life cycle consumption and hyperbolic discount functions abstract studies of animal and human behavior suggest that discount functions are approximately hyperbolic ainslie picoeconomics 1992 hyperbolic models explain a wide range of empirical anomalies including 1 missing precautionary savings effects 2 incongruence between the elasticity of intertemporal substitution and the inverse of the coefficient of relative risk aversion 3 consumption discontinuities at retirement 4 variation in patience over the life cycle 5 consumer self reports of undersaving 6 disproportionate retirement accumulation in illiquid assets 7 asset specific marginal propensities to consume and 8 declining national savings rates in developed countries hyperbolic models also provide a new framework for analyzing the welfare gains that come from pro saving policies like social security and tax deferred retirement accounts

a comparative study of efficiency in european banking this paper investigates whether there has been an improvement in and convergence of productive efficiency across european banking markets since the creation of the single internal market using efficiency measures derived from dea estimation the determinants of european bank efficiency are evaluated using the tobit regression model approach the established literature on modelling the determinants of bank efficiency is then extended by recognizing the problem of the inherent dependency of dea efficiency scores when used in regression analysis to overcome the dependency problem a bootstrapping technique is applied overall the results suggest that since the eu s single market programme there has been a small improvement in bank efficiency levels although there is little evidence to suggest that these have converged the results also suggest that inference on the determinants of bank efficiency drawn from non bootstrapped regression analysis may be biased and misleading

induced value tests of the referendum voting mechanism abstract an induced value laboratory experiment is conducted testing the incentive compatibility of the referendum voting mechanism for eliciting willingness to pay for public goods although errors were observed at the individual level aggregate results suggest incentive compatibility in both hypothetical and real referenda

the hyperbolic consumption model calibration simulation and empirical evaluation ur preferences for the long run tend to conflict with our short run behavior when planning for the long run we intend to meet our deadlines exercise regularly and eat healthfully but in the short run we have little interest in revising manuscripts jogging on the stairmaster and skipping the chocolate souffleala mode delay of gratification is a nice long term goal but instant gratification is disconcertingly tempting this gap between long run intentions and short run actions is apparent across a wide range of behaviors including saving choices a 1997 survey found that 76 percent of respondents believe they should be saving more for retirement looking only at respondents who believed they were at an age where you should be seriously saving already the survey found that 55 percent reported being behind in their savings and only 6 percent reported being ahead farkas and johnson 1997 the report on the survey concluded t he gaps between people s atti tudes intentions and behavior are troubling and threaten increased insecurity and dissatisfaction for people when they retire americans are simply not doing what logic and their own reasoning suggests they should be doing a 1993 luntz webber merrill lynch survey found similar answers when baby boomers were asked what percentage of your annual household income do you think you should save for retirement and what percentage of your annual

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

the quantity and quality of life and the evolution of world inequality gdp per capita is usually used to proxy for the quality of life of individuals living in different countries welfare is also affected by quantity of life however as represented by longevity this paper incorporates longevity into an overall assessment of the evolution of cross country inequality and shows that it is quantitatively important the absence of reduction in cross country inequality up to the 1990s documented in previous work is in stark contrast to the reduction in inequality after incorporating gains in longevity throughout the post world war ii period health contributed to reduce significantly welfare inequality across countries this paper derives valuation formulas for infra marginal changes in longevity and computes a full growth rate that incorporates the gains in health experienced by 96 countries for the period between 1960 and 2000 incorporating longevity gains changes traditional results countries starting with lower income tended to grow faster than countries starting with higher income we estimate an average yearly growth in full income of 4 1 percent for the poorest 50 percent of countries in 1960 of which 1 7 percentage points are due to health as opposed to a growth of 2 6 percent for the richest 50 percent of countries of which only 0 4 percentage points are due to health additionally we decompose changes in life expectancy into changes attributable to 13 broad groups of causes of death and three age groups we show that mortality from infectious respiratory and digestive diseases congenital perinatal and ill defined conditions mostly concentrated before age 20 and between ages 20 and 50 is responsible for most of the reduction in life expectancy inequality at the same time the recent effect of aids together with reductions in mortality after age 50 due to nervous system senses organs heart and circulatory diseases contributed to increase health inequality across countries

risk self protection and ex ante economic value abstract we develop three propositions about the ex ante value of reduced risk if there is a continuous outcome distribution and if self protection influences outcome probability and severity then 1 unobservable utility terms cannot be eliminated from the ex ante value expressions 2 knowledge of the convexity or the nonconvexity of dose response functions is insufficient to sign changes in these expressions and 3 self protection expenditures need not be a lower bound measure of these expressions therefore many restrictions applied in recent empirical work on the economic value of risk changes are not immediately transferable to settings where endogenous risks prevail

is there one unifying concept of utility an experimental comparison of utility under risk and utility over time the nature of utility is controversial whereas decision theory commonly assumes that utility is context specific applied and empirical decision analysis typically assumes one unifying concept of utility applicable to all decision problems this controversy has hardly been addressed empirically because of the absence of methods to measure utility outside the context of risk we introduce a method to measure utility over time and compare utility under risk and utility over time we distinguish between gains and losses and also measure loss aversion in two experiments we found that utility under risk and utility over time differed and were uncorrelated utility under risk was more curved than utility over time subjects were loss averse both for risk and for time but loss aversion was more pronounced for risk loss aversion over risk and time were uncorrelated this suggests that loss aversion although important in both decision contexts is volatile and subject to framing

benchmarking superannuation funds based on relative performance in this article we assess fund performance using data envelopment analysis dea for each inefficient fund dea provides a set of role model funds whose best practices may be emulated for performance improvement we find that the role models of most inefficient funds consist entirely of funds different from their own type to overcome this situation we suggest a multi step dea procedure the procedure starts by categorizing funds on a hierarchical basis we establish the hierarchy based on the frequency of efficient funds that belong to each fund type thereafter a set of role model funds for each inefficient fund is found by pooling the funds in its own category and the funds that belongs to the categories at the lower levels in the hierarchy and applying dea this procedure is repeated by augmenting the pool with funds at the next higher level and so on until all the sampled funds are included at each step a set of role models is identified an inefficient fund can thus reach the efficient frontie

anomalies in intertemporal choice evidence and an interpretation research on decision making under uncertainly has been strongly influenced by the documentation of numerous expected utility eu anomalies behaviors that violate the expected utility axioms the relative lack of progress on the closely related topic of intertemporal choice is partly due to the absence of an analogous set of discounted utility du anomalies we enumerate a set of du anomalies analogous to the eu anomalies and propose a model that accounts for the anomalies as well as other intertemporal choice phenomena incompatible with du we discuss implications for savings behavior estimation of discount rates and choice framing effects

efficiency of mutual funds and portfolio performance measurement a non parametric approach abstract in finance portfolio performance assessment is an important area of research the two popular indices of performance are the jensen s alpha and the sharpe index however there are a number of shortcomings of the above measures that have been highlighted in the literature we propose a new measure of performance that seeks to address the limitations of the earlier indices the new index is calculated by employing a well known method in operations research called data envelopment analysis we show the benefits of the proposed approach and assess the performance of mutual funds we compare the results with traditional indices of performance an interesting result we obtain is that the mutual funds are all approximately mean variance efficient

do individuals have preferences used in macro finance models an experimental investigation recent financial studies often assume that agents have epstein zin preferences preferences that require agents to care about when uncertainty is resolved under this recursive preference framework the preference for uncertainty resolution is entirely determined by an agent s preferences for risk and intertemporal substitution to test the implications of this model this paper presents an experiment designed to elicit subject preferences on risk time intertemporal substitution and uncertainty resolution results reveal that most subjects prefer early resolution of uncertainty and have relative risk aversion greater than the reciprocal of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution consistent with the predictions by recursive preferences subjects are classified in a finite mixture model by their risk time and intertemporal substitution parameters regression results show that types predicted by the epstein zin model to prefer early resolution choose early resolution with 20 50 higher probabili

are choice experiments incentive compatible a test with quality differentiated beef steaks this study compares hypothetical and nonhypothetical responses to choice experiment questions we test for hypothetical bias in a choice experiment involving beef ribeye steaks with differing quality attributes in general hypothetical responses predicted higher probabilities of purchasing beef steaks than nonhypothetical responses thus hypothetical choices overestimate total willingness to pay for beef steaks however marginal willingness to pay for a change in steak quality is in general not statistically different across hypothetical and actual payment settings

best performing us mutual fund families from 1993 to 2008 evidence from a novel two stage dea model for efficiency decomposition when analyzing relative performance especially at the institutional level the traditional data envelopment analysis dea models do not recognize vastly different and important activities as separate functions and therefore cannot identify which function may be the main source of inefficiency we propose a novel two stage dea model that decomposes the overall efficiency of a decision making unit into two components and demonstrate its applicability by assessing the relative performance of 66 large mutual fund families in the us over the period 1993 2008 by decomposing the overall efficiency into operational management efficiency and portfolio management efficiency components we reveal the best performers the families that deteriorated in performance and those that improved in their performance over the sample period we also make frontier projections for poorly performing mutual fund families and highlight how the portfolio managers have managed their funds relative to the others during financial crisis periods

the economic lives of the poor in what turned out to be a rhetorical master move the 1990 world development report from the world bank defined the extremely poor people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than 1 per day per person measured at the 1985 purchasing power parity ppp exchange rate in 1993 the poverty line was updated to 1 08 per person per day at the 1993 ppp exchange rate which is the line we use in this paper poverty lines have always existed indeed 1 per day was chosen in part because of its proximity to the poverty lines used by many poor countries 1 however the 1 a day poverty line has come to dominate the conversations about poverty to a remarkable extent

a reconsideration of minsky s financial instability hypothesis the worst and longest depressions have tended to occur after periods of prolonged and reasonably stable prosperity this results in part from agents rationally updating their expectations during good times and hence becoming more optimistic about future economic prospects investors then increase their leverage and shift their portfolios towards projects that would previously have been considered too risky so when a downturn does eventually occur the financial crisis and the extent of default become more severe whereas a general appreciation of this syndrome dates back to minsky 1992 jerome levy economics institute wp 74 and even beyond to irving fisher 1933 econometrica 1 337 357 we model it formally in addition endogenous default introduces a pecuniary externality since investors do not factor in the impact of their decision to take risk and default on the borrowing cost we explore the relative advantages of alternative regulations in reducing financial fragility and suggest a novel criterion for improvement of aggregate welfare

a discrete choice model with endogenous attribute attendance abstract this paper develops a discrete choice model in which the decision to consider an attribute in the choice process is modelled endogenously in an application to patients choice of general practitioner it is found that the proposed model outperforms the standard logit model in terms of goodness of fit and produces substantially different estimates of willingness to pay

are choice experiments reliable evidence from the lab this study investigates whether a popular stated preference method the choice experiment ce reliably measures individuals values for a good we address this question using an induced value experiment our results indicate that ces fail to elicit payoff maximizing choices we find little evidence that increasing the salience of the choices or adding monetary incentives increase the proportion of payoff maximizing choices this questions the increasing use of ce to value non market goods for policy making

value functions for infinite period planning cost benefit and risk analysis studies that model tradeoffs between the present and the distant future by means of present value discounting have been criticized for according the future and thus future generations far too little importance this paper presents an alternative means of modeling tradeoffs between different periods that accords the future far more importance than present value discounting and that is no more difficult to apply the paper also presents a means of modeling the preference issue of concern for equity or stability between different periods

using cheap talk as a test of validity in choice experiments abstract in two experiments on the choice of consumer goods the estimated marginal willingness to pay for food is found to be lower in the survey version with cheap talk our test can be seen as a test of hypothetical bias this implies that we cannot reject the hypothesis of a hypothetical bias for marginal wtp in choice experiments

risk aversion and the value of life we show that state non separable preferences a la epstein zin weil ezw provide a tractable and flexible framework to study the economics of health and longevity this utility representation 1 admits a preference for timing of resolution of uncertainty regarding mortality risks 2 links the marginal valuation of survival to the level of survival 3 can preserve homotheticity even for low degrees of intertemporal substitution without generating implausible predictions regarding the value of life and 4 adds needed flexibility to account for the empirical evidence on the value of life we illustrate the implications of ezw preferences for the economic value of observed differences in life expectancy across countries and over time and for the value of life over the life cycle

modelling superannuation fund management function as a two stage process for overall and stage level performance appraisal we assess superannuation fund performance in a multi dimensional framework by conceptualizing its management function as a serially linked two sub process operational management om and portfolio

designing discrete choice experiments do optimal designs come at a price in discrete choice experiments design decisions are crucial for determining data quality and costs while high statistical efficiency designs are desirable they may come at a price if they increase the cognitive burden for respondents we address this problem by designing 44 experiments that systematically vary numbers of attributes and attribute level differences our results for two product categories suggest that respondents systematically are less consistent in answering choice questions as statistical efficiency increases this relationship holds regardless of the number of attributes and is statistically significant even if one accommodates preference heterogeneity implications for practice and future research are discussed

models as usual for unusual risks on the value of catastrophic climate change we study the role of alternative intertemporal preference representations in a model of economic growth stock pollutant and endogenous risk of catastrophic collapse we contrast the traditional discounted utility model which assumes risk neutrality with respect to intertemporal utility with a multiplicative choice model that displays risk aversion in that dimension first we show that both representations of preferences can rationalize the same business as usual economy for a given interest rate and no pollution externality second once we introduce a collapse risk whose hazard rate is a function of the pollution stock multiplicative preferences recommend a much more stringent policy response an illustration in the context of climate change indicates that switching to the multiplicative preference representation has a similar effect in terms of policy recommendations as scaling up the schedule of the hazard rate by a factor of 100

do drunk drivers pay their way a note on optimal penalties for drunk driving this paper uses a simple framework to describe optimal penalties for drunk driving and reviews available data to judge current policies against this standard the analysis suggests that policies should be designed so that the penalties paid by drunk drivers equal the value of the increased risks drunk drivers impose on others current penalties appear to be too lenient implying that current levels of drunk driving are too high

altruism fertility and the value of children health policy evaluation and intergenerational welfare abstract this paper accounts for the value of children and future generations in the evaluation of health policies this is achieved through the incorporation of altruism and fertility in a value of life type of framework we are able to express adults willingness to pay for changes in child mortality and also to incorporate the welfare of future generations in the evaluation of current policies our model clarifies a series of puzzles from the literature on the value of life and on intergenerational welfare comparisons we show that by incorporating altruism and fertility into the analysis of the recent u s experience the estimated welfare gain of a young adult from reductions in mortality easily doubles

technology growth and expenditure growth in health care in the united states health care technology has contributed to rising survival rates yet health care spending relative to gdp has also grown more rapidly than in any other country we develop a model of patient demand and supplier behavior to explain these parallel trends in technology growth and cost growth we show that health care productivity depends on the heterogeneity of treatment effects across patients the shape of the health production function and the cost structure of procedures such as mris with high fixed costs and low marginal costs the model implies a typology of medical technology productivity i highly cost effective home run innovations with little chance of overuse such as anti retroviral therapy for hiv ii treatments highly effective for some but not for all e g stents and iii gray area treatments with uncertain clinical value such as icu days among chronically ill patients not surprisingly countries adopting category i and effective category ii treatments gain the greatest health improvements while countries adopting ineffective category ii and category iii treatments experience the most rapid cost growth ultimately economic and political resistance in the u s to ever rising tax rates will slow cost growth with uncertain effects on technology growth

the value of life and the rise in health spending over the past half century americans spent a rising share of total economic resources on health and enjoyed substantially longer lives as a result debate on health policy often focuses on limiting the growth of health spending we investigate an issue central to this debate is the growth of health spending a rational response to changing economic conditions notably the growth of income per person we develop a model based on standard economic assumptions and argue that this is indeed the case standard preferences of the kind used widely in economics to study consumption asset pricing and labor supply imply that health spending is a superior good with an income elasticity well above one as people get richer and consumption rises the marginal utility of consumption falls rapidly spending on health to extend life allows individuals to purchase additional periods of utility the marginal utility of life extension does not decline as a result the optimal composition of total spending shifts toward health and the health share grows along with income in projections based on the quantitative analysis of our model the optimal health share of spending seems likely to exceed 30 percent by the middle of the century

how much would you pay to resolve long run risk abstract though risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution have been the subjects of careful scrutiny the long run risks literature as well as the broader literature using recursive utility to address asset pricing puzzles has ignored the full implications of their parameter specifications recursive utility implies that the temporal resolution of risk matters and a quantitative assessment thereof should be part of the calibration process this paper gives a sense of the magnitudes of implied timing premia its objective is to inject temporal resolution of risk into the discussion of the quantitative properties of long run risks and related models jel d81 g11 g12

wealth health and health services in rural rajasthan what are the determinants of health and of well being income and wealth are clearly part of the story but does access to health care have a large independent effect as the advocates of more investment in health care such as the world health organization s commission on macroeconomics and health commission on macroeconomics and health 2001 have argued this paper reports on a recent survey in a poor rural area of the state of rajasthan in india intended to shed some light on this issue where there was an attempt to use a set of interlocking surveys to collect data on health and economic status as well as the public and private provision of health care

longevity genes and efforts an optimal taxation approach to prevention this paper applies the analytical tools of optimal taxation theory to the design of the optimal subsidy on preventive behaviours in an economy where longevity varies across agents and depends on preventive expenditures and on longevity genes public intervention can be here justified on three grounds corrections for misperceptions of the survival process and for externalities related to individual preventive behaviour and redistribution across both earnings and genetic dimensions the optimal subsidy on preventive expenditures is shown to depend on the combined impacts of misperception externalities and self selection it is generally optimal to subsidize preventive efforts to an extent depending on the degree of individual myopia on how productivity and genes are correlated and on the complementarity of genes and preventive efforts in the survival function

uncertain lifetime and intertemporal choice risk aversion as a rationale for time discounting this article makes explicit the links between preferences over lotteries on length of life and intertemporal choice it shows that the approach used by traditional life cycle models to account for uncertain survival corresponds to a strong assumption of risk neutrality with respect to length of life relaxing such an assumption leads us to develop a more general formulation of lifetime utility in which time discounting is directly related to preferences over length of life exponential and hyperbolic discounting are found to result in a first approximation from constant and hyperbolic risk aversion with respect to length of life

evaluating the performance of us credit unions credit unions are small cooperative not for profit institutions which distinguishes them from other financial intermediaries in this study we conduct a performance evaluation of credit unions the criteria respect the unique organizational and institutional features of credit unions without losing sight of the fact that they must compete with other financial intermediaries we use nonparametric nonstochastic techniques to measure performance and we use parametric stochastic techniques to attribute performance variation to features of credit unions and their operating environment our sample consists of two thirds of all active credit unions in 1990