information acquisition and under diversification if an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests which assets should he learn about the best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold but the assets the investor holds depend on the information he observes we build a framework to solve jointly for investment and information choices with general preferences and information cost functions although the optimal research strategies depend on preferences and costs the main result is that the investor who can first collect information systematically deviates from holding a diversified portfolio information acquisition can rationalize investing in a diversified fund and a concentrated set of assets an allocation often observed but usually deemed anomalous copyright wiley blackwell

on the concavity of the consumption function at least since keynes 1935 many economists have had the intuition that the marginal propensity to consume out of wealth declines as wealth increases nonetheless standard perfect certainty and certainty equivalent versions of intertemporal optimizing models of consumption imply a marginal propensity to consume that is unrelated to the level of household wealth we show that adding income uncertainty to the standard optimization problem induces a concave consumption function in which as keynes suggested the marginal propensity to consume out of wealth or transitory income declines with the level of wealth

project evaluation by potential tax reform abstract shadow prices are derived for small open economies with several production sectors experiencing constant returns to scale small projects affect the balance of trade domestic prices of non traded goods and factors and sector scales only domestic prices affect welfare and only if there is not domestic price equalization generally a project s net benefits depend upon the potential tax and tariff reform made possible or necessary through the balance of trade effect border prices are right for traded goods but domestic good shadow pricing requires knowing the direction of at least one reversible available tax reform and presuming optimality with respect to available reforms

foreign exchange equivalence and project appraisal procedures this paper investigates the implications of different adjustment mechanisms for shadow pricing traded and nontraded goods in a flexible price model a foreign exchange equivalent rule that can be readily adapted whatever the adjustment mechanism is derived it is shown that traded commodities are always valued at border prices and nontraded commodities can always be shadow priced in terms of changes in production and consumption of traded goods valued at border prices the role of the shadow exchange rate and the implications for measuring the balance of payments effect when no tax adjustment policy is assumed are also discussed copyright 1990 by royal economic society

shadow pricing with suboptimal policy rules abstract this paper aims to clarify different views on the validity of the little mirrlees border price rule for project evaluation in a context where the government chooses its controls suboptimally in a systematic fashion the rule is shown to be valid quite generally for small public sector projects when the government s response restores market clearing in nontradeables and foreign exchange it can be invalid in contexts of a non market clearing or b private sector projects that generate profits distributed to households in the latter case special treatment of profit effects is required along the lines described by little and mirrlees 1974

tax perceptions and preferences over tax structure in the united kingdom do voters know their tax liabilities accurately or do they systematically misperceive them could such misperceptions influence voters choices over alternative tax structures proposed by politicians this paper assesses the accuracy of individuals tax perceptions in the uk using micro data from the british social attitudes survey 1995 and tests an empirical model of the determinants of tax structure preferences including tax misperceptions a systematic bias towards over estimation of income and expenditure tax vat liabilities is found and individ uals tax preferences appear to be both dominated by self interest and distorted by tax misperceptions whether using a traditional utility maximisation framework or a variety of public choice frameworks economists agree that consumer voters or taxpayer voters dislike taxes taxes lower the consumption possibility set and thereby utility politicians proposing higher taxes expect to lose votes unless they can persuade voters that the utility gain from the use of those taxes will exceed the tax induced utility loss of course the extent of individuals losses will depend on their circumstances and how revenues are raised the tax structure traditional tax incidence and excess burden analyses and models of political costs associated with the tax structure hettich and winer 1984 1988 each provide guidance on the extent to which different individuals may be expected to suffer and vote differently under alternative tax structures much will depend on attitudes towards and perceptions of specific taxes especially personal income taxes and consumption taxes underlying most such analyses are two common presumptions i tax preferences are dictated by self interest and ii individuals accurately assess their tax liabilities and so make informed choices two largely independent areas of literature have challenged these assumptions first models incorporating altruism

shadow prices for non traded goods in a tax distorted economy formulae and values abstract two different approaches to the shadow pricing of non traded goods in tax distorted economies have led to differing shadow price formulae these include measures of marginal foreign exchange cost expressions incorporating producer prices and tax revenues and the harberger weighted average formula this paper uses a general equilibrium model with fixed taxes to demonstrate the equivalence of these formulae it is argued that distinguishing between the formulae and their values answers many of the criticisms that have been advanced as to the usefulness of shadow prices

behavioral economics for environmental policy abstract the predictions of widely prescribed global and country level environmental policies at present are based mainly on mainstream economic models which treat individual actors to be unboundedly rational in their decision making in recent years however behavioral and experimental economists have found that the individual actors in many circumstances act within a bounded rationality framework suggesting that predictions based on the unbounded rationality models would be less valid while some of mainstream economists have already started adopting the bounded rationality based models in their academic discourse many environmental economists seem to be reluctant to use these alternative models of rationality in their research and policy prescriptions this paper highlights the implications of using bounded rationality models in environmental research in general and policymaking in particular

commodity taxes and taste heterogeneity we study optimal linear commodity taxes in the presence of non linear income taxes when agents differ in skills and tastes for consumption we show that optimal commodity taxes are partly determined by a many person ramsey rule when there is taste heterogeneity within income classes the usual role of commodity taxes in relaxing incentive constraints explains the remaining part of these taxes when there is taste heterogeneity between income classes we quantify these two parts using french consumption microdata and find that commodities taxes are only shaped by many person ramsey considerations

another look at the role of the industrial structure of markets for international diversification strategies abstract this paper re examines the extent to which gains from international diversification are due to differences in industrial structure across countries recent papers by roll 1992 journal of finance 47 3 42 and heston and rouwenhorst 1994 journal of financial economics 36 3 27 investigate this issue and find conflicting evidence using a new database the dow jones world stock index with coverage in 25 countries and over 66 industry classifications we decompose comprehensively both country and industrial sources of variation we confirm that little of the variation in country index returns can be explained by their industrial composition we also uncover differences in the proportion of variation in industry index returns that is captured by country and industry factors and discuss the implications for global diversification strategies

cost benefit criteria and the compensation principle in evaluating small projects the use of the compensation principle in cost benefit analysis as a means of separating the efficiency and distributional effects of a project is theoretically suspect for a number of reasons one difficulty is the lack of a necessary and sufficient criterion for determining that a compensation test is passed in an economy where consumers and producers prices are not the same for this paper we establish such a criterion for projects that are small in the differential sense the criterion requires the calculation of a set of shadow prices which is a weighted average of the consumers and producers price vectors

earmarked taxation welfare versus political support abstract compared with the traditional public finance approach of a monolithic fully informed planner earmarking of taxation is less likely to be optimal if a principal agent setting is considered where taxing and spending are performed by two separate agents which are monitored by the parliament we assume that the parliament either maximizes welfare or expected votes vote maximizers are more inclined to choose earmarking but at the price of inefficiently high costs

welfare analysis of tax reforms using household data abstract this paper discusses a methodology for calculating the distribution of gains and losses from a policy change using data for a large sample of households estimates are based on the equivalent income function which is money metric utility defined over observable variables this enables calculations to be standardised and a computer program to compute the statistics presented in the paper is available for a general demand system equivalent income is related to measures of deadweight loss and standard errors are computed for each of the welfare measures an application to u k data for 5 895 households is given which simulates a reform that involves eliminating housing subsidies

how robust is the uniform emissions pricing rule to social equity concerns abstract this paper examines pollution tax differentiation across industries in light of social equity concerns using theoretical and numerical general equilibrium analyses in an optimal tax framework we characterize the drivers for non uniform optimal taxes stemming from the interaction of household heterogeneity with social preferences quantitatively assessing the case of price based co2 emissions control in the u s economy we find that uniform emissions pricing is approximately optimal when social concerns are defined over inequity induced by the environmental tax the deviation from uniform emissions pricing however becomes non negligible when pollution tax rebates deviate much from optimal transfer schemes or when social concerns are defined over both policy induced impacts and inequity unrelated to environmental policy our results are robust to a number of model extensions including the stringency of the environmental target downstream vs upstream taxation pre existing distortionary taxes and parametric uncertainty in firms and households equilibrium tax responses

global sector rotation new look at an old idea an investment product that capitalizes on the rising importance of the industry factor in increasingly integrated global markets should have a bright future

optimal portfolio choice for long horizon investors with nontradable labor income this paper examines how risky labor income and retirement affect optimal portfolio choice with idiosyncratic labor income risk the optimal allocation to stocks is unambiguously larger for employed investors than for retired investors consistent with the typical recommendations of investment advisors increasing idiosyncratic labor income risk raises investors willingness to save and reduces their stock portfolio allocation towards the level of retired investors positive correlation between labor income and stock returns has a further negative effect and can actually reduce stockholdings below the level of retired investors financial advisors typically recommend that their customers invest more in stocks than in safe assets when they are working and to shift their investments towards safe assets when they retire jagannathan and kocherlakota 1996 malkiel 1996 by contrast the standard academic models of portfolio choice merton 1969 1971 samuelson 1969 show that retirement is irrelevant for portfolio decisions if investment opportunities are constant and human capital is tradable in this case the fraction of wealth optimally invested in risky assets should be constant over the lifetime of an individual recent research building on the pioneering work by merton 1971 shows that time varying investment opportunities result in portfolio rules with an intertemporal hedging component whose magnitude depends on the investment horizon of the investor kim and omberg 1996 balduzzi and lynch 1997 brennan schwartz and lagnado 1997 brandt 1999 campbell and viceira 1999 2001 barberis 2000 with time variation in investment opportunities retirement and death play an instrumental role as events that exogenously fix the individual s investment horizon more importantly retirement also marks the time at which individuals stop working and thereafter must live off their lifetime savings and possibly transfers from this perspective retirement matters for portfolio choice

is there a retirement savings puzzle in this paper we ask whether households are saving enough for their retirement we use data on income expenditure and expenditure components to analyse patterns of behaviour at and around the time of retirement for successive date of birth cohorts we compare periods of unemployment to periods of retirement and separate expenditures into categories reflecting work related expenditures basic necessities and other goods we find that income typically falls by more at unemployment than retirement but the reverse is true for expenditure we observe falls in expenditure at retirement for all expenditure categories using a stochastic life cycle model including mortality rates we assess the anticipated impact of retirement on consumption against that of unemployment the inter relationship between goods and leisure explains a large part of the persistent fall in expenditure at retirement we argue that the only way in which the life cycle hypothesis could be reconciled with the remaining unanticipated dip in consumption would be with the systematic arrival of unexpected adverse information at the time of retirement

energy populism and household welfare we study a cycle of subsidized energy prices and estimate its welfare impact on households in the buenos aires metropolitan region a simple framework explains its emergence in terms of the preference of a median household voter for receiving transfer gains followed by a future flow of transfer losses we evaluate actual transfers and welfare effects that a departure of prices of natural gas and electricity generation from opportunity costs since 2003 had on households and explore the impact of a way back to opportunity cost pricing

costly search and mutual fund flows this paper studies the flows of funds into and out of equity mutual funds consumers base their fund purchase decisions on prior performance information but do so asymmetrically investing disproportionately more in funds that performed very well the prior period search costs seem to be an important determinant of fund flows high performance appears to be most salient for funds that exert higher marketing effort as measured by higher fees flows are directly related to the size of the fund s complex as well as the current media attention received by the fund which lower consumers search costs

sensitivity of optimal commodity taxes to relaxing leisure goods separability and to the wage rate abstract this paper uses a new labour augmented demand functional form to calculate optimal commodity taxes for india the optimal taxes which are far from uniform are extremely sensitive to deviation from leisure goods separability and to variation in the wage rate parameter

time varying fund manager skill we propose a new definition of skill as general cognitive ability to pick stocks or time the market we find evidence for stock picking in booms and market timing in recessions moreover the same fund managers that pick stocks well in expansions also time the market well in recessions these fund managers significantly outperform other funds and passive benchmarks our results suggest a new measure of managerial ability that weighs a fund s market timing more in recessions and stock picking more in booms the measure displays more persistence than either market timing or stock picking alone and predicts fund performance

political economy of pension plans impact of institutions gender and culture abstract national pension systems are an important part of financial intermediation and worker welfare in most countries but how and why do they differ internationally controlling for important political economic and social institutions we document that international differences in pension progressivity or how pensions reflect lifetime earnings are negatively related to masculinity uncertainty avoidance individualism long term orientation employment rights average pension levels social trust and economic inequality we also find that pension progressivity is positively related to the economic and societal role of women the extent of catholicism as well as political voice and accountability these results provide important insights for both public policy and mnc managers

relative shadow prices and the shadow exchange rate abstract the divergent conclusions that have been reached in the literature as to the role of the shadow exchange rate in project appraisal are reconciled in this paper it is shown that the shadow exchange rate is not needed to assess the relative shadow prices of either traded or nontraded goods

indivisible labor lotteries and equilibrium abstract this paper considers an economy where labor is indivisible and agents are identical although the discontinuity in labor supply at the individual level disappears as a result of aggregation it is shown that indivisible labor has strong consequences for the aggregate bahavior of the economy it is also shown that optimal allocations involve lotteries over employment and consumption

optimal consumption portfolio choices and retirement planning abstract we examine consumption and investment decisions in a life cycle model with habit formation stochastic opportunity set stochastic wages and labor supply flexibility retirement is taken into account by specifying an age at which labor earnings stop but consumption spending continues explicit solutions are obtained for optimal consumption labor supply and the financing portfolio we examine the structure and determinants of the optimal portfolio we also study the effects of the retirement date and of habits on optimal decisions finally we conduct a preliminary analysis to assess the effects of a liquidity constraint on optimal consumption leisure choices

does industrial structure explain the benefits of international diversification abstract we examine the influence of industrial structure on the cross sectional volatility and correlation structure of country index returns for 12 european countries between 1978 and 1992 we find that industrial structure explains very little of the cross sectional difference in country return volatility and that the low correlation between country indices is almost completely due to country specific sources of return variation diversification across countries within an industry is a much more effective tool for risk reduction than industry diversification within a country

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

the measurement of the benefits of public inputs with distortionary taxation this paper derives formulae that show the marginal benefits of public inputs in second best economies with tax distortions the values of the change in the aggregate net output vector and in some cases the change of profit income evaluated at appropriate shadow prices show their marginal benefits these shadow prices depend on which taxation scheme you can perturb when the amount of a public input is increased the author considers the three cases where he can change 1 all indirect tax rates and all corporate income tax rates 2 all lump sum transfers and 3 some part of indirect tax rates

on the fluctuations in consumption and market returns in the presence of labor and human capital an equilibrium analysis abstract we examine the effects of human capital on consumption stock market and other fluctuations in a general equilibrium continuous time model a representative consumer worker investor derives utility from consumption and leisure a representative firm demands labor as the sole input to a stochastic production technology driven by general possibly nonmultiplicative shocks for cobb douglas utility and multiplicative shocks labor is nonstochastic and consumption and stock market volatility are equated as under no human capital deviations from this are analyzed for logarithmic utility and constant elasticity of substitution production technology cases are identified where the presence of labor causes consumption to be smoother than the stock market

a unified model of entrepreneurship dynamics we develop an incomplete markets q theoretic model to study entrepreneurship dynamics precautionary motive borrowing constraints and capital illiquidity lead to underinvestment conservative debt use under consumption and less risky portfolio allocation the endogenous liquid wealth illiquid capital ratio w measures time varying financial constraint the option to accumulate wealth before entry is critical for entrepreneurship flexible exit option is important for risk management purposes investment increases and the private marginal value of liquidity decreases as w decreases and exit becomes more likely contrary to predictions of standard financial constraint models we show that the idiosyncratic risk premium is quantitatively significant especially for low w

retirement spending and biological age abstract we solve a lifecycle model in which the consumer s chronological age does not move in lockstep with calendar time instead biological age increases at a stochastic non linear rate in time like a broken clock that might occasionally move backwards in other words biological age could actually decline our paper is inspired by the growing body of medical literature that has identified biomarkers which indicate how people age at different rates this offers better estimates of expected remaining lifetime and future mortality rates it isn t farfetched to argue that in the not too distant future personal age will be more closely associated with biological vs calendar age thus after introducing our stochastic mortality model we derive optimal consumption rates in a classic yaari 1965 framework adjusted to our proper clock time in addition to the normative implications of having access to biological age our positive objective is to partially explain the cross sectional heterogeneity in retirement spending rates at any given chronological age in sum we argue that neither biological nor chronological age alone is a sufficient statistic for making economic decisions rather both ages are required to behave rationally

of tournaments and temptations an analysis of managerial incentives in the mutual fund industry we test the hypothesis that when their compensation is linked to relative performance managers of investment portfolios likely to end up as losers will manipulate fund risk differently than those managing portfolios likely to be winners an empirical investigation of the performance of 334 growth oriented mutual funds during 1976 to 1991 demonstrates that mid year losers tend to increase fund volatility in the latter part of an annual assessment period to a greater extent than mid year winners furthermore we show that this effect became stronger as industry growth and investor awareness of fund performance increased over time

lifetime consumption and investment retirement and constrained borrowing retirement flexibility and inability to borrow against future labor income can significantly affect optimal consumption and investment with voluntary retirement there exists an optimal wealth to wage ratio threshold for retirement and human capital correlates negatively with the stock market even when wages have zero or slightly positive market risk exposure consequently investors optimally invest more in the stock market than without retirement flexibility both consumption and portfolio choice jump at the endogenous retirement date the inability to borrow limits hedging and reduces the value of labor income the wealth to wage ratio threshold for retirement and the stock investment

country and industry concentration and the performance of international mutual funds abstract we examine the relation between country and industry portfolio concentration and performance using a data set of international equity mutual funds when sorted by concentration measures funds in the most concentrated quintile outperform those in the most diversified quintile by 0 16 and 0 30 monthly in country and industry dimensions respectively further analysis shows that the superior performance of concentrated funds is largely driven by industry rather than country concentration suggesting the existence of global industry private information finally we show that industry concentrated funds rotate top holding industries less frequently than their diversified counterparts and that the industries these funds purchase subsequently outperform the industries they sell

some simple results on the gains from trade from growth and from public production abstract a simple compact but general revealed preference type of argument is used to derive results on the gains from trade from terms of trade changes and from exogenous resource growth the approach extends to the welfare evaluation of public sector production the relation between the sufficiency conditions for welfare improvement derived from this approach and the necessary and sufficient conditions derived in an alternative approach are briefly discussed most of the argument is conducted in the context of a representative individual economy though it is shown to extend in an essentially unchanged way to cases where redistribution is an issue

the theory of reform and indian indirect taxes abstract given a set of value judgements an initial state and a model of the economy one can ask whether some feasible tax change would increase welfare we do this by defining the marginal cost in terms of welfare of raising an extra rupee from the i th good the inverse optimum problem is the calculation of non negative welfare weights on households which imply that the initial state is optimum if no such welfare weights exist then a pareto improvement is possible we illustrate the concepts and results using data from the indian economy for 1979 1980 directions of tax reform for a number of specific social welfare functions and for pareto improvements are presented

tariff reform in a small open multi household economy with domestic distortions and nontraded goods we examine tariff reforms in the context of a small open economy and simultaneously deal with three extensions of the current literature nonremovable domestic tax distortions nontraded goods and many households using the new concepts of a constant utility tax adjusted balance of trade function and a constant utility productivity improvement in tariffs necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of strict pareto improving tariff and transfer reforms are established we also consider directional tariff reforms such as movements towards the world price vector proportional reductions and reductions of extreme tariffs also discussed is the role of normality of household preferences most of the literature on piecemeal tariff reform in small open economies has been concerned with models in which there is a single household and in which domestic commodity taxes are absent an exception to this is lloyd 1974 who allows the existence of domestic commodity taxes but maintains the assumption of a single household nor does he consider nontraded commodities other than nontaxed fixed factors others such as foster and sonnenschein 1970 bertrand and vanek 1964 bruno 1972 hatta 1977b and fukushima 1979 deal with single household economies with no domestic distortions the purpose of this paper is to consider the question of tariff reform in a very general model of a small open economy the generality of the model allows us to simultaneously deal with three extensions of the current literature the first extension is to allow for nonremovable domestic tax distortions the second is to incorporate nontraded commodities into the model and the third is to explicitly consider a multi household economy by dealing simultaneously with these extensions to the model we are able to provide a general treatment of tariff reform in small open economies and to obtain new and more general results since domestic tax distortions are prevalent in the real world it is important that they be taken into account in any analysis of tariff reform specifically it is of considerable theoretical and policy interest to determine whether the piecemeal tariff policy prescriptions that have been derived in the literature for models

saving and investing for early retirement a theoretical analysis we study optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where investors adjust their labor supply through an irreversible choice of their retirement time we show that investing for early retirement tends to increase savings and reduce an agent s effective relative risk aversion thus increasing her stock market exposure contrary to common intuition an investor might find it optimal to increase the proportion of financial wealth held in stocks as she ages and accumulates assets even when her income and the investment opportunity set are constant the model predicts a decrease in risk aversion following strong market gains like those observed in the nineties

optimal consumption and investment under time varying liquidity constraints we study consumption and investment decisions given realistic time varying constraints on borrowing we first consider the case where borrowing is constrained by a maximum debt to income ratio we then consider collateral borrowing with a maximum loan to value ratio the resulting implications for optimal policies differ considerably from those obtained in the existing literature based on fixed borrowing limits but are consistent with those documented in the empirical literature

valuation optimal asset allocation and retirement incentives of pension plans we provide a framework in which we link the valuation and asset allocation policies of defined benefits plans with the lifetime marginal productivity schedule of the worker and the pension plan formula in turn we examine the retirement policies that are implied by the primitives of the model and the value of pension obligations our model provides an explicit valuation formula for a stylized defined benefits plan the optimal asset allocation policies consist of the replicating portfolio of the pension liabilities and the growth optimum portfolio independent of the pension liabilities we show that the worker will retire when the ratio of pension benefits to current wages reaches a critical value which depends on the parameters of the pension plan and the discount rate using numerical techniques we analyze the feedback effect of retirement policies on the valuation of plans and on the asset allocation decisions article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

efficiency with costly information a reinterpretation of evidence from managed portfolios we investigate the informational efficiency of mutual fund performance for the period 1965 84 results are shown to be sensitive to the measurement of performance chosen we find that returns on s p stocks returns on non s p stocks and returns on bonds are significant factors in performance assessment once we correct for the impact of non s p assets on mutual fund returns we find that mutual funds do not earn returns that justify their information acquisition costs this is consistent with results for prior periods coauthors are martin j gruber sanjiv das and matthew hlavka article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

tax reform from the gradient projection viewpoint abstract this paper examines the problems of gradual tax reform desirable small moves of the tax system are determined using the principles of the well known gradient projection algorithm three classical models of public finance are considered for each of them a continuous time dynamic process is exhibited along which the social welfare function increases until convergence to local second best extrema although the selection of trajectories according to the gradient projection method has some arbitrariness it leads to intuitively and economically appealing rules such as a tax reform analog of the classical optimal taxation result on production efficiency

how family status and social security claiming options shape optimal life cycle portfolios we show how optimal household decisions regarding work retirement saving portfolio allocations and life insurance are shaped by the complex financial options embedded in u s social security rules and uncertain family transitions our life cycle model predicts sharp consumption drops on retirement an age 62 peak in claiming rates and earlier claiming by wives versus husbands and single women moreover life insurance is mainly purchased on men s lives our model which takes social security rules seriously generates wealth and retirement outcomes that are more consistent with the data in contrast to earlier and less realistic models

unemployment risks and optimal retirement in an incomplete market we develop a new approach for solving the optimal retirement problem for an individual with an unhedgeable income risk the income risk stems from a forced unemployment event which occurs as an exponentially distributed random shock the optimal retirement problem is to determine an individual s optimal consumption and investment behaviors and optimal retirement time simultaneously we introduce a new convex duality approach for reformulating the original retirement problem and provide an iterative numerical method to solve it reasonably calibrated parameters say that our model can give an explanation for lower consumption and risky investment behaviors of individuals and for relatively higher stock holdings of the poor we also analyze the sensitivity of an individual s optimal behavior in changing her wealth level investment opportunity and the magnitude of preference for postretirement leisure finally we find that our model explains a countercyclical pattern of the number of unemployed job leavers

dalton improving tax reform when households differ in ability and needs abstract in a previous paper we suggested a method for identifying tax reforms that adhere to dalton s principle of transfers approving a small enough transfer from rich to poor however even the weak requirement from that method namely prescribing a uni dimensional ordinal ranking of households by how deserving they are of a marginal income transfer is con fining here we extend the approach by formulating a two dimensional criterion for a dalton improving tax reform when there is social approval for transfers when other things are equal from the more able to the less able and from less needy households to more needy ones the possibility of applying this extended criterion in practice and a comparison with other criteria is carried out using the example of u k excise taxes

sensitivity of optimal commodity tax rates to alternative demand functional forms an econometric case study of india this study investigates on a nine commodity disaggregation of indian budget data nss 28th round the sensitivity of optimal commodity tax rates to alternative demand systems les and rnlps optimality is used here in the very special sense of being conditional on observed expenditure and fixed consumer prices the alternative sets of tax rates agree at low levels of inequality aversion but disagree widely at rawlsian levels les is heavily rejected in favour of its one parameter generalisation rnlps the results suggest that les price elasticities should not be used in optimal tax calculations the optimal tax rates imply only a modest redistribution

shadow prices for project evaluation under alternative macroeconomic specifications for purposes of social cost benefit analysis a project may be viewed as a disturbance to the economy displacing it from some initial equilibrium to a new one but the new configuration will depend on which particular variables adjust to restore equilibrium this paper examines the shadow prices for project evaluation under alternative assumptions about how equilibrium is restored when the government reacts by altering its foreign exchange reserves the shadow prices coincide with those advocated in the manuals on social cost benefit analysis however if the government adjusts its domestic expenditures or tariff rates the shadow prices will differ from those of the manuals except insofar as the relative shadow prices of tradeables remain their relative border prices the paper first presents the model followed by two cases in which domestic prices and wage rates do not vary because ad valorem tariffs are fixed and one case in which they are endogenous

hedging in incomplete markets with hara utility in the context of merton s original problem of optimal consumption and portfolio choice in continuous time this paper solves an extension in which the investor is endowed with a stochastic income that cannot be replicated by trading the available securities the problem is treated by demonstrating using analytic and in particular viscosity solutions techniques that the value function of the stochastic control problem is a smooth solution of the associated hamilton jacobi bellman hjb equation the optimal policy is shown to exist and given in a feedback form from the optimality conditions in the hjb equation at zero wealth a fixed fraction of income is consumed for large wealth the original merton policy is approached we also give a sufficient condition for wealth under the optimal policy to remain strictly positive

optimal taxes and the structure of preferences if optimal tax theory is to be the basis for calculating tax rates a close understanding is required of the relationship between the structure of preferences and the configuration of optimal tax rates otherwise hypotheses chosen by the econometrician for practical convenience may completely determine the results independently of measurement this paper explores the relationship between various types of separability particularly weak and implicit separability and optimal tax rates in the various models discussed in the literature the use of distance functions and the antonelli matrix provides a significant unification of previously disparate results in the final analysis optimal tax theory should be the basis for actual calculation of tax rates although recently there have been great advances in theoretical results and in our understanding of their meaning we are still some way from a working knowledge of whether uniform commodity taxes are in practice optimal or if not which commodities should be discriminated against present theoretical formulae do not yield clear cut results except in special cases and it has recently become clear that optimal rates depend crucially on the detailed structure of consumer preferences for example atkinson and stiglitz 3 show that with an optimal nonlinear income tax discriminatory commodity taxes are only necessary to the extent that individual commodities are not weakly separable from leisure more recently deaton 6 has shown that a similar result holds for what is perhaps the most interesting of the standard models that where there are many consumers and only a linear income tax and proportional commodity taxes are allowed in this case separability between goods and leisure together with linear engel curves for goods removes the need for differential commodity taxation in consequence nothing can be learned about commodity taxes from consumer demand studies in which commodity demands are explained conditionally on total expenditure and commodity prices and which assume linear engel curves all such studies require separability from leisure as a maintained hypothesis and so are consistent with uniform commodity taxation these results suggest that the prospects for meaningful empirical calculations of tax rates are bleak econometricians estimating commodity demand and labor supply equations make generous use of separability assumptions to enable estimation at all in consequence it is likely that empirically calculated tax rates based on econometric estimates of parameters will be determined in structure not by the measurements actually made but by arbitrary untested and even unconscious hypotheses chosen by the econometrician for practical convenience to remedy this situation and as a prelude to fruitful empirical work it is necessary to have a more explicit understanding of how preference structure affects optimal tax rates such is the object of this paper three different

household portfolio diversification a case for rank dependent preferences the proliferation of novel preference theories in financial economics is hampered by a lack of non experimental evidence and by the theories additional complexity which has not been shown to be critical in applications in this article i present arguments in support of preferences with rank dependency using the survey of consumer finances data i document two widespread patterns inconsistent with expected utility i many households simultaneously invest in well deversified funds and in poorly diversified portfolios of stocks and ii some households with substantial savings do not invest anything in equities i show that portfolio choice models with rank dependent preferences plausibly parameterized and under fully rational assumptions are quantitatively consistent with the observed diversification these results call for further efforts to integrate the models of rank dependent preferences in portfolio theory and asset pricing the decision theoretic literature has long acknowledged the shortcomings of the expected utility theory of von neumann and morgenstern 1944 several generalizations of the theory are inspired by the experimental evidence and aimed at improving its descriptive accuracy however there are few applications of new models of preferences in finance and expected utility continues to dominate the field 1 two principal hurdles slow the proliferation of novel preferences in financial economics first the lack of empirical non experimental or field data confirming that the behavior motivating non expected utilities is widespread outside the laboratory settings second the additional and often significant complexity of the alternative preferences which has not been shown to be critical in applications where the models based on expected utility fall short of reasonable predictions this article presents empirical and theoretical this paper was previously circulated under the title household portfolio diversification the paper has benefited from the comments of shlomo benartzi luca benzoni markus brunnermeier john dickhaut maria perozek raj singh hersh shefrin and workshop participants at minnesota finance bag lunch 2003 wharton conference household financial decision making and portfolio choice and 2003 summer meetings of econometric society i would like to thank cam harvey the editor and an anonymous referee for many helpful comments and suggestions a special thanks to jack kareken for comments and editorial help on an earlier draft i am grateful to donna zerwitz for editorial assistance the views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily of the federal reserve bank of minneapolis or the federal reserve system all errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the author address correspondence to valery polkovnichenko finance 3 122 csom 319 19 th

a computational procedure for calculating optimal commodity taxes with illustrative evidence from indian budget data a simple procedure for calculating optimal commodity taxes is proposed which takes into account the simultaneous interdependence of taxes expenditure and price levels responses the method also allows for the social marginal utility of income to depend on prices besides expenditures in a manner implied by the assumed preference functional form illustrative calculations on indian budget data provide evidence not only in favor of the procedure but of considerable sensitivity of directions of marginal tax reforms to the data set rural or urban used and of optimal tax estimates to demand functional form copyright 1989 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

intergenerational risk sharing and endogenous labour supply within funded pension schemes funded defined benefit pensions add to welfare on account of providing intergenerational risk sharing but lower it on account of inducing labour supply distortions we show that a properly designed funded defined benefit pension scheme involves a welfare improvement even if contributions are distortionary and even if individuals face potentially correlated wage and equity risks numerical calculations indicate that diversification gains from risk sharing are large compared to the losses related to labour supply distortions this result withstands a number of extensions like the introduction of a short sale constraint for individuals or the inclusion of a labour income tax

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

labor supply flexibility and portfolio choice in a life cycle model abstract this paper examines the effect of the labor leisure choice on portfolio and consumption decisions over an individual s life cycle the model incorporates the fact that individuals may have considerable flexibility in varying their work effort including their choice of when to retire given this flexibility the individual simultaneously determines optimal levels of current consumption labor effort and an optimal financial investment strategy at each point in his life cycle we show that labor and investment choices are intimately related the ability to vary labor supply ex post induces the individual to assume greater risks in his investment portfolio ex ante

portfolio choice in retirement health risk and the demand for annuities housing and risky assets in a life cycle model a retiree faces stochastic health depreciation and chooses consumption health expenditure and the allocation of wealth between bonds stocks and housing the model explains key facts about asset allocation and health expenditure across health status and age the portfolio share in stocks is low overall and is positively related to health especially for younger retirees the portfolio share in housing is negatively related to health for younger retirees and falls significantly in age finally out of pocket health expenditure as a share of income is negatively related to health and rises in age

tax reform and temporary inefficiency abstract if any type of direct income redistribution is permitted a very weak condition ensures that it will not be desirable or necessary to permit production inefficiency in the process of a pareto improving tax reform inefficiency arises in models which make an implausible set of assumptions about the range of policies available to the government

tobacco consumption and taxation in italy an application of the quaids model estimates are presented of the demand for tobacco in italy in the context of a demand system approach the grouping of goods is based on varian s non parametric test for weak separability the parametric demand model is banks blundell and lewbel s quaids model which combines the empirical flexibility of quadratic logarithmic engel curves with integrability estimation is by iterative gmm procedure the estimates are used in an analysis of welfare improving tax reforms which incorporates distributional data the results are discussed with respect to the special features of the italian tobacco market

optimal retirement with unemployment risks abstract this paper investigates the optimal retirement of an individual in the presence of involuntary unemployment risks and borrowing constraints in a complete market with frictions we use an intensity model and loading factors to illustrate the involuntary unemployment risks and frictions in unemployment insurance markets using reasonably calibrated parameters we observe that high involuntary unemployment intensity and loading factors could be important explanations for the empirical findings emphasized in recent studies we also find that an individual with high leisure demand after retirement reduces consumption during retirement and increases stockholdings as retirement time approaches

the matrix approach to evaluating demand equations as there is a plethora of demand models which one should be used to estimate income and price elasticities the paper sheds light on this important practical problem by developing a matrix approach to simulating mas demand equations to analyse their performance under idealized circumstances artificial data on the dependent variable are generated by one model and these are then used for the estimation of another model as an illustrative application using four popular models a 4 4 matrix is generated which gives all pair wise comparisons the performance of the models is then evaluated on the basis of the quality of the income and own price elasticity estimates

when can life cycle investors benefit from time varying bond risk premia we study the importance of time varying bond risk premia in a consumption and portfolio choice problem for a life cycle investor facing short sales and borrowing constraints tilts in the optimal asset allocation in response to changes in bond risk premia exhibit pronounced life cycle patterns we find that the investor is willing to pay an annual fee up to 1 to implement a strategy that optimally conditions on prevailing bond risk premia in addition to her age and wealth to solve our model we extend recently developed simulation based techniques to life cycle problems featuring multiple state variables and multiple risky assets

a structural retirement model the life cycle model analyzed here constrains most work on the main job to be full time partial retirement entails a wage reduction and frequently a job change maximum likelihood estimates of utility function parameters are designed to incorporate information on the age of leaving full time work and the age of full retirement the model closely tracks retirement behavior including peaks in retirement activity at 62 and 65 the paper explores the relation of these peaks to nonlinearities in the budget constraint created by various retirement programs policy analyses based on this and on earlier models with simpler structures are compared the retirement choice is one of the more prominent manifestations of life cycle behavior the decision is the result of an interplay between an individual s preferences and a set of incentives which change in complicated ways as the individual progresses through his or her late 50 s and 60 s the purpose of this study is to formulate and estimate a structural model which incorporates in a fundamental way this interplay between lifetime preferences and incentives and to illustrate how such a model may be used to investigate retirement behavior a structural model of this type is essential for analyzing potential policy changes which can be expected to affect incentives in varying ways over a number of years in the life cycle the current study incorporates two structural features which have frequently been omitted from previous studies first the model requires that an individual who wishes to reduce work effort below full time must accept a reduced hourly wage rate in order to do so this reflects empirical evidence from micro data sets which indicates that around one third of older individuals engage in part time work at one time or another and that regardless of whether or not these older workers change jobs to obtain part time work they usually take wage cuts as compared to their previous full time work 2 the fact that an individual is willing to accept a lower wage rate in return for the opportunity to work fewer than full time hours contains important information about the preferences of the

household portfolio choice and retirement this study examines household portfolio choice through the retirement transition i show that couples significantly decrease their stock allocations after retirement whereas singles allocations remain relatively unchanged reallocations are concentrated among couples in which the wife is more risk averse than her husband husbands and wives respective retirement events are followed by opposite signed changes in stock allocations these findings are consistent with a model of collective household decision making in which spouses have heterogeneous risk preferences and suggest that dynamics in the distribution of intrahousehold bargaining power generate time varying household risk aversion

longevity risk retirement savings and financial innovation abstract over the last couple of decades unprecedented increases in life expectancy have raised important concerns for retirement savings we solve a life cycle model with longevity risk which can be hedged through endogenous saving and retirement decisions we investigate the benefits of financial assets designed to hedge the shocks to survival probabilities when longevity risk is calibrated to match forward looking projections those benefits are substantial this lends support to the idea that such hedging should be pursued by defined benefit pension plans on behalf of their beneficiaries finally we draw implications for optimal security design

a generalization of yaari s result on annuitization with optimal retirement abstract in this paper we generalize the following result of yaari 1965 on annuitization with an agent s optimal retirement it is optimal for individuals to annuitize all of their wealth in the absence of bequest motive we have other results that refine or extend the result of yaari 1965 full annuitization can be viewed as an american type option that allows an economic agent to exchange the value of labor income with the extra leisure that is brought about by annuitizing all of her wealth when the agent s wealth is above a certain wealth threshold annuitization is triggered otherwise it is not accordingly wealth plays a key role in controlling the distance to full annuitization

a leaky bucket in the real world estimating inequality aversion using survey data existing evidence of inequality aversion relies on data from class room experiments where subjects face hypothetical questions this paper estimates the magnitude of inequality aversion using representative survey data with questions related to the real economy situations the respondents face the results reveal that inequality aversion can be measured in a meaningful way using survey data but the magnitudes of the estimates depend dramatically on how inequality aversion is measured no matter how measured the revealed inequality aversion predicts opinions on a wide range of questions related to the welfare state such as the level of taxation tax progressivity and the structure of unemployment benefits

undominated directions of tax reform abstract this article considers the reform of a commodity tax system consumers preferences over directions of tax reform are constructed from indirect utility functions a wicksellian decision procedure is used to define a dominance relation on the set of directions of change direction x dominates direction y if and only if a everybody prefers x to y or b x is the status quo and at least one person prefers x to y a number of characterizations of undominated directions of change are provided a related unanimity rule procedure which does not single out the status quo for special treatment is also considered particular attention is paid to the issue of whether wicksellian reforms preserve production efficiency remarks on the relationship between this work previous work in optimal taxation theory and social choice theory are also provided

developing country interests in agricultural trade reform this paper examines whether developing countries as a group would be better off in the absence of agricultural protection in the industrial north and if so whether they should support reforms negotiated between the major players in the uruguay round results from the tyers anderson gls model of world food markets suggest that the net effect of industrial country agricultural protection is beneficial to developing countries though by only a small margin even if its removal were to stimulate accelerated technical change in developing countries the same is found to be true of partial reforms which are more palatable politically such as quotas to reduce oversupply in the ec of course many developing countries including those which are members of the cairns group are badly hurt by protection in the north unfortunately however they and the other members of that group stand to gain comparatively little from the reduction of oversupply in the ec through quotas

tariff design and reform in a revenue constrained economy theory and an illustration from india abstract this paper develops the theory of design and reform of protective tariffs in a revenue constrained small open economy characterized by learning by doing it shows that revenue raising requires wedges between consumer prices and shadow prices while protection when typically not achievable via subsidies directly targeted towards factor market distortions requires wedges between producer prices and shadow prices illustrative calculations in a modestly disaggregated general equilibrium model of india support the view that uniformity in protective tariffs is likely to be a reasonably good policy in situations where the government intends no discrimination within the sectors already identified for special treatment

a review article the case against the use of the sum of compensating variations in cost benefit analysis this paper presents a case against the use of the sum of compensating varia tions as a cost benefit test we argue that 1 the ethical judginents implied by the test are not defensible 2 positive sums of compensating variations occur without potential pareto improvements resulting in social preference reversals without simultaneous scitovsky re versals 3 when lump sum transfers are feasible a positive sum of compensating variations is necessary but not sufficient for a potential pareto improvement 4 in order to eliminate preference reversals and intransitivities all households must have almost identical quasi homothetic preferences a condition that is not satisfied in real economies