are household portfolios efficient an analysis conditional on housing in this paper we argue that standard tests of portfolio efficiency are biased towards rejection because they neglect the existence of illiquid wealth in the case of household portfolios the most important illiquid asset is housing if housing stock adjustments are costly and therefore infrequent we show how the dynamic optimization problem produces optimal portfolios in periods of no adjustment that are affected by housing price risk through a hedge term when the housing stock is not adjusted we argue that tests for portfolio efficiency of financial asset must then be run conditionally upon housing wealth in our application we use italian household portfolio data from shiw 1998 and time series data on financial asset and housing stock returns to assess whether actual portfolios are efficient we first consider purely financial portfolios and portfolios that also treat the housing stock as another asset we then consider the consequences of treating the housing stock as given and test for efficiency in this framework our empirical results support the view that the presence of illiquid wealth can explain portfolio choice by home owners

adverse selection and moral hazard with risk neutral agents abstract this paper surveys some recent developments of the literature on adverse selection and moral hazard in agency problems it is concerned with the case where both aspects coexist and both agents are income risk neutral it shows that in most cases the moral hazard aspect does not entail welfare losses compared to the pure adverse selection case it moreover analyses different ways using a single contract or a family of contracts of deriving the optimal contracts from the optimal pure adverse selection solution

the distribution of wealth measurement and models abstract analysts debating the consequences of a policy change for the wealth distribution may come to different conclusions because of different views about how the distribution should be defined and measured or about the processes determining the distribution the aim of this survey is to provide an analytical framework within which such conflicts may be assessed the first part of the paper discusses conceptual issues in the definition of wealth and compares methods of deriving estimates of wealth distribution the second and larger part of the paper surveys lifecycle and intergenerational models of the distribution of wealth including a discussion of the role played by inheritance the presentation is largely theoretical indeed one of the paper s conclusions is that empirical modelling of the wealth distribution is under developed at least for the purposes of addressing many topical policy issues

an r d race with knowledge accumulation i develop a model of an r d race with knowledge accumulation my model does not inherit the memorylessness property of the exponential distribution that troubles existing models of r d races hence firms knowledge stocks are no longer irrelevant to their behavior during the r d race and knowledge accumulation has strategic implications in this more general setting i obtain results that stand in marked contrast to the previous literature in particular under some conditions the firm that is behind in the race engages in catch up behavior this pattern of strategic interactions action reaction is consistent with empirical research copyright 2003 by the rand corporation

another look at portfolio optimization under tracking error constraints research has shown that adding constraints to total portfolio volatility can substantially improve the performance of managed portfolios although other work has considered constant tracking error volatility frontiers in this study tracking error was allowed to vary but the risk aversion was fixed the resulting optimal portfolios have several desirable properties

survey measures of risk aversion and prudence this paper utilizes a thought experiment conducted by the bank of italy to estimate absolute and relative risk aversion along with absolute and relative prudence for a broad cross section of italian households upper and lower bounds are calculated for each parameter and comparisons are made across socio demographic groups evidence is found of decreasing absolute risk aversion decreasing absolute prudence increasing relative risk aversion and increasing relative prudence

taxes and transaction costs in asset market equilibrium abstract this paper examines the effects of capital taxation in an imperfect capital market in which acquiring risky assets incurs costs individual portfolio choice has two distinct aspects the extensive choice of which assets to hold in the portfolio and the intensive choice of what fraction of wealth to invest in each asset held the traditional assumption of zero transaction costs obscures the extensive choice this paper shows that if trading in assets is costly capital taxes have extensive effects as well as the intensive effects previously studied

wealth and portfolio composition theory and evidence we examine a survey of 6010 u s households and estimate a model for household portfolio allocation we extend the conventional portfolio choice model in order to capture the observed incompleteness of household portfolios we show that the empirical specification of the joint discrete and continuous choice that characterizes household portfolio behavior is a switching regressions model with endogenous switching we go on to examine the impact of taxes on portfolio composition using detailed survey data to calculate precisely the marginal tax rate facing each household finally we estimate wealth elasticities of demand for a range of assets and liabilities

how to improve the management of renewable resources the case of canada s northern cod fishery the paper examines howan easy to apply optimal feedback rule can be used to solve for optimal levels of exploitation of a renewable resource using data from canada s northern cod fishery the optimal feedback rule is used to derive optimal levels of exploitation for the years 1962 91 under different discount rates alternative model specifications and parameter assumptions the optimal feedback rule indicates that over much of the period the fishery was economically overexploited and given the stock development that actually took place a harvesting moratorium should have been instituted three years earlier than when it was introduced the results show how the use of a simple and flexible optimal rule by managers of renewable resources can generate substantial gains many of the earth s environmental problems arise from the exploitation of renewable resources the major causes of overexploitation include attenuated property rights misguided policies poverty and simply a lack of information or understanding about the stocks and flows of resources and the timing and magnitude of environmental shocks 1 where the level of exploitation can be controlled one way to help improve the management of renewable resources is to develop optimal feedback rules as optimal feedback rules are a function of the resource stock they can provide managers with an adaptive method of regulating resource use to achieve defined objectives and to evaluate alternative harvesting strategies

minimum information management in fisheries this paper deals with problems of optimal management of common property fisheries it advances the proposition that many fisheries management schemes which are theoretically capable of generating efficiency are actually not practicable owing to their huge informational requirements this applies for instance to management by means of corrective taxes subsidies the paper proceeds to show that there exists under fairly unrestrictive conditions market based management systems that require minimal information for their operation but lead nevertheless to efficiency in common property fisheries one such system is the individual transferable share quota system

the impact of the demographic transition on capital formation the population of the united states is aging we review a variety of the implications this has for u s national saving rates and discuss the policy issues that they raise after reviewing what different models would predict for household saving over the next several decades we consider how the demographic transition may also affect national saving through changes in government behavior ways in which the composition of household saving might change as individuals age are also analyzed along with the implications of changes in government fiscal policy for asset composition excerpt

modeling the dynamics of regulated resource systems a fishery example abstract in this paper a discrete time model of regulated fisheries is developed this class of models is interesting because most modern real world fisheries are under some kind of regulation the regulatory part of the fishery in this paper is partitioned into two stages in the first stage which is the main focus total allowable catch quotas tacs based on biological and economic considerations are determined in a way that guarantees the safety of the stock from a conservation viewpoint in addition we assume that a target biomass level is set by the management authorities to be achieved over a given time horizon to satisfy an economic objective since we assume here that the main goal is to rebuild the stock we propose a gradual approach to the target biomass level via a simple recursive rule

stockholding behavior of u s households evidence from the 1983 1989 survey of consumer finances most households persistently invest in riskless assets but not stocks and may do so because they perceive information required for market participation to be costly relative to expected benefits in a consumption capital asset pricing model ccapm increased risk aversion income risk and lower resources reduce the information expense sufficient to deter stockholding bivariate probit analysis using the 1983 1989 survey of consumer finances shows that households with lower risk aversion higher education and greater wealth who were nonstockholders in 1983 had an increased conditional probability of entering by 1989 whereas 1983 stockholders with lower resources more limited education and greater risk aversion were more likely to be nonstockholders by 1989

a model of the evolution of duopoly does the asymmetry between firms tend to increase or decrease this paper is an attempt to identify some of the factors that affect the evolution of market structure in a model of dynamic competition between two firms the stochastic evolution of the state of competition depends on the respective effort rates of the firms the question is whether the current leader works harder than the laggard does the gap between firms tend to increase or decrease we show that several effects are at work the state tends to evolve in the direction where joint payoffs are greater since joint payoffs are related to joint product market profits less joint effort costs there are two classes of effect the joint profit effect and various joint cost effects the latter result in part from the pattern of profits and in part from endpoint effects that give relief from efforts asymptotic expansions illuminate these influences moreover we show by numerical simulation that there is another kind of joint cost effect the pattern of joint effort costs can influence the pattern of evolution of market structure and the evolution of the pattern of market structure can influence the pattern of efforts in a mutually self reinforcing manner in particular there may be equilibria in which this last effect means that the laggard works harder than the leader even though all the other effects work in favour of the leader

rising longevity education savings and growth this paper examines the impact of declines in adult mortality on growth in an overlapping generations model with public education and imperfect annuity markets a decline in mortality affects growth through three channels first it raises the saving rate and thereby increases the rate of physical capital accumulation second it reduces accidental bequests lowers investment and thereby lowers the rate of physical capital accumulation third it may lead the median voter to increase the tax rate for public education initially but lower the tax rate in a later stage starting from a high mortality rate as found in many third world populations the net effect of a decline in mortality is to raise the growth rate however starting from a low mortality rate such as is found in most industrial populations the net effect of a further decline in mortality is to reduce the growth rate the findings appear consistent with recent empirical evidence

an empirical test of the asymmetric models on innovative activity who invests more into r d the incumbent or the challenger the theoretical discussion concerning the question whether the incumbent or the potential entrant invests more into r d has attracted considerable interest this paper reports the results of an empirical study on this question using data of about 3500 german firms over the years 1992 to 1995 the survey explicitly asks the firms for their motives to undertake innovative activity it is thus possible to take account of intended not just completed market entry it turns out that the challenger invests more into r d in order to enter a new market than the incumbent thus the patent racing model by reinganum and others seems to characterize innovative activity more accurately than the competing auction model of gilbert and newbery we use a heteroscedastic tobit as well as a tobit model with selectivity in order to deal with the econometric problems of double censoring

seasonal harvest patterns in multispecies fisheries fishers face multidimensional decisions when to fish what species to target and how much gear to deploy most bioeconomic models assume single species fisheries with perfectly elastic demand and focus on inter seasonal dynamics in real world fisheries vessels hold quotas for multiple species with heterogeneous biological and or market conditions that vary intra seasonally we analyze within season behavior in multispecies fisheries with individual fishing quotas accounting for stock aggregations capacity constraints and downward sloping demand numerical results demonstrate variation in harvest patterns we specifically find 1 harvests for species with downward sloping demand tend to spread out 2 spreading harvest of a high value species can cause lower value species to be harvested earlier in the season and 3 harvest can be unresponsive or even respond negatively to biological aggregation when fishers balance incentives in multispecies settings we test these using panel data from the norwegian multispecies groundfish fishery and find evidence for all three we extend the numerical model to account for transitions to management with individual fishing quotas in multispecies fisheries we show that under some circumstances fishing seasons could contract or spread out

optimal feedback controls comparative evaluation of the cod fisheries in denmark iceland and norway the economic efficiencies of the danish icelandic and norwegian cod fisheries are examined for this purpose nonlinear aggregate models of these fisheries are constructed comparing the calculated optimal harvest and biomass quantities with the actual fisheries provides a measure of the degree of efficiency in these fisheries the comparisons confirm that the cod harvesting policies of these countries have been hugely inefficient in the past it appears that inefficiency has been increasing over the last three to four decades even after tac regulations replaced open access indicating that the management policies adopted by all three countries have failed to cure overfishing the primary purpose of this article is to compare the relative efficiency of past fish harvesting strategies in iceland norway and denmark by the term harvesting policy we mean the harvesting volume each year so efficiency here merely refers to appropriateness of the annual harvesting volumes it does not in particular refer to the relative efficiency of the fishing industries in the three countries we know that maximizing net revenue has not been an objective in any of these fisheries experience shows that the management regimes that were in place for most of the period were highly inefficient and should be expected to produce poor economic results the mere fact that these stocks feature biomass levels far below the maximum sustainable yield level strongly suggests inefficient policies iceland norway and denmark are all major fishing nations harvesting a number of fish species we have chosen to concentrate on cod fishing as this is the single most important fishragnar arnason is professor faculty of economics and business

a perpetual race to stay ahead this paper presents a model of dynamic competition between two firms that repeatedly engage in an innovative activity the state of competition measured by the difference between the number of innovations introduced by the firms evolves stochastically according to their effort level the structure of markov perfect equilibria is identified it is generally not true that competition is fiercest when firms are closest rather firms invest under two distinct circumstances while sufficiently ahead to outstrip their rival and secure a durable leadership while behind to regain leadership and prevent the situation from worsening to the point where their rival outstrips them industry such a market structure cannot be adequately modelled by a repeated game since history obviously affects market opportunities more precisely previous outcomes determine the range of available actions and pay offs economists have thus resorted to the study of races to gain insights into the strategic issues raised by such competition with the notable exceptions of aoki 1991 harris 1991 and budd harris and vickers 1993 most of the literature has analysed formal races displaying exogenous finishing lines or deadlines as well as final prizes and rewards and the corresponding results rely on backward induction however such assumptions do not seem to capture accurately the essential features of many markets often the rivalry only ends if at all when one of the competitors withdraws so that the deadline should be endogenized moreover benefits and losses are continuously collected additionally the emerging empirical literature on races stresses the inadequacy of standard models and the need to model r d as a race with multiple prizes in the words of cockburn and henderson 1994 our finding that the modern game theoretic literature is of only limited usefulness as an empirical guide points to the need to model r d as a race with multiple prizes the model analysed in this paper is an attempt to offer an adequate framework for this type of dynamic competition the stochastic evolution of the state of competition between two firms depends on their respective effort levels the state of competition is measured by the

the poor are twice cursed wealth inequality and inefficient credit market abstract this paper investigates the role of unobservable wealth differences on credit market equilibrium given there is also asymmetric information concerning effort preferences and choices in equilibrium poor but able entrepreneurs may subsidise the rich and incompetent or be excluded as a result investment may exceed or fall short of the optimal level low inequality may deliver conditions for perfect screening and an efficient level of investment the equilibrium with cross subsidisation is consistent with otherwise puzzling empirical observations

preemption in r d races abstract fudenberg gilbert stiglitz and tirole 1983 consider a patent race in which each firm s instantaneous probability of discovering a patentable invention is an increasing function of its cumulative expenditure on rd in particular we show that for intermediate values of it is possible for the follower to spoil the race by forcing the leader to drop out

changing patterns of wealth distribution evidence from ghana a largely unexplored feature of structural transformation is the change in the composition of an economy s asset holdings in most poor economies assets are concentrated in land in rich economies

an econometric analysis of choice of mortgage design in the united kingdom the research seks to better understand the choice of mortgage design by households in the united kingdom family expenditures survey data is used to test the various hypotheses on the determinants of the choice between an endowment and a repayment mortgage a bivariate probit model with sample selection is estimated to detect any likely selectivity bias arising out of tenure choice the theoretical modelling reflects the behaviour of liquidity constrained households comparing comparative periodic mortgage costs and households concerned with the oppurtunity cost of equity in a property actual choices appear to reflect the impact of nominal interest rates income and cash flow considerations there is little direct evidence that the choice of mortgage repayment vehicle is motivated by portfolio design there is some tentative evidence of supply side pressure on endowment mortgage take up

patents imitation and licensing in an asymmetric dynamic r d race abstract rd some may have an advantage in early stages of the r d process while others may have advantages in other stages of the process this paper uses a two firm asymmetric ability multistage r d race model to analyze the effect of patents imitations and licensing arrangements on the speed of innovation firm value and consumers surplus by using numerical analyses to study the mpe of the r d race the paper demonstrates the circumstances under which a weak patent protection regime that facilitates free imitation of any intermediate technology may yield a higher consumers surplus and total surplus than a regime that awards a patent for the final innovation the advantage of imitation may hold even when we allow for voluntary licensing of intermediate technologies

public saving and policy coordination in aging economies in the coming decades the share of people of working age will fall significantly in most developed countries according to optimal taxation theory public debts should be reduced before the baby boom generation retires i find that if debts are instead maintained at current levels welfare may be reduced substantially in countries with a large public sector and or a large demographic change since population aging will be less dramatic in the united states than in europe and japan capital will move from europe and japan to the united states these capital movements will facilitate the us demographic transition but aggravate the transition in most european countries

mortality decline and long run economic growth this paper examines the impacts of mortality decline on long run growth in a dynastic family two sector growth model with social security a rise in longevity has direct effects on fertility human capital investment and growth as well as indirect effects through increasing unfunded social security contributions both the direct and indirect effects depend on the relative strength of the tastes for the number and welfare of children and may have different signs the net effects of rising longevity on fertility tend to be negative but positive on human capital investment and growth c 2001 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

saving accounts versus stocks and bonds in household portfolio allocation we study the structure of household portfolios of financial wealth by analyzing both the determinants of total financial wealth and the choice between risky stocks and bonds and riskfree assets saving accounts the econometric specification is a generalized trivariate tobit model estimated on a cross section of 3 077 households in the netherlands in 1988 we account for endogeneity of financial wealth and for selectivity due to nonreporting results show that the level of financial wealth and the marginal tax rate are major determinants of the allocation between riskfree and risky assets

building risk into the mitigation adaptation decisions simulated by integrated assessment models this paper proposes an operationally simple and easily generalizable methodology to incorporate climate change damage uncertainty into integrated assessment models iams first uncertainty is transformed into a risk measure by extracting damage distribution means and variances from an ensemble of socio economic and climate change scenarios then a risk premium is computed under different degrees of risk aversion quantifying what society would be willing to pay to insure against the uncertainty of the damages our estimates show that the premium for the risk is a potentially significant addition to the standard average damage but highly sensitive to the attitudes toward risk in the last research phase the risk premium is incorporated into the climate change damage function of a widely used iam which shows consequently a substantial increase in both mitigation and adaptation efforts reflecting a more precautionary attitude by the social planner interestingly adaptation is stimulated more than mitigation in the first half of this century while the situation reverses afterwards

personal taxation pension wealth and portfolio composition this paper emphasizes the roles played by personal taxation and pension wealth in portfolio choice and composition a theoretical discussion of the impacts of taxation and participation in social security and private pension systems on individual wealth allocation is followed by empirical evidence based on u s cross section data both effects prove to be significant anticipated social security and private pension benefits exert a measurable influence on household portfolio allocation their omission from an asset demand model may lead to a misinterpretation of the impact of taxation on portfolio composition

the redistributive design of social security systems countries with low intragenerational redistribution in social security systems bismarckian are associated with larger public pension expenditures a smaller fraction of private pension and lower income inequality than countries with more redistributive social security beveridgean this article introduces a bidimensional voting model to account for these features agents different in age income and in their ability to invest in the capital market vote on the degree of redistribution of the social security system and on the size of the transfer in an economy with three income groups a small beveridgean system is supported by low income agents who gain from its redistributive feature and high income individuals who seek to minimise their tax contribution and to invest in a private scheme middle income individuals instead favour a large bismarckian system

is expected utility theory applicable a revealed preference test we proffer a method to assess the adequacy of expected utility theory eut in empirical studies involving discrete and continuous choices the method calibrates a utility function to revealed choices and rejects eut for absurd degrees of implied concavity over the wealth at risk we find eut rejections in cases where risk averse choices are made between gambles with similar stakes regardless of their absolute sizes eut is shown to be applicable only when expected payoffs of gambles are similar or when more than half of wealth is at risk we illustrate our method with an application to agricultural production

dividend taxes and international portfolio choice this paper investigates how dividend taxes influence portfolio choices using the response to the distinctive treatment of a subset of foreign dividends in the jobs and growth tax relief reconciliation act jgtrra of 2003 an open economy after tax capital asset pricing model is used to derive the hypothesis that jgtrra should lead to a portfolio reallocation by us investors towards equities in tax favored countries a difference in difference analysis that compares us equity holdings in affected and unaffected countries finds a substantial portfolio reallocation towards the former this effect cannot be explained by several potential alternative hypotheses including differential changes to the preferences of american investors differential changes in investment opportunities differential time trends in investment changed tax evasion behavior or changes in stock prices associated or contemporaneous with jgtrra

transaction costs and the pricing of assets the existence of transaction costs explains why investors do not fully diversify their portfolios this paper examines the implications of such limited diversification oi equilibrium asset prices in the framework of the capital asset pricing model in the pricing equation obtained here an asset s risk premium depends on a weighted average of its covariance with the market and its own variance the absence of transaction costs in the sharpe lintner capital asset pricing model capm is often claimed to be only a minor idealization which hardly affects the substantive implications of the model this paper aims to demonstrate that this is not the case incorporating transaction costs into the capm leads to a major reformulation of its basic asset pricing equation in contrast with the capm formula

marginal taxes and the asset portfolios of swedish households this paper focuses on the effects of marginal tax rates wealth income and a set of socioeconomic and demographic variables on the portfolio composition of households using detailed micro data on 2 000 swedish households in particular efforts are made to disentangle the effects of marginal tax rates on the portfolio behavior of households some econometric problems involved when estimating asset demand equations in the presence of incomplete portfolios are briefly discussed a final section examines the overall effect of marginal tax rates on asset demands by applying estimated discrete and continuous portfolio equations to compute different tax elasticities

dropout behavior in r d races with learning we examine a game theoretic model of a two firm r d race in which expenditures on r d and the concomitant increase in experience learning enable thefirms to increase their probability of discovering an invention the learning process is stochastic it generates a unique subgame perfect equilibrium for identicalfirms with the characteristic that the leader never drops out but the follower drops out if the leader gains a significant lead the leader can find it optimal to drop out if the firms value the invention differently or have different r d efficiencies thus our analysis generates results between vigorous competition and natural monopoly central to schumpeter s 1934 vision of entrepreneurship are the extraordinary profits associated with innovation the lure of these profits fuels the fires of creative destruction as innovators replace declining firms this article analyzes the competition for the profits obtained by bringing an innovation to fruition and receiving the associated patent we restrict attention to the subclass of innovations known as inventions innovations that are the product of a firm s research and development in particular we are concerned with the conditions that cause a firm after having invested in r d to drop out of the competitive race situations in which the leading firm drops out are of even greater interest competition in r d is often modelled as a race in which the winner receives a patent and reaps most or all of the benefits of the invention as exemplified by kamien and schwartz 1972 the early theoretical literature tended to be based on decision theoretic models the firm seeks an optimal rate of expenditure on r d determined in part by the expected value of the invention the extent of the first mover advantage the economies or diseconomies of scale in r d and the perceived intensity of rivalry it is not anticipated that the firm s decisions will affect the r d efforts of the perhaps unknown rivals kamien and schwartz 1982 p 124 show that the firm does no research if rivalry is sufficiently intense because their model is static however it is never the case that a firm enters the race and then drops out

tax arbitrage and labor supply we examine how tax avoidance in the form of trade in well functioning asset markets affects the basic labor supply model we show that tax arbitrage has dramatic implications for positive normative and econometric analysis of how taxes affect work incentives

cointegration and unit roots this paper provides an updated survey of a burgeoning literature on testing estimation and model specification in the presence of integrated variables integrated variables are a specific class of non stationary variables which seem to characterise faithfully the properties of many macroeconomic time series the analysis of cointegration develops out of the existence of unit roots and offers a generic route to test the validity of the equilibrium predictions of economic theories special emphasis is put on the empirical researcher s point of view

economic and social security in the twenty first century with attention to europe a partly heuristic attempt at exploring long run policies aimed at a second best compromise between ex ante risk sharing efficiency and ex post productive efficiency wage subsidies for low skilled workers financed by taxes on high wages are advocated together with improved risk sharing between capital and labour between generations and between the countries belonging to emu the scope of the advocated policies is limited by considerations of moral hazard time consistency and fiscal competition also estimates of some key economic parameters remain very imprecise several avenues of further research are identified

unfair credit allocations this article investigates the impact of credit allocation on heterogeneous wealth entrepreneurs we show that with decreasing risk aversion and unobservable wealth poorer borrowers exert more effort as a consequence of endogenous adverse selection they are either excluded from the market or necessarily subsidize richer borrowers in a pooling equilibrium resulting in a paradoxical and inequitable redistribution alternatively a less likely separating equilibrium may occur in which poor types bear the entire weight of separation in the form of excess risk taking

what fisher knew about his relation we sometimes forget abstract expected consumption growth increases the real interest rate as one tries to smooth consumption over time we demonstrate that placing it in the fisher relation 1 is consistent with the euler equation governing the purchase of nominal bonds 2 explains observed procyclicality of the real interest rate 3 is supported empirically and 4 provides an alternative method for estimating the consumer s degree of relative risk aversion

gender inequalities in ownership and control of land in africa myth and reality lack of clarity behind measurement and interpretation of statistics on gender and land leads to an inability to clearly articulate a policy response to the potential inequalities faced by women and men this article sets out to explore conceptually and empirically the levels and relative inequalities in land rights between women and men in african countries the first section of the article engages in a conceptual discussion of how to measure gendered land outcomes what ownership and control mean in different contexts and why attention to these factors is important for the development of gender and land statistics the second section of the article systematically reviews existing evidence from microlevel large sample studies to summarize recent trends in land access ownership and control by sex the third section presents new statistics from a variety of nationally representative and large scale unpublished data on gender and land in africa results provide not only a nuanced understanding of the importance of measuring land indicators for gendered development in africa and globally but also new statistics on a variety of land outcomes to aid stakeholders in the discussion of gender land inequalities

a dynamic small open economy model with involuntary unemployment it is well known that real business cycle small open economy soe models rely on greenwood hercowitz and huffman 1988 preferences to match the countercyclical trade balance observed in open economies as well as other second moments while standard preferences a la king plosser and rebelo 1988 are commonly labelled ineffective owing to their inability to yield the countercyclical trade balance in this paper i show that an soe model with standard preferences and involuntary unemployment with efficient risk sharing can obtain a countercyclical trade balance and match main empirical regularities in small open economies il est bien connu que les modeles de cycles d affaires reels dans une petite economie ouverte peo comptent sur des preferences a la greenwood hercowitz et huffman 1988 pour etre compatibles avec la balance commerciale contre cyclique observee dans les economies ouvertes ainsi que sur d autres second moments alors que les preferences standards a la king plosser et rebelo 1988 sont considerees comme ineffectives a cause de leur inhabilitea engendrer la balance commerciale contre cyclique dans ce texte l auteur montre qu un modele de peo avec preferences standards et chomage involontaire et partage efficient du risque peut engendrer une balance commerciale contre cyclique et s arrimer aux principales regularites observees dans les petites economies ouvertes

adverse selection and entrepreneurship in a model of development this paper presents a theory in which talented entrepreneurs are identified as the key agents driving the process of development and modernisation entrepreneurial skills are private information which prevents full risk sharing development into a modern industrial economy might fail to take place since potentially talented entrepreneurs may refrain from taking on the entrepreneurial risks as a way to avoid income shocks an interesting feature of the model is the fact that the informational asymmetries are endogenous to the process of development as they are related to the heterogeneity in entrepreneurial skills required in the manufacturing activities

a stochastic competitive r d race where winner takes all the paper considers a race among multiple firms that compete over the development of a product the first firm to complete the development gains a reward whereas the other firms gain nothing each firm decides how much to invest in developing the product and the time it completes the development is a random variable that depends on the investment level the paper provides a method for explicitly computing a unique nash equilibrium parametrically in the interest rate for a given interest rate the nash equilibrium is determined in time that is linear in the number of firms the structure of the solution yields insights about the behavior of the participants furthermore an explicit expression for a unique globally optimal solution is obtained and compared to the unique nash equilibrium

endogenous fiscal policy and capital market transmissions in the presence of demographic shocks abstract previous analyses of population aging mainly focused on the social security implications of the aging trend this paper addresses aging in an open economy framework with two regions that have politically responsive fiscal policy regarding education finance demographic shocks start an economic growth process but results are sensitive to a critical parameter in the model that indicates return to education spending low values of this parameter are associated with less favorable economic outcomes hence a policy implication emerges that enhancing the education system might pay off in terms of easing the negative growth and welfare consequences of expected demographic shocks

harvesting in a fishery with stochastic growth and a mean reverting price we analyze a continuous nonlinear bioeconomic model to demonstrate how stochasticity in the growth of fish stocks affects the optimal exploitation policy when prices are stochastic mean reverting and possibly harvest dependent optimal exploitation has nonlinear responses to the price signal and should be conservative at low levels of biological stochasticity and aggressive at high levels price stochasticity induces conservative exploitation with little or no biological uncertainty but has no strong effect when the biological uncertainty is larger we further observe that resource exploitation should be conservative when the price reverts slowly to the mean simulations show that in the long run both the stock level and the exploitation rate are lower than in the deterministic solution with a harvest dependent price the long run price is higher in the stochastic system the price mean reversion rate has no influence on the long run solutions

the portfolio composition of asset holdings in the united kingdom an extensive literature has developed on theoretical aspects of portfolio selection one basic model which often serves as a convenient benchmark assumes that individuals choose their portfolio to maximise expected utility in a world of perfect information perfect capital markets and no taxes or transaction costs if these individuals exhibit constant relative risk aversion the optimal asset combination will be one in which the proportion of wealth invested in each type of asset is independent of total wealth the asset proportions are also independent of age if the analysis is extended to a lifecycle framework with an additively separable intertemporal utility function once the stringent preconditions of this benchmark model are relaxed it becomes progressively more difficult to derive any firm predictions regarding the structure of asset portfolios the recognition of such factors as transaction costs indivisibilities capital market imperfections and the vagaries of tax systems as well as the possibility that relative risk aversion may not be constant makes it unlikely that asset proportions will show stability across wealth and age groups but portfolio theory is generally ambiguous about how the pattern of asset holdings is affected 2 it follows that the further analysis of portfolio behaviour needs to be primarily empirically orientated unfortunately data on the asset holdings of individuals or households are notoriously poor in comparison with other important economic variables information is available from sample surveys but there are usually problems with the limited asset coverage suspect valuations and biases arising from the non randomness of response rates furthermore the sample sizes are generally low against these deficiencies has to be set the fact that the surveys contain a range of other economic variables and demographic characteristics whose relationship with asset holdings can be investigated projector and weiss i966 report asset shares for a sample of 2 557 households in the united states and these data have been subsequently used by feldstein i976 to examine the impact of the tax structures on asset holdings using another source uhler and cragg i97i present results on portfolio composition for 965 households focusing in particular on the holdings of money balances exploiting yet

dynamic competition in technological investments an empirical examination of the lcd panel industry abstract when are technological laggards more likely to try to catch up with leaders we offer empirical evidence on firm level data of plant investments in the tft lcd panel industry where technological competition has been intense and dynamic we find that the followers level of technology has a non monotonic effect on technology improving investments with intermediate followers the most apt to invest in catch ups this result is a puzzle given the existing theory on technology race we also find that followers catch up investments increase with the capacity of the leader that employs the state of the art technology these results are robust to variations in specification and alternative accounts of effects we discuss our findings and contributions in light of the technology race literature

dynamic r d competition the authors study a simple two stage stochastic patent race involving two firms they examine the behavior of the participants as they gain the lead or fall behind in the race the authors find that the leader engages in rd 2 a policy of issuing patents for intermediate research results and 3 the effects of research joint ventures whereby the firms coordinate their initial research efforts and share their results copyright 1987 by royal economic society

efficiency risk aversion and portfolio insurance an analysis of financial asset portfolios held by investors in the united kingdom using data for the united kingdom the author shows that investors in six different wealth ranges hold mean variance efficient portfolios of financial assets this result permits him to estimate coefficients of relative risk aversion for investors in each wealth range the author finds that these coefficients are much higher than most previous studies have found this implies that investors 1 are unwilling to hold risky assets unless they are compensated with a sufficiently high risk premium and 2 are willing to pay for portfolio insurance the general nonavailability of portfolio insurance in the united kingdom appears to indicate a supply side rather than a demand side failure copyright 1996 by royal economic society

gender differences in risk behavior an analysis of asset allocation decisions in ghana abstract within a developing country context little is known about gender differences in risk preferences as reflected in asset allocation decisions much of the empirical literature within development studies on risk and investment in assets centers on risk coping and risk management strategies of households with some exceptions this literature primarily focuses on household and household level outcomes previous experimental studies have explored gender differences in risk preferences in developing countries with inconclusive results using unique national representative sex disaggregated data with self reported asset ownership and wealth information of individuals within households in ghana from a multi country project the gender asset gap project this paper explores men and women s risk preferences as reflected in asset allocation decisions through a decomposition method typically used to explore gender differences in wage employment the study finds that although women hold significantly fewer risky assets than men in absolute terms and as a proportion of their wealth in the sample men and women do not have systematically different risk preferences the results in this paper differ from the results in many empirical studies in developed countries where women are often found to be more risk averse than men as the first study to look at gender differences in risk aversion in terms of asset allocation with in the developing country context the results from this study provide evidence that gender differences in risk attitudes may vary by cultural context as the growing experimental literature in developing countries suggests

the tradeoff between performance and quitting in high power tournaments tournaments may be characterized by the performance they induce as well as by the rate of quitting and dropouts of participants although most of the attention in the literature is on the performance induced by high power incentives there are many daily situations in which dropouts and quitting are a major concern using a field experiment in schools and a model of dynamic tournament we examine the effect of different levels of rewards on the rate of quitting our experiment indicates that there is a possible tradeoff between performance and quitting strong incentives tournaments induced participants to exert more effort and exhibit a better performance but at the same time it induces a higher rate of quitting we present a multi stage tournament model that gives rise to a similar characterization jel c93 c73 d8 j30

productivity development in icelandic norwegian and swedish fisheries this article analyses the total factor productivity tfp performance of fisheries in iceland norway and sweden during the period 1973 to 2003 we measure tfp growth using real gross value added as output and capital input labour input and a stock input index based on the major fish stocks in developed neighbouring countries we expect rapid diffusion of fishing technology innovations contributing to productivity convergence in addition innovations in the public regulation and the industrial organization may also have influenced productivity growth during the period we find that iceland had the highest annual tfp growth accounting for stock changes it amounts to 3 while the corresponding figures for sweden and norway are 2 8 and 0 8 respectively despite best practice fishing technologies being widely available we find no evidence of productivity convergence among the three countries