joint confidence intervals for income shares and lorenz curves in a recent paper beach and davidson 1983 extended the principles of statistical inference to lorenz curves and income shares by establishing the asymptotic distribution and covariance structure of a vector of lorenz curve ordinates corresponding to a set of quantile abscissae one can thus use the lorenz curve and income shares no longer just as descriptive devices for summarizing distribution information but now also as analytical tools for comparing alternative distributions and carrying out conventional statistical inference on them it would clearly be desirable however to extend and complement this work by providing a method for computing a set of joint confidence intervals about these income shares and for illustrating graphically a joint confidence band about a set of estimated lorenz curve ordinates the present paper provides a new and simple technique for doing this when analyzing differences between sets of income shares or lorenz curves one typically wants to elicit more detailed information than is provided by a standard joint chi square test on the overall set of shares that is when the hypothesis of two sets of shares being the same is rejected we generally want to know further which particular differences in shares are different from zero and of these nonzero differences which are positive and which negative savin 1980 a natural way of providing such information is through multiple comparison procedures developed in this paper in a recent work richmond 1982 has developed a general method of finding multiple comparison intervals that is particularly suited to the present problem and in this situation appears to dominate other conventional alternatives in contrast for example to scheff s s projection method richmond s approach focuses on a set of primary points of interest income shares among a more general set of points including the lorenz curve ordinates and optimizes the joint confidence interval lengths on this primary set of points since estimated lorenz curve ordinates are built up from underlying income shares these shares perhaps further supplemented are natural choices for the primary set the method however also provides a joint confidence band that geometrically bounds the set of lorenz curve ordinates and interpolated segments between them the present

speculative bubbles in bitcoin markets an empirical investigation into the fundamental value of bitcoin amid its rapidly increasing usage and immense public interest the subject of bitcoin has raised profound economic and societal issues in this paper we undertake economic and econometric modelling of bitcoin prices as with many asset classes we show that bitcoin exhibits speculative bubbles further we find empirical evidence that the fundamental price of bitcoin is zero

volatility estimation for bitcoin a comparison of garch models we explore the optimal conditional heteroskedasticity model with regards to goodness of fit to bitcoin price data it is found that the best model is the ar cgarch model highlighting the significance of including both a short run and a long run component of the conditional variance

information can wreck cooperation a counterpoint to kandori 1992 we propose a simple model of repeated games with private monitoring and time varying information structures we then obtain an example demonstrating that the set of achievable equilibrium payos may shrink when play

equity in the finance of health care some international comparisons this paper presents the results of a ten country comparative study of health care financing systems and their progressivity characteristics it distinguishes between the tax financed systems of denmark portugal and the u k the social insurance systems of france the netherlands and spain and the predominantly private systems of switzerland and the u s it concludes that tax financed systems tend to be proportional or mildly progressive that social insurance systems are regressive and that private systems are even more regressive out of pocket payments are in most countries an especially regressive means of raising health care revenues

price clustering in bitcoin investor and media attention in bitcoin has increased substantially in recently years reflected by the incredible surge in news articles and considerable rise in the price of bitcoin given the increased attention there little is known about the behaviour of bitcoin prices and therefore we add to the literature by studying price clustering we find significant evidence of clustering at round numbers with over 10 of prices ending with 00 decimals compared to other variations but there is no significant pattern of returns after the round number we also support the negotiation hypothesis of harris 1991 by showing that price and volume have a significant positive relationship with price clustering at whole numbers

testing for marginal changes in income distributions with lorenz and concentration curves asymptotically distribution free statistical tests for comparing absolute and relative lorenz and concentration curves are provided the procedures do not require independent samples and can be used to test for marginal changes in income distributions the tests are illustrated using a large sample of tax returns that have been randomly selected for audit by the internal revenue service the tests reveal the marginal effects of systematic underreporting of income and tax liabilities on the u s income distribution copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the inefficiency of bitcoin revisited a dynamic approach abstract this letter revisits the informational efficiency of the bitcoin market in particular we analyze the time varying behavior of long memory of returns on bitcoin and volatility 2011 until 2017 using the hurst exponent our results are twofold first r s method is prone to detect long memory whereas dfa method can discriminate more precisely variations in informational efficiency across time second daily returns exhibit persistent behavior in the first half of the period under study whereas its behavior is more informational efficient since 2014 finally price volatility measured as the logarithmic difference between intraday high and low prices exhibits long memory during all the period this reflects a different underlying dynamic process generating the prices and volatility

the folk theorem with imperfect public information the authors study repeated games in which players observe a public outcome that imperfectly signals the actions played they provide conditions guaranteeing that any feasible individually rational payoff vector of the stage game can arise as a perfect equilibrium of the repeated game with sufficiently little discounting the central condition requires that there exist action profiles with the property that for any two players no two deviations one by either player give rise to the same probability distribution over public outcomes the results apply to principal agent partnership oligopoly and mechanism design models and to one shot games with transferable utilities copyright 1994 by the econometric society

inference tests for gini based tax progressivity indexes distribution free statistical inference procedures for changes in lorenz and gini based indexes of tax progressivity are developed and applied related but distinct tests for the reynolds smolensky index of residual progression and the kakwani index of liability progression are provided the inference procedures are illustrated by applying them to luxembourg income study microdata for sweden the united kingdom and the united states before and after periods of tax reform in each country a finding of significant change depends on the choice among progressivity indexes no single index exhibits a consistent pattern of significant change in all countries across time

the distributional impact of health financing in europe a review this article summarises extends and updates previous empirical work on the distributional implications of alternative health care financing arrangements in a selection of european countries and the us on the one hand total health care payments are almost proportional to ability to pay in most countries this is predominantly driven by a high reliance on public financing on the other hand private payments out of pocket payments as well as private insurance premiums are highly regressive more extended reliance on private financing may therefore endanger the equitable nature of financing systems in addition private payments put a heavy burden on unfortunate households

the inefficiency of bitcoin bitcoin has received much attention in the media and by investors in recent years although there remains scepticism and a lack of understanding of this cryptocurrency we add to the literature on bitcoin by studying the market efficiency of bitcoin through a battery of robust tests evidence reveals that returns are significantly inefficient over our full sample but when we split our sample into two subsample periods we find that some tests indicate that bitcoin is efficient in the latter period therefore we conclude that bitcoin in an inefficient market but may be in the process of moving towards an efficient market

equity in health care finance in palestine the triple effects revealed this paper presents an application of the urban and lambert upgraded ajl decomposition approach that was designed to deal with the problem of close income equals in equity analysis and as applied to the area of health care finance contrary to most previous studies vertical and horizontal inequities and the triple effects of inter groups intra group and entire group reranking of various financing schemes are estimated with statistical significance calculated using the bootstrap method application is made on the three financing schemes present in the case of the occupied palestinian territory results demonstrate the relative importance of the three forms of reranking in determining overall inequality the paper offers policy recommendations to limit the existing inequalities in the system and to enhance the capacity of the governmental insurance scheme

statistical inference of progressivity dominance an application to health care financing distributions this paper employs a distribution free statistical test suitable for comparisons based on dependent samples to analyse changes in health care financing distributions on finnish data in distinction to the more general summary index approach used in most studies of progressivity measurement the difference between the lorenz curve of income inequality and the concentration curves of various taxes and payments is used to evaluate progressivity dominance and changes in progressivity sample weights are applied to account for the effect of sampling design and non response the analysis demonstrates that the dominance approach can be successfully applied to various types of distributional problems besides comparisons concerning differences in income distributions as an empirical application the paper presents estimation results for the progressivity of various health care financing sources using data from the 1987 and 1996 finnish health care surveys

crypto currencies an introduction to not so funny moneys we introduce the distributed ledger blockchain technology of crypto currencies we examine the monetary attributes of crypto currencies and describe some of the reasons they have been adopted the paper discusses the mechanics of bitcoin the original crypto currency to illustrate the fundamental elements of decentralized crypto currencies we then provide a high level summary of the implications of crypto currencies for consumers financial systems and for monetary and regulatory authorities we argue that crypto currencies are unlikely to supplant traditional fiat currencies and we anticipate an enduring role for financial intermediaries in facilitating credit

on the inefficiency of bitcoin abstract urquhart 2016 investigated the market efficiency of bitcoin by means of five different tests on bitcoin returns it was concluded that the bitcoin returns do not satisfy the efficient market hypothesis we show here that a simple power transformation of the bitcoin returns do satisfy the hypothesis through the use of eight different tests the transformation used does not lead to any loss of information

assessing equitable health financing for universal health coverage a case study of south africa abstractthis article argues that an assessment of progressivity over time can provide an indication of progress towards a more progressive or a less regressive health financing system and can be useful to policymakers it introduces a framework to characterize shifts in progressivity in health financing between two time periods using the popularly known kakwani index of progressivity and other associated indices it also decomposes the shifts in progressivity into the relative contributions of the changes in income distribution and the changes in the distribution of health payments further it proposes graphics that statistically analyses how the shifts in progressivity vary along the distribution of income a pro poor pro rich shift implies that the health financing mechanism is becoming more less progressive or less more regressive between two time periods a proportional shift means that progressivity is constant between the two periods this framework is applied to nationally represen

is more information always better a case in credit markets this paper studies the impact of behavioral and non behavioral information contained in consumer credit reports on the credit market a repeated game of incomplete information between a borrower and a sequence of lenders is considered lenders beliefs regarding the borrower s type depend on the borrower s historical loan performance and other informative signals it is established that for low beliefs strategic defaults occur in equilibrium as the borrower defaults on his loans despite having the ability to repay them further as the ancillary signals become increasingly informative of the borrower s type the range of beliefs over which strategic defaults occur expands this increase in strategic defaults highlights an unintended negative effect of allowing informative signals to influence beliefs on the upside the informative signals allow lenders to learn the borrower s type more quickly

statistical inference for the measurement of the incidence of taxes and transfers we establish the asymptotic sampling distribution of general functions of quantile based estimators computed from samples that are not necessarily independent the results provide the statistical framework within which to assess the progressivity of taxes and benefits their horizontal inequity and the change in the inequality of income which they cause by the same token these findings characterise the sampling distribution of a number of popular indices of progressivity horizontal inequity and redistribution they can also be used to assess welfare and inequality changes using panel data and to assess poverty when it depends on estimated population quantiles we illustrate these results using micro data on the incidence of taxes and benefits in canada

money is memory abstract this paper examines the sets of feasible allocations in a large class of economic environments in which commitment is impossible following myerson 8 the standard definition of feasibility is adapted to take account of the lack of commitment the environments feature either memory or money memory is defined as knowledge on the part of an agent of the full histories of all agents with whom he has had direct or indirect contact in the past money is defined as an object that does not enter utility or production functions and is available in fixed supply the main proposition is that any allocation that is feasible in an environment with money is also feasible in the same environment with memory depending on the environment the converse may or may not be true hence from a technological point of view money is equivalent to a primitive form of memory journal of economic literature classification numbers e40 c73 d82

equity in the finance of health care some further international comparisons this paper presents further international comparisons of progressivity of health care financing systems the paper builds on the work of wagstaff et al wagstaff a van doorslaer e et al 1992 equity in the finance of health care some international comparisons journal of health economics 11 pp 361 387 but extends it in a number of directions we modify the methodology used there and achieve a higher degree of cross country comparability in variable definitions we update and extend the cross section of countries and we present evidence on trends in financing mixes and progressivity

crypto currency bubbles an application of the phillips shi yu 2013 methodology on mt gox bitcoin prices the creation of bitcoin heralded the arrival of digital or crypto currency and has been regarded as a phenomenon since its introduction it has experienced a meteoric rise in price and rapid growth accompanied by huge volatility swings and also attracted plenty of controversies which even involved law enforcement agencies hence claims abound that bitcoin has been characterized by bubbles ready to burst any time e g the recent collapse of bitcoin s biggest exchange mt gox this has earned plenty of coverage in the media but surprisingly not in the academic literature we therefore fill this knowledge gap we conduct an econometric investigation of the existence of bubbles in the bitcoin market based on a recently developed technique that is robust in detecting bubbles that of phillips et al 2013a over the period 2010 2014 we detected a number of short lived bubbles most importantly we found three huge bubbles in the latter part of the period 2011 2013 lasting from 66 to 106 days with the

efficiency in repeated prisoner s dilemma with private monitoring abstract this paper analyzes repeated games with private monitoring where in each period each player receives a signal of the other player s action in the previous period and that signal is private information previous literature on discounted repeated games with private monitoring has not shown whether or not nearly efficient equilibria exist for a repeated prisoner s dilemma satisfying a certain assumption regarding stage game payoffs we show that there exists a nearly efficient sequential equilibrium provided that imperfectness of signals is small and players are patient journal of economic literature classification number c73