accounting for emerging market countries international reserves are pacific rim countries different abstract popular perception is that emerging market economies emes and asian pacific rim countries china indonesia korea malaysia philippines thailand and vietnam rims in particular have been rapidly accumulating reserves perhaps beyond what is justified by precautionary motives this paper compares and contrasts the determinants of the demand for international reserves in the rim countries with other emes over the last three decades based on current and capital account risks mercantilism and other motives our findings suggest that the motives for holding reserves has shifted from insurance against current account shocks mostly in the 1980s to insurance against capital account shocks in the 1990s and as the by product of possible mercantilism in the 2000s we also find some differences between country groups rim countries tend to hold more reserves against current account vulnerabilities and fewer reserves against capital account vulnerabilities but more reserves overall there is also greater evidence of mercantilist motives being at play for rim countries though this motive accounts for only a small fraction of the rise in reserve holdings in recent years peaking in 2004 and declining thereafter

the american business cycle continuity and change in recent decades the american economy has experienced the worst peace time inflation in its history and the highest unemployment rate since the great depression these circumstances have prompted renewed interest in the concept of business cycles which joseph schumpeter suggested are like the beat of the heart of the essence of the organism that displays them in the american business cycle some of the most prominent macroeconomics in the united states focuses on the questions to what extent are business cycles propelled by external shocks how have post 1946 cycles differed from earlier cycles and what are the major factors that contribute to business cycles they extend their investigation in some areas as far back as 1875 to afford a deeper understanding of both economic history and the most recent economic fluctuations seven papers address specific aspects of economic activity consumption investment inventory change fiscal policy monetary behavior open economy and the labor market five papers focus on aggregate economic activity in a number of cases the papers present findings that challenge widely accepted models and assumptions in addition to its substantive findings the american business cycle includes an appendix containing both the first published history of the nber business cycle dating chronology and many previously unpublished historical data series

guidelines for exploiting natural resource wealth the principles of how best to manage the various components of national wealth are outlined where the permanent income hypothesis the hotelling rule and the hartwick rule play a prominent role as far as managing natural resource wealth is concerned a case is made to use an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund to smooth consumption across generations a liquidity fund for the precautionary buffers to deal with commodity price volatility and an investment fund to park part of the windfall until the country is ready to absorb extra spending on domestic investment capital scarcity implies that a positive part of the windfall should be spent on domestic investment the conclusions highlight the political economy problems that will have to be tackled with these normative proposals for managing wealth the author 2014 published by oxford university press

bargaining and the timing of investment the joint determination of the timing of investment and wage bargaining is modelled two cases are considered a there is an alternating offer bargaining game over binding wage contracts and production is possible only when agreement is reached b there are no binding contracts so revenue is divided in period by period bargaining post investment investment can occur earlier in case b than in case a and the equilibrium in case b can pareto dominate the equilibrium with binding contracts these conclusions depend on players discount factors

bargaining with imperfect enforcement the game theoretic bargaining literature insists on a noncooperative bargaining procedure but implicitly assumes cooperative implementation of agreements in reality courts cannot implement agreements costlessly and parties often prefer to use noncooperative implementation we present a bargaining model which incorporates the idea that agreements may be enforced noncooperatively we show that this has a substantial impact in limiting the inequality of agreements and results in a nonmonotonicity of the discount rate the model also explains why some parties may have incentives to deliberately write incomplete contracts as a way to enhance their bargaining power

skills in the city this paper documents the allocation of skills across cities and estimates the impact of agglomeration on the hedonic prices of worker skills we find that large cities are more skilled than are small cities but only to a modest degree we also show that the increase in productivity associated with agglomeration as measured by the urban wage premium is larger for workers with stronger cognitive and people skills in contrast motor skills and physical strength are not rewarded to a greater degree in large cities urbanization thus enhances thinking and social interaction rather than physical abilities these results are robust to a variety of estimation strategies including using nlsy variables that control for worker quality and a worker msa fixed effect specification

macro hedging for commodity exporters abstract this paper uses a dynamic optimization model to quantify the potential welfare gains of hedging against commodity price risk for commodity exporting countries we show that hedging enhances domestic welfare through two channels first by reducing export income volatility and second by reducing the country s need to hold precautionary reserves and improving the country s ability to borrow against future export income under plausible calibrations of the model the second channel may lead to much larger welfare gains amounting to several percentage points of annual consumption

bargaining in environmental regulation and the ideal regulator abstract we present a model of environmental regulation in which the stringency of a firm s emissions standard is determined by cooperative bargaining between the firm and a regulator we show that bargaining can be socially beneficial because it can achieve the first best outcome this outcome is never an equilibrium of the noncooperative stackelberg game we also show that the social cost function is not the preferred objective function for a regulator when regulations are determined by bargaining social costs are lower with a regulator that attaches more importance to damages and enforcement costs than to the firm s compliance costs

communication externalities in cities to identify communication externalities in french cities we exploit a unique survey recording workplace communication of individual workers our hypothesis is that in larger and or more educated cities workers should communicate more in turn more communication should have a positive effect on wages by estimating both an earnings and a communication equation we find evidence of communication externalities in larger and more educated cities workers communicate more and in turn this has a positive effect on their wages depending on the estimates we find that 13 to 22 of the effects of a more educated and larger city on wages percolate through this channel

optimal reserves in financially closed economies abstract financially closed economies insure themselves against current account shocks using international reserves we characterize the optimal management of reserves using an open economy model of precautionary savings and emphasize several results first the welfare based opportunity cost of reserves differs from the measures often used in the literature second under plausible calibrations the model is consistent with the rule of thumb that reserves should be close to three months of imports third optimal linear rules can capture most of the welfare gains from optimal reserve management but significantly differ from certainty equivalence fourth policymakers should place more emphasis on how to use reserves in response to shocks than on the reserve target itself

toward a theoretical model of voluntary overcompliance abstract we explain why some firms voluntarily overcomply with environmental regulation in our model all consumers value environmental quality but differ in their willingness to pay which depends on their income levels publicly available information on environmental performance of firms enables consumers to identify clean firms firms participate in a two stage duopoly game where they first choose their levels of cleaning technology and next engage in price competition the market gets segmented by income levels a minimum standard binding on the dirty firm has the effect of improving the performance of the cleaner firm a subsidy obtains the same competitive outcome

bargaining and waiting until recently the final word on bargaining with full information had been rubinstein s 1982 seminal work which concluded that an agreement will be reached immediately and the first mover will have the advantageous share rubinstein s model was one of alternating offers made at fixed time intervals many variations of the model have emerged and until recently they mainly focus on asymmetric information with some having the uninformed agent making all the offers the conclusion from examining these variations is that the equilibrium is highly sensitive to the exact specification of the institutional structure in more recent work perry and reny 1990 perry and reny 1993 sakavics 1993 and nickerson sadanand and sadanand 1994 endogenize the structure of the bargaining by allowing the order and timing of play to be determined endogenously the first three papers endogenous structure models deal with the full information setting and the last is an asymmetric information model 2 in addition to the exogenously given minimum reaction time for responding to offers made by the other player the endogenous structure models introduce the important innovation of an exogenous waiting time a time between a player s offer and his next offer they also allow players to make simultaneous offers which sakovics later disallows the findings in this recent literature are rather startling i the waiting time has a profound impact the longer the time the greater the share the player can command 3 ii the consequence of simultaneous offers is multiple equilibria when the reaction time is zero a continuum of shares lying between the two unique rubinstein shares can result and additional continua of shares arise with delayed agreement when the reaction times are positive iii equilibrium paths are almost exclusively characterized by simultaneous offers in this paper we examine the question of simultaneous offers and reconcile the conflict between the infrequency of simultaneous offers in real life bargaining and their prevalence in the endogenous structure models we

productivity gains from geographic concentration of human capital evidence from the cities abstract based on recent theoretical developments the argument is made that the average level of human capital is a local public good cities with higher average levels of human capital should therefore have higher wages and higher land rents after conditioning on the characteristics of individual workers and dwellings this prediction is supported by data for standard metropolitan statistical areas smsas in the united states where the smsa average levels of formal education and work experience are used as proxies for the average level of human capital the alternative explanations of omitted smsa variables and self selection are evaluated an estimate of the effect of an additional year of average education on total factor productivity is computed

regulatory dealing revisiting the harrington paradox abstract despite the fact that i when the epa observes regulatory violations it rarely pursues the violator and ii the expected penalty faced by a violator who is pursued is small compared to the cost of compliance it is still the case that iii firms comply a significant portion of the time winston harrington harrington w 1988 enforcement leverage when penalties are restricted journal of public economics 37 29 53 provides a dynamic model consistent with this apparent paradox we offer an alternative rationalisation in a model of regulatory dealing in which the agency uses tolerance in some contexts to induce increased compliance in others the observed tolerance of the epa to non compliance may be a strategic response by the agency to a difficult enforcement environment rather than evidence that it has gone soft on pollution or been captured by industry interests we use the model to consider the impact of the growing trend towards citizen suits and ngo enforcement of regulation arriving at some unconventional conclusions we argue that the model is consistent with existing empirical analyses

termination restrictions and investment in general training abstract conditional separation payments efficiently increase firms investment in general training if the latter is not directly contractible since training is vested in the worker on separation a firm s return to training is zero when a match ends or more generally when the firm s outside return is binding large enough conditional separation penalties ensure that independently from outside opportunities the ex post situation is one of bilateral monopoly this allows the firm to capture a positive share of the return to the general component of training in all states of nature a fixed wage contract and large enough separation penalties ensure that the firm s investment decision is fully efficient if training is general in becker s 1964 sense

money burning and multiple equilibria in bargaining abstract this paper synthesizes recent work on delay and multiple equilibria in complete information rubinstein bargaining we identify a general principle money burning underlying prior results and develop a general model of the phenomena money burning is a threat by one player to destroy surplus which can serve to enhance that player s bargaining power if it is credible our results show that the uniqueness and efficiency properties of the subgame perfect equilibrium of rubinstein bargaining are vulnerable to players ability to burn money journal of economic literature classification number 026

job independence as an incentive device a firm can either subject its workers to strict rules and regulations or grant them independence if independent they can make entrenchment investments which will not only raise their productivity but also make the firm depend on their cooperation however in contrast to a standard holdup problem the firm can afterwards take over control thus stripping such workers of a part of their bargaining assets this leads to structural distortions and may aggravate the holdup problem however the threat of partial expropriation may also alleviate the holdup problem and even induce overinvestment

present value tests of the current account with durables consumption abstract the present value tests of the intertemporal model of the current account usually assume that all goods are traded and that aggregate consumption decisions can be closely approximated by a random walk process this paper extends these models by explicitly introducing durables and nontraded goods into an intertemporal model of the current account and tests the model using canadian data since aggregate consumption expenditures on durables do not exhibit random walk behavior even when the aggregate consumer has a quadratic utility function the model that includes durables makes predictions that differ from those of the basic approach when nontraded goods are also incorporated into the model the most appropriate income variable becomes output net of nontraded production these implications are examined using present value tests the results suggest that in the annual data introduction of both durables and nontraded goods improves upon the model with traded nondurables only this seems to be due to the combination of durables and nontraded goods as durables alone do not sufficiently refine the basic model

a theory of urban growth in an economy experiencing endogenous economic growth and exogenous population growth we explore two main themes how urbanization affects efficiency of the growth process and how growth affects patterns of urbanization localized information spillovers promote agglomeration and human capital accumulation fosters endogenous growth individual city sizes grow with local human capital accumulation and knowledge spillovers and city numbers generally increase which we demonstrate is consistent with empirical evidence we analyze whether local governments can successfully internalize local dynamic externalities in addition we explore how growth involves real income differences across city types and how urbanization can foster income inequality most nonagricultural production in developed countries occurs in metropolitan areas the underlying reasons why economic activity agglomerates into cities localized information and knowledge spillover also make cities the engines of economic growth in an we gratefully acknowledge support of the national science foundation grants sbr 9422440 and sbr9730142 for this research the work has benefited from conversations with harl ryder on the dynamics of the model and from comments by gilles duranton and participants in seminars at brown colorado and texas austin and a presentation at an isit seminar sponsored by the centre for economic policy research and the national bureau of economic research

macroeconomic uncertainty precautionary saving and the current account abstract the relationship between current account developments and changes in the macroeconomic environment is a key issue in open economy macroeconomics this paper extends the standard intertemporal model of the current account to incorporate the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on external saving behavior it is shown that the greater the uncertainty in national cash flow defined as output less investment less government consumption the greater will be the incentive for precautionary saving and ceteris paribus the larger the current account surplus empirical support for the model is found using post war quarterly data for the united states japan and the united kingdom as well as a long time series 1919 1990 for the united states

the theory of human capital revisited on the interaction of general and specific investments human capital theory distinguishes between training in general usage and firm specific skills becker 1964 argues that employers will only invest in specific training not general training when labour markets are competitive the article reconsiders becker s theory using essentially his framework we show that there exists an incentive complementarity between employer sponsored general and specific training the possibility to provide specific training leads the employer to invest in general human capital conversely the latter reduces the hold up problem that arises with firm specific training we also consider the desirability of institutionalised training programmes and the virtues of breach penalties and discuss some empirical facts that could be explained by the theory

international capital mobility amongst the major industrialised countries too little or too much this paper examines capital flows among the major industrialized countries with a view to assessing m feldstein and c horioka s 1980 claim that international capital mobility is limited it argues that saving investment correlation tests are inherently flawed and proposes an alternative methodology for testing the degree of international capital mobility it finds that capital flows have been excessive in the sense that they are driven by speculative forces rather than by economic fundamentals copyright 1995 by royal economic society

the current account and precautionary savings for exporters of exhaustible resources abstract exporters of exhaustible resources have historically exhibited higher income volatility than other economies suggesting a heightened role for precautionary savings this paper uses a parameterized small open economy model to quantify the role of precautionary savings for exporters of exhaustible resources when the only source of uncertainty is the price of the exhaustible resource the parameterized model fares moderately well at capturing current account balances in both cross section and time series data the results show that the precautionary motive can generate sizable external sector savings the more so the greater the weight of exhaustible resource revenues in future income

robustness information processing constraints and the current account in small open economies article i nfo in this paper we examine the effects of two types of induced uncertainty model uncertainty due to robust ness rb and state uncertainty due to finite information processing capacity called rational inattention or ri on consumption and the current account we show that the combination of rb and ri improves the model s predictions for i the contemporaneous correlation between the current account and income and ii the volatility and persistence of the current account in small open emerging and developed economies in addition we show that the two informational frictions improve the model s ability to match the impulse response of consumption to income and the relative volatility of consumption to income growth

contract renegotiation a simple framework and implications for organization theory this paper provides a unifying framework for studying renegotiation of contracts in the presence of asymmetric information we show that interim renegotiation does not constrain the set of contracts attainable with full commitment regardless of whether renegotiation offers are made by the informed or the uninformed agent ex post renegotiation however does constrain the set of attainable contracts these constraints depend on the identity of the agent making the renegotiation offer we then show how the theory of contract renegotiation can provide insights for organization theory specifically we show how decentralization of decision making can be an optimal response to the threat of ex post renegotiation finally we show that our framework can be used to analyse the trade off between internal and external markets

perfect equilibria in a model of bargaining with arbitration abstract we consider an alternating offer bargaining model in which the players may agree to call in an arbitrator in case of disagreement the main message of our study is that the mere presence of an arbitrator who can only become active with the consent of both parties in the background of negotiations may entirely drive their outcome we compare our results with those obtained in models with outside options journal of economic literature classification number c78

reputation in bargaining and durable goods monopoly this paper analyzes durable goods monopoly in an infinite horizon discrete time game we prove that as the time interval between successive offers approaches zero all seller payoffs between zero and static monopoly profits are supported by subgame perfect equilibria this reverses a well known conjecture of coase alternatively one can interpret the model as a sequential bargaining game with one sided incomplete information in which an uninformed seller makes all the offers our folk theorem for seller payoffs equally applies to the set of sequential equilibria of this bargaining game

precautionary saving and consumption smoothing across time and possibilities this paper examines how aversion to risk and aversion to intertemporal substitution determine the strength of the precautionary saving motive in a two period model with selden kreps porteus preferences for small risks we derive a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive which generalizes the concept of prudence introduced by kimball 1990b for large risks we show that decreasing absolute risk aversion guarantees that the precautionary saving motive is stronger than risk aversion regardless of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution holding risk preferences fixed the extent to which the precautionary saving motive is stronger than risk aversion increases with the elasticity of intertemporal substitution we derive sufficient conditions for a change in risk preferences alone to increase the strength of the precautionary saving motive and for the strength of the precautionary saving motive to decline with wealth within the class of constant elasticity of intertemporal substitution constant relative risk aversion utility functions these conditions are also necessary

intertemporal optimizing models of trade and current account balance a survey abstract this study surveys the intertemporal optimizing models of trade and current account balance that were developed calibrated and empirically tested since they came into vogue in the 1980s the implications of these models often differ from those of static and dynamic conventional non optimizing models the literature on optimizing models has not only grown reasonably fast but has also witnessed significant advances in methodology and these models have culminated into a distinct strand of new open economy macroeconomics the studies conducted until the late 1980s have used deterministic perfect foresight models while several studies conducted since the 1990s relax the perfect foresight and certainty equivalence assumptions and develop stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models to account for uncertainty confronting the optimizing agents the future research needs to explore the possibility of tracing any preferred specification of household preferences model the effect of time varying discount factor on household utility function and intertemporal budget constraint examine the role of costs in international trade place a parallel emphasis on the empirical verifications of theoretical propositions examine the relative performance of optimizing vis a vis non optimizing models and rationalize the extreme propositions of perfect and imperfect capital mobility in the wake of moderately open capital accounts

naked slotting fees for vertical control of multi product retail markets abstract slotting fees are fixed charges paid by food manufacturers to retailers for access to the retail market this note considers this practice in the context of multi product markets with imperfectly competitive retailers a monopoly supplier of one good and competitive suppliers of other goods we show how the monopolist and the retailers can use naked slotting fees charges imposed on the suppliers of other goods to obtain vertically integrated monopoly profits

watta satta bride exchange and women s welfare in rural pakistan in a setting where husbands wield considerable coercive power forms of marriage should adapt to protect the interests of women and their families the authors study the pervasive marriage custom of watta satta in rural pakistan a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of retaliation they show that watta satta may be a mechanism to coordinate the actions of two sets of in laws each of whom wish to restrain their sons in law but who only have the ability to restrain their sons the authors empirical results support this view the likelihood of marital inefficiency as measured by estrangement domestic abuse and wife s mental health is significantly lower in watta satta arrangements as compared with conventional marriages but only after properly accounting for selection

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

a letter to the editor on wage bargaining abstract the rubinstein perfect information alternating offers bargaining model is problematic when applied to wage negotiations a strike or any other industrial action is not an automatic consequence of a delay in reaching an agreement because production can continue normally also when negotiations take place this paper extends the rubinstein model to incorporate the choice of calling a strike and it is shown that in this model there is no longer a unique subgame perfect equilibrium and that strikes with a length in real time can occur in equilibrium

the biodiversity bargaining problem we employ cooperative bargaining theory and nash s rational threats idea to cast light on the biodiversity bargaining problem the problem of global environmental negotiations is argued to be of the nature of a bargaining problem in which bargainers must agree on the distribution of cooperative surplus in order to move to the bargaining frontier we discuss the importance of both efficiency bargaining frontier and fairness recognition of characteristics of bargainers in the choice of the appropriate contract we show that the incremental cost contract used to resolve the biodiversity bargaining problem is of the form of an extreme point contract that fails to recognise the contributions of the south to the production of cooperative surplus a rational response to such a contract is the use of threats of biodiversity destruction contracts must evince both efficiency and fairness in order to represent lasting solutions

the economics of urban density density boosts productivity and innovation improves access to goods and services reduces typical travel distances encourages energy efficient construction and transport and allows broader sharing of scarce urban amenities however density is also synonymous with crowding and makes living and moving in cities more costly we explore the appropriate measurement of density and describe how it is both a cause and a consequence of the evolution of cities we then discuss whether and how policy should target density and why in practice the tradeoff between its pros and cons is unhappily resolved by both market and political forces

are empirical measures of macroeconomic uncertainty alike there is a plethora of time series measures of uncertainty for inflation and real output growth in empirical studies but little is known whether they are comparable to the uncertainty measure reported by individual forecasters in the survey of professional forecasters are these two measures of uncertainty inherently distinct this paper shows that compared with many uncertainty proxies produced by time series models the use of real time data with fixed sample recursive estimation of an asymmetric bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model yields inflation uncertainty estimates which resemble the survey measure there is however overwhelming evidence that many of the time series measures of growth uncertainty exceed the level of uncertainty obtained from survey measure our results highlight the relative merits of using different methods in modelling macroeconomic uncertainty which are useful for empirical researchers

is economic volatility detrimental to global sustainability in a dynamic panel data model allowing for error cross section dependence output volatility is found to impede sustainable development through a financial development channel liquidity liability ratio output volatility exerts a significant effect on depletion of natural resources a key component of sustainability low income countries low energy intensity countries and low trade share countries tend to be especially vulnerable to macroeconomic volatility and shocks the findings highlight the interaction between global financial markets and the wider economy as a key factor influencing sustainable development with important implications for macroeconomic and environmental policies in an integrated global green economy

the game of negotiations ordering issues and implementing agreements abstract we use a two issue bargaining model with asymmetric information to study agent choice of how to structure bargaining we uncover the settings in which different agenda structures are chosen in equilibrium how the order in which issues are bargained over matters and what impact the rules for implementing agreements have if agreements are implemented as they are reached easy issues are negotiated first and hard issues later if agreements are implemented only after all issues are settled then it is size that matters with large issues settled first all parties prefer the former rules of implementation to the latter

a non cooperative bargaining model with strategically timed offers abstract rubinstein s alternating offers bargaining model is enriched by allowing players to choose when and whether or not to make an offer time is continuous and players make offers whenever they wish it is assumed that upon making an offer players must wait a fixed amount of time before making another it is shown that if players can react arbitrarily quickly to their opponent s offers then all subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes are rubinstein like in particular efficient however if it takes time to react then some delay can be supported this potential delay becomes arbitrarily large as reaction times increase journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 c72

rent seeking and surplus destruction in unanimity bargaining abstract in non cooperative bargaining games in the tradition of rubinstein the proposer s bargaining power stems from the prospect of a delay in case of disagreement since players are impatient this delay is costly for everyone we consider a unanimity bargaining game in which the proposer can strategically choose the length of this delay we assume that the size of the surplus depends endogenously on the chosen length of the prospective delay intuitively the proposer faces the following trade off the more he exploits his proposer power the smaller is the surplus that can be divided one interpretation is that aggressive bargaining tactics hurt the fruitful cooperation among players and thus the surplus we characterize stationary equilibrium strategies and payoffs and obtain sharp predictions on the extent of surplus destruction the size of the social loss and the surplus allocation

contracting on time the paper shows how the time considerations especially those concerning contract duration affect incomplete contract theory time is not only a dimension along which the relationship unfolds but also a continuous verifiable variable that can be included in contracts we consider a bilateral trade setting where contracting investment trade and renegotiation take place in continuous time we show that efficient investment can be induced either through a sequence of constantly renegotiated fixed term contracts or through a renegotiation proof evergreen contract a perpetual contract that allows unilateral termination with advance notice we provide a detailed analysis of properties of optimal contracts

a theory of consumer boycotts under symmetric information and imperfect competition this article models strategic interactions between non identical duopolistic firms and a public interest environmental organisation eo that promotes green production practices by threatening consumer boycotts against brown producers the article describes when boycotts are deterred by prior firm commitments to be green and also when a boycott arises in equilibrium despite symmetric information when a boycott arises it is either a small persistent boycott against the small firm in the industry or a large transitory boycott against the large firm in the industry that prompts the target firm to accede to the boycott demands quickly

striking for a bargain between two completely informed agents this paper models the wage contract negotiation procedure between a union and a firm as a sequential bargaining process in which the union must decide in each period whether or not to strike for the duration of that period we show that there exist subgame perfect equilibria in which the union engages in several periods of strikes prior to reaching a final agreement although both parties are completely rational and fully informed this has implications for other inefficient phenomena such as tariff wars debt negotiations and wars in general we characterize the set of equilibria show that strikes can occur in real time and discuss extensions of the model such as lockouts and the possibility of multiple recontracting opportunities copyright 1991 by american economic association

a note on noncompetes bargaining and training by firms abstract this paper analyzes how noncompetes via wage bargaining can affect firms incentives to provide their employees with on the job training the results show that noncompetes increase incentives to provide general training but reduce those related to specific training

consumption puzzles and precautionary savings abstract when marginal utility is convex agents accumulate savings as a precautionary measure against labor income eventualities this paper shows that precautionary savings can go a long way in making the excess growth excess smoothness and excess sensitivity features of consumption consistent with the stochastic processes of labor income observed in the u s at the microeconomic level

bargaining with surplus destruction in a two player alternating offer bargaining model if one player can destroy the surplus to be allocated then the value to bargain for is endogenous except at the beginning even with complete information the model has perfect equilibria with delayed agreement and or surplus destruction the model therefore explains inefficiency and destruction that may appear irrational we characterize the set of equilibrium payoffs and its limiting be haviour as the time between offers vanishes real time delay remains possible even in the limit we also consider the case of surplus destruction that is exogenously limited by the

current account dynamics under information rigidity and imperfect capital mobility abstract the current account in developed countries is highly persistent and volatile in comparison to their output growth the standard intertemporal current account model with rational expectations re fails to explain the observed current account and consumption dynamics the re model extended with imperfect capital mobility by shibata and shintani 1998 can account for the consumption dynamics but only at the cost of the explanatory power for the volatility of the current account this paper replaces re in the intertemporal current account model with sticky information si in which consumers are inattentive to shocks to their income the si model can better explain a persistent and volatile current account than the re model but it overpredicts the persistence of changes in consumption the si model extended with imperfect capital mobility explains both the current account and consumption provided that sufficiently high degrees of information rigidity and imperfect capital mobility are considered

regulating global biodiversity what is the problem we distinguish between local problems of biodiversity loss and global ones where international cooperation is required global biodiversity regulation involves choosing the optimal stopping rule regarding global land conversions in order to ensure that some areas of unconverted natural reserves remain to support the production sector that exists on converted lands the basic difficulty with implementing a solution to this global problem lies in the asymmetry in endowments between those states that have previously converted and those that have not we demonstrate that the fundamental problem of global biodiversity regulation is similar to the bargaining problem analysed by nash rubinstein and others there are benefits from global land conversion and there must be agreement on their distribution before the conversion process can be halted since the institutions addressing global biodiversity problems are either highly ineffectual benefit sharing agreements prior informed consent clauses or very extreme incremental cost contracts the biodiversity bargaining problem remains unresolved for this reason we anticipate that suboptimal conversions will continue to occur as a way of protesting the ineffective and unfair approaches employed in addressing this problem to date

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

smart cafe cities testing human capital externalities in the boston metropolitan area abstract existing studies have explored only one or in some cases two mechanisms by which human capital externalities percolate at the macrogeographic levels this study however uses the 1990 massachusetts census data to test four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels in the boston metropolitan area labor market we propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in the same local labor market through four channels depth of human capital stock marshallian labor market externalities jacobs labor market externalities and thickness of the local labor market we find that all types of human capital externalities are significant across census blocks different types of externalities attenuate at different speeds over distances for example the effect of human capital depth decays rapidly beyond three miles away from block centroids we conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localized within a microgeographic scope in cities that we call smart cafe cities

green business and blue angels this paper presents a model of a monopolist svoluntary overcompliance with legal environmentalstandards under asymmetric information about thefirm s environmental impacts the key assumptions are the existence of quality premia for environmentalsoundness a positive but imperfect degree ofmonitoring and adaptive consumer expectations conditions necessary for overcompliance to arise in aprofit maximizing equilibrium are derived the effectsof a third party eco labeling system are analyzed itis shown that the existence of an independent labelingauthority increases the likelihood of overcomplianceto be profit maximizing moreover firms might have anincentive to lobby for the introduction of such asystem the effect of consumers risk preferences andan instrument for preventing greenwash companieslying about their environmental performance is alsodiscussed

the role of negotiators in union firm bargaining differences between the objectives of union leaders and those of the rank and file have traditionally been thought the result of political processes or irrationality this paper shows that such differences will naturally arise as part of a rational bargaining strategy since delegation of authority to a negotiator permits the union members to achieve advantageous commitment this use of negotiators leads to revised interpretation of many popular theories of wage and employment determination such as the efficient bargain and the right to manage models and has implications for the interpretation of econometric modeling of union behavior

strategic bargaining with destructive power abstract this note studies a two player alternating offers bargaining model in which one of the agents has the ability to damage permanently the pie bargained over beside the rubinsteinian bilateral monopoly outcome i show that it is possible to select a harming equilibrium in which the sequence of damages to the pie is endogenously determined

testing a present value model of the current account evidence from us and canadian time series abstract this paper presents a simple model of current account determination based upon the permanent income hypothesis of private consumption behavior under rational expectations the model employs a representative national agent who is forward looking and can borrow and lend at a constant world interest rate a present value relationship for the current account is derived and its implications are tested on post war data for the united states and canada testing is done using the framework developed by campbell and shiller 1987 which allows the forcing variables in the model to be difference rather than trend stationary our empirical results indicate the most stringent restrictions of the present value model are strongly rejected by the us and canadian data however less formal procedures suggest the consumption smoothing model has some ability to track the dynamic behavior of the us current account jel f32

factor proportions and relative wages the supply side determinants of wage inequality supply side factors may contribute to rising wage inequality first certain changes in the supply of skills allegedly exacerbate wage inequality women s increased labor force participation and increased immigration are the leading candidates both allegedly reduce the wages of less skilled men however immigration s impact on wage inequality has been minor and the effects of women s participation is inconclusive second in evaluating the likelihood that human capital investment will mitigate future inequality evidence suggests that rising returns to education have increased the proportion of young people attending college limiting the growth of inequality among high wage workers

semi parametric predictions of the intertemporal approach to the current account abstract this paper uses the method dynamic programming dp by gmm and canadian data to estimate a dynamic model of a small open economy dp by gmm has several appealing features it does not impose certainty equivalence it accommodates multiple shocks and imposes few restrictions on the properties of the shocks in the model also since it uses the actual shocks series to estimate approximate decision rules it produces sample paths for the endogenous variables in the model the model estimated fits the data well in particular the variance of the predicted trade balance output ratio matches its empirical counterpart

the terms of trade productivity growth and the current account abstract this paper extends the analytical framework provided by glick and rogoff 1995 journal of monetary economics 35 159 192 to an economy with traded and nontraded goods and it analyzes the impact of country specific and global productivity shocks on the current account and investment each of these disturbances have different implications for the current account and investment that are largely consistent with the empirical results first the current account responds more than investment to country specific traded productivity growth second global traded productivity and country specific nontraded productivity growth have no effect on the current account but they have a significant impact on investment third the global component of nontraded productivity is negligible and has no significant impact on either the current account or investment in addition the response of the current account and investment to relative prices the terms of trade and exchange rate are insignificant this paper also discusses the potential reasons for it

present value tests of an intertemporal model of the current account abstract this paper first demonstrates that in a simple intertemporal open economy model the current account is equal to the expected decline of the present discounted value of net output of a country net output is defined as gross domestic product less the sum of investment plus government spending it then uses econometric methods for present value models to analyze the current account for four countries in two of these countries the model does a satisfactory job of explaining the current account

contract bargaining with symmetric information this paper reviews a recent literature that extends the rubinstein stahl bargaining model to the case of contract bargaining theoretical issues such as the appropriate game form existence and uniqueness of equilibria are discussed the paper finishes with a brief overview of some applications of the framework

precautionary saving in the small and in the large the theory of precautionary saving is shown to be isomorphic to the arrow pratt theory of risk aversion making possible the application of a large body of knowledge about risk aversion to precautionary saving and more generally to the theory of optimal choice under risk in particular a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive analogous to the arrow pratt measure of risk aversion is used to establish a number of new propositions about precautionary saving and to give a new interpretation of the dreze modigliani substitution effect copyright 1990 by the econometric society

perfect equilibria in a negotiation model rubinstein s alternating offers bargaining model is enriched by assuming that players payoffs in disagreement periods are determined by a normal form game it is shown that such a model can have multiple perfect equilibria including inefficient ones provided that players are sufficiently patient delay is possible even though there is perfect information and the players are fully rational the length of delay depends only on the payoff structure of the disagreement game and not on the discount factor not all feasible and individually rational payoffs of the disagreement game can be supported as average disagreement payoffs indeed some negotiation games have a unique perfect equilibrium with immediate agreement

strategic delay in bargaining this paper analyses a bargaining model with incomplete information in which the time between offers is an endogenous strategic variable we find equilibria involving a delay to agreement that is due to the use of strategic time delay by bargainers to signal their relative strength under some specifications of the parameters delay is present in the unique sequential equilibrium whose beliefs satisfy one intuitive restriction this delay does not vanish as the minimal time between offers becomes small

the timing of arbitration and sequential bargaining this paper links two literatures the paper adds to results on disagreement in per fect information bargaining games it is found that under certain conditions the possibility of third party intervention induces delay the paper is also the first attempt to model the arbitration process in a sequential bargaining framework it therefore adds to the theoretical arm of the industrial relations literature by permitting an explicit temporal setting for the chilling effect and alternative mechanisms for the timing of arbitration