the economics of a blend mandate for biofuels a biofuel blend mandate may increase or decrease consumer fuel prices with endogenous oil prices depending on relative supply elasticities biofuel tax credits always reduce fuel prices tax credits result in lower fuel prices than under a mandate for the same level of biofuel production if tax credits are implemented alongside mandates then tax credits subsidize fuel consumption instead of biofuels this contradicts energy policy goals by increasing oil dependency co 2 emissions and traffic congestion while providing little benefit to either corn or ethanol producers these social costs will be substantial with tax credits costing taxpayers 28 7 billion annually by 2022 copyright 2008 oxford university press

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

intertemporal labor supply and human capital accumulation we solve and estimate a dynamic model that allows agents to optimally choose their labor hours and consumption and that allows for both human capital accumulation and savings estimation results and simulation exercises indicate that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is much higher than the conventional estimates and the downward bias comes from the omission of the human capital accumulation effect the human capital accumulation effect renders the life cycle path of the shadow wage relatively flat even though wages increase with age hence a rather flat life cycle labor supply path can be reconciled with a high intertemporal elasticity of substitution

the demographic deficit abstract there has been a slowdown in growth in the world s most advanced economies in this paper we argue that changing demographics in particular aging populations combined with increased life expectancy may be part of the explanation for why we observe slower growth falling interest rates and falling productivity growth using japan and the u s in the years prior to the financial crises as a case study we provide estimates of the growth deficit that arises from an aging cohort structure and increasing life expectancy we also provide projections of the impact of predictable demographic changes on future growth in the u s and japan

moral hazard and optimal subsidiary structure for financial institutions banks and related financial institutions often have two separate subsidiaries that make loans of similar type but differing risk for example a bank and a finance company or a good bank bad bank structure such bipartite structures may prevent risk shifting in which banks misuse their flexibility in choosing and monitoring loans to exploit their debt holders by insulating safer loans from riskier loans a bipartite structure reduces risk shifting incentives in the safer subsidiary bipartite structures are more likely to dominate unitary structures as the downside from riskier loans is higher or as expected profits from the efficient loan mix are lower

food versus fuel an updated and expanded evidence abstract this paper replicates the study of zhang et al 2010 food versus fuel what do prices tell us energy policy 38 pp 445 451 we confirm the findings of the original paper that there was only a weak relationship between ethanol and food commodities in the period between march 1989 and july 2008 in addition we extend that study and examine the cointegration relationship between biofuels and related commodities for a considerably enlarged dataset 3 vs 1 market 26 vs 8 commodities analysis up till 2017 vs 2008 weekly vs monthly data frequency focusing on the biofuel markets of brazil the eu and the usa in the three separate periods before during and after the food crisis of 2007 and 2008 we show that studying the time variation of the relationships plays an essential role in their proper understanding our results help to clarify the wide extensive discussion about the role of biofuels prices in food shortages manifested particularly during the food crises in agreement with the original study we confirm that price series data do not support strong statements about biofuels uniformly serving as main leading source of high food prices and consequently the food shortages

commitment and fairness in a dynamic regulatory relationship this paper considers a multiperiod model of a regulated firm that has stationary private information which may be revealed through performance if it cannot make commitments to future policies the regulator has an incentive to exploit any information the firm reveals and laffont and tirole show that there is no regulatory policy that is separating over any closed interval a fairness arrangement is proposed in which the firm agrees not to quit if in future periods the regulator allows it to earn a nonnegative profit given the type it revealed in earlier periods the properties of such arrangements are studied and an example is presented in which both the firm and the regulator prefer a fairness arrangement to a policy feasible without commitment

revisiting wage earnings and hours profiles abstract for the youngest cohorts whose entire working life can be observed hours start falling much earlier than wages wages do not fall if they fall at all until one s late 60s the data suggest that many workers start a smooth transition into retirement by working progressively fewer hours while still facing an upward sloping wage profile this pattern is not an artifact of staggered abrupt retirement or selection this evidence imposes restrictions on dynamic models of the aggregate economy and provide updated numerical profiles that can be readily used in quantitative macroeconomic analysis to incorporate this new pattern into aggregate models

foreclosures house prices and the real economy from 2007 to 2009 states without a judicial requirement for foreclosures were twice as likely to foreclose on delinquent homeowners analysis of borders of states with differing foreclosure laws reveals a discrete jump in foreclosure propensity as one enters nonjudicial states using state judicial requirement as an instrument for foreclosures we show that foreclosures led to a large decline in house prices residential investment and consumer demand from 2007 to 2009 as foreclosures subsided from 2011 to 2013 the foreclosure rates in nonjudicial and judicial requirement states converged and we find some evidence of a stronger recovery in nonjudicial states

panel attrition from the panel study of income dynamics household income marital status and mortality this analysis is concerned with the determinants of panel attrition from the panel study of income dynamics and with its consequences for estimation of dynamic behavioral models which exploit the panel or longitudinal information household income dynamics marriage formation and dissolution and adult mortality risk we develop and estimate joint models of attrition and one or more of these substantive processes and allow for correlation across the equations through random effects although we find evidence of significant selectivity in attrition behavior the biases that are introduced by ignoring selective attrition are very mild

are those paid more really more productive the case of experience this study uses computerized personnel microdata on the white male managerial and professional employees at a major u s corporation to address the following question can the additional earnings which are associated with more labor market experience at a point in time really be explained by higher productivity at the same point in time our answer to this question based on both cross sectional and longitudinal information is that performance plays a substantially smaller role in explaining cross sectional experience earnings differentials and earnings growth than is claimed by those who have adopted the human capital explanation of the experience earnings profile this response depends critically on our assumption that the performance ratings which supervisors give to their white male managerial and professional subordinates adequately reflect the subordinates relative productivity in the year of assessment we present a great deal of evidence which strongly supports this assumption

information in production this paper presents a simple model of the manner in which person specific information on productive capabilities is put to use in the firm the analysis is then employed to examine the impact of improved information quality on equilibrium output wage rates and degree of specialization much effort has been devoted to studying the process through which personspecific information is accumulated burdett mortensen 1 macdonald 8 prescott visscher 10 hartog 3 and johnson 5 examine the process of learning about person specific parameters through investment of resources in activities that yield information jovanovic 6 analyses the more specific problem of inferring the quality of a particular job worker match little attention has been given to the question of just how the firm utilizes this kind of information for information to play an interesting role in production two things are necessary one is that workers be heterogeneous in a meaningful sense that is in the space of productive characteristics workers must not all be simply scalar multiples of one another second the firm must have some choice about the kind of activities in which workers are engaged if either of these conditions fails the optimal assignment of workers is not a problem 2

considering macroeconomic indicators in the food before fuel nexus abstract a structural vector autoregression svar model along with a direct acyclic graph is employed to decompose how supply demand structural shocks affect food and fuel markets the results support the hypothesis that fundamental market forces of demand and supply are the main drivers of food price volatility increased biofuel production may cause short run food price increases but not long run price shifts decentralized freely operating markets will mitigate the persistence of any price shocks and restore prices to their long run trends the main policy implications are that oil gasoline and ethanol market shocks do not spillover into grain prices which indicates no long run food before fuel issue in the short run grain prices can spike due to market shocks so programs designed to blunt these price spikes may be warranted

collective moral hazard maturity mismatch and systemic bailouts the paper elicits a mechanism by which private leverage choices exhibit strategic complementarities through the reaction of monetary policy when everyone engages in maturity transformation authorities haver little choice but facilitating refinancing in turn refusing to adopt a risky balance sheet lowers the return on equity the key ingredient is that monetary policy is non targeted the ex post benefits from a monetary bailout accrue in proportion to the number amount of leverage while the distortion costs are to a large extent fixed this insight has important consequences first banks choose to correlate their risk exposures second private borrowers may deliberately choose to increase their interest rate sensitivity following bad news about future needs for liquidity third optimal monetary policy is time inconsistent fourth macro prudential supervision is called for we characterize the optimal regulation which takes the form of a minimum liquidity requirement coupled with monitoring of the quality of liquid assets we establish the robustness of our insights when the set of

micro and macro elasticities in a life cycle model with taxes we build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work we find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of work moreover we find that there is no inconsistency between this result and the empirical finding of small labor elasticities for prime age workers in our model micro and macro elasticities are effectively unrelated our model is also consistent with other cross country patterns

blend wall economics relaxing us ethanol regulations can lead to increased use of fossil fuels abstract the us environmental protection agency is currently considering a waiver allowing an increase in the fuel ethanol blend limit the blend wall from 10 e10 up to 15 e15 justifications for this waiver are reduced vehicle fuel prices and less consumption of petroleum gasoline leading to energy security a theoretical examination of this waiver reveals an anomaly where a relaxation of this blend wall elicits a demand response under a wide range of elasticities this demand response can actually increase the consumption of petroleum gasoline and thus lead to greater energy insecurity the economics supporting this result and associated policy implications are developed and discussed

sources of lifetime inequality is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime we answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital estimated directly from data as well as heterogeneity in ability to learn initial human capital and initial wealth we find that as of age 23 differences in initial conditions account for more of the variation in lifetime earnings lifetime wealth and lifetime utility than do differences in shocks received over the working lifetime jel d31 d91 j24 j31 to what degree is lifetime inequality due to differences across people established early in life as opposed to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime among the individual differences established early in life which ones are the most important a convincing answer to these questions is of fundamental importance first and most simply an answer serves to contrast the potential importance of the myriad policies directed at modifying or at providing insurance for initial conditions e g public education against those directed at shocks over the working lifetime e g unemployment insurance second a discussion of lifetime inequality cannot go too far before discussing which specific type of initial condition is the most critical for determining how one fares in life third a useful framework for answering these questions should also be central in the analysis of a wide range of policies considered in macroeconomics public finance and labor economics we view lifetime inequality through the lens of a risky human capital model agents differ in terms of three initial conditions initial human capital learning ability and financial wealth initial human capital can be viewed as controlling the intercept of an agent s mean earnings profile whereas learning ability acts to rotate

costly monitoring financial intermediation and equilibrium credit rationing abstract this paper establishes a link between equilibrium credit rationing and financial intermediation in a model with asymmetrically informed lenders and borrowers costly monitoring and investment project indivisibilities intermediation is shown to dominate borrowing and lending between individuals and these financial intermediaries exhibit several of the important features of intermediaries as we know them equilibrium interest rates and the aggregate quantity of loans respond quite differently to changes in taste and technology parameters depending on whether or not there is rationing in equilibrium

paradoxical effects of increasing the normal retirement age a prospective evaluation abstract a life cycle model that incorporates both disability insurance di and old age insurance oai is developed to study social security reforms and is compared to an alternative model without di the model with di predicts that increasing the normal retirement age nra causes a decrease in employment and an increase in di receipt and that the decrease of payroll tax revenue and the increase of di expenses combined offset about 40 of the decrease of oai expenses these paradoxical effects of increasing the nra are absent from the model without di i employ both models to search for reforms that will balance the government budget in an economy with an aging population which has the demographics for the year 2100 and find that the required change in tax and benefit rules differ substantially across the two models

the optimal size of a bank costs and benefits of diversification abstract this paper provides a theory of diversification and financial structure of banks it shows that by diversifying the bank portfolio and financing it with debt the bank can commit to a higher level of monitoring by linking the benefits of diversification to the costs the paper derives an optimal size of the bank which is bounded the costs of diversification lie in the higher overload costs with which the banker is faced by monitoring more projects the benefits of diversification lie in increasing the bank s owner s incentives to monitor the lenders

labor supply and government programs a cross country analysis abstract there are substantial cross country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle age 50 a theory of labor supply and retirement decisions is developed to quantitatively assess the role of social security disability insurance and taxation for understanding differences in labor supply late in the life cycle across european countries and the united states the findings support the view that government policies can go a long way towards accounting for the low labor supply late in the life cycle in the european countries relative to the united states with social security rules accounting for the bulk of these effects

exploring the drivers side of the blend wall u s consumer preferences for ethanol blend fuels abstract analysis of stated preferences from over 2300 u s respondents shows that general attitudes nationwide favor the use of ethanol as a motor fuel but a sizeable segment 20 indicated strong unwillingness to buy ethanol blend fuels results from a discrete choice experiment analyzed using mixed logit regressions show that all else constant price per gallon and miles per gallon dominated preferences for fuel attributes but ethanol content made the average consumer more likely to choose a blend fuel findings provide strong evidence of heterogeneity in preferences driven by attitudes but also affected by age and income at a point of price per mile equivalence for ethanol and gasoline in a market where gasoline e20 and e85 were available with no regulatory supply or technological constraints e85 would dominate market share in this case ethanol would account for 56 of volume of motor fuels consumed our results show a high level of consumer substitutability of gasoline with ethanol and willingness to choose high ethanol blend fuels which could help expand ethanol use beyond the current regulatory and technological limits of the blend wall

towards a micro founded theory of aggregate labour supply we build a heterogeneous agents life cycle model that captures a large number of salient features of individual male labour supply over the life cycle by education both along the intensive and extensive margins the model provides an aggregation theory of individual labour supply firmly grounded on individual level micro evidence and is used to study the aggregate labour supply responses to changes in the economic environment we find that the aggregate labour supply elasticity to a transitory wage shock is 1 75 with the extensive margin accounting for 62 of the response furthermore we find that the aggregate labour supply elasticity to a permanent compensated wage change is 0 44

the cyclical and secular behaviour of the labour input comparing efficiency units and hours worked summary a monthly labour input series designed to correct for the fact that all hours worked are not of the same quality is constructed and its properties compared with unadjusted hours worked this efficiency units series is constructed from bls data on hours worked and earnings by age and sex the cyclical fluctuations displayed by the efficiency units series are smaller on average than those displayed by hours worked although the difference is not large however the secular behaviour of the series is quite different hours worked per capita displays a significant positive trend while efficiency units per capita does not

forecasting bank loans loss given default abstract with the advent of the new basel capital accord banking organizations are invited to estimate credit risk capital requirements using an internal ratings based approach in order to be compliant with this approach institutions must estimate the loss given default the fraction of the credit exposure that is lost if the borrower defaults this study evaluates the ability of a parametric fractional response regression and a nonparametric regression tree model to forecast bank loan credit losses the out of sample predictive ability of these models is evaluated at several recovery horizons after the default event the out of time predictive ability is also estimated for a recovery horizon of 1 year the performance of the models is benchmarked against recovery estimates given by historical averages the results suggest that regression trees are an interesting alternative to parametric models in modeling and forecasting loss given default

monitoring the monitor an incentive structure for a financial intermediary this paper studies financial intermediation i e delegated monitoring in a costly state verification model there are a finite number of agents thus the intermediary cannot fully diversify its portfolio and is subject to default risk the role of the intermediary is to satisfy simultaneously the different portfolio preferences of borrowers and lenders two questions arise when a delegated monitor is subject to non trivial default risk a what arrangement solves the problem of monitoring the monitor b what intermediary portfolio accomplishes optimal asset transformation between borrowers and lenders unlike previous delegated monitoring studies the law of large numbers is not sufficient to obtain our results instead we appeal to a stronger results the large deviation principle which establishes that convergence in the law of large numbers is exponential

the price for biofuels sustainability abstract the production and usage of biofuels has increased worldwide seeking goals of energy security low carbon energy and rural development as biofuels trade increased the european union introduced sustainability regulations in an attempt to reduce the risks associated with biofuels producers were then confronted with costs of sustainability certification in order to access the eu market hopes were that sustainably produced biofuels would be rewarded with higher prices in the eu based on a review of recent literature interviews with traders and price data from platts this paper explores whether sustainability premiums emerged and if so did they represent an attracting feature in the market for sustainable biofuels this article finds that premiums for ethanol and biodiesel evolved differently between 2011 and 2012 but have been in general very small or inexistent with certified fuels becoming the new norm in the market for different reasons there has been an apparent convergence between biofuel policies in the eu and the us as market operators perceive a long term trend for full certification in the biofuels market producers in developing countries are likely to face additional challenges in terms of finance and capacity to cope with the sustainability requirements

relationship between ethanol and gasoline aids approach abstract ethanol production in the united states has increased significantly due to government support which has begun to dwindle ethanol now seems to compete with gasoline for vehicle fuel but because ethanol is mostly sold as a blend gasoline and ethanol could be complementary fuel sources the study investigates the true relationship between these fuels since it has policy implications results of la aids estimation show the two fuels were substitutes before the rapid expansion of ethanol production but have become complements overtime due to increasing share of ethanol in fuel consumption

a theory of wage dynamics a dynamic equilibrium model of long term implicit labour contracts under incomplete but symmetric information is developed workers are assumed to be risk averse and of unknown ability or productivity risk neutral firms learn as do workers about each worker s productivity by observing the worker s output over time it is shown that equilibrium contracts provide for wages which never decline with age and increase only when the worker s market value increases above his current wage in addition to characterizing the equilibrium wage contract we also derive some of its implications for the behaviour of aggregate wages across various groups of workers these implications explain some findings in the recent empirical literature on ageearnings profiles in particular our model can explain why earnings may be positively related to experience even after controlling for productivity as some empirical studies have indicated

an optimal u s biodiesel fuel subsidy abstract enhanced environmental quality fuel security and economic development along with reduced prices of blended diesel are often used as justifications for a u s federal excise tax exemption on biodiesel fuels however the possible effect of increased overall consumption of fuel in response to lower total prices mitigating the environmental and fuel security benefits are generally not considered taking this price response into account the optimal u s biodiesel subsidy is derived estimated values of the optimal subsidy are close to the recently expired subsidy revealing the subsidy s environmental and security benefits however further positive environmental and security benefits from the biodiesel tax exemption subsidy may be obtained if the subsidy is combined with a federal excise tax on petroleum diesel

the new economics of organization over the last ten years or so an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics it is perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a theoretical focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this paper provides political scientists with an overview of the new economics of organization and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy so far positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy in part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration the other side of the coin however is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice voting and markets and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions this third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy indeed of all organizations in fact significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken but by economists not political scientists in small numbers of course economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of downs 1967 tullock 1965 and niskanen 1971 but this new wave of theoretical work is different it is already a large complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm which assumes away all organizational considerations to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms corporations and other enterprises behave as they do propo

bureaucrats legislators and the size of government some recent theories have blamed the growth of government on budget maximizing bureaucrats who are assumedly capable of imposing their most preferred budget output combination on legislatures subject to cost and demand constraints however theoretical examination of the range of bargaining outcomes that might occur between bureau and legislature shows that budget maximizing behavior does not necessarily lead to super optimal levels of production nor do the suggested reforms of competition and privatization necessarily improve the situation in this bargaining model the central determinants of governmental growth are not budget maximizing bureaucrats but the legislature s decisions regarding mode of oversight and form of internal organization

nonconvexities retirement and the elasticity of labor supply abstract we consider two life cycle models of labor supply that use nonconvexities to generate retirement in each case we derive a link between hours worked prior to retirement the intertemporal elasticity of substitution for labor ies and the size of the nonconvexities this link is robust to allowing for credit constraints and human capital accumulation by younger workers and suggests values for the ies that are 75 or higher jel d91 j22 j24 j26

financial intermediaries and liquidity creation trading losses associated with information asymmetries can be mitigated by designing securities which split the cash flows of underlying assets these securities which can arise endogenously have values that do not depend on the information known only to informed agents bank debt deposits is an example of this type of liquid security which protect relatively uninformed agents and we provide a rationale for deposit insurance in this content high grade corporate debt and government bonds are other examples implying that a money market mutual fund based payments system may be an alternative to one based on insured bank deposits

the dynamics of incentive contracts the paper studies a simple two period principal agent model in which the principal updates the incentive scheme after observing the agent s first period performance the agent has superior information about his ability the principal offers a first period incentive scheme and observes some measure of the agent s first period performance cost or profit which depends on the agent s ability and unobservable first period effort the relationship is entirely run by short term contracts in the second period the principal updates the incentive scheme and the agent is free to accept the new incentive scheme or to quit the strategies are required to be perfect and updating of the principal s beliefs about the agent s ability follows bayes rule the central theme of the paper is that the ratchet effect leads to much pooling in the first period first for any first period incentive scheme there exists no separating equilibrium second when the uncertainty about the agent s ability is small the optimal scheme must involve a large amount of pooling the paper also gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of partition equilibria and looks at the effect of cost uncertainty

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

an ethanol blend wall shift is prone to increase petroleum gasoline demand abstract in 2010 the u s environmental protection agency announced a waiver allowing an increase in the fuel ethanol blend limit the blend wall from 10 e10 to 15 e15 justifications for the waiver are reduced vehicle fuel prices and less consumption of petroleum gasoline leading to greater energy security empirical investigations of this waiver using monte carlo simulations reveal an anomaly where a relaxation of this blend wall elicits a demand response under a wide range of elasticities this demand response can actually increase the consumption of petroleum gasoline and thus lead to greater energy insecurity the economics supporting this result and associated policy implications are developed and discussed

the impact of energy prices on the volatility of ethanol prices and the role of gasoline emissions abstract the contribution of renewable energy resources is vital for a country s economic growth by providing high efficiency in energy as well as an effective tool for the confrontation of climate change in particular concerning the eu an increase in the consumption of renewable energy resources as a proportion of the total energy consumption by its member states was set as an objective until 2020 ethanol has been widely used as a substitute to conventional energy like gasoline and oil the present paper surveys the role of alternative energy prices and gas emissions in the formation of the ethanol prices the results of the empirical survey confirmed the existence of a sole relationship among the variables employed according to the results obtained an increase in the volume of emissions or in gasoline prices results in an increase in ethanol prices while the opposite is confirmed in the case of crude oil he elasticity of ethanol prices to the increase of the emissions is another result worth mentioning indicative of the significant role of the emissions in the formation of ethanol prices

loan size as a commitment device the authors model risky lending with costly state verification but without commitment to an audit strategy the borrower underreports with a positive probability in the successful state and the lender audits with a positive probability after a report of failure under lack of commitment to audit probabilities an increase in loan size convinces the borrower that the lender has a high stake in an audit this reduces the probability of underreporting and leads to overinvestment relative to the commitment case however there is underinvestment relative to the level under full information copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the costs of bankruptcy chapter 7 liquidation versus chapter 11 reorganization our paper explores a comprehensive sample of small and large corporate bankruptcies in arizona and new york from 1995 to 2001 bankruptcy costs are very heterogeneous and sensitive to the measurement method used we find that chapter 7 liquidations appear to be no faster or cheaper in terms of direct expense than chapter 11 reorganizations however chapter 11 seems to preserve assets better thereby allowing creditors to recover relatively more our paper also provides a large number of further empirical regularities our paper analyzes the largest sample of corporate bankruptcies to date we research approximately 300 cases from the arizona and new york federal bankruptcy courts from 1995 to 2001 these cases consist of 1 both publicly traded and privately held corporations and 2 both chapter 7 liquidations and chapter 11 reorganizations this sample is practically the entire population of unique corporate bankruptcies in these courts our paper s primary objective is to measure how the two available bankruptcy procedures differ especially but not only in terms of cost we explore four variables namely the change in the estate s value during bankruptcy a measure of indirect costs the time spent in bankruptcy another and more common measure of indirect costs the expenses submitted to and approved by the bankruptcy court a measure of direct costs and the recovery rates for creditors and apr violations our most important findings are that chapter 7 liquidations are not cheaper than chapter 11 reorganizations particularly after we control for endogenous self selection of firms into bankruptcy procedure bankruptcy professionals attorneys accountants trustees regularly end up with most of the post bankruptcy firm s value in chapter 7 arturo bris is at imd yale school of management and ecgi ivo welch is at brown uni

the effect of part time work on wages evidence from the social security rules this article identifies the part time wage effect using hours variation caused by the social security rules we show that work hours and wages drop sharply at ages 62 and 65 we argue that the hours decline causes the wage decline resulting in a 25 wage penalty for men who cut their work week from 40 to 20 hours however we find little evidence for such an effect among women we also show that models that fail to account for the joint determination of hours and wages will understate the labor supply response to a tax change by about 26

empirical age earnings profiles the human capital earnings function in which earnings are expressed as a quadratic in potential experience is probably the most widely accepted empirical specification in economics in spite of its widespread acceptance the human capital earnings function provides a very poor approximation of the true empirical relationship between earnings and experience the standard formulation understates early career earnings growth by about 30 50 and overstates midcareer growth by 20 50 however simple alternative specifications that fit the data are available

the macroeconomic implications of rising wage inequality in the united states in recent decades american workers have faced a rising college premium a narrowing gender gap and increasing wage volatility this paper explores the quantitative and welfare implications of these changes the framework is an incomplete markets life cycle model in which individuals choose education intrafamily time allocation and savings given the observed history of the u s wage structure the model replicates key trends in cross sectional inequality in hours worked earnings and consumption recent cohorts enjoy welfare gains on average as higher relative wages for college graduates and for women translate into higher educational attainment and a more even division of labor within the household

income tax compliance in a principal agent framework previous analyses have modeled income tax evasion as a portfolio problem deriving the optimal consumption of the risky asset unreported income under the assumption of a fixed probability of detection the purpose of this paper is to examine some of these issues in tax compliance starting from a different set of assumptions in particular we compare alternative audit policies to the standard random audit policy we focus on an audit cutoff policy in which an agent triggers an audit if his or her reported income is too low and is not audited if reported income is sufficiently high this paper establishes two major results first random audit rules are weakly dominated by audit cutoff rules it can be shown given lump sum taxes and fines that these audit cutoff rules are the least cost policies which induce truthful reporting of income second the dominance of audit cutoff rules over random audit rules holds for lump sum as well as proportional taxation in fact the equilibrium consequences of the two are equivalent

human capital and the wealth of nations we reevaluate the role of human capital in determining the wealth of nations we use standard human capital theory to estimate stocks of human capital and allow the quality of human capital to vary across countries our model can explain differences in schooling and earnings profiles and consequently estimates of mincerian rates of return across countries we find that effective human capital per worker varies substantially across countries cross country differences in total factor productivity tfp are significantly smaller than found in previous studies our model implies that output per worker is highly responsive to changes in tfp and demographic variables jel e23 i25 j24 j31 o47 no question has perhaps attracted as much attention in the economics literature as why are some countries richer than others much of the current work traces back to the classic work of solow 1956 solow s seminal paper suggested that differ ences in the rates at which capital is accumulated could account for differences in output per capita more recently following the work of lucas 1988 human capital disparities were given a central role in the analysis of growth and development however the best recent work on the topic reaches the opposite conclusion klenow and rodriguez clare 1997 hall and jones 1999 parente and prescott 2000 and bils and klenow 2000 argue that most of the cross country differences in output per worker are not driven by differences in human capital or physical capital rather they are due to differences in a residual total factor productivity tfp in this paper we revisit the development problem in line with the earlier view we find that factor accumulation is more important than tfp in accounting for relative incomes across countries the key difference between our work and previous analyses is in the measurement of human capital the standard approach largely inspired by the work of mincer 1974 takes estimates of the rate of return to schooling as building blocks to directly measure a country s stock of human capital implicitly this method assumes that the marginal contribution to output of one additional year

training and lifetime income this paper challenges the notion that on the job training investments are quantitatively important for workers welfare and argues that on the job training may not increase lifetime income by more than 1 percent i argue that it is very difficult to reconcile the slowdown in wage growth late in a worker s career with optimizing behavior unless the technology for learning on the job is such that it generates very low gains from training the analysis is based on a nonparametric methodology for estimating the learning technology from wage profiles the results are arrived at by comparing the lifetime income when the worker optimally invests in his human capital to the one where he does not make any investments jel e24 j24 j31

the information content of bank exam ratings and subordinated debt prices do supervisory examinations of large commercial banking firms produce useful information not already reflected in market prices to investigate this question we apply a new research methodology to data on bank exam ratings and the subordinated debt risk spreads of their parent holding companies we find that government exams do produce new value relevant information that debenture prices do not immediately reflect this information and that the market prices the likely regulatory actions implied by this information these results have implications for market versus regulatory discipline at large banking firms and for proposals to make subordinated debt mandatory for these firms

wage declines among older men we examine the evidence on whether real wages decline with age among older men while the general human capital model of wage growth over the life cycle predicts that wages will fall as workers approach the end of their career alternative models of wage growth do not predict these wage declines we find that in longitudinal estimates of age wage profiles wage declines only set in for workers in their 60s furthermore these longitudinal declines are at least partly due to interactions with the social security system the earnings cap or other effects of social security appear to lead some workers to choose jobs and job characteristics associated with lower wages copyright 1996 by mit press

the effects of health wealth and wages on labour supply and retirement behaviour this paper estimates a life cycle model of labour supply retirement and savings behaviour in which future health status and wages are uncertain individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labour pension or social security income the method of simulated moments is used to match the life cycle profiles of labour force participation hours worked and assets that are estimated from the data to those that are generated by the model the model establishes that the tax structure of the social security system and pensions are key determinants of the high observed job exit rates at ages 62 and 65 removing the tax wedge embedded in the social security earnings test for individuals aged 65 and older would delay job exit by almost one year by contrast social security benefit levels health and borrowing constraints are less important determinants of job exit at older ages for example reducing social security benefits by 20 would cause workers to delay exit from the labour force by only three months

partially verifiable information and mechanism design in a principal agent model with adverse selection we study the implementation of social choice functions when the agent s message space is a correspondence which depends on this true characteristic we characterize such correspondence for which the revelation principle is valid returns must not contradict easily observable elements of the taxpayer s lifestyle in this paper we present a model of two person organizations in which these considerations are important we ask whether the restrictions on fallacious statements inherent in the system are sufficient to achieve the goals of the organization we show that the optimal way of eliciting the agent s response may not be to establish incentives for truthtelling in all instances in our model there is one player the agent who observes the state of the economic system another player the principal takes an action based on the information presented to him by the agent this class of models is often referred to as the principal agent problem in the extensive and growing literature on this problem it has always been assumed that the agent could lie to the principal and therefore that he had to be properly motivated to act at least partially in the principal s interest our formal way of modelling the partial verifiability of information is to introduce the restriction that the agent s responses must lie in a set m o that varies with the true state 0 it is assumed that this set always admits the possibility of responding with the true state the way in which the allowable response set varies with the true state is known to the principal in other respects we retain the usual principal agent formalization in particular the principal is the stackelberg leader in this game he can commit himself to choose a collective action as a function of the message transmitted by the agent whether the variation of the message space with the true observation is purely technological or whether it is induced by the severity of potential actions of the principal

optimal life cycle labour supply consumption and investment the role of longevity linked assets abstract we solve in closed form the problem of an agent who maximises his inter temporal lifetime utility the agent is subject to the so called longevity risk i e his force of mortality is stochastic his utility is additively separable on leisure while working and consumption consumer s preferences belong to the hyperbolic absolute risk aversion family with a subsistence consumption level the individual optimally chooses labour supply consumption and portfolio allocation we study these optimal choices when the agent has access to a complete financial market where he can trade in longevity linked securities he can also contribute to a personal pension scheme a calibrated application shows that the optimal demand for the longevity linked assets crucially depends on the stages of the agent s life and his wage profiles this observation opens up the possibility of longevity risk transfers across individuals with heterogeneous characteristics

the welfare economics of a biofuel tax credit and the interaction effects with price contingent farm subsidies a framework is developed to analyze the effects of a biofuel consumer tax exemption and the interaction effects with a price contingent farm subsidy ethanol prices rise above the gasoline price by the amount of the tax credit corn farmers gain directly while gasoline consumers only gain from any reduction in world oil prices due to the extra ethanol production domestic oil producers lose historically the intercept of the ethanol supply curve is above the gasoline price hence part of the tax credit is redundant and represents rectangular deadweight costs that dwarf triangular deadweight cost measures of traditional farm subsidies copyright 2007 oxford university press

an analysis of sample attrition in panel data the michigan panel study of income dynamics by 1989 the michigan panel study on income dynamics psid had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership we study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the estimates of several sets of regression coefficients we provide a statistical framework for conducting tests for attrition bias that draws a sharp distinction between selection on unobservables and on observables and that shows that weighted least squares can generate consistent parameter estimates when selection is based on observables even when they are endogenous our empirical analysis shows that attrition is highly selective and is concentrated among lower socioeconomic status individuals we also show that attrition is concentrated among those with more unstable earnings marriage and migration histories nevertheless we find that these variables explain very little of the attrition in the sample and that the selection that occurs is moderated by regression to the mean effects from selection on transitory components that fade over time consequently despite the large amount of attrition we find no strong evidence that attrition has seriously distorted the representativeness of the psid through 1989 and considerable evidence that its cross sectional representativeness has remained roughly intact

optimal contracts when enforcement is a decision variable this paper analyzes choice theoretic costly enforcement in an intertemporal contracting model with a differentially informed investor and entrepreneur an intertemporal contract is modeled as a mechanism in which there is limited commitment to payment and enforcement decisions the goal of the analysis is to characterize the effect of choice theoretic costly enforcement on the structure of optimal contracts the paper shows that simple debt is the optimal contract when commitment is limited and costly enforcement is a decision variable theorem 1 in contrast stochastic contracts are optimal when agents can commit to the ex ante optimal decisions theorem 2 the paper also shows that the costly state verification model can be viewed as a reduced form of an enforcement model in which agents choose payments and strategies as part of a perfect bayesian nash equilibrium

toward an optimal u s ethanol fuel subsidy abstract enhanced environmental quality fuel security and economic development along with reduced prices of ethanol gasoline blends are often used as justifications for the u s federal excise tax exemption on ethanol fuels however the possible effect of increased overall consumption of fuel in response to lower total price mitigating the environmental and fuel security benefits are generally not considered taking this price response into account the optimal u s ethanol subsidy is derived estimated values of the optimal subsidy reveal that the subsidy s environmental and security benefits are questionable however positive environmental and security benefits from the ethanol tax exemption subsidy may be obtained if the subsidy is combined with an increase in the excise tax on gasoline

signaling future actions and the potential for sacrifice we consider extensions of games where some players have the option of signaling future actions by incurring costs the main result is that in a class of games if one player can incur costs then forwards induction selects her most preferred outcome surprisingly the player does not have to incur any costs to achieve this the option alone suffices however when all players can incur costs one player s attempt to signal a future action is vulnerable to a counter signal by the opponent this vulnerability to counter signaling distinguishes signaling future actions from signaling types

avoiding tax avoidance a repeated game theoretic approach abstract we propose an optimal auditing scheme for the tax authorities who face a given tax and penalty functions and a given budget constraint under our proposed strategy individuals can be classified into one of three groups each group is characterized by two parameters i the probability of being audited in that group and ii into which group will an individual move if ii a he reported truthfully ii b he cheated it is then shown that there is a choice of these parameters so that in equilibrium i e when every individual maximizes his payoff given the auditing strategy the percentage of individuals that cheat is arbitrarily small

correlated default and financial intermediation financial intermediation naturally arises when knowledge about the aggregate state is valuable for managing investments and lenders cannot easily observe the aggregate state i show this using a costly enforcement model in which lenders need ex post incentives to enforce payments from defaulted loans and borrowers payoffs are correlated when projects have correlated outcomes learning the state of one project via enforcement provides information about the states of other projects a large correlated portfolio provides ex post incentives for enforcement as a result intermediation dominates direct lending intermediaries are financed with risk free deposits earn positive profits and hold systemic default risk

a model of declining health and retirement the declining u s average retirement age has been difficult to reconcile with cross section evidence that poor health is a primary cause of early retirement this paper reconciles those observations by building a grossman type model of investment in health distinguished from its predecessor by a more formal treatment of initial conditions a discontinuous mid life increase in health investment retirement is shown in general to be part of the optimal investment strategy time series productivity increases are shown to lower the optimal retirement age while varying health endowments and depreciation rates are shown to be able to account for cross section retirement age variations

all or nothing monitoring a principal can observe both the output and input of an agent who works at a job involving multiple tasks we provide a simple theory that explains why it may be optimal for the principal to use only an output based incentive contract even though the principal can monitor the agent s actions perfectly in all but one task and knows exactly which action is optimal for each task jel d82 d86 m54

recovery rates default probabilities and the credit cycle in recessions the number of defaulting firms rises on top of this the average amount recovered on the bonds of defaulting firms tends to decrease this paper proposes an econometric model in which this joint time variation in default rates and recovery rate distributions is driven by an unobserved markov chain which we interpret as the credit cycle this model is shown to fit better than models in which this joint time variation is driven by observed macroeconomic variables we use the model to quantitatively assess the importance of allowing for systematic time variation in recovery rates which is often ignored in risk management and pricing models

samurai accountant a theory of auditing and plunder a risk neutral principal wishes to exact a payment from a risk neutral agent whose wealth he does not know but may verify through a costly auditing procedure we characterize efficient schemes for the principal when he is allowed to choose schedules for preaudit and postaudit payments and audit probabilities subject to the constraint that only monetary incentives can be used and that the principal may never make a net payment to the agent the main results are that efficient schemes involve preaudit payments which are increasing in the agent s wealth audit probabilities are decreasing in the agent s wealth and also satisfy certain constraints as equalities in general such schemes involve stochastic auditing and rebates after an audit in this paper we analyse the problem of a principal extracting wealth from an agent who is reluctant to part with it and is also better informed than the principal as to the amount he owns we assume that the principal has a costly means of discovering the agent s

delegation as commitment the case of income tax audits in this article we study the value of delegating authority over income tax audit policy arising from the incompleteness of contracts consider a utilitarian government whose ability to commit is limited to aggregate dimensions of its audit policy as publicly verifiable information about detailed allocations of audit budgets is not available we show that the welfare level associated with the full commitment solution can be attained by delegating authority over audit policy to a manager the latter is offered a simple incentive scheme based only on the aggregate variables which are publicly observable in contrast if the government retains authority direct commitment to these same variables does not allow the full commitment welfare level to be achieved thus despite sharing a common informational basis delegation may perform better than centralized arrangements in the presence of incomplete contracts