tax spend spend tax or fiscal synchronization a wavelet analysis in this article we use wavelet methodology to analyse the long term relationship between spending and taxes unlike the standard methodology that utilizes unit roots and cointegration with or with

social identity and social free riding abstract we model individual identification choice as a strategic group formation problem when choosing a social group to identify with individuals appreciate high social status and a group stereotype to which they have a small social distance a group s social status and stereotype are shaped by the exogenous individual attributes of its members and hence endogenous to individuals choices unless disutility from social distance is strong enough this creates a strategic tension as individuals with attributes that contribute little to group status would like to join high status groups thereby diluting the latters status and changing stereotypes such social free riding motivates the use of soft exclusion technologies in high status groups which provides a unifying rationale for phenomena such as hazing rituals charitable activities or status symbols that is not taste based or follows a standard signaling mechanism

common trends the government s budget constraint and revenue smoothing abstract the requirement that the government s budget be balanced in present value terms is shown to be equivalent to the condition that government expenditures inclusive of interest tax receipts and seignorage be cointegrated the condition is in fact stronger requiring that the deficit inclusive of interest be stationary stationarity of the net of interest deficit is neither necessary nor sufficient for intertemporal budget balance however it does have implications for barro s tax smoothing hypothesis data for the period 1890 1986 are consistent with intertemporal budget balance but not with tax smoothing

art as an investment and conspicuous consumption good ments art is also a consumption good art owners take pleasure in its intrinsic value e g for aesthetic pleasure or as a storehouse of an artist s deftness and to the extent that it is a luxury good they derive additional enjoyment from the signal of wealth that owning a masterpiece transmits it is the mixture of pecuniary and nonpecuniary payoffs to ownership that makes artworks both compelling to purchase and difficult to value i exploit this insight to explain why the measured risk premium of a portfolio of artworks is low compared to other risky assets in a consumption based pricing model an asset s risk premium is a function of the covariance of its returns with agents marginal utility of consump tion agents need to be compensated if the asset pays off in a period of already high utility as a luxury good relative art demand is an increasing function of wealth therefore positive shocks to income increase the demand price and returns to art in periods of high consumption utility implying a high risk premium this intuition is at odds with empirical studies that quantify the average financial returns of paintings relative to more traditional investment vehicles these studies find that art 1 often underperforms relative to equities and bonds while there have been

a model of the it products in fashion one of the characteristics of the fashion marketplace is the unpredictability and apparent randomness of fashion hits another one is the information asymmetry among consumers in this paper we consider fashion as a means consumers use to signal belonging to a higher social rank and propose an analytical model of fashion hits in the presence of competition and consumers who can coordinate on which product to use we show that consistent with the observed market phenomenon in equilibrium consumer coordination involves randomization between products chosen i e in randomness of fashion hits analyzing optimal consumer choice we find that whenever low type consumer demand for a product is positive a price increase results in a higher probability of high type consumers choosing this product but lower low type consumer demand we also show that although high type consumers may prefer higher prices that would lead to complete separation of the high and the low type consumers through product use in equilibrium firms always price as to attract positive demand from low type consumers the equilibrium price and profits turn out to be nonmonotonic in the low type consumer valuation of being recognized as belonging to a higher social rank equilibrium profits first increase and then decrease in this valuation

durable goods theory for real world markets the early 1970s witnessed three major advances in durable goods theory swan 1970 1971 and sieper and swan 1973 on optimal durability coase 1972 on time inconsistency and akerlof 1970 on adverse selection this paper surveys durable goods theory starting with these three contributions where much of the focus is on recent literature and on models that explain real world phenomena in addition to the ideas found in the contributions of swan coase and akerlof topics covered include why producers sometimes practice planned obsolescence the role of adverse selection in new car leasing and reasons for aftermarket monopolization

explaining fashion cycles imitators chasing innovators in product space abstract this paper considers the problem of a fashion trend setter confronting an imitator who can produce the same product at lower cost a one dimensional product space is considered which is an abstraction of the key attribute of some consumer good three broad strategies can be optimal for the fashion leader 1 never innovate which milk profits from the initially advantageous position but ultimately concede the market without a fight 2 innovate once but only once which just temporarily defers conceding the market 3 cycle infinitely around product space never letting the imitator catch up and capture the market sometimes the cycles start immediately sometimes the innovator should wait for a time before beginning the cycles the optimal solution exhibits strong state dependency with so called skiba curves separating regions in state space where various of these strategies are optimal there are even instances of intersecting skiba curves in most cases analytical expressions can be stated that characterize these skiba curves

social attributes and strategic equilibrium a restaurant pricing game using a game theoretic approach we examine possible equilibrium explanations of the often observed phenomenon that two neighboring restaurants offering similar menus nevertheless experience vastly different demands the essential aspect of this analysis is the presence of a consumption externality that makes the popularity itself a factor in the determination of the relative attractiveness of the restaurants

capacity choice counters the coase conjecture the coase conjecture 1972 is the proposition that a durable goods monopolist who sells over time and can quickly reduce prices as sales are made will price at marginal cost subsequent work has shown that in some plausible cases that conjecture does not hold we show that the coase conjecture does not hold in any plausible case in particular we examine that conjecture in a model where there is a vanishingly small cost for production capacity and the seller may augment capacity in every period in the gap case any positive capacity cost ensures that in the limit as the size of the gap and the time between sales periods shrink the monopolist obtains profits identical to those that would prevail when she could commit ex ante to a fixed capacity given a standard condition on demand those profits are at least 29 8 of the full static monopoly optimum

research note trading up a strategic analysis of reference group effects reference groups influence product and brand evaluations especially when the product is a publicly consumed luxury good marketers of such luxury goods need to carefully balance two important social forces 1 the desire of leaders to distinguish themselves from followers and 2 the countervailing desire of followers to assimilate with leaders in this paper we examine the theoretical implications of these social forces for firm prices product design and target consumer selection we show that the presence of reference group effects can motivate firms to add costly features which provide limited or no functional benefit to consumers furthermore reference group effects can induce product proliferation on one hand and motivate firms to offer limited editions on the other hand we find that offering a limited edition can increase sales and profits in some cases reference group effects can even lead to a buying frenzy

status goods experimental evidence from platinum credit cards this paper provides novel evidence on status goods using a series of field experiments with an indonesian bank that markets platinum credit cards to high income customers in a first experiment the paper shows that demand for the platinum card greatly exceeds demand for a nondescript control product with identical benefits suggesting demand for the pure status aspect of the card transaction data reveal that platinum cards are more likely to be used in social contexts implying social image motivations combining price variation with information on the use of the card sheds light on the magnitude of the demand for social status a second experiment provides evidence of positional externalities from the consumption of these status goods the final experiment shows that increasing self esteem causally reduces demand for status goods this suggests that part of the demand for status is psychological in nature and that social image is a substitute for self image

panel data modelling and the tax spend controversy in the euro zone this article attempts to differentiate between the debatable tax and spend spend and tax fiscal synchronization and institutional separation hypotheses in order to explore empirically the interplay between public expenditures and public revenues in the economic and monetary union emu member states for this purpose panel data models are derived to test the validity of the four hypotheses in emu countries a notable characteristic of this article is that the four hypotheses are tested by dividing emu countries into various subgroups and using disaggregated data for government expenditures and revenues seeking for the robustness of the empirical evidence the panel data methods of generalized two stage least squares gtsls and generalized method of moments gmm are accordingly applied to identify the relationship between public outlays and taxation receipts gtsls and gmm results strongly support the fiscal synchronization hypothesis implying that budget decision making is significantly influenced b

co integration and error correction models the temporal causality between government taxes and spending several interesting papers have recently considered whether government taxes granger cause government spending or vice versa the findings based on standard granger 6 causality tests are not consistent manage and marlow 10 conclude that when evidence of one way causality exists federal taxes granger cause federal spending while anderson wallace and warner 1 conclude that the evidence supports one way causality in the opposite direction ram 11 reexamining the issue concludes that taxes granger cause spending at the federal level but that spending granger causes taxes at the state and local level von furstenberg green and jeong 13 in another related article examine the tax and spend spend and tax causality issue using a more general vector autoregressive var model they introduce in addition to federal taxes and spending two economic variables the gnp gap and the inflation rate decompose federal spending into several categories and remove the effects of automatic stabilizers when appropriate they find little evidence that taxes granger cause spending and limited evidence that spending causes taxes a finding which corresponds most closely to that of anderson wallace and warner 1 our purpose is to reconsider the causality issue with the aid of co integration and errorcorrection modeling our analysis illustrates with a specific example how sources of causality can be neglected in standard granger causality tests moreover addressing the question of temporal causality between government taxes and spending provides insight as to how different policies might or might not help control the growth of government the results of our estimating various co integration and error correction models with quarterly data suggest bi directional causality between government taxes and spending both for the federal and state and local sectors this finding counters the conclusions of previous studies when annual data are used however our

on the long run effects of fashion fashion changes but should a fashion last for even a moderate length of time so strong is the principle of inheritance that some effect will probably be impressed on the breed darwin c 1883 the variation of animals and plants under domestication p 231 i introduction fashion is thought as the tendency of consumers to prefer a variety design or brand of a good though it cannot be ranked higher than others in any intrinsically useful dimension in natural sciences darwin s observations suggest that fashion can have dramatic long lasting effects when revisited in the context of the industrial society these observations inspire two questions how does fashion influence the evolution of a product and how does this evolution feed back on the role of fashion moreover can the effects of fashion explain why some fashionable varieties survive while others lose popularity when fashion changes in this article we take a step toward answering these questions we examine the dynamic interaction between fashion and industry structure and how this interaction affects the relevance of fashion in the market for a product in the different stages of its life in our economy firms have two observable characteristics the quality of their production and the prestige of their variety brand both quality and prestige can take a high or a low value consistent with darwin s observations we assume that agents derive utility from quality but no direct or indirect benefit from prestigious varieties we interpret fashion as a norm such that when consumers choose between two varieties with the same quality but different prestige they opt for the most prestigious one in other words in our economy fashion is synonymous of brand loyalty that is the systematic tendency of consumers to be loyal to a variety or brand we analyze how fashion affects firms decisions in the merger market by influencing firm mergers fashion affects the evolution of the industry structure meant in our context as the distribution of characteristics across firms in turn the evolution of the industry structure feeds back on the relevance of fashion intuitively fashion lacks any intrinsic content and is only a norm for choosing among varieties or brands with the same quality as such its relevance changes as the set of consumption possibilities evolves with the industry structure the way fashion affects firm mergers is the following a fashionable low quality firm and an unfashionable high quality one have the incentive to merge with each other intuitively a low quality firm benefits from merging with a high quality firm because it participates to the current profits deriving from high quality production in turn a high quality unfashionable firm knows that if it faces the competition of a high quality fashionable firm it will not be chosen by consumers if this probability is high enough that is if the share of high quality fashionable firms is large enough this firm will prefer merging and foregoing part of its current profits by merging with a fashionable firm in fact it will potentially gain prestige and will overcome competition moreover whenever such a merger occurs with some probability the firm generated by the merger inherits both a high low prestige and a high low quality of production therefore over time the merging process induced by fashion modifies the distribution of attributes industry structure which in turn feeds back on the relevance of fashion we characterize the dynamics of the relevance of fashion in two cases in a first more general case we allow firms prestige to decay at an exogenous rate in this case the dynamics of fashion is driven jointly by firm mergers and by the decay of prestige the dynamics turns out to be potentially quite rich though fashion loses relevance in the long run for some values of the rate of decay it can exhibit periods of rising importance followed by periods of declining importance

learning tastes through social interaction abstract this paper offers an information based model of social interaction and analyzes optimal investment and pricing of services that facilitate interaction in a duopoly agents have uncertainty over their preferences but are aware that they are correlated with others so there exists an incentive to communicate with others in the population when a firm s good can be bundled with a coordination mechanism for its consumers its value is endogenously determined due to a consumption externality although this mechanism increases total surplus it is underprovided and consumer surplus decreases

budget deficits and national saving are politicians exogenous during the thirty five year period following world war ii the federal budget deficit averaged less than one percent of net national product never once exceeding five percent for the five year period from 1982 86 the budget deficit never once fell below five percent of net national product there have been some modest cutbacks recently and the deficit is likely to fall to about four percent of net national product in 1988 further declines are now projected in the congressional budget office 1988 baseline forecast of the implications of present policies but both 1988 presidential candidates suggested many more policies that would increase than decrease the deficit these numbers indicate that after years of relative abstinence the united states has experimented with persistent budget deficits on a rather massive scale in the 1980s economists have generally been quite critical of this fiscal policy though there are at least three respectable minority views arguing that federal deficits are not so bad and quite possibly better than likely corrective measures the rationale for economists general opposition comes from those who hold what is called the neoclassical view of deficits according to this view if the united states should be treated as a closed economy persistent deficits will raise interest rates and lower investment if the united states should be treated as a small open economy persistent deficits will leave real interest rates and investment unchanged but the drop in national saving would be financed by higher foreign borrowing accomplished through a rise in the dollar and a drop in net exports either way net national saving falls and consumption rises at the expense of some combination of investment and net exports as a result living standards are higher in the present but lower in the future compared to what they would be in a world of no deficits

the making of a hot product a signaling explanation of marketers scarcity strategy every marketer s dream is to create a hot product that customers would absolutely want to have thus generating considerable profit to the marketer according to one school of thought marketers should make products hard to get in order to create really hot products in this paper using a game theoretic model we investigate if such scarcity strategies can indeed be optimal while a scarcity strategy may appear to be a viable approach for making a firm s product successful further analysis raises some puzzling issues in particular it is not clear why a firm would not increase its price to get demand and supply in sync and increase its profit in the process we therefore offer a signaling explanation for the optimality of such strategies and show that a high quality seller may optimally choose to make the product scarce in order to credibly signal the quality of its product to uninformed customers our analysis indicates that a high quality seller optimally employs scarcity as a signaling device in product markets that are characterized ceteris paribus by a small difference in marginal cost between high and low quality products a low reservation price for a low quality product a greater heterogeneity in reservation prices for a high quality product and a moderate number of informed consumers our results provide a rationale for the fact that scarcity strategies are usually observed for discretionary or specialty products but not for commodity products staple products or new to the world products

social culture and economic performance the connection between obtaining higher paying jobs and undertaking some seemingly irrelevant activity is interpreted as social culture in the context of a society trying to adopt a new technology i show that by allowing the firms to give preferential treatment to workers based on some cultural activity the society can partially overcome an informational free riding problem therefore social culture may affect the economic performance by altering the effective production technology of the economy jel p17 z1 what is social culture what is the role of social culture in economic performance in a provocative article kenneth arrow 1971 argued that norms of social behavior including ethical and moral codes are reactions of society to compensate for market failure somewhat surprisingly this idea of the role of social culture has not been further pursued in the literature in this paper i take arrow s viewpoint seriously and construct a simple model to examine the possibility that social culture may alleviate market failure i consider a society that is deciding whether to adopt a new technology three important assumptions are made about the economy first adoption decisions are made by entrepreneurs or firms but the operators of the new technology are workers second the new technology can be successfully operated only when the worker has invested in some imperfectly observable requisite skills and third it is costly for the workers

the revenues expenditures nexus panel data evidence from swedish municipalities this paper examines the dynamic relationship between local government revenues and expenditures in sweden results from a panel of 265 municipalities covered over the time period 1974 87 show that i expenditures cause revenues while revenues do not cause expenditures ii intergovernmental grants both cause and are caused by expenditures and revenues iii lags of four years are needed to describe the dynamics among the fiscal variables and iv the parameters of the expenditures equation are time varying these results cast doubt on static modeling of local government activities and on models imposing time invariant parameters without ever testing for it

is the budget deficit too large yes specifically we find that recent spending and taxing policies of the government if continued violate the government s intertemporal budget constraint as a result government spending must be reduced and or tax revenues must be increased these conclusions are based on tests of whether government spending and revenue are cointegrated in addition to examining real spending and revenue we also normalize these variables by real gnp and population for a growing economy these normalized measures are perhaps more pertinent we also test and find support for the hypothesis that deficits have become a problem only in recent years

resource development and inequality in indigenous societies concern has been expressed both by indigenous people and by academic analysts that large scale resource development may sharpen inequality in what are relatively egalitarian indigenous societies much of the academic literature suggests that resource development does indeed have this effect but such claims are usually based on very limited empirical evidence in addition the literature is lacking in conceptual frameworks which allow the concept of inequality to be adequately specified take into account the quite different forms of income which resource development can generate explain rather than simply document specific changes in income distribution and on this basis provide grounds for policy prescription this article seeks to develop such a framework

waves in consumption with interdependence among consumers this paper presents a model to analyze the development of consumption patterns when there are social interactions among consumers in particular a consumer in this model recognizes three reference groups a peer group of similar consumers with whom the consumer wishes to share consumption activities a distinction group from which the consumer wishes to distinguish him or herself and an aspiration group to which the consumer does not belong but wishes that he she did and with whom the consumer would like to share consumption activities the interplay of aspiration and distinction can lead to waves in consumption these can happen when for example the avant garde consumption of up market pioneers is copied by other types of consumer as the latter aspire to emulate the former the former in turn seek to distinguish themselves from these unwelcome companions by varying their consumption in consequence a particular consumption activity may start up market an then gradually proceed down the social spectrum more complex patterns with continuing cycles in consumption can also be found the paper argues that this model is not only applicable to the consumption behaviour of an elite or would be elite but is relevant in a wide range of consumption settings

an examination of the causal relationship between government spending and revenue a cointegration analysis this paper tests the validity of the proposition that there is a causal relationship between government expenditure and government revenue for greece over the period 1957 1993 the empirical analysis employs tests of cointegration as pre tests for granger tests of causality the empirical evidence suggests that there is a long run relationship between government spending and government revenue and expenditures cause revenues

on the limitations of government borrowing a framework for empiricaltesting this paper seeks to distinguish empirically between two views on the limitations of government borrowing according to one view nothing precludes the government from running a permanent budget deficit paying interest due on the growing debt load simply by issuing new debt an alternative perspective holds that creditors would be unwilling to purchase government debt unless the government made a credible commitment to balance its budget in present value terms we show that distinguishing between these possibilities is mathematically equivalent to testing whether a continuing currency inflation might be fueled by speculation alone or is instead driven solely by economic fundamentals empirical tests which have been developed for this economic question lead us to conclude that postwar u s deficits are largely consistent with the proposition that the government budget must be balanced in present value terms this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

social image concerns and prosocial behavior field evidence from a nonlinear incentive scheme abstract using longitudinal data on the entire population of blood donors in an italian town we examine how donors respond to a nonlinear award scheme that rewards them with symbolic prizes medals when they reach certain donation quotas our results indicate that donors significantly increase the frequency of their donations immediately before reaching the thresholds for which the rewards are given but only if the prizes are publicly announced in the local newspaper and awarded in a public ceremony the results are robust to several specifications sample definitions and controls for observable and unobservable heterogeneity our findings indicate that social image concerns are a primary motivator of prosocial behavior and that symbolic prizes are most effective as motivators when they are awarded publicly we discuss the implications of our findings for policies aimed at incentivizing prosocial behavior

government spending and taxation what causes what in the past few years as federal deficits have risen to high nominal levels economists have argued about the effect that raising taxes ostensibly to reduce deficits might have on government spending some economists including milton friedman have argued that raising taxes will simply lead to more spending others including james buchanan and richard wagner have said that the high deficits themselves have been responsible for the growth of federal spending and that if that spending had to be financed completely by direct taxes people would demand that the federal government spend less a third group led by robert barro says that increased taxes and borrowing are results of increased government spending in section ii we briefly review various hypotheses about the relationship between federal government spending and revenues section iii describes the testing procedure used to discriminate between these hypotheses the results of four tests are presented in section iv section v contains a summary and major conclusions to foreshadow what follows we find no evidence that higher real federal taxes today lead to either higher or lower federal spending tomorrow on the other hand we find strong evidence that higher spending now will lead to higher taxes later our results support a view of the world in which the political system somehow determines how much to spend and then looks for revenue sources to finance that level of spending including direct taxation borrowing and money creation we also find evidence that real federal revenues are positively affected by real gross national product gnp real federal spending also rises with real gnp but it appears to be independent of the rate of inflation

optimal firm behavior with consumer social image concerns and asymmetric information abstract this paper explores how consumers belief dependent social image concerns can affect firm strategic choices in a product market setting we consider a theoretical framework with incomplete information where a profit maximizing monopolist sets a price for its product taking into account that consumers care about the belief that others hold about the product s popularity throughout our analysis we highlight the close connection between our dynamic psychological game and the literature on network effects we show in particular that belief dependent social image concerns generate equilibrium price distortions that do not arise in a network effect setting and we explore the implications for consumer demand and firm profits

purchasing power parity in the presence of foreign exchange black markets the case of india the empirical validity of b ppp eb as a long run constraint between india and the us is examined in the preesence of foreign exchange black markets in a triariate model the official exchange rate is found to be coinergrated with both the price ratio and the black market exchange rate both the official exchange rate and price ratio respond to correct short run departures from b ppp eb also both the official and the black market exchange rates respond to correct departures from their own equilibrium relation the two sources of endogeneity in the official rate follow rate follow as indian authorities aimed to stabilize domestic prices and reduce uncertainty about the dollar price of rupees

the role of land reform in economic development policies and politics as the extensive literature on the subject attests the issue of land reform has been and remains heatedly debated 1 the latest massive demonstration of interest came with the 1979 world conference on agrarian reform and rural development where representatives of no less than 145 nations and three liberation movements agreed that equitable distribution and efficient use of land are indispensable for rural development for the mobilization of human resources and for increased production for the alleviation of poverty fao at one time or another but especially since 1960 virtually every country in the world has passed land reform laws yet the record is far more modest than the promise a in spite of decades if not centuries tuma of land reform activities landownership remains extremely skewed concentration of landownership is almost universally increasing the mass of landless is growing rapidly and the extent of rural poverty and malnutrition has reached horrendous proportions and b in spite of widespread agreement on the need for land reform there are virtually no significant ongoing land reform programs except under extreme political pressures revolutionary in el salvador and postrevolutionary in nicaragua mozambique and angola in several countries the progressive gains achieved by land reform programs are being either eroded by the forces of economic growth mexico venezuela and south korea or purposefully canceled by public policies chile the question i want to explore in this paper is why this blatant discrepancy between rhetoric and reality or to put it another way why is land reform no longer a significant policy issue even though it remains an important political issue in most countries of the world 2 to answer we need first to explore in a positive sense what has been the nature of different land reforms that occurred in the past what were their purposes achievements and limits this will be done by developing a typology of land reforms in the third world because it is essential to distinguish carefully among a wide variety of reforms following the approach of political economy i will do this in the context of modes of production social class structure and types of land tenure

a note on dynamic monopoly pricing under consumption externalities we analyze dynamic monopoly pricing under consumption externalities focusing on pricing under negative externalities we also attempt to generalize models in the previous literature which encompass both negative and positive externalities by incorporating a consumer s discount factor for past sales as a parameter analyzing our model reveals oscillation as the optimal price path in the presence of negative externalities

budget deficits rhetoric and reality w v t hatever the real or imagined ills of the economy the news media most politicians and a fair proportion of the economics profession are quick to point to the culprit the budget deficit no matter that few appear to know or care precisely what deficit they are talking about or how it is measured no matter that few bother to explain in terms of a relevant model just how government deficits may be expected to impact the economy no matter that few offer any empirical data to sustain their judgments so budget deficits cause inflation budget deficits raise interest rates budget deficits bring on the trade deficits budget deficits crowd out investment budget deficits are an irresponsible mortgage on the future and budget deficits caused the october 1987 stock market crash and now threaten further financial cataclysms is there truth in any of these assertions or does it all depend budget deficits do matter and their effects contrary to barro s ricardian equivalence theorem can be substantial as most economists have recognized for at least half a century budget deficits can however be too small as well as too large to know which you have to measure them right and you have to analyze their role in the world in which we live pure walrasian and rational expectation market clearing models may prove more useful for academic advancement than for promotion of economic health i need not repeat many of the objections to the equivalence theorem raised by bernheim and gramlich and addressed by barro in this symposium however there is

instability of equilibria in experimental markets upward sloping demands externalities and fad like incentives the objective of the paper is to study markets in which the value of the activity to any one person increases with the level with which the activity is undertaken by others the general interpretation could be fads mimicking behavior or some sort of belief formation process in which the beliefs or expectations of agents about some underlying state of nature are influenced by the buying behavior of other agents the result is to create a market that can be modeled as having an upward sloping market demand curve the questions posed are 1 in the fad like environment does the classical concept of equilibrium as an equating of market demand and market supply accurately predict market behavior ii can both stable and unstable equilibria be observed and iii which of the two classical concepts of stability best describes the conditions under which instability is obeserved under the conditions of a fad like demand side externality in a market organized by the multiple unit double auction muda market equilibration occurs at a point where demand equals supply the disequilibrium behavior follows the dynamics of the marshallian model of dynamics as opposed to the walrasian model these results confirm and extend the major findings of plott and george who studied a similar environment with a downward sloping supply

pricing of conspicuous goods a competitive analysis of social effects abstract social needs play an important role in the purchase of conspicuous goods in this article the authors extend traditional economic models to accommodate social needs such as desire for uniqueness and conformism and examine their implications for pricing conspicuous goods first in the context of a duopoly the authors identify the conditions under which the desire for uniqueness can increase demand among some consumers as the price of a product increases second the authors show that though the desire for uniqueness leads to higher prices and firm profits a desire for conformity leads to lower prices and profits third the authors find that consumers purchase high quality products not because of their desire for uniqueness but despite it finally marketers of conspicuous goods may find it beneficial not to emphasize the functional differences among their products when the need for uniqueness is high in a laboratory test the authors find support for the claim that demand for a product amo

dress to impress brands as status symbols abstract we analyzed the market for indivisible pure status goods firms produce and sell different brands of pure status goods to a population that is willing to signal individual abilities to potential matches in another population individual status is determined by the most expensive status good one has there is a stratified equilibrium with a finite number of brands under constant tax rates a monopoly sells different brands to social classes of equal measure while in contestable markets social classes have decreasing measures under optimal taxation contestable markets have progressive tax rates while a monopoly faces an adequate flat tax rate to all brands in contrast with extant literature subsidies may be socially optimal depending on the parameters in both market structures

government expenditures and revenues evidence from asymmetric modeling 1 introductionexamining the empirical relationship between government revenues and expenditures is a crucial step in understanding the future path of the budget deficit four alternative explanations have been used to describe the relationship between these variables in the budgetary process i the tax and spend hypothesis ii the spend and tax hypothesis iii the fiscal synchronization hypothesis and iv the institutional separation hypothesis the issue of which hypothesis best describes the nature of the budgetary process has yet to be resolved in the literature however existing research has implicitly assumed that the state of the budget and whether or not the budget deficit or surplus is worsening or improving does not matter we argue that government decision makers may take these factors into account when determining expenditures and tax policy as such this article reexamines the tax spend debate by using a more robust econometric technique that allows for asymmetry in the relationship between revenues and expenditures until now the empirical evidence on the tax spend debate has focused almost exclusively on two conventional econometric techniques depending on the cointegrating properties between revenues and expenditures these techniques are based on either variations of the unrestricted vector autoregression uvar or the vector autoregression error correction model ecm 1 if for example the two budgetary variables are not cointegrated then the application of causality2 tests requires the use of stationary variables in the uvar model 3 on the other hand if the two budgetary variables are cointegrated then the application of causality tests requires an ecm specification it is important to note that the ecm specification implicitly assumes that the adjustment process of expenditures and revenues due to disequilibrium between the variables is strictly symmetric indeed if the adjustment is asymmetric then the symmetric adjustment implicitly assumed in the conventional techniques to ascertain causality implies model misspecification this specification error may lead to misguided and perhaps inappropriate fiscal policy decisions accurate estimation of the revenue and expenditure process is especially important as changes in taxes and spending alter incentives for work investment and productive activity cea 2004 thus the anticipated behavioral responses of households and businesses may be better captured by more general models that allow for asymmetry in the tax spend relationship to this end this article examines the existence of cointegration between revenues and expenditures and the corresponding ecm specification by using the recently developed techniques of asymmetric modeling in particular we employ the threshold autoregression tar and momentum threshold autoregression m tar models developed by enders and granger 1998 and enders and siklos 2001 within the context of these models we shed new light on whether budget surpluses versus budget deficits or an improving budget versus a worsening budget have asymmetric effects on the dynamic behavior of expenditures and revenues there is an a priori rationale for modeling asymmetry in the budget and for the response of its components to disequilibrium this rationale can be categorized into four factors first the fiscal policymakers may respond differently to a deviation of the deficit or surplus from its long run trend one would expect for example that the response would be more aggressive if the deficit was greater than its long run trend than if it was less than its trend second it is widely acknowledged that there is a very close connection between the budget and the business cycle through automatic fiscal stabilizers and discretionary fiscal measures to the extent that the business cycle is asymmetric the associated change in the budget may also be asymmetric

measurement and determinants of rural poverty household consumption patterns and food poverty in rural sudan abstract a logit model and engel curves are used to study the determinants of food poverty and composition of household consumption among the tenant farmers of the rahad scheme in sudan where land is equally distributed the data support the permanent income hypothesis whereas engel s assumption of declining food shares with increased total spending did not hold for the present sample the logit analysis provides strong evidence for the important influences of better access to productive assets other than land smallersized families higher non farm earnings and farming experience on reducing the probability of food poverty on the scheme policies directed towards the provision of better family planning education extension increased on and off farm employment and improved infrastructure for higher labour mobility can make for effective poverty alleviation programmes in this sector

conspicuous consumption and dynamic pricing how do firms develop marketing strategy when consumers seek to satisfy both quality and status related considerations we develop an analytical model to study this issue examining both pricing and product management decisions in markets for conspicuous durable goods our analysis yields many interesting and nontrivial insights first we demonstrate that high intrinsic quality indirectly generates exclusivity via pricing effects in turn this exclusivity generates considerable social payoffs where consumers value status this insight reverses the direction of causality in the existing literature wherein only status considerations matter and mere price increases may enhance consumer utility second our dynamic model indicates that where consumers prioritize status benefits producers incur substantial price depreciation in equilibrium third we examine the product management strategies used by firms to preserve early adopter exclusivity finally we discuss the boundary conditions of our results as well as our results implications for managerial and policy issues

design innovation and fashion cycles a model of fashion cycles is developed in which designs are used as a signaling device in a dating game a monopolist periodically creates a new design over time the price of the design falls as it spreads across the population once sufficiently many consumers own the design it is profitable to create a new design and thereby render the old design obsolete this paper gives conditions under which all consumers would be better off by banning the use of fashion competition among designers may lead to less frequent changes in fashion and to higher prices than monopoly copyright 1995 by american economic association

cloak or flaunt the fashion dilemma there exists a dichotomy in the communication strategies of fashion firms some firms purposefully cloak information on the tastefulness of their products whereas others openly flaunt their tasteful or it products this divide in communication strategies cannot be explained by existing wealth signaling models of fashion in this paper we offer a model of fashion that explains the above dichotomy we model fashion as a social device that plays the dual role of allowing people to both fit in with their peers and differentiate themselves by signaling their good taste or access to information in this context we show that a fashion firm faces an interesting dilemma if it restricts information then only sophisticated consumers buy its products and use them to signal their taste cloaking thus preserves the signaling value of its products but reduces the number of social interactions enabled by them in contrast flaunting undermines the signaling value of its products but increases the interactions enabled by them given these trade offs we derive the conditions under which cloaking occurs we also show that in equilibrium the most tasteful product endogenously emerges as the fashion hit or it product

promotions and product pricing parsimony versus veblenesque demand the veracity of the parsimonious law of demand has long been challenged by analyses of the veblen effect and prestige pricing backward bending demand curves often attend discussions of conspicuous consumption probing the sociological and psychological intricacies of potential consumer interdependencies scholars in economics and marketing have overlooked mundane product promotions for a monopolistic firm we formalize the relationship between the optimal price quantity combination and the thoroughness of product promotions iterating toward the profit maximizing thoroughness of product promotion gives rise to a backward bending price quantity locus challenges to the law of demand that ignore product promotions are thereby undercut

cycles of conflict an economic model abstract we propose a model of cycles of conflict and distrust overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of bad types who always take bad actions good actions may be misperceived as bad and information about past actions is limited conflict spirals start as a result of misperceptions but also contain the seeds of their own dissolution bayesian agents eventually conclude that the spiral likely started by mistake and is thus uninformative of the opposing group s type the agents then experiment with a good action restarting the cycle jel d72 d74 d83 z13

government revenue and government expenditure nexus evidence from developing countries the relationship between government revenue and government expenditure has attracted a lot of interest given its policy relevance particularly with respect to budget deficits the goal of this paper is to investigate evidence for causality between government revenue and government expenditure within a multivariate framework by modelling them together with gross domestic product for 12 developing countries our application of the toda and yamamoto 1995 test for granger causality reveals support for the tax and spend hypothesis for mauritius el salvador haiti chile and venezuela for haiti there is evidence for the spend and tax hypothesis while for peru south africa guatemala uruguay and ecuador there is evidence of neutrality

unequal wealth accumulation and income inequality in a unimodal agriculture sudan s radad irrigation scheme patterns of income savings and wealth accumulation of tenant farmers in the rahad irrigation scheme of sudan were examined although land and irrigation water are publicly owned and equally distributed in these schemes unequal access to capital was found to influence strongly the distribution of family income and the saving and accumulation capacities of the tenant farmers analysis using lorenz curves and gini coefficients revealed a high positive correlation between wealth and family income the average wealth gap between poor and rich households increased by 28 per cent over the year of the study to reduce relative poverty improved credit and marketing systems plus more research and extension support to enhance productivity and create higher on farm incomes for the poorer tenants are needed in addition macro and sector policies that subsidise labour saving technologies and lower incentives for export and domestic crop production need to be reformed to promote greater employment and higher off fa

do revenues or expenditures respond to budgetary disequilibria the post world war ii increase in the size of the federal government has led to a number of theoretical and empirical investigations of the sources of this growth in particular economists have questioned whether increases in the size of the federal budget tend to be initiated by changes in expenditures followed by revenue adjustments by the reverse sequence or both friedman for example argues that governments adjust expenditures to the level of revenues so that control of taxation is essential to limit growth in government 13 alternatively the spend and tax model posits that revenues will be adjusted to finance any politically chosen level of expenditures a third perspective reflecting the institutional separation of allocation and taxation functions of the federal government hypothesizes the independent determination of revenues and expenditures the goal of this investigation is to test these three alternative theories of the budgetary process for the united states

limited edition products when and when not to offer them many brands today introduce limited edition le products as part of their product line however little is known about the conditions under which a brand should introduce an le product or the competitive implications of doing so we investigate this issue using a game theoretic model of a market where two brands compete for consumers who desire exclusivity our analysis shows that adding an le product has a positive direct effect on brand profits through the increased willingness of consumers to pay for such a product but also has a negative strategic effect by increasing price competition between brands these effects result in different conclusions depending on the nature of brand differentiation when brands differ in quality we show that only the high quality brand may gain in comparison to a scenario where there are no le products although a low quality brand may offer an le product as a defensive strategy its profits are lower than would be in a world without le products because of the negative strategic effect when we consider brands that are differentiated on a horizontal attribute such as taste we find that the negative strategic effects cause lower equilibrium profits if both brands introduce le products yet brands cannot avoid introducing le products because they face a prisoners dilemma

rituals or good works social signaling in religious organizations we develop a model of social signaling of religiosity and cooperative behavior in religious organizations the model embeds a ritual based religious organization in which signaling arises through the use of costly rituals and a discipline based religious organization in which such signaling occurs through the monitoring of past behavior we use this framework to contrast positively and normatively these two forms of social signaling we show we develop a model of social signaling of religiosity and cooperative behavior in religious organizations the model embeds a ritual based religious organization in which signaling arises through the use of costly rituals and a discipline based religious organization in which such signaling occurs through the monitoring of past behavior we use this framework to contrast positively and normatively these two forms of social signaling we show that ritual based religions while using a costly and wasteful signal also imply a higher level of coordination of behavior in social interactions and a higher incidence of mutual cooperation our welfare analysis suggests that communities are more likely to support a switch to a discipline based religion if strategic complementarities are high and if there is sufficiently high level of public information about social behavior this accords with the success of calvin s reformation in switzerland and france a process characterized by the reduction of rituals along with the creation of institutions to monitor and publicize individuals behavior such as the consistory

inventories and the automobile market this article studies the within model year pricing production and inventory management of new automobiles using new monthly data on u s transaction prices we document that for the typical vehicle prices fall over the model year at a 9 0 annual rate concurrently both sales and inventories are hump shaped to explain these time series we formulate an industry model for new automobiles in which inventory and pricing decisions are made simultaneously the model predicts that automakers build to stock inventory management policy substantially influences the time series of prices and sales accounting for four tenths of the price decline observed over the model year

the intertemporal relation between government revenue and expenditure in the united kingdom 1750 to 2004 we examine the intertemporal relation between government revenue and expenditure in the uk during 1750 to 2004 we pay particular attention to long run trends by applying a battery of unit root and cointegration techniques to the data and we use a modified granger causality test on data spans organized around structural breaks in the series the results suggest that allowing for structural breaks uk real revenue and spending are i 1 series and cointegrated and that granger causality runs from government spending to revenue as such the spend tax hypothesis appears to best characterize the long run intertemporal relation between government revenue and spending in the uk

the causal relation between federal expenditures and receipts federal expenditures have consistently exceeded federal revenues since 1970 in fact the federal government has seen a surplus in only five years since 1950 the symptoms of such fiscal imbalance are of course budget deficits while budget deficits are nothing new in u s history the recent and projected size of the deficit during peacetime nonrecessionary years has been the cause of much concern to academics the news media and politicians this preoccupation with federal deficits has produced a variety of policy proposals to deal with them

overcoming adverse selection how public intervention can restore market functioning as illustrated by liquidity support equity injections and asset repurchases in financial crises and by imf credit lines to countries authorities often intervene in orderto revive markets that have dried up or to create newones in suchsituations agents participate only if they receive from the governmental scheme more than in the marketplace while the market outcome depends on who joins the scheme the paper provides a first analysis of market jumpstarting and its two way interaction between mechanism design and participation constraints in the model sellers in need of cash have private information about the value of their legacy asset the absence of buyer confidence forces authorities to intervene to jump start the market we characterize the optimal intervention and draw two main implications first the government should clean up the market through buybacks of the weakest assets and then through some equity injections and leave the agents with the strongest legacy assets to the market in particular authorities should not substitute fully for the market even when they have no comparative disadvantage in acquiring assets or shares thereof second the government creates its own competition by cleaning up the market from its most toxic pieces at the optimal intervention the government always strictly overpays for the legacy asset yet and unlike what would be suggested by coasian profit evasion the existence of a later market imposes no welfare cost while it is cast in a public intervention context the analysis of mechanismdependent reservation utilities also admits important private sector applications

beyond the purchasing power parity testing for cointegration and causality between exchange rates prices and interest rates abstract this paper reexamines the causality between the dollar and the yen in a multivariate framework with the aid of cointegration and error correcting modeling for the 1951 94 period the phillips perron tests and johansen s tests are performed while causality from interest rates to exchange rates is found in the short run no causality between prices and exchange rates is found in the short run however causality is found running from relative prices to exchange rates along with interest rates between the u s and japan in the long run which supports the long run ppp hypothesis

pre match investment with frictions the paper explores an environment in which agents are motivated to make unproductive investments with the sole aim of improving their matching opportunities in contrast to existing work i add frictions by allowing the investment to be imperfectly observed the analysis allows for a deeper understanding of the trade off inherent in related models investments waste resources but facilitates more efficient matching patterns i show that greater frictions i do not always lead to inferior matching patterns and ii can force the economy into to a pareto preferred equilibrium

strategic firms and endogenous consumer emulation better informed consumers may be treated preferentially by firms since their consumption serves as a quality signal for other customers for normal goods this results in wealthy individuals being treated better than poor individuals we investigate this phenomenon in an equilibrium model of social learning with heterogeneous consumers and firms that act strategically consumers search for high quality firms and condition their choices on observed actions of other consumers when they observe consumers who are more likely to have identified a high quality firm uninformed individuals will optimally emulate those consumers one group of consumers arises endogenously as leaders whose consumption behavior is emulated follow on sales induce firms to give preferential treatment to these lead consumers which reinforces their learning

tax and spend spend and tax or fiscal synchronization new evidence for ten countries cointegration and vector autoregression are used to test the tax and spend spend and tax and fiscal synchronization for ten countries using annual time series data over the period 1951 to 1996 three of them are part of the newly industrialized countries of asia south korea taiwan and thailand and seven are industrialized countries australia canada japan new zealand south africa uk and the usa this paper includes gdp as a control variable into the model like baghestani and mcnown 1994 ross and payne 1998 and koren and stiassny 1998 the johansen 1988 and johansen and juselius 1990 cointegration test results indicate that these three variables are cointegrated with two cointegrating vectors for south korea one vector for australia canada south africa taiwan uk and the usa and no vector for japan new zealand and thailand the results from granger causality tests suggest unidirectional causality running from revenues to spending supporting the tax and spend hypoth

signalling inequality and the social structure this paper proposes a theory of endogenous transmission of social status through signalling in the labour market a signalling game is analysed in which education acting as a signalling good determines one s position in society the economy s degree of inequality is shown to be a determinant of whether a society is aristocratic where high income is the source of social standing or meritocratic bestowing status on high ability each social structure shows a different balance between production efficiency and social factors such as equality or mobility

cooperation secret handshakes and imitation in the prisoners dilemma building on a j robson 1990 j theoret biol 144 379 396 we introduce into the repeated prisoners dilemma mutants who have the ability to send a costly signal i e the secret handshake before each round of the game and to condition their actions on whether or not they observe the same signal from their opponent we show that as mutation probabilities approach zero in the limit cooperation occurs a positive fraction of the time using simulations to study the behavior of the system with nonzero mutation probabilities we obtain similar results surprisingly in some cases an increased payoff to unilateral defection actually raises the level of cooperation journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c72 d60

conspicuous consumption snobbism and conformism abstract we develop a model in which consumers purchase a conspicuous good in order to signal high income and thereby achieve greater social status in equilibrium the signalling value of conspicuous consumption depends in an identifiable way on the number of consumers and consumer behaviour is characterized by either snobbism or conformism the market demand curve for the conspicuous good may exhibit a positive slope if consumers are conformist we derive some unconventional policy implications concerning the taxation of luxuries and the voluntary provision of public goods

market stability backward bending supply in a laboratory experimental market 1999 presidential address western economic association the paper investigates the stability properties of markets with backward bending supply curves parameters are chosen so that the two classic models of price dynamics the walrasian model and the marshallian model give opposite predictions the results are 1 market instability can be observed 2 in the backward bending case stability is captured by the walrasian model and the marshallian model of dynamics is rejected previous experiments have demonstrated that the marshallian model works in the forward falling case thus which theory of dynamics is appropriate for a market depends upon the underlying reasons for demand and supply shapes

rank as an inherent incentive evidence from a field experiment abstract money is the prime incentive considered in economic models however recent evidence indicates that people are also greatly concerned about their social rankings is this solely because rank brings tangible benefits or because in addition people have an inherent preference for high rank this paper deployed a field experiment that provides evidence for an inherent preference in the experiment vietnamese students enrolled in an english course performed significantly better on the official standardized international final test when they were told their rankings on practice tests than when they were not this result held even when this ranking information could not be reliably communicated thus severely attenuating the potential to bring tangible or status benefits

measuring the importance of oil related revenues in total fiscal income for mexico revenues from oil exports are an important part of government budgets in mexico a time series analysis is conducted using monthly data from 1990 to 2005 examining three different specifications to determine how international oil price fluctuations and government income generated from oil exports influence fiscal policy in mexico the behavior of government spending and taxation is consistent with the spend tax hypothesis the results show that there is an inverse relationship between oil related revenues and tax revenue from non oil sources fiscal policy reform is urgently needed in order to improve tax collection as oil reserves in mexico become more and more depleted

information cascades replication and an extension to majority rule and conformity rewarding institutions in a randomly determined order each agent was given an independent private signal about which of two states was selected by a random draw after receiving the private signal each agent made a publicly announced decision about the state thus at the time of personal decision each agent had a private signal and also knew the decisions of all preceding agents the experiments focused on three different types of organization 1 agents were rewarded according to whether their announced decision was right or wrong this individualistic institution is the one studied by anderson and holt aer 1997 their discovery of information cascades is replicated 2 agents were rewarded according to whether a majority of announced decisions were right or wrong under this majority rule institution the instance of information cascades is sharply reduced 3 agents are rewarded more according to whether their personal announced decision was the same as the majority decision than they were rewarded if their decision was correct this conformity rewarding institution is motivated by proceedings in which there is incentive to produce reports that conform to the reports of others substantial information cascades are observed

research note price discrimination as an adverse signal why an offer to spread payments may hurt demand firms often search enthusiastically for distinguishing traits that they may use to price discriminate between segments yet there are occasions in which firms forgo the opportunity to price discriminate and instead charge a single price traditional explanations for why retailers forgo the opportunity to price discriminate focus on the cost of discriminating including operational costs explicit discrimination costs and implicit discrimination costs in this paper we identify an additional reason for why firms may forgo an opportunity to price discriminate by revealing that a product is being sold to a broad range of segments a retailer implicitly claims that the product is suitable for each segment however claiming that a premium quality product is suitable for price sensitive consumers undermines the credibility of a retailer s quality claim the signaling explanation was motivated by extensive discussions over more than a year with a major catalog retailer that sells premium quality jewelry and gifts discussions with managers revealed that they were reluctant to use any price discrimination mechanism that signals their products are targeted at price sensitive customers for example the catalog does not include sale or clearance sections and does not target more price sensitive customers by using separate items however management was under some pressure to consider installment billing offers which allow customers to pay over a series of periods rather than in a lump sum management feared that offering installment billing may adversely affect customers quality perceptions and demand to investigate this issue we develop a general game the oretic model illustrate how the model extends to installment billing and conduct a large scale field test the general model illustrates how selling to multiple segments may lead to an adverse quality signal we illustrate how the model extends to installment billing offers in a direct mail catalog installment billing offers allow customers to spread the total payment over a series of payments all customers have the option of using installment billing and customers who use the plan receive an economic benefit an interest free loan we would normally expect this type of offer to increase demand or at a minimum leave demand unchanged however because installment billing offers target credit constrained customers we predicted that the introduction of installment billing would prompt an unfavorable quality inference and reduce demand among quality sensitive customers we empirically investigated this prediction in a large scale field test with a catalog that offers premium quality jewelry and gifts two versions of the catalog were created a test version that contained an installment billing offer and a control version in which installment billing was not offered importantly the prices in both the test version and control version were identical approximately 240 000 catalogs were mailed and customers were randomly assigned to either the test version or control version results show that the installment billing offer test version was associated with both a reduction in the number of orders received and a reduction in aggregate revenue offering installment billing resulted in approximately 15 000 in lost revenue the only plausible explanation for this counterintuitive finding appears to be the signaling theory to investigate the long term effects the catalog agreed to survey their customers to measure how an offer of installment billing affects their customers quality perceptions similar to the field test two versions of a catalog were created and customers were randomly mailed a catalog along with a short survey respondents were asked to browse through the catalog and return their responses in a replypaid envelope the findings are consistent with customer beliefs in the signaling model offering installment billing lowers the perceived quality of the items in the catalog the field test and survey findings were both statistically significant and managerially relevant together the results convinced the catalog not to include installment billing offers in future catalogs

why do people care about social status abstract this paper shows that complementary interaction can induce people to care about social status because it serves as a signal of non observable abilities there is a unique separating equilibrium in which everyone cares about social status in this equilibrium a person s social status perfectly reveals his abilities and everyone matches with a person of like ability the analysis shows that people s instrumental concern for social status has important welfare and policy implications indeed peoples efforts to keep up with the joneses may be welfare enhancing

turkish budget deficit sustainability and the revenue expenditure nexus the sustainability of the turkish budget deficits as well as the dynamics of government revenues and expenditures in controlling the size of the deficit is examined using annual data from 1968 to 2004 the findings support the existence of a long run relation between government revenues and expenditures once allowance is made for an unknown structural break however the size of the slope parameter is significantly less than one suggesting that the government might face difficulties in financing its future debt with respect to the revenue expenditure nexus the empirical evidence is favourable to the tax spend hypothesis through the error correction term in the expenditures equation finally there is no evidence of asymmetries in the adjustment process in either the threshhold autoregressive or momentum threshold autoregressive specifications of the budgetary adjustment process