do greens drive hummers or hybrids environmental ideology as a determinant of consumer choice this paper uses several california data sets to test for differences in consumption patterns between greens and browns a person s environmentalism is rarely observed in consumer data sets in california a community s share of green party registered voters is a viable proxy for community environmentalism environmentalists are more likely to commute by public transit purchase hybrid vehicles and consume less gasoline than non environmentalists

getting ahead of the joneses when equality increases conspicuous consumption among bottom tier consumers it is widely believed that increasing the equality of material possessions or income in a social group should lead people at the bottom of the distribution to consume less and save more however this prediction and its causal mechanism have never been studied experimentally five studies show that greater equality increases the satisfaction of those in the lowest tier of the distribution because it reduces the possession gap between what they have and what others have however greater equality also increases the position gains derived from status enhancing consumption since it allows low tier consumers to get ahead of the higher proportion of consumers clustered in the middle tiers as a result greater equality reduces consumption when consumers focus on the narrower possession gap but it increases consumption when they focus on the greater position gains i e when consumption is conspicuous social competition goals are primed and the environment is competitive

tax evasion on a social network abstract we relate tax evasion behavior to a substantial literature on social comparison in judgements taxpayers engage in tax evasion as a means to boost their expected consumption relative to others in their social network the unique nash equilibrium of the model relates optimal evasion to a bonacich measure of network centrality more central taxpayers evade more given that tax authorities are now investing heavily in big data tools that aim to construct social networks we investigate the value of acquiring network information we do this using networks that allow for celebrity taxpayers whose consumption is seen widely and who are systematically of higher wealth we show that there are pronounced returns to the initial acquisition of network information especially in the presence of celebrity taxpayers

behavioral spillover effects from a social information campaign abstract we investigate whether a social information campaign aimed at reducing water use causes a spillover effect on the use of electricity on average water use decreased by 6 percent for the treatment group we identify a positive spillover effect on electricity use among households that had efficient use of water before the campaign the effect is sizeable almost a 9 percent reduction we argue that these results are consistent with a model of cognitive dissonance where the efficient households infer information about electricity use from the water use information

fractional reserve banking in grain fractional reserve banks namely enterprises being legally liable to pay some substance on demand while regularly having too little on hand to satisfy all their obligations are commonly associated exclusively with money conceivably fractional reserve banks can deal in substances other than money as it happens chicago s warehousemen of the 1860s practiced fractional reserve banking not in dollars or sterling but in grain l these warehousemen operated in the style of a conventional financial intermediary borrowing short through demand deposits in order to lend long the natural evolution of fractional reserve banking in grain in nineteenth century chicago was interrupted however ever more stringent laws the result of repeated campaigns against fraudulent receipts eventually forced chicago s warehousemen to keep 100 percent reserves consequently the organization of the grain trade past and present not only provides information about the development of fractional reserve banking in general but reveals the effects of a rare experiment in outlawing fractional reserve banking

social comparisons and contributions to online communities a field experiment on movielens we design a field experiment to explore the use of social comparison to increase contributions to an online community we find that after receiving behavioral information about the median user s total number of movie ratings users below the median demonstrate a 530 percent increase in the number of monthly movie ratings while those above the median decrease their ratings by 62 percent when given outcome information about the average user s net benefit score above average users mainly engage in activities that help others our findings suggest that effective personalized social information can increase the level of public goods provision

distributional and efficiency impacts of increased us gasoline taxes we examine the impacts of increased us gasoline taxes in a model that links the markets for new used and scrapped vehicles and recognizes the consider able heterogeneity among households and cars household choice parameters derive from an estimation procedure that integrates individual choices for car ownership and miles traveled we find that each cent per gallon increase in the price of gasoline reduces the equilibrium gasoline consumption by about 0 2

merit approbation and the evolution of social structure in this paper we study a society in which individuals gain utility from income and from social approbation income is correlated with class approbation is given to an unobservable trait which must be signalled through the agent s social mobility i e class change mobility is driven by a simple mechanism involving inheritance effort and ability thus social structure class composition is affected by individuals quest for approbation and we study how that affects the emergence and multiplicity of long run social organizations including hybrid forms of dynasties and meritocracies specifically we observe that even though social mobility is driven purely by a meritocratic mechanism pure dynasties can emerge we then introduce a feedback between the size of the upper class and its income value so that effort levels and social structure are jointly endogenous we derive results on equilibrium effort levels and stationary when they exist social structures social organization can converge to a unique steady state multiple long run equilibria or cycles

relativity rank and the utility of income relative utility has become an important concept in several disjoint areas of economics i present a cardinal model of income utility based on the supposition that agents care about their rank in the income distribution and that utility is subject to adaptation over time utility levels correspond to the leyden individual welfare function while utility differences yield a version of the prospect theory value function thereby providing a new and shared derivation of each i offer an explanation of some long standing paradoxes in the wellbeing literature and an insight into the links between relative comparisons and loss aversion

estimating the demand for protecting freshwater lakes from eutrophication in any discussion of the valuation of public goods particularly environmental amenities contingent valuation travel cost and hedonics are commonly cited as methods for estimating hicksian or marshallian welfare freeman while contingent valuation and travel cost are widely employed we know of very few applications where hedonic demand functions have been estimated palmquist 1984 and parsons estimated second stage hedonic demands for characteristics of housing units both used the approach of estimating separate hedonic price functions for different real estate markets to identify demand parameters for housing characteristics the research reported here is the first to use separate real estate markets to identify demand parameters for an environmental amenity the specific application is water clarity in selected lakes in maine reduced water

macroeconomic implications of conspicuous consumption a sombartian dynamic model this chapter presents a dynamic general equilibrium model in which consumers have status preference i investigate the manner in which capital accumulation is impeded by conspicuous consumption a la corneo and jeanne j public econ 66 55 71 1997a following the literature social norms are given as either bandwagon type or snob type i then show that when the economy is characterized by a bandwagon type social norm capital accumulation exhibits interesting patterns those patterns include for example an oscillating convergence path the rise of the economy feeds its decay through conspicuous consumption and that decay suppresses conspicuous consumption and engenders prosperity as predicted by sombart liebe luxus und kapitalismus reprinted 1967 deutscher taschenbuch verlag munchen 1912

optimal income tax in the presence of status effects abstract the existence of distortions from individuals competing to attain social status by using consumption signals justifies some measure of income tax as a counter acting distortion the question posed here is whether it also constitutes a reason for a more progressive income tax schedule the answer is found to be broadly negative if progressiveness is interpreted as a more convex tax schedule unless the rich are more concerned with status seeking than the poor on the other hand status seeking makes the optimal tax schedule steeper so that redistribution is increased essentially the analysis of status seeking based on a signaling approach confirms and strengthens the existing view of an optimal tax schedule and can be incorporated into the diamond american economic review 88 1998 83 95 approach

a test of conspicuous consumption visibility and income elasticities abstract this paper shows that consistent with a signaling by consuming model a la veblen income elasticities can be predicted from the visibility of consumer expenditures we outline a stylized conspicuous consumption model where income elasticity is endogenously predicted to be higher if a good is visible and lower if it is not we then develop a survey based measure of expenditure visibility ranking different expenditures by how noticeable they are to others finally we show that our visibility measure predicts up to one third of the observed variation in elasticities across consumption categories in u s data

the social contingency of wants abstract economic models typically assume that individual wants are determined by forces exogenous to the economic system social psychology and consumer research in contrast support the view that the perceived benefits of goods and services are strongly affected by endogenously determined social norms we present a selective overview of the literature on the relationship between consumption and well being exploring the ways in which informal arguments from social science might be linked to formal models of economic behavior we find that the fixed preferences hypothesis leads to the systematic undervaluation of environmental services and the underprovisioning of environmental goods

reassessing the ethicality of some common financial practices depositors have perceived banks as acting unethically during the most recent recession one area of consternation is the ambiguity of the legal obligations entailed by the deposit contract when it is backed with only fractional reserves in this article we apply an existing analysis of the legitimacy and ethicality of banking practices to a wider range of financial transactions including insurance policies securities lending perpetual bonds and callable loans securities lending in particular creates rights violations analogous to those in fractional reserve banking both callable loans and perpetual bonds have clear legal obligations which are not inherently problematic though we herein clarify what these obligations are finally we apply our ethical framework to demonstrate that insurance products are distinct from banking deposit contracts and that perceived parallels between the two products underestimate these differences

oil and water do not mix or aliud est credere aliud deponere the financial crisis has led to new interest in the ethics of financial markets in this article we further the debate on the nature of banking contracts by showing that the fundamental subjective purposes of loan and deposit contracts are irreconcilable any resultant mixture of the two contracts is a legal aberration we consider a mutual fund as an important and legitimate alternative to the common demand deposit to provide high liquidity and some yield without offering full availability of a nominal sum besides being a close substitute for how many deposit accounts function today the mutual fund has the additional benefit of satisfying all legal and ethical requirements loan and investment contracts such as money market mutual funds allow for the bank to make use of their clients funds while the intents of money owners are clearly classified without running into legal or ethical problems

bayesian estimation of the global minimum variance portfolio in this paper we consider the estimation of the weights of optimal portfolios from the bayesian point of view under the assumption that the conditional distribution of the logarithmic returns is normal using the standard priors for the mean vector and the covariance matrix we derive the posterior distributions for the weights of the global minimum variance portfolio moreover we reparameterize the model to allow informative andnon informative priors directly for the weights of the global minimum variance portfolio the posterior distributions of the portfolio weights are derived in explicit form for almost all models the models are compared by using the coverage probabilities of credible intervals in an empirical study we analyze the posterior densities of the weights of an international portfolio

on the rationality of mutually immiserating coercion abstract the pursuit of relative advantage in a setting where one person has power over another may yield perfectly rational decisions by the person in power which reduce the wealth of all affected parties including the person in power this contrasts with decisions by independent egoistic decision makers who in a similar circumstances will not pursue transfers when they are known to cost more to obtain than would be realized utility functions that include relative wealth or position as arguments have the property that utility increases as relative wealth increases consequently mutually immiserating policies may be rationally undertaken if they yield sufficient relative advantage to offset absolute wealth reductions

the hubris of hybrids in the pages of this journal a fruitful debate has evolved on the ethical legitimacy of fractional reserve banking in this article we respond to the new arguments raised by evans j bus ethics 2014 as we clarify our bagus et al in j bus ethics 128 197 206 2015a position on the unethical and illegitimate nature of fractional reserve banking fractional reserve banking is not a recent financial innovation unlike e g money market mutual funds but represents a long standing legal aberration the co mingling of two mutually exclusive financial contracts deposit and loan confounds the contracting parties purposes intents rights and obligations as a result it creates unsolvable legal difficulties and ethical dilemmas while these problems are most evident in the case of a bank run they also arise when trying to answer the simple question of who owns a deposit

conspicuous consumption and race evidence from south africa abstract a century ago thorstein veblen introduced socially contingent consumption into the economic literature this paper complements the scarce empirical literature by testing his conjecture on south african household data and finds that black and coloured households spend relatively more on visible consumption than comparable white households following the approach of charles et al 2009 this paper explores whether the differences in visible expenditures can be explained with a signaling model of status seeking moreover it is assessed to which extent positional concerns motivate conspicuous consumption although the socially contingent share in visible consumption increases with income different incentives to consume conspicuously seem to explain that at every level of income black households spend relatively more on visible consumption than comparable white households in contrast to the findings of charles et al 2009 where differential spending on conspicuous consumption can be found also within each group separately the model s core hypothesis fails to hold within the group of white south africans

conspicuous consumption and race using nationally representative data on consumption we show that blacks and hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods clothing jewelry and cars than do comparable whites these differences exist among virtually all subpopulations are relatively constant over time and are economically large although racial differences in utility preference parameters might account for a portion of these consumption differences we emphasize instead a model of status seeking in which conspicuous consumption is used as a costly indicator of a household s economic position using merged data on race and state level income we demonstrate that a key prediction of the status signaling model that visible consumption should be declining in reference group income is strongly borne out in the data for each racial group moreover we show that accounting for differences in reference group income characteristics explains most of the racial difference in visible consumption

the legitimacy of loan maturity mismatching a risky but not fraudulent undertaking barnett and block journal of business ethics 2009 attack the heart of modern banking by claiming that the practice of borrowing short and lending long is illicit while their claim of illegitimacy concerning fractional reserve banking can be defended their justification lacks substance their claim is herein strengthened by a legal analysis of deposits and loans based on huerta de soto money bank credit and economic cycles 2006 a combined legal and economic analysis shows that while lending deposits can be regarded as illicit the maturity mismatching of loans is legitimate contrary to barnett and block s claim no over issuance of property rights is involved with this practice once the distinction between present and future goods is taken into account however while the practice is not illicit per se it is greatly assisted and developed through the presence of a fractional reserve banking system and can sometimes breed detrimental effects

mean variance portfolio selection in presence of infrequently traded stocks abstract this paper deals with a mean variance optimal portfolio selection problem in presence of risky assets characterized by low frequency trading and therefore low liquidity to model the dynamics of illiquid assets we introduce pure jump processes this leads to the development of a portfolio selection model in a mixed discrete continuous time setting we pursue the twofold scope of analyzing and comparing either long term investment strategies as well as short term trading rules the theoretical model is analyzed by applying extensive monte carlo experiments in order to provide useful insights from a financial perspective

conspicuous consumption dynamics abstract we formalize veblen s idea of conspicuous consumption as two alternative forms of interdependent preferences dubbed envy and pride agents adjust consumption patterns gradually in the direction of increasing utility from an arbitrary initial state the distribution of consumption among agents with identical preferences converges to a unique equilibrium distribution when pride is stronger the equilibrium distribution has a right skewed density when envy is stronger the equilibrium is concentrated at a single point and the adjustment dynamics involve a shock wave that can be interpreted as a growing moving homogeneous middle class

look at me saving the planet the imitation of visible green behavior and its impact on the climate value action gap abstract examining the regional distribution of 15 different greenhouse gas mitigation practices mps across australia we study the tendency for consumers to imitate visible pro environmental behavior in their local region while there is a great deal of variation in the specific type of mps adopted by consumers located in the same region anova results suggest that they tend to adopt a similar number of mps as their neighbours using discrete choice modelling our results suggest that this is due to the peer adoption of certain visible mps such as using public transport or car pooling encouraging agents to adopt other types of visible mps however the character of this spillover is limited in that visible pro environmental behavior does not appear to influence the adoption of non visible mps we also find that social imitation patterns help individuals overcome the observed gap between their stated concern about climate change and their propensity to act on this concern known as the climate value action gap policy implications for designing effective green nudges are discussed

pricing of conspicuous goods a competitive analysis of social effects abstract social needs play an important role in the purchase of conspicuous goods in this article the authors extend traditional economic models to accommodate social needs such as desire for uniqueness and conformism and examine their implications for pricing conspicuous goods first in the context of a duopoly the authors identify the conditions under which the desire for uniqueness can increase demand among some consumers as the price of a product increases second the authors show that though the desire for uniqueness leads to higher prices and firm profits a desire for conformity leads to lower prices and profits third the authors find that consumers purchase high quality products not because of their desire for uniqueness but despite it finally marketers of conspicuous goods may find it beneficial not to emphasize the functional differences among their products when the need for uniqueness is high in a laboratory test the authors find support for the claim that demand for a product amo

running to keep in the same place consumer choice as a game of status if individuals care about their status defined as their rank in the distribution of consumption of one positional good then the consumer s problem is strategic as her utility depends on the consumption choices of others in the symmetric nash equilibrium each individual spends an inefficiently high amount on the status good using techniques from auction theory we analyze the effects of exogenous changes in the distribution of income in a richer society almost all individuals spend more on conspicuous consumption and individual utility is lower at each income level in a more equal society the poor are worse off

in defence of demand deposits contractual solutions to the barnett and block and bagus and howden debate this article contributes to a recent debate between barnett and block j bus ethics 88 4 711 716 2009 bagus and howden j bus ethics 90 3 399 406 2009 barnett and block j bus ethics 100 299 238 2011 cachanosky j bus ethics 104 219 221 2011 and bagus and howden j bus ethics 106 295 300 2012a regarding the conceptual distinction between demand deposits and time deposits it is argued that from an economic perspective there is nothing inherently fraudulent or illegitimate about deposit accounts that are available on demand but that this relies on certain contractual provisions particular attention is drawn to option clauses and withdrawal clauses which solve the problems raised by barnett and block and bagus and howden previous authors have also neglected the asset side of banks balance sheets and this is shown to further justify the legitimacy of fractional reserve banking

the value of environmental status signaling how much are consumers willing to pay to signal their environmental consciousness we identify the signaling value of an environmental public good by focusing on hybrid cars and exploiting the physical uniqueness of the toyota prius relative to hybrids that look identical to their non hybrid counterparts we deploy a quasi experimental hedonic model to estimate this willingness to pay we find that controlling for observable and unobservable factors the prius commands an environmental signaling value of 587 or 4 5 of its value our research provides lessons for economists and policymakers and contributes to the literature on identifying signaling values

on the necessary and sufficient conditions for legitimate banking contracts what role do demand deposits serve in the financial system the answer to this simple question has great implications in keeping the legal terms of the contract consistent with the demands of the financial system demand deposits are a perfect monetary substitute since money is only held to hedge against perceived uncertainty in both the timing and magnitude of future expenditures demand deposits are demanded for the same reason from this we derive three main conclusions first a financial contract similar to a demand deposit e g very short term bonds money market mutual funds etc cannot substitute for money second full agreement to a financial contract does not create a perfect substitute for money unless it provides money s two key characteristics on demand and par value redemption finally the demand for fractional reserve demand deposits is fostered by an exogenous source deposit insurance and that demand for a good or service is not a sufficient condition to justify its legality or ethicality

the effect of unionism on fringe benefits this study analyzes the impact of unionism on fringes paid to production workers using data on individual establishments it compares fringe expenditures in establishments having the same level of compensation per hour and finds that unionism raises the share of compensation allotted to fringes particularly to pensions vacation pay and life accident and health insurance in addition since unionism also raises the straight time wage rate itself a prime determinant of expenditures on fringes unionism has a very sizeable impact on total fringe expenditures as well as on the fringe share of compensation the union fringe effect exceeds in percentage terms the union wage effect and is sufficiently large to suggest that standard union wage studies understate the union effect on total compensation the study also compares the fringe expenditures of production and non production workers within the same establishment controlling for within establishment pay policies the findings suggest that the pres

understanding the solar home price premium electricity generation and green social status this study uses a large sample of homes in the san diego area and sacramento california area to provide some of the first capitalization estimates of the sales value of homes with solar panels relative to comparable homes without solar panels although the residential solar home market continues to grow there is little direct evidence on the market capitalization effect using both hedonics and a repeat sales index approach we find that solar panels are capitalized at roughly a 3 5 premium this premium is larger in communities with a greater share of college graduates and of registered prius hybrid vehicles

the continuing continuum problem of deposits and loans barnett and block j bus ethics 18 2 179 194 2011 argue that one cannot distinguish between deposits and loans due to the continuum problem of maturities and because future goods do not exist both essential characteristics that distinguish deposit from loan contracts in a similar way but leading to opposite conclusions cachanosky forthcoming maintains that both maturity mismatching and fractional reserve banking are ethically justified as these contracts are equivalent we argue herein that the economic and legal differences between genuine deposit and loan contracts are clear this implies different legal obligations for these contracts a necessary step in assessing the ethics of both fractional reserve banking and maturity mismatching while the former is economically legally and perhaps most importantly ethically problematic there are no such troubles with the latter

positional deprivation and support for radical right and radical left parties we explore how support for radical parties of both the left and right may be shaped by what we call positional deprivation where growth in income of individuals at a given point in the income distribution is outpaced by income growth elsewhere in that distribution we argue that positional deprivation captures the combination of over time and relative misfortune that can be expected to distinctly spur support for radical left and right parties we explore this possibility by matching new measures of positional deprivation to individual level survey data on party preferences in 20 european countries from 2002 to 2014 we find that positional deprivation is robustly correlated with supporting radical populist parties first positional deprivation generally measured as average income growth across deciles of a country s income distribution minus a respondent s own decile s growth is associated with respondents retreat from mainstream parties and with support for both radical right and particularly radical left parties second positional deprivation relative to the highest and the lowest ends of the income spectrum play out differently for radical right and for radical left support a respondent s positional deprivation relative to the wealthiest decile s growth in his or her country tends to spur support for radical left but not radical right parties in contrast positional deprivation relative to the poorest decile s growth in a respondent s country tends to spur support for radical right but not left parties the results suggest that the combination of over time and relative economic misfortune may be key to how economic experience shapes radical backlash of the left and right

positional concerns and social network structure an experiment abstract we experimentally study the positional concerns of individuals embedded in social networks in the game individuals compete for positional advantage with their direct neighbors by purchasing a positional good the nash equilibrium consumption is determined by the katz bonacich centrality of the individual s network position while the efficient outcome requires a lower consumption level for most network positions the gameplay converged to the nash equilibrium except for local centers that consumed less of the positional good than the nash prediction despite this the consumption of the positional good increased in the individual s centrality the evolution of the gameplay was explained by the myopic best response dynamics model

diagram for a small planet the production and ecosystem possibilities curve abstract with the development of the gpi there is now an ecological alternative to gdp for measuring a country s economic performance but we still lack an ecological alternative to the ppc for illustrating a country s economic problem the diagram suggested here illustrates a country s production and ecosystem possibilities including climate stability flood control carbon sequestration aquifer recharge scenery recreation biological diversity and so on burning a rainforest to clear the land shifts a country s ppc outward giving the visual impression of an unmitigated improvement but such development causes a movement along the country s pepc as ecosystem services are transformed into gdp the slope of the pepc is the marginal rate of transformation which equals the ratio of the land s marginal marketable product to its marginal ecosystem product changes in technology create substitution and income effects that help explain the enclosure movement and the environmental kuznets curve much as employment of the human resource can be restrained to allow more leisure development of the natural resource can be restrained to preserve more ecosystem services commercial lobbying interests and rivalries for positional goods create distortions that move a country along its pepc to a materialistic misallocation with too little conservation an idealistic misallocation is also possible with too much preservation of the natural environment small is beautiful up to a point and that is evident in this diagram jacob viner s viner j 1937 studies in the theory of international trade harper and brothers new york analytical objections to the ppc are revived

dynamic asset allocation with relative wealth concerns in incomplete markets abstract in dynamic portfolio choice problems stochastic state variables such as stochastic volatility lead to adjustments of the optimal stock demand referred to as hedge terms or merton breeden terms by deriving an explicit solution in a two agent framework with a stochastic opportunity set we show that relative wealth concerns give rise to new hedge terms beyond the ordinary ones this is because the agents hedge against both exogenous changes in the state variable and endogenous decisions of the other agent depending on the parametrization of the model these new terms can significantly change the investors hedging demands we also show that both heterogeneity in risk aversion or relative wealth concerns can have similar effects on the heterogeneity in portfolio decisions formally we study a non cooperative non zero sum stochastic differential game for which we prove a verification theorem in a setting with an unspanned state variable

relative consumption and tax evasion abstract relative consumption effects or status concerns that feature jealousy in the sense of dupor and liu 2003 boost consumption expenditure if consumption is financed by labour income such status considerations increase labour supply and hence the tax base a higher taxable income in turn can make tax evasion more attractive we show for various specifications of preferences that the tax base effect generally dominates consequently relative consumption effects tend to reduce tax evasion this is true irrespective of whether tax parameters are exogenous guarantee a balanced budget or are set optimally

balance of power and the propensity of conflict we study the role of an imbalance in fighting strengths when players bargain in the shadow of conflict our experimental results suggest in a simple bargaining game with an exogenous mediation proposal the likelihood of conflict is independent of the balance of power if bargaining involves endogenous demand choices however the likelihood of conflict is higher if power is more imbalanced even though endogenous bargaining outcomes reflect the players unequal fighting strengths strategic uncertainty causes outcomes to be most efficient when power is balanced in turn the importance of exogenous mediation proposals depends on the balance of power

what is the latin for mayonnaise a response to bagus howden and gabriel if fractional reserve demand deposits are common and illegitimate an obvious flaw in the banking system is exposed however this article maintains that the only reason why demand deposits may be considered illegitimate is because of a way of defining them that renders them almost irrelevant this article provides a response to bagus et al j bus ethics forthcoming 2014 and identifies examples of how they misrepresent evans j bus ethics forthcoming 2013 it also provides further considerations on the tradeoffs relating to the availability of a deposit methodological subjectivism and the potential for hybrid contracts deposit and loan contracts may be hard to mix but the actual results of doing so should not be ignored

values in the wind a hedonic analysis of wind power facilities the siting of wind facilities is extremely controversial this paper uses data on 11 331 property transactions over nine years in northern new york state to explore the effects of new wind facilities on property values we use a fixed effects framework to control for omitted variables and endogeneity biases we find that nearby wind facilities significantly reduce property values in two of the three counties studied these results indicate that existing compensation to local homeowners communities may not be sufficient to prevent a loss of property values jel q51 q53

conspicuous conservation the prius halo and willingness to pay for environmental bona fides abstract this paper develops a theory of conspicuous conservation a phenomenon related to conspicuous consumption in which individuals seek status through displays of austerity amid growing concern about environmental protection we identify a statistically and economically significant conspicuous conservation effect in vehicle purchase decisions and estimate a mean willingness to pay for the green signal provided by the distinctively designed toyota prius in the range of 430 4200 depending upon the owner s location results are related to the growing literature on green markets and suggest that policy should target less conspicuous conservation investments that will be under provided relative to those that confer a status benefit

sustainable management of fossil fuels a dynamic stochastic optimization approach with jump diffusion abstract this paper deals with a relevant aspect of energy modeling i e fossil fuels management the issue is faced by using purely operational research techniques which are suitable in this context in particular a dynamic stochastic optimization model is developed to optimally determine use and stock of resources to be employed in consumption and investments in a wide economic sense human and physical capital r d etc it is assumed that a sustainability criterion drives the optimality rules i e decisions are also grounded on the well being of future generations the policymaker maximizes an aggregated intergenerational expected utility under the dilemma of present consumption conservation of natural resources for the future in reference to standard environmental economic theory jump diffusion dynamics for the stock of natural resources and infinite time horizon are assumed extensive numerical experiments complete the analysis and contribute to determine fossil fuels management policies showing that long term investments make the difference for the well being of present and future generations

keeping one step ahead of the joneses status the distribution of wealth and long run growth assuming that the utility of each agent depends on its relative wealth position in the society this chapter constructs an endogenous growth model it is shown that even if the subjective discount rates differ across agents there exists a unique balanced growth equilibrium in which each agent owns a positive share of the world wealth it is also shown that if the agents are identical then an increase in savings incentives always raises the long run growth rate but if they are heterogeneous then an increase in savings incentives may lower the long run growth rate

consumer learning and hybrid vehicle adoption we study the effect of differences in product quality on new technology diffusion we propose a model in which heterogeneity in perceived product quality affects consumer adoption if consumers experientially infer the quality of a technology an increase in initial exposure to a low quality product may inhibit subsequent diffusion incentives intended to speed up adoption may in fact have the opposite effect if they propagate low quality signals we examine the predictions of the model using sales data for 11 hybrid vehicle models between 2000 and 2006 consistent with press reports that the first generation insight was perceived to be of lower quality than the first generation prius we find that conditional on overall hybrid vehicle adoption in the first 2 years locations with a relatively high prius market share experienced faster subsequent adoption than states with a relatively high insight market share we estimate the elasticity of new hybrid sales with respect to the prius penetration rate is 0 30 0 58 while the elasticity with respect to the insight penetration rate is 0 14 to 0 44

conspicuous consumption snobbism and conformism abstract we develop a model in which consumers purchase a conspicuous good in order to signal high income and thereby achieve greater social status in equilibrium the signalling value of conspicuous consumption depends in an identifiable way on the number of consumers and consumer behaviour is characterized by either snobbism or conformism the market demand curve for the conspicuous good may exhibit a positive slope if consumers are conformist we derive some unconventional policy implications concerning the taxation of luxuries and the voluntary provision of public goods

a geometric approach to multiperiod mean variance optimization of assets and liabilities we present a geometric approach to discrete time multiperiod mean variance portfolio optimization that largely simplifies the mathematical analysis and the economic interpretation of such model settings we show that multiperiod mean variance optimal policies can be decomposed in an orthogonal set of basis strategies each having a clear economic interpretation this implies that the corresponding multiperiod mean variance frontiers are spanned by an orthogonal basis of dynamic returns specifically in a k period model the optimal strategy is a linear combination of a single k period global minimum second moment strategy and a sequence of k local excess return strategies which expose the dynamic portfolio optimally to each single period asset excess return this decomposition is a multi period version of hansen and richard econometrica 1987 orthogonal representation of single period mean variance frontiers and naturally extends the basic economic intuition of the static markowitz model to the multiperiod context using the geometric approach to dynamic mean variance optimization we obtain closed form solutions in the i i d setting for portfolios consisting of both assets and liabilities al each modelled by a distinct state variable as a special case the solution of the mean variance problem for the asset only case in li and ng mathematical finance 10 2000 follows directly and can be represented in terms of simple products of some single period orthogonal returns we illustrate the usefulness of our geometric representation of multiperiods optimal policies and mean variance frontiers by discussing specific issues related to al portfolios the impact of taking liabilities into account on the implied mean variance frontiers the quantification of the impact of the rebalancing frequency and the determination of the optimal initial funding ratio

social comparisons status and driving behavior abstract the establishment of desirable social norms is an integral part of a well functioning civil society while recent evidence has demonstrated that social comparison can affect behavior in a variety of contexts it is not clear what type of comparative social information is most effective using a large scale field experiment to study driving practices we sent text messages containing different types of social information to drivers in tsingtao china we find two types of social information to be particularly effective in reducing traffic violations the driving behavior of those similar to oneself and the driving behavior of those with high status cars our results indicate that the combination of descriptive norms with social status is a cost effective yet powerful intervention for establishing better driving behavior in emerging markets

why do people care about social status abstract this paper shows that complementary interaction can induce people to care about social status because it serves as a signal of non observable abilities there is a unique separating equilibrium in which everyone cares about social status in this equilibrium a person s social status perfectly reveals his abilities and everyone matches with a person of like ability the analysis shows that people s instrumental concern for social status has important welfare and policy implications indeed peoples efforts to keep up with the joneses may be welfare enhancing