capita below 1200 2000 for which aid is about 9 5 of gdp the partial effects in these regressions are as follows remittances enhance net immigration savings public expenditure on education and growth but reduce tax revenues all as a share of gdp net immigration enhances labour force growth and the savings ratio official development aid decreases the savings ratio and the per capita gdp growth rate but it increases investment public expenditure on education and literacy and also labour force growth then we integrate all equations to a dynamic system and run a simulation the result is an endogenous migration hump with several peaks in a counterfactual simulation we double aid with the result that for more than a hundred years migration is reduced and the gdp per capita is enhanced because the positive effects of aid on investment and education dominate the negative direct effects of aid on growth and the unfavourable effects on savings tax revenues and labour force growth

a model of how discounting high priced brands affects the sales of low priced brands drawing on a consumer preference distribution structure postulated in analytical modeling research the author develops a separate effects model that separates the total discount effect of a compet

international migration and trade agreements the new role of ptas this paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between preferential trade agreements ptas and bilateral migration flows building on the empirical literature on the determinants of migration flows i estimate a modified gravity model to assess the role of ptas and their content on bilateral migration flows using a sample of 29 oecd destination countries over the period 1998 2008 i show a strong positive effect of ptas on bilateral migration flows i find that the content of ptas also matters when visa and asylum and labour market related provisions are included in ptas this further stimulates bilateral migration flows different estimation strategies including instrumental variables are employed to address the potential endogeneity bias problems related to ptas and their content

trying to explain home bias in equities and consumption investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest a phenomenon called equity home bias in the absence of this bias investors would optimally diversify domestic output risk using foreign equities therefore consumption growth rates would tend to co move across countries even when output growth rates do not empirically however consumption growth rates tend to have a lower correlation across countries than do output growth rates a phenomenon i call consumption home bias in this paper i discuss these two biases and their potential relationship as suggested by the literature

who is against immigration a cross country investigation of individual attitudes toward immigrants abstract this paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants within and across countries the two survey data sets used covering a wide range of developed and developing countries make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country level attributes in particular theory predicts that the correlation between pro immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes but they don t alter significantly the labor market results

relative wealth concerns and financial bubbles we present a rational general equilibrium model that highlights the fact that relative wealth concerns can play a role in explaining financial bubbles we consider a finite horizon overlapping generations model in which agents care only about their consumption though the horizon is finite competition over future investment opportunities makes agents utilities dependent on the wealth of their cohort and induces relative wealth concerns agents herd into risky securities and drive down their expected return even though the bubble is likely to burst and lead to a substantial loss agents relative wealth concerns make them afraid to trade against the crowd

migration and foreign aid when it comes to linkages between migration and the global allocation of foreign development assistance the size of the immigrant population from a recipient country residing in a donor country is an important determinant of dyadic aid commitments two complementary hypotheses probe this relationship first donors use foreign aid to achieve their broader immigration goals targeting migrant sending areas to increase development and decrease the demand for entry into the donor country second migrants already residing in the donor country mobilize to lobby for additional aid for their homeland empirical tests on a large sample of country pairs made up of twenty two donors and more than 150 recipients over the period 1993 to 2008 show robust support for these hypotheses

home bias in equity portfolios inflation hedging and international capital market equilibrium we test whether the home bias in equity portfolios is caused by investors trying to hedge inflation risk the empirical evidence is consistent with this motive only if investors have very high levels of risk tolerance and equity returns are negatively correlated with domestic inflation we then develop a model of international portfolio choice and equity market equilibrium that integrates inflation risk and deadweight costs using this model we estimate the levels of costs required to generate the observed home bias in portfolios consistent with different levels of risk aversion for a level of risk aversion consistent with standard estimates of the domestic equity market risk premium these costs are about a few percent per annum greater than observable costs such as withholding taxes thus the home bias cannot be explained by either inflation hedging or direct observable costs of international investment unless investors have very low levels of risk aversion article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

asymmetric and neighborhood cross price effects some empirical generalizations this paper provides some empirical generalizations regarding how the relative prices of competing brands affect the cross price effects among them particular focus is on the asymmetric price effect and the neighborhood price effect the asymmetric price effect states that a price promotion by a higher priced brand affects the market share of a lower priced brand more so than the reverse the neighborhood price effect states that brands that are closer to each other in price have larger cross price effects than brands that are priced farther apart the main objective of this paper is to test if these two effects are generalizable across product categories and to assess which of these two effects is stronger while the neighborhood price effect has not been rigorously tested in past research the asymmetric price effect has been validated by several researchers however these tests of asymmetric price effect have predominantly used elasticity as the measure of cross price effect the cross price elasticity measures the percentage change in market share or sales of a brand for 1 change in price of a competing brand we show that asymmetries in cross price elasticities tend to favor the higher priced brand simply because of scaling effects due to considering percentage changes furthermore several researchers have used logit models to infer asymmetric patterns we also show that inferring asymmetries from conventional logit models is incorrect to account for potential scaling effects we consider the absolute cross price effect defined as the change in market share percentage points of a target brand when a competing brand s price changes by one percent of the product category price the advantage of this measure is that it is dimensionless hence comparable across categories and it avoids scaling effects we show that in the logit model with arbitrary heterogeneity in brand preferences and price sensitivities the absolute cross price effect is symmetric we develop an econometric model for simultaneously estimating the asymmetric and neighborhood price effects and assess their relative strengths we also estimate two alternate models that address the following questions i if i were managing the ith highest priced brand which brand do i impact the most by discounting and which brand hurts me the most through price discounts ii who hurts whom in national brand vs store brand competition based on a meta analysis of 1 060 cross price effects on 280 brands from 19 different grocery product categories we provide the following empirical generalizations 1 the asymmetric price effect holds with cross price elasticities but tends to disappear with absolute cross price effects 2 the neighborhood price effect holds with both cross price elasticities and absolute cross price effects and is significantly stronger than the asymmetric price effect on both measures of cross price effects 3 a brand is affected the most by discounts of its immediately higher priced brand followed closely by discounts of its immediately lower priced brand 4 national brands impact store brands more so than the reverse when the cross effect is measured in elasticities but the asymmetric effect does not hold with absolute effects store brands hurt and are in turn hurt the most by the lower priced national brands that are adjacent in price to the store brands 5 cross price effects are greater when there are fewer competing brands in the product category and among brands in nonfood household products than among brands in food products the implications of these findings are discussed

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

could ralph nader s entrance and exit have helped al gore the impact of decoy dynamics on consumer choice abstract people are frequently faced with making a new choice decision after a preferred option becomes unavailable prior research on the attraction effect has demonstrated how the introduction of an option into a choice set increases the share of one of the original options the authors examine the related but previously unaddressed issue of whether the unexpected exit of an option from a choice set returns the choice shares of the original options to the status quo in a series of experiments they observe that when an option turns out to be unselectable following a choice problem in which it was selectable the choice shares of the remaining options are predictably different from those of a choice problem in which the option was unselectable from the start they also observe that this attraction effect due to the disappearance of a decoy is likely a consequence of changes in the importance of decision criteria they conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications of the research

decision making under uncertainty capturing dynamic brand choice processes in turbulent consumer goods markets we construct two models of the behavior of consumers in an environment where there is uncertainty about brand attributes in our models both usage experience and advertising exposure give consumers noisy signals about brand attributes consumers use these signals to update their expectations of brand attributes in a bayesian manner the two models are 1 a dynamic model with immediate utility maximization and 2 a dynamic forward looking model in which consumers maximize the expected present value of utility over a planning horizon given this theoretical framework we derive from the bayesian learning framework how brand choice probabilities depend on past usage experience and advertising exposures we then form likelihood functions for the models and estimate them on nielsen scanner data for detergent we find that the functional forms for experience and advertising effects that we derive from the bayesian learning framework fit the data very well relative to flexible ad hoc functional forms such as exponential smoothing and also perform better at out of sample prediction another finding is that in the context of consumer learning of product attributes although the forward looking model fits the data statistically better at conventional significance levels both models produce similar parameter estimates and policy implications our estimates indicate that consumers are risk averse with respect to variation in brand attributes which discourages them from buying unfamiliar brands using the estimated behavioral models we perform various scenario evaluations to find how changes in marketing strategy affect brand choice both in the short and long run a key finding obtained from the policy experiments is that advertising intensity has only weak short run effects but a strong cumulative effect in the long run the substantive content of the paper is potentially of interest to academics in marketing economics and decision sciences as well as product managers marketing research managers and analysts interested in studying the effectiveness of marketing mix strategies our paper will be of particular interest to those interested in the long run effects of advertising note that our estimation strategy requires us to specify explicit behavioral models of consumer choice behavior derive the implied relationships among choice probabilities past purchases and marketing mix variables and then estimate the behavioral parameters of each model such an estimation strategy is referred to as structural estimation and econometric models that are based explicitly on the consumer s maximization problem and whose parameters are parameters of the consumers utility functions or of their constraints are referred to as structural models a key benefit of the structural approach is its potential usefulness for policy evaluation the parameters of structural models are invariant to policy that is they do not change due to a change in the policy in contrast the parameters of reduced form brand choice models are in general functions of marketing strategy variables e g consumer response to price may depend on pricing policy as a result the predictions of reduced form models for the outcomes of policy experiments may be unreliable because in making the prediction one must assume that the model parameters are unaffected by the policy change since the agents in our models choose among many alternative brands their choice probabilities take the form of higher order integrals we employ monte carlo methods to approximate these integrals and estimate our models using simulated maximum likelihood estimation of the dynamic forward looking model also requires that a dynamic programming problem be solved in order to form the likelihood function for this we use a new approximation method based on simulation and interpolation techniques these estimation techniques may be of interest to researchers and policy makers in many fields where dynamic choice among discrete alternatives is important such as marketing decision sciences labor and health economics and industrial organization

incorporating reference price effects into a theory of consumer choice although there has been a good deal of research on incorporating the effects of reference price formation into empirical models of consumer buying behavior little formal theoretical work had been undertaken to date this paper incorporates reference price effects into the traditional economic theory of consumer choice and examines the effects of reference price formation on the results of the traditional theory its marketing implications and the implications for empirical models which examine the effects of reference price formation on actual consumer behavior several implications of the theoretical model are empirically tested using weekly retail egg sales data from southern california this analysis indicates that reference price formation does have significant effects on consumer behavior furthermore these effects are asymmetric with consumers two and a half times more responsive to egg price increases that are in excess of the reference price than they are to comparable egg price decreases

modeling loss aversion and reference dependence effects on brand choice based upon a recently developed multiattribute generalization of prospect theory s value function tversky and kahneman 1991 we argue that consumer choice is influenced by the position of brands relative to multiattribute reference points and that consumers weigh losses from a reference point more than equivalent sized gains loss aversion we sketch implications of this model for understanding brand choice we develop a multinomial logit formulation of a reference dependent choice model calibrating it using scanner data in addition to providing better fit in both estimation and forecast periods than a standard multinomial logit model the model s coefficients demonstrate significant loss aversion as hypothesized we also discuss the implications of a reference dependent view of consumer choice for modeling brand choice demonstrate that loss aversion can account for asymmetric responses to changes in product characteristics and examine other implications for competitive strategy

on modeling the advertising operations interface under asymmetric competition abstract using a market share attraction structure of advertising competition and following a supermodular game approach this article demonstrates for an asymmetric oligopoly the directional impact of changes in model parameters on the marketing controlled variables of all rivals advertising budgets and the operations controlled variables of all rivals ordered quantities importantly the various changes are examined analytically empirically and numerically in both non dominated and dominated asymmetric oligopolies in this regard the results indicate that firms in a dominated oligopoly one firm of market share larger than or equal to 50 behave differently compared to firms in a non dominated oligopoly each firm of market share less than 50 in response to changes in model parameters furthermore changes in model parameters are investigated in terms of their relative influential impact on a variety of equilibrium measures in this regard the findings indicate that for the analyzed model the marketing parameters exert much more influence on the equilibrium measures than the operations parameters additionally a change in the mode of competition from non cooperation oligopoly to cooperation joint ownership dictates that strong asymmetric firms of favorable marketing and operations parameters continue advertising but at lower levels and weak asymmetric firms of less favorable parameters cease advertising altogether

long run trends in internal migrations in italy a study in panel cointegration with dependent units the objective of this paper is to examine the long run determinants of internal migrations from southern italy in order to accomplish this task the paper develops a bootstrap test for panel cointegration analysis with dependent units monte carlo simulations show that the test based on the continuous path block bootstrap has good power and size properties and is robust to both short and long run dependence across units the empirical analysis points to income in the sending region as a key factor of the decline of migrations with unemployment and income differentials playing only a minor role copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

stock market crashes as social phase transitions abstract stock market crashes are traumatic events that affect the lives of millions of people around the globe and have tremendous economic implications crashes are not only dramatic but often completely unexpected the 1987 crash for example was not induced by any obvious trigger even after the fact it is hard to find the reason for the crash why did the market crash in october rather than in september or december why did it crash at all to this day we lack satisfactory answers this paper shows that spontaneous market crashes can be explained by a social phase transition mechanism similar to statistical mechanics phase transitions investors heterogeneity plays the role of temperature and is key in determining the possibility and magnitude of the crash the analysis suggests that dramatic crashes are a robust and inevitable property of financial markets it also implies that market crashes should be preceded by an increase in price volatility as empirically observed thus market crashes like earthquakes are a fundamental and unavoidable part of our world however we can develop early warning systems that may help minimize the damage

trade aid and migrations some basic policy issues the link between trade policy and international migration is explored using data from the united states and europe we conclude that restrictive trade policies in industrialised countries have most likely added to migration pressures we then turn to the broader question of the effects of income growth in the sending countries on the propensity to migrate we argue that in relatively poor countries an increase in income will be associated with higher migration flows for middle income countries however income growth will lead to lower migrations in the medium run therefore the relationship between development levels as measured by gdp per capita and the propensity to migrate follows an inverse u pattern econometric analysis of aggregate migration flows from southern europe provides considerable support for such conjecture excerpt

social interaction and stock market participation we propose that stock market participation is influenced by social interaction in our model any given social investor finds the market more attractive when more of his peers participate we test this theory using data from the health and retirement study and find that social households those who interact with their neighbors or attend church are substantially more likely to invest in the market than non social households controlling for wealth race education and risk tolerance moreover consistent with a peer effects story the impact of sociability is stronger in states where stock market participation rates are higher

adding asymmetrically dominated alternatives violations of regularity and the similarity hypothesis an asymmetrically dominated alternative is dominated by one item in the set but not by another adding such an alternative to a choice set can increase the probability of choosing the item that dominates it this result points to the inadequacy of many current choice models and suggests product line strategies that might not otherwise be intuitively plausible

welfare effects of financial innovation in incomplete markets economies with several consumption goods abstract we show that in almost every incomplete markets economy with more than one consumption good and with sufficiently many uninsured states of nature at any general equilibrium of this economy it is possible to arbitrarily perturb the equilibrium utilities merely by introducing the appropriate asset making for example all agents worse off this result demonstrates that the examples given by hart on the optimality of equilibrium when the market structure is incomplete j econ theory11 1975 418 443 and others are actually general phenomena and is in sharp contrast to the intuition that innovation since it expands financial opportunities should benefit all agents journal of economic literature classification numbers d52 d60 g10

multiplicity in general financial equilibrium with portfolio constraints abstract this paper explores the role of portfolio constraints in generating multiplicity of equilibrium we present a simple financial market economy with two goods and two households households who face constraints on their ability to take unbounded positions in risky stocks absent such constraints equilibrium allocation is unique and is pareto efficient with one portfolio constraint in place the efficient equilibrium is still possible however additional inefficient equilibria in which the constraint is binding may emerge we show further that with portfolio constraints cum incomplete markets there may be a continuum of equilibria adding incomplete markets may lead to real indeterminacy

new products the antidote to private label growth abstract as private labels pls continue to grow in power and market share product innovation has become one of the strongest weapons in the national brand nb manufacturer s arsenal in this article the author assesses when and to what extent new products change nbs market position to address this question more than 300 nb and pl introductions are analyzed using a multibreak model that quantifies the impact of product introductions on own share rival nb and pl share and category sales drawing on empirical generalizations the author finds that products introduced by leading nbs standard pls and premium pls are more likely to increase category sales than products introduced by follower nbs or economy pls new products introduced by leader and follower nbs more often boost own share thus new products help prevent the decline of nb shares with respect to competitive impact new products affect rival shares with the exception of those launched by economy pls still nbs tend to hurt rival nbs

implications of keeping up with the joneses behavior for the equilibrium cross section of stock returns international evidence this paper tests the cross sectional implications of keeping up with the joneses kuj preferences in an international setting when agents have kuj preferences in the presence of undiversifiable nonfinancial wealth both world and domestic risk the idiosyncratic component of domestic wealth are priced and the equilibrium price of risk of the domestic factor is negative we use labor income as a proxy for domestic wealth and find empirical support for these predictions in terms of explaining the cross section of stock returns and the size of the pricing errors the model performs better than alternative international asset pricing models

what can explain the apparent lack of international consumption risk sharing recent research in international business cycles finds that international consumption comovements do not match the risk sharing predictions of standard complete markets models in this paper i ask whether two different types of explanations can help explain this result 1 nonseparabilities between tradables and nontradable leisure or goods and 2 the effects of capital market restrictions on consumption risk sharing i find that risk sharing cannot be resolved by either explanation alone however when i allow for both nonseparabilities and certain market restrictions risk sharing among unrestricted countries cannot be rejected this evidence suggests that a combination of these two effects may be necessary to explain consumption risk sharing across countries

migration remittances and the brain drain a symposium in memory of riccardo faini an introduction it seems inevitable that international migration will be one of the major challenges of the twenty first century lower transaction and communication costs have already greatly eased the formation of migrant networks and reduced migration costs for long a deterrent to migration from developing countries to developed countries demographics also keep migratory policies near the top of policy agendas in developed countries where dependency ratios continue to rise migratory pressures will also increase as falling dependency ratios in developing countries contribute to the swelling of their labor forces designing immigration policies in industrial countries will be a challenge especially in the european union where negative attitudes toward immigrants from poor non european union eu countries persist

why are people more pro trade than pro migration i analyze individual attitudes towards trade and immigration in comparative terms i find that individuals are on average more pro trade than pro immigration across several countries i identify a key source of this difference the cleavage in trade preferences absent in immigration attitudes between individuals working in traded as opposed to non traded sectors

social norms savings behavior and growth we argue that many goods and decisions are not allocated or made through markets we interpret an agent s status as a ranking device that determines how well he or she fares in the nonmarket sector the existence of a nonmarket sector can endogenously generate a concern for relative position in for example the income distribution so that higher income implies higher status moreover it can naturally yield multiple equilibria it is thus possible to explain differences in growth rates across countries without recourse to differences in underlying preferences technologies or endowments different social organizations lead to different reduced form preferences which lead to different growth rates

participation and investment decisions in a retirement plan the influence of colleagues choices abstract this paper investigates whether peer effects play an important role in retirement savings decisions we use individual data from employees of a large university to study whether individual decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account plan sponsored by the university and the choice of the mutual fund vendor for people who choose to enroll are affected by the decisions of other employees in the same department to overcome the identification problems we divide the departments into sub groups along gender status age and tenure lines and we instrument the average participation of each peer group by the salary or tenure structure in this group our results suggest that peer effects may be an important determinant of savings decisions

signaling status the impact of relative income on household consumption and financial decisions this paper investigates the importance of status in household consumption and credit decisions using data from the survey of consumer finances linked to tract level data in the american community s

diversification as a public good community effects in portfolio choice within a rational general equilibrium model in which agents care only about personal consumption we consider a setting in which due to borrowing constraints individuals endowed with local resources underparticipate in financial markets as a result investors compete for local resources through their portfolio choices even with complete financial markets and no aggregate risk agents may herd into risky portfolios this yields a pareto dominated outcome as agents introduce community risk unrelated to fundamentals moreover if some agents are behaviorally biased or cannot completely diversify their holdings rational agents may choose more extreme portfolios and amplify the effect

quality perceptions and asymmetric switching between brands rotating indifference curves are used to induce an income effect that favors superior brands at the expense of inferior brands in a discrete choice model when calibrated on scanner panel data the model yields an objective measure of brand quality which is related to the rate of rotation the model also leads to asymmetric responses to price promotions where switching up to high quality brands is more likely than switching down the model is capable of nesting the standard logit model and is similar to a nested logit model when there exists clusters of brands of like quality the model is used to explore a product line pricing decision where profits are maximized subject to the constraint that consumer utility is maintained

asymmetric competition in choice and the leveraging of competitive disadvantages studies of grocery sales show that consumers of store brands switch to price discounted national brands more than consumers of national brands switch to discounted store brands such asymmetric price competition can be explained with numerous mechanisms proposed here and elsewhere we report a choice experiment that replicates asymmetric price competition favoring higher quality competitors and demonstrates asymmetric quality competition favoring lower quality competitors also demonstrated are multiple mechanisms contributing to competitive asymmetries where dominance involving the otherwise preferred brand is particularly potent e g when a higher quality competitor matches the price of an otherwise preferred lower quality brand the findings implicate modifications to 1 theories of decision making when extended to repeat choice 2 empirical models of secondary purchase data and 3 strategies for positioning and attacking brands whereas improving competitive disadvantages often attracts consumers from competitors more than does improving competitive advantages this benefit must be weighed against the differentiation sacrificed by improving competitive disadvantages improving competitive advantages in contrast increases differentiation

the inefficiency of the stock market equilibrium this paper establishes that when there is not a complete set of markets but more than one commodity the stock market equilibrium will not in general be a constrained pareto optimum the economy will lack both the property of exchange and production efficiency necessary conditions which must be satisfied if the economy is to be a constrained pareto optimum for all technologies are derived if all individuals have identical homothetic indifference maps then either there must be unitary price elasticities so there is no effective risk or all individuals must have the same degree of risk aversion so there is no trade on the stock market

the international diversification puzzle is not as bad as you think the international diversification puzzle is the fact that country portfolios are on average biased toward domestic assets while one good international macro models with nondiversifiable labor income risk predict the opposite pattern of diversification this paper embeds a portfolio choice decision in a two good international business cycle model and provides a closed form solution for equilibrium country portfolios equilibrium portfolios are biased toward domestic assets because endogenous international relative price fluctuations make domestic assets a good hedge against labor income risk evidence from developed economies in recent years is qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with the mechanisms highlighted by the theory

aid and migration substitutes or complements this paper investigates the impact of aid on migration and identifies two channels bilateral aid influences migration by enhancing the information about labor market conditions in the destination country attraction effect total aid correlates with migration through increasing expenditure financing and hence wages in countries of origin push effect we compute the critical level of income above which emigration and income are substitutes which is about us 7 300 per capita in ppp 2000 prices for example brazil or russia we argue that for countries below this threshold there is a trade off between aid and migration policies a tightening of the migration policy is equivalent to a reduction of the level of aid by about 24 a comparison of skilled and unskilled migrations shows that the former are more sensitive to the attraction effect than the latter

foreign aid and illegal immigration abstract we develop a two country model of illegal immigration we analyse the effect of foreign aid on illegal immigration and consider both exogenous and endogenous income repatriation in the former an increase in aid increases illegal immigration if the total amount of aid is small a transfer of resources from border control to aid increases illegal immigration when the total amount of aid is small under endogenous income repatriation aid has no effect on illegal immigration when the preferences of the immigrants and their family members are the same if the preferences are different aid may increase illegal immigration

diversification and its discontents idiosyncratic and entrepreneurial risk in the quest for social status social status concerns influence investors decisions by driving a wedge in attitudes toward aggregate and idiosyncratic risks i model such concerns by emphasizing the desire to get ahead of the joneses which implies that aversion to idiosyncratic risk is lower than aversion to aggregate risk the model predicts that investors hold concentrated portfolios in equilibrium which helps rationalize the small premium for undiversified entrepreneurial risk in the model status concerns are more important for wealthier households consequently these households own a disproportionate share of risky assets particularly private equity and experience greater volatility of consumption consistent with empirical evidence diversification and risk sharing are fundamental principles of modern finance and macroeconomics however empirical evidence suggests that household portfolios are poorly diversified with many people reporting substantial holdings of a single stock for the wealthiest households large shares in closely held businesses constitute a particularly important source of risk e g heaton and lucas 2000a it is not surprising that entrepreneurs bear substantial undiversified risk since it is important for mitigating moral hazard and or adverse selection problems yet from a standpoint of portfolio theory entrepreneurship does not appear to be well compensated implying that many investors are willing to take poorly rewarded risks despite the availability of superior investment opportunities such as public equity that earns a large risk premium e g moskowitz and vissing j0rgensen 2002 hall and woodward 2007

international aid from the recipient perspective public or private good input assistance abstractthis article proposes a theoretical model from the recipient perspective that considers what type of assistance a donor country should provide public good assistance or private good assistance we investigate the effects of migration and free riders under both types of assistance we empirically apply this model to the rapidly growing economies and a large official development assistance disbursement for east asia

the impact of foreign aid on migration revisited abstract while policymakers hope to stem migration flows by giving foreign aid existing empirical evidence points in the opposite direction by loosening budget constraints aid tends to encourage people to emigrate in this paper we revisit the aid migration link using a substantially extended and adjusted econometric approach based on a gravity model of international migration in contrast to the previous literature we obtain evidence of a negative relationship between the total aid a country receives and emigration rates this even holds for the poorer part of recipient countries which suggests that the budgetary constraint channel does not play a significant role in shaping migration decisions the most plausible explanation for these contrasting results is that unlike in previous studies we use migrant flows rather than migrant stocks as the dependent variable in substantive terms the limited importance of the budgetary constraint channel might reflect that positive welfare effects of foreign aid tend to manifest themselves in improved public services for the poor rather than higher incomes which is in line with the reorientation of foreign aid towards social sectors under the millennium development goals

aid trade and migration how do bilateral flows interact this paper takes as its point of departure the european commission s position set out in 2005 which laid clear emphasis on aid and trade as tools for controlling immigration we attempt to subject this position to empirical investigation we exploit data on bilateral aid trade and migration flows between developed and developing countries for the period 2000 10 adopting an instrumental variable approach to address the endogeneity issue due to potential simultaneity bias our results establish that increasing aid and trade with developing countries is likely to fail to contain immigration at least in the short run the pattern of results is consistent with the hypothesis that promoting development in migrant sending countries or cooperating with such countries to control migration outflows is not sufficient to lessen immigration increasing visa restrictions and controls at borders is generally controversial still the results imply that policymakers cannot attain their short term immigration goals with the so called smart solutions of aid and trade

asymmetric decoy effects on lower quality versus higher quality brands meta analytic and experimental evidence prior research demonstrates that adding decoys to choice sets can increase choice shares of brands similar to decoys while reducing shares of brands dissimilar to decoys such effects have been dubbed attraction effects and violate the principles of independence of irrelevant alternatives ha and regularity we report a meta analysis that in addition to revealing heretofore unsupported range effects demonstrates an effect of brand quality decoys reduce shares of lower quality competitors more than they reduce shares of higher quality competitors moreover whereas iia is violated throughout regularity is violated only when higher quality brands are targeted decoys increase shares of higher quality brands but typically do not increase shares of lower quality brands to assess the generalizability of the meta analytic pattern we tested decoy effects on two distinct populations in a large experiment the more traditional population replicated the meta analytic pattern standard asymmetry while the more nontraditional population reversed it these findings suggest that while the standard asymmetry is replicable it may not generalize to all market segments

a political economic analysis of labor migration and income redistribution we present a two country political economic model of income redistribution with internationally mobile labor migration can be exogenous and or endogenous i e determined by labor income differentials political influence is determined by the size and homogeneity of the groups where the latter can be affected by immigration we show that immigration can increase the transfers to and the income of the mobile group we also investigate the possibility of migration regulation tax transfer policy competition and coordination and finally coordination of regulation policies it is shown that the selection of any of those regimes will depend on the particular distribution of political influence among the relevant social groups in the two countries

are third world emigration forces abating most observers appear to believe that third world emigration pressure is on the rise but history suggests that migration typically follows a bell shape in which case it might be entering on the downward phase this paper estimates the economic and demographic fundamentals driving emigration from the developing world to the united states since 1970 the results suggest that emigration pressure determined largely by source country demographics education poverty and migrant stock dynamics has recently been abating projections into the future suggest that it may even decline and that its composition will become much more african and much less hispanic