guaranty funds and risk taking evidence from the insurance industry abstract this paper examines change in property liability insurers risk taking around enactments of state guaranty fund laws our evidence suggests that the risk of insurers asset portfolios increases following enactments but this increase in risk is significant only for stock insurers our evidence of increased risk taking following guaranty fund adoptions suggests that the way these funds are organized creates counterproductive investment incentives especially for stock companies because these laws were enacted by states over the period 1969 1981 our evidence on changes in risk taking helps resolve statistical problems that have been troublesome for studies of bank deposit insurance

first and second order effects of consumers institutional logics on firm consumer relationships a cross market comparative analysis consumers conceptions of a market s institutional logic affect mechanisms of firm consumer relationships but are generally neglected in comparative studies of international marketing this study bridges institutional and relationship marketing theories to examine two questions do consumers hold meaningful mental models of a market s institutional logics and do these mental models explain differentiated patterns of market relationships across international contexts building on contract relational duality we develop a market level construct for capturing consumers socially constructed mental models for the institutional logics of market action we theorize that differences in consumers institutional logics will influence both their evaluation of a firm s capabilities first order effect and the degree to which they reward a firm through their commitment second order effect these bridging predictions are tested using data from the insurance industry across three international markets our results show that the german insurance market is located in the relatively high contracts low relational quadrant whereas the us and dutch markets are both located in the relatively low contracts high relational quadrant our results also suggest that consumer commitment conforms to a principle of alignment such that commitment accrues to providers who align their capabilities with consumers prevalent institutional logics of the market and penalizes those who deviate from it

the connection between public transfers and private interfamily transfers abstract this paper investigates the anti poverty effectiveness of public transfers taking private transfer responses into account widespread altruistically motivated private transfers would neutralize the distributional impact of public transfers but exchange motivated transfers can reinforce the effects of public transfers on the distribution of economic well being the common technique for gauging anti poverty effectiveness subtracting public transfers from other income and measuring the poverty rate counterfactual yields results that are close to a more complex procedure that takes private transfer responses into account and some of the empirical findings suggest an exchange rather than altruistic motive for private transfers indicating that the effects of public transfers can be magnified by private behavior this is an exact reversal of the prediction that public transfers merely supplant private ones

transfer behavior in the health and retirement study measurement and the redistribution of resources within the family recent work by a number of economists has opened a debate about the role played by intergenerational transfers using the new health and retirement study hrs we are better able to address the issues involved contrary to the current literature on bequests we do not find that parents give transfers equally to all children rather we find that in the case of inter vivos transfers respondents give greaterfinancial assistance to their less well off children than to their children with higher incomes financial transfers to elderly parents are also found to be negatively related to the potential recipient s income these results hold both for the incidence of transfers and for the amounts in addition we allow for unobserved differences across families by estimating fixed effect models and find our results to be robust to these specifications a comparison of the hrs transfer data to other survey data demonstrates that the hrs is potentially quite useful for research on transfer behavior

the carnegie conjecture some empirical evidence this paper examines tax return generated data on the labor force behavior of people before and after they receive inheritances the results are consistent with andrew carnegie s century old assertion that large inheritances decrease a person s labor force participation for example a single person who receives an inheritance of about 150 000 is roughly four times more likely to leave the labor force than a person with an inheritance below 25 000 additional albeit weaker evidence suggests that large inheritances depress labor supply even when participation is unaltered warren kendall heir to an insurance company fortune says he s worth about 5 million and has an income of about oh 300 and some thousand a year h e has never held a job or wanted to going down to sea in cruise ships is his full time pursuit he estimates that he has taken about 250 cruises over the past couple of decades spending at least 50 percent to 70 percent of the year afloat morgenthaler 1991 p al

the strategic bequest motive although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete we develop a simple model of strategic bequests in which a testator influences the decisions of his beneficiaries by holding wealth in bequeathable forms and by conditioning the division of bequests on the beneficiaries actions the model generates falsifiable empirical predictions that are inconsistent with other theories of intergenerational transfers we present econometric and other evidence that strongly suggests that bequests are often used as compensation for services rendered by beneficiaries

inter vivos transfers and intergenerational exchange the surge of interest in intergenerational transfers in the past decade has sparked a debate over the motivation for them are transfers given out of altruism or part of an exchange while each motive is probably at work to some extent we know little about whether one motive predominates the question is relevant for issues concerning public income redistribution and inequality in the family but despite its importance empirical evidence about motives is scarce because of limited data we investigate a new data set the national survey of families and households which remedies many of the shortcomings of other data sets containing private transfer information we find that empirical patterns for inter vivos transfers i e transfers between living persons are more consistent with exchange than altruism

organizational form and risk taking in the savings and loan industry abstract i hypothesize that risk taking is greater in stock thrifts than in mutual thrifts because the residual and fixed claims are separable i find that stock thrifts exhibit greater profit variability during the 1982 1988 period and that conversions from mutual to stock ownership are associated with increased investment in risky assets and increased profit variability these findings illustrate the relation between the structure of residual claims incentives and firm performance as well as the unintended consequences resulting from changes in thrift regulations

the determinants of organizational form changes evidence and implications from real estate abstract we study changes in the real estate industry among organizational forms with varying degrees of restrictiveness and document the associated changes in profitability free cash flow debt dividends and investment policies all troubled firms in our sample move to a more flexible organizational structure with subsequent reductions in dividends improvements in performance and increases in asset sales and investments healthy firms that move to a tighter structure have larger free cash flows before the change they increase dividends reduce free cash flows and improve profitability after the change we document evidence of tax considerations in organizational changes

crowding out of private support to the elderly evidence from a demogrant in mexico abstract to examine whether private support dampens or reinforces the impact of redistributive policies this paper estimates the effect of an exogenous increase in the income of the elderly caused by a recent demogrant in mexico on the amount of private transfers they receive my instrumental variables strategy overcomes the endogeneity of income that typically contaminates estimates and unlike related studies that use natural or policy experiments in reduced form estimations it yields evidence of a positive bias this suggests that an unobservable characteristic is positively correlated both with income and private transfer receipt and that treating income as exogenous could lead to an underestimation of the crowding out effect in contrast my preferred estimates are negative significant and not far from minus one implying an almost complete crowding out my findings suggest that private transfers could neutralize the changes in the public transfers for the elderly

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

the role of insider influence in mutual to stock conversions using a sample of 347 demutualizing thrifts from 1991 to 2004 we show that the level of inside participation is not a traditional signal of firm performance we conclude that unanticipated inside participation reflects the incentives of insiders to reduce the size of the offer to influence the level of expected initial public offer ipo returns we find unanticipated inside participation is related to lower offer size and higher initial returns but we do not find a relationship between inside participation and post ipo performance

inheritance and labor supply using data from the michigan panel study of income dynamics and from federal estate tax returns this paper investigates the labor disincentive caused by inheritance the results are of interest for several reasons whether or not inheritances are a strong labor disincentive figures prominently in the controversy surrounding the relative importance of inheritances and life cycle savings as sources of u s wealth also the size of the disincentive is important in determining the relationship between inheritance and inequality our results indicate that inheritances do not lead to large reductions in the labor supply of men and married women family consumption increases after an inheritance but again the effect is small

can a small social pension promote labor force participation evidence from the colombia mayor program one of the primary motivations behind the establishment of noncontributory pension programs is to allow beneficiaries to retire from the labor force yet as with other unconditional cash transfer schemes their aggregate effects may be more complex using panel data and instrumental variable techniques this paper shows that the effect of one such program colombia mayor has been to raise the labor force participation of relatively younger male beneficiaries this increase occurred precisely in the occupations with characteristics that are likely to require some up front investment the paper concludes that the transfer effectively loosened the liquidity constraints to remaining in these occupations however no such effect is found among women or older beneficiaries

the governance of exchanges members cooperatives versus outside ownership the paper compares co operative governance structure to outside ownership the distinction between the two lies in who has residual rights of control it is found that a co operative becomes relatively less efficient as the environment becomes more competitive and the interests of members become more skewed these ideas are applied to the governance of exchanges this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

bequest behavior and the effect of heirs earnings testing the altruistic model of bequests that parents transfer resources to children because of altruistic concern is a reasonable a priori assumption however economic theories of altruistic transfers have produced many counterintuitive conclusions and consequently much debate when applied to bequests these theories predict that inheritances will compensate for earnings differences between siblings as well as between parents and children this paper tests these implications using a new data set centered on federal estate tax returns little support can be found for an altruistic theory of bequests this finding has implications for macroeconomic policy government transfer programs and inequality copyright 1996 by american economic association

organizational form and efficiency the coexistence of stock and mutual property liability insurers this article introduces a new approach cross frontier analysis for estimating the relative efficiency of alternative organizational forms in an industry the technique is illustrated by analyzing a sample of stock and mutual property liability insurers using nonparametric frontier efficiency methods cross frontier analysis measures the relative efficiency of each organizational form by computing the efficiency of each stock mutual firm relative to a reference set consisting of all mutual stock firms we test agency theoretic hypotheses about organizational form including the managerial discretion and expense preference hypotheses the results indicate that stocks and mutuals are operating on separate production and cost frontiers and thus represent distinct technologies consistent with the managerial discretion hypothesis the stock technology dominates the mutual technology for producing stock outputs and the mutual technology dominates the stock technology for producing mutual outputs however consistent with the expense preference hypothesis the stock cost frontier dominates the mutual cost frontier our findings thus suggest a richer interpretation of organizational form than provided by previous researchers

do private transfers displace the benefits of public transfers evidence from south africa abstract this paper investigates whether government transfer programs displace or crowd out private support focusing on a large increase in state old age pensions in south africa using data spanning the period of the expansion we find that each rand of public pension income to the elderly leads to a 0 25 0 30 rand reduction in private transfers from children living away from home however despite the large increase in income there were no significant changes in migration labor supply or household composition we also show that evaluations of the distributional effects of the pension are overstated when crowding out is ignored

the effect of organizational structure on efficiency evidence from the spanish insurance industry this paper provides new information on the effects of organizational structure on efficiency by analyzing spanish stock and mutual insurers over the period 1989 1997 we test the efficient structure hypothesis which predicts that the market will sort organizational forms into market segments where they have comparative advantages and the expense preference hypothesis which predicts that mutuals will be less efficient than stocks technical cost and revenue frontiers are estimated using data envelopment analysis the results indicate that stocks and mutuals are operating on separate production cost and revenue frontiers and thus represent distinct technologies in cost and revenue efficiency stocks of all sizes dominate mutuals in the production of stock output vectors and smaller mutuals dominate stocks in the production of mutual output vectors larger mutuals are neither dominated by nor dominant over stocks in the cost and revenue comparisons thus large mutuals appear to be vulnerable to competition from stock insurers in spain overall the results are consistent with the efficient structure hypothesis but are generally not consistent with the expense preference hypothesis

regulatory incentives and the thrift crisis dividends mutual to stock conversions and financial distress during the 1980s insolvency of individual thrifts and the thrift deposit insurer created severe incentive problems lacking cash to close insolvent thrifts regulators induced nearly 10 billion of private capital to flow into the industry through mutual to stock conversions we test a theory of how regulators encouraged capitalimpaired mutual thrifts to convert by permitting them to pay dividends rather than rebuild capital we estimate the costs of this policy and interpret the 1991 federal deposit insurance corporation improvement act as requiring regulators to impose restraints on depository institutions parallel to debt covenants that prevent capital distributions by nonfinancial firms experiencing distress

old age government transfers and the crowding out of private gifts the70 and aboveprogram for the rural elderly in mexico old age public transfers and remittances

the effect of noncontributory pensions on saving in mexico this paper examines the effects of non contributory pension programs at the federal and state levels on mexican households saving patterns using micro data from the mexican income and expenditure survey the federal program by itself appears to reduce the saving rate of households whose oldest member is either 18 to 54 or 65 to 69 state programs by themselves have no significant effects on household saving rates in the smallest localities but in larger localities they may reduce the saving of households with members in their sixties the combination of both types of programs generally does not have statistically significant effects on households aggregate saving probably because each program seems to affect different population strata no significant effects are found for households whose oldest member is age eligible 70 and older within specific investment categories evidence is found of increases in human capital and in durable and financial goods for some age groups finally the paper provides evidence on household level labor supply responses

motives for private transfers over the life cycle an analytical framework and evidence for peru abstract this paper tests for the motives for private income transfers we consider two motives altruism and exchange the question of private transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income using a household survey for peru we find that transfer amounts received increase with recipient pre transfer income which contradicts a key prediction of the strong form of the altruism hypothesis but is consistent with exchange we also find that capital market imperfections are likely to be an important cause of private transfers and that social security benefits crowd out the incidence of private transfers

the measurement of efficiency in life insurance estimates of a mixed normal gamma error model abstract this paper make three contributions to the literature on efficiency in financial services first it presents estimates of a mixed error cost frontier in which the variances of both the normal and gamma distributions can vary with firm size second it extends the literature on life insurance scale and product mix economies by incorporating and measuring x inefficiency estimates of x inefficiency range from 35 to 50 ray scale economies exist up to 15 billion in assets third comparisons of normal gamma estimates with other methods 3 thick frontier weighted least squares half normal distributions 3 demonstrate some of their pitfalls

efficient intra household allocations a general characterization and empirical tests the neoclassical theory of demand applies to individuals yet in empirical work it is usually taken as valid for households with many members this paper explores what the theory of individuals implies for households that have more than one member we make minimal assumptions about how the individual members of the household resolve conflicts all we assume is that however decisions are made outcomes are efficient we refer to this as the collective setting we show that in the collective setting household demands must satisfy a symmetry and rank condition on the slutsky matrix we also present some further results on the effects on demands of variables that do not modify preferences but that do affect how decisions are made we apply our theory to a series of surveys of household expenditures from canada the tests of the usual symmetry conditions are rejected for two person households but not for one person households we also show that income pooling is rejected for two person households we then test for our collective setting conditions on the couples data none of the collective setting restrictions are rejected we conclude that the collective setting is a plausible and tractable next step to take in the analysis of household behavior

organization and efficiency in the international insurance industry a cross frontier analysis abstract this paper employs cross frontier analysis an innovative tool based on data envelopment analysis to provide new insight into the relationship between organization and efficiency in international insurance markets we are the first to empirically test the expense preference hypothesis and the efficient structure hypothesis in a large cross country study for this purpose we consider 23 807 firm years for 21 countries from northern america and the european union a dataset not previously analyzed in this context we find evidence for the efficient structure hypothesis in selected market segments but we find no evidence for the expense preference hypothesis our results provide insight into the competitiveness of stock and mutual insurers from different countries at the country level the results can be used to compare different insurance markets our findings are especially interesting for the strategic management of insurance companies as well as for regulators and boards of national insurance associations

the demise of the mutual organizational form an investigation of the life insurance industry we investigate the role of organizational structure in financial services markets by examining the u s life insurance industry traditionally stock and mutual life insurers were equally represented but now the industry is mainly composed of stock firms we find operational efficiency access to capital and tax savings are important determinants for this shift the incentive to demutualize differs by the type of conversion full demutualization is chosen for efficiency and access to capital reasons and partial conversion using a mutual holding company is chosen for tax savings firm operational efficiency improves after conversion we also find the efficiency of the stock organizational form dominates that of the mutual structure during our sample period 1995 to 2004

motives for private income transfers private income transfers are becoming increasingly recognized as a key aspect of the u s economy the majority of private income transfers occur inter vivos i e between living persons but very little is known about this type of transfer behavior this paper tests alternative hypotheses concerning motivation for inter vivos transfers two motives are considered altruism and exchange evidence presented here casts doubt on the altruistic model of transfer behavior observed patterns for inter vivos transfers are more consistent with exchange related motives this finding has important implications for the effects of public transfer programs on the distribution of economic well being

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

how responsive are private transfers to income evidence from a laissez faire economy abstract in recent years there has been burgeoning interest in how private transfers respond to household income or transfer derivatives much of it is fueled by the specter of crowding out the more responsive are private transfers the more likely they could be supplanted by expansions in public transfers weakening or destroying the latter s distributive impact yet there is also an emerging consensus that actual transfer derivatives are trivial at least for the united states suggesting that crowding out might loom larger in the minds of some economists than in the data but perhaps crowding out is a fait accompli in the united states accordingly we focus on the philippines which has a much smaller public sector we also pursue a novel theoretical angle which generates a sharp non linear relationship between private transfer receipts and income in the form of a spline our empirical work applies recently developed estimation techniques that treat the spline s threshold as an unknown parameter and they uncover transfer derivatives much larger than conventional methods reveal notably private transfers patterns are consistent with altruistic preferences effective risk sharing or both in accord with theoretical predictions however strong transfer derivatives prevail only among low income households our findings suggest that attempts to aid the poor could be thwarted by private responses which leak benefits to richer households in the form of lighter burdens of support for less fortunate kin so the problems that operative private transfers create for public redistribution policy first pointed out by becker and barro over 25 years ago do indeed matter empirically

testing the neoclassical model of family labor supply and fertility the mcelroy horney nash bargaining model of family demand behavior relaxes the restriction that nonearned income of husband and wife has the identical effect on family labor supply and commodity demands this restriction of the neoclassical model offamily behavior is tested for the determination of husband and wife labor supply andfertility based on the 1981 socioeconomic survey of thailand the neoclassical restriction is rejected for female labor supply andfertility another unexplored limitation offamily demand studies due to the sample self selection of intact marriages is empirically treated through alternative estimation strategies in this case a more sharply focused theory of marital behavior is needed to identify family demand models

parental altruism and inter vivos transfers theory and evidence this paper uses psid data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism specifically the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one dollar reduction in that child s income results in the parents increasing their transfer to the child by one dollar this restriction on parental and child transfer income derivatives is derived for the standard altruism model augmented to include uncertainty and liquidity constraints these additional elements pin down the timing of inter vivos transfers the method used to estimate income transfer derivatives takes into account unobserved heterogeneity across families in the degree of altruism the findings strongly reject the altruism hypothesis redistributing one dollar from a recipient child to donor parents leads to less than a 13 cent increase in the parents transfer to the child far less than the one dollar increas

the effect of social entitlement programs on private transfers new evidence of crowding out working paper 2010 15 september 2010 abstract this paper exploits a natural policy experiment to directly identify the crowding out effects of public transfers on the incidence and level of private transfers the introduction of a large social security program in taiwan is used to estimate the effect of an exogenous increase in government transfer payments to the elderly on the private transfer behavior of their adult children using an instrumental variables strategy that accounts for the endogeneity of receiving public transfers the empirical results show strong evidence of crowding out on the extensive margin the probability of providing a positive transfer and weaker evidence of crowding out on the intensive margin the amount of the transfer conditional on it being positive jel classification h53 h55 h31 key words private transfers crowding out 1 introduction determining the impact of public transfer programs on private transfer behavior is a key issue from both a research and policy perspective if public transfers largely crowd out private transfers then the welfare impact of social redistributive programs will be smaller than perceived economic theory is ambiguous in its predictions about crowding out the altruism model developed in the seminal papers of barro 1974 and becker 1974 predicts essentially complete crowding out the model focuses on transfers from parents to children but can be applied equally well to transfers from adult children to their elderly parents in the model the child s utility is included in an altruistic parent s utility function which gives the parent an incentive to support the child the core of the altruism model is the prediction of redistribution neutrality which posits that the parents will adjust their transfer behavior in response to changes in the child s income for example an increase in the child s income due to welfare subsidies from the government will lower the amount of parental transfers if ricardian equivalence holds and the government subsidy is financed by a tax on the parents income then the parents will reduce their transfer exactly by the tax amount implying complete crowding out in contrast to the altruism model the exchange model of bernheim et al 1985 and cox 1987 argues that a child s services to the parents such as contacts and visits are at least in part financially motivated as the child expects monetary compensation in this model the amount of transfers could be a positive or negative function of the child s income as the child s income increases the opportunity cost of services increases and thus the amount of expected compensation for the services increases in such a setting the relationship between the child s income and the amount of parental transfers is not clear it could be positive if the parents demand for services is inelastic as they would need to increase transfer payments to the child in order to receive the same level of services if this were the case government subsidies would increase the amount of private transfers received and thus there would be no crowding effect on the other hand if the demand for services is highly elastic then parents demand would fall along with monetary compensation which would lead to crowding out 1 as a result of the ambiguous effect of crowding out predicted by theory a relatively large empirical literature has focused on the estimation of both the sign and magnitude of the crowding out effect of public transfer programs however due to data limitations most empirical studies have not been able to directly measure the crowding out effect of public redistribution programs most studies in this literature have attempted to indirectly measure the impact of such programs on beneficiaries by studying the response of private transfers to changes in the recipient s level of income the results from these papers however are not consistent

public goods hidden income and tax evasion some nonstandard results from the warm glow model abstract a large literature explores crowd out in situations where public goods are jointly provided work in this area typically depicts a tax system where individuals take taxes as given but in some settings such as those in developing economies efforts to evade or avoid taxes may be widespread using the canonical warm glow model this paper considers joint public good provision in a setting where individuals can evade taxes by hiding their income the model s implications change significantly in this setting with hidden income stronger warm glow will lead to greater crowd out not less using research on crowd out and inter family transfers i present suggestive evidence that the model s results may help to reconcile divergent estimates of crowd out in the literature

x efficiency in the us life insurance industry abstract using six years of data 1985 1990 we estimate hybrid translog cost functions for 561 life insurers we examine the resulting residuals to determine the relative efficiency of insurers in the sample we then test the residuals to see if they are related to so called x efficiencies because of internal and external monitoring or to other factors related to rent seeking results show a large degree of persistent inefficiency seems to exist among sample firms the inefficiencies relate to some internal or external monitoring and rent seeking may be occurring

income and outcomes a structural model of intrahousehold allocation there is evidence from several sources that one cannot treat many person households as a single decision maker if this is the case then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household we develop a method of identifying how incomes affect outcomes given conventional family expenditure data the basic assumption we make is that household decision processes lead to efficient outcomes we apply our method to a sample of canadian couples with no children we find that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner depend significantly on their relative incomes and ages and on the level of lifetime wealth

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

is the extended family altruistically linked direct tests using micro data this paper uses panel study of income dynamics data on parents and their adult children to test the standard altruism model this model predicts that within the extended family the distribution of consumption is independent of the distribution of resources the authors findings strongly reject this prediction copyright 1992 by american economic association

testing for expense preference behavior mutual versus stock savings and loans this article investigates expense preference behavior in the savings and loan industry previous studies used an intercept test and in general concluded that managers of mutual s ls exhibit expense preference behavior i derive the necessary and sufficient conditions on cost functions for the intercept test to be valid these restrictions are rejected for the savings and loan industry stock and mutual s ls have different cost structures and both have non cobb douglas production technologies i derive a new more general test for expense preference behavior that does not require the restrictive assumptions of the intercept test the results of this test do not support earlier conclusions of managerial expense preferences

estimating the cost savings and avoided co2 emissions in brazil by implementing energy efficient policies abstract investing more in renewable energy sources and using this in a rational and efficient way is vital for the sustainable growth of world energy efficiency ee will play an increasingly important role in future generations the aim of this work is to estimate how much the pnef national plan for energy efficiency launched by the brazilian government in 2011 will save over the next 5 years by avoiding the construction of additional power plants as well as the amount of the co2 emission the marginal operating cost is computed for medium term planning of the dispatching of power plants in the hydro thermal system using stochastic dynamic dual programming after incorporating stochastic energy efficiencies into the demand for electricity we demonstrate that even for a modest improvement in energy efficiency 1 in the optimistic scenario by comparison the new belo monte hydro electric plant will cost r 26 billion to be repaid over a 30 year period i e r 867 million in 5 years so in brazil ee policies are preferable to building a new power plant