sticky prices and monetary policy evidence from disaggregated us data this paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregated prices due to macroeconomic and sectoral conditions using a factor augmented vector autoregression estimated on a large data set on the basis of this estimation we establish eight facts 1 macroeconomic shocks explain only about 15 of sectoral inflation fluctuations 2 the persistence of sectoral inflation is driven by macroeconomic factors 3 while disaggregated prices respond quickly to sector specific shocks their responses to aggregate shocks are small on impact and larger thereafter 4 most prices respond with a significant delay to identified monetary policy shocks and show little evidence of a price puzzle contrary to existing studies based on traditional vars 5 categories in which consumer prices fall the most following a monetary policy shock tend to be those in which quantities consumed fall the least 6 the observed dispersion in the reaction of producer prices is relatively well explained by the degree of market power 7 prices in sectors with volatile idiosyncratic shocks react rapidly to aggregate monetary policy shocks 8 the sector specific components of prices and quantities move in opposite directions

the effect of agglomeration economies on firm deaths a comparison of firm and regional based approaches this paper compares the merits of regional and firm based approaches for analysing the effect of agglomeration economies on firm deaths in ireland we aggregate a comprehensive data set on irish fi

agglomeration effects and financial performance this study empirically tests the trade off between the costs and benefits of agglomeration for a large sample of firms in line with the existing literature it is found that population and employment density benefit productivity but increase labour and real estate costs to test the trade off of benefits and drawbacks of agglomeration the analysis focuses on the relation between agglomeration and profitability for a sample of single establishment dutch firms it is found that on average the costs of settling in an area with a dense spatial distribution of employment outweigh the benefits an effect that holds for both urbanisation and localisation measures in general doubling the employment density will decrease the average return on assets by more than one percentage point

testing for asymmetric information in insurance markets the first goal of this paper is to provide a simple and general test of the presence of asymmetric information in contractual relationships within a competitive context we also argue that insurance data are particularly well suited to such empirical investigations to illustrate this claim we use data on contracts and accidents to investigate the extent of asymmetric information in the french market for automobile insurance using various parametric and nonparametric methods we find no evidence for the presence of asymmetric information in this market

testing for evidence of adverse selection in the automobile insurance market a comment in 1994 puelz and snow presented empirical evidence of adverse selection in the market for automobile collision insurance using data from a private insurer they claimed to have found strong evidence of adverse selection in the insurer s portfolio their test was based on individuals choice of deductible in each risk class from the models of rothschild and stiglitz 1976 and wilson 1977 it is well known that if residual adverse selection is present in some risk classes insurers will offer menus of contracts from which insureds will self select at equilibrium higher risk individuals will choose the smaller deductible and will be charged the higher price per unit of insurance dionne doherty and fombaron 2000 an empirical test of the theory is to verify in each risk class whether lower deductibles are chosen by insureds with higher accident proba

adverse selection commitment and renegotiation extension to and evidence from insurance markets with asymmetric information full commitment to long term contracts may permit markets to approach first best allocations however commitment can be undermined by opportunistic behavior notably renegotiation we reexamine commitment in insurance markets we present an alternative model which extends laffont and tirole s procurement model to address uncertainty and competition which involves semipooling in the first period followed by separation this and competing models e g single period models and no commitment models have different predictions concerning temporal patterns of insurer profitability a test using california data suggests that some automobile insurers use commitment to attract selective portfolios comprising disproportionate numbers of low risks

why has u s inflation become harder to forecast we examine whether the u s rate of price inflation has become harder to forecast and to the extent that it has what changes in the inflation process have made it so the main finding is that the univariate inflation process is well described by an unobserved component trend cycle model with stochastic volatility or equivalently an integrated moving average process with time varying parameters this model explains a variety of recent univariate inflation forecasting puzzles and begins to explain some multivariate inflation forecasting puzzles as well

welfare improving asymmetric information in dynamic insurance markets this article presents a two period asymmetric learning model of insurance markets when information about past accidents is not shared by insurers asymmetries of information develop through time equilibrium contracts exist are payoff unique and display a realistic bonus malus pattern eliminating asymmetries through information sharing is welfare decreasing in contrast with past contributions on insurance and adverse selection when second period contract offers cannot be contingent on initial contract choice a strict increase in welfare is obtained through menus of contracts although initial contract choice is in itself worthless information

market equilibrium with private knowledge the effect of asymmetric information between buyers and sellers on product quality was first explored by akerlof 1970 in his pathbreaking paper on the market for lemons he showed that if all purchasers have imperfect information on quality then a market for the product may not exist or if it does function it may not be efficient these results have led to a number of papers concerning insurance and labor markets under different assumptions regarding how agents discriminate between products of varying quality see pauly 1974 rothschild and stiglitz 1976 wilson 1977 miyasaki 1977 and spence 1978

geography industrial organization and agglomeration this paper makes two contributions to the empirical literature on agglomeration economies first the paper uses a unique and rich database in conjunction with mapping software to measure the geographic extent of agglomerative externalities previous papers have been forced to assume that agglomeration economies are club goods that operate at a metropolitan scale second the paper tests for the existence of organizational agglomeration economies of the kind studied qualitatively by saxenian 1994 this is a potentially important source of increasing returns that previous empirical work has not considered results indicate that localization economies attenuate rapidly and that industrial organization affects the benefits of agglomeration

empirical evidence on inflation expectations in the new keynesian phillips curve abstract we review the main identification strategies and empirical evidence on the role of expectations in the new keynesian phillips curve paying particular attention to the issue of weak identi

effects of insurance incentives on road safety evidence from a natural experiment in china we investigate the incentive effects of insurance experience rating on road safety by evaluating the claim frequency following a regulatory reform introduced in a pilot city of china our contribution to the growing literature on moral hazard is to offer a neat identification of a causal effect of experience rating on road safety by employing the differences in differences methodology in the framework of a natural experiment the pre treatment placebo test corroborates the assumption that the pilot city and the control city share the same pre reform time trends in claims we find that basing insurance pricing on traffic violations reduces claim frequency significantly these results are robust to the inclusion of vehicle controls alternative definitions of claim frequency two placebo experiment tests and several robustness checks the effects of basing pricing on past claims are not significant

substitution between unemployment insurance and workers compensation abstract this paper extends the literature on post injury duration of absence from work by developing a model that incorporates substitution between unemployment insurance benefits and workers compensation a theoretical analysis is presented in which the worker maximizes expected utility over four possible states of nature the model is tested empirically using pooled cross section and time series data at the two digit industry level the main findings support the predictions of the model an increase in workers compensation benefits increases the average duration of accidents with an elasticity of 0 9 1 4 while an increase in unemployment insurance payments reduces the average duration of accidents with an elasticity of 0 5 0 7

the repeat rent index abstract we employ a weighted repeat rent estimator to construct quarterly indexes that expand the profession s ability to make cross sectional comparisons of housing markets our analysis shows that there is considerable heterogeneity in the behavior of rents across cities over the 2000 2010 decade but the number of cities and years for which nominal rents fell is substantial rents fell in many cities following the onset of the housing crisis in 2007 and the repeat rent and bureau of labor statistics indexes differ due to sampling and construction methods

separating the reporting effects from the injury rate effects of workers compensation insurance a hedonic simulation this paper presents a numerical simulation based on data from the early 1970s to investigate the economic links between labor market outcomes and the workers compensation insurance system the results suggest that in most cases any of three changes in the system more generous benefits more accurate categorization of insurance claims or more complete experience rating of premiums will slightly reduce the actual number of work related injuries but will dramatically increase the number of insurance claims filed the authors conclude that changes in self reported injuries can produce significant misimpressions of the safety incentives created by the workers compensation insurance system

the case of risk premia for risky jobs revisited abstract the empirical evidence concerning the existence of risk premia for risky jobs is contradictory some results support the existence of these premia while others do not this note provides a theoretical justification for these contradictory results in a fairly general model where firms and workers can effect the probability of a workplace accident

inflation persistence the nairu and the great recession the rate of inflation fell far less over the period 2007 2013 than in the period 1979 1985 despite similar large increases in the unemployment rate this paper asks why possible explanations include a change in the persistence of inflation changes in nairu and other shocks a change in the persistence of inflation with inflation more anchored in the period 2007 2013 than in the period 1979 1985 is found to be important the level and change in the nairu cannot be precisely estimated but the data suggest an increase of nearly 1 percentage point since 2007

moral hazard and dynamic insurance data this paper exploits dynamic features of insurance contracts in the empirical analysis of moral hazard we first show that experience rating implies negative occurrence dependence under moral hazard individual claim intensities decrease with the number of past claims we then show that dynamic insurance data allow to distinguish this moral hazard effect from dynamic selection on unobservables we develop nonparametric tests and estimate a flexible parametric model we find no evidence of moral hazard in french car insurance our analysis contributes to a recent literature based on static data that has problems distinguishing between moral hazard and selection and dealing with dynamic features of actual insurance contracts methodologically this paper builds on and extends the literature on state dependence and heterogeneity in event history data jel d82 g22 c41 c14

agglomeration accessibility and productivity evidence for large metropolitan areas in the us this paper estimates the productivity gains from agglomeration economies for a sample of the largest metropolitan areas in the united states using measures of urban agglomeration based on employment density and employment accessibility the latter is a more accurate measure of economic proximity and allows testing for the spatial decay of agglomeration effects with increasing travel time we find that the productivity gains from urban agglomeration are consistent between measures with elasticity values between 0 07 and 0 10 the large majority of the productivity gains occur within the first 20 minutes and do not appear to exhibit significant nonlinearities

can group incentives alleviate moral hazard the role of pro social preferences abstract incentivizing unobservable effort in risky environments such as in insurance credit and labor markets is vital as moral hazard may otherwise cause significant welfare losses including the outright failure of markets ensuring incentive compatibility through state contingent contracts between principal and agent however is undesirable for risk averse agents we provide a theoretical intuition on how pro social preferences between agents in a joint liability group contract can ensure incentive compatibility two independent large scale behavioral experiments framed in an insurance context support the hypotheses derived from our theory in particular effort decreases when making agents payoff less state dependent but this effect is mitigated with joint liability in a group scheme where agents are additionally motivated by pro social concerns activating strategic motives slightly increases effort further particularly in non anonymous groups with high network strength the results support existing evidence on joint liability groups and further suggest that even if peer pressure to ensure effort provision is absent such group policies can improve efficiency when agents are pro social

distinguishing limited liability from moral hazard in a model of entrepreneurship we present and estimate a model in which the choice between entrepreneurship and wage work may be influenced by financial market imperfections the model allows for limited liability moral hazard and a combination of both constraints the paper uses structural techniques to estimate the model and identify the source of financial market imperfections using data from rural and semiurban households in thailand structural nonparametric and reduced form estimates provide independent evidence that the dominant source of credit market imperfections is moral hazard we reject the hypothesis that limited liability alone can explain the data

simple solutions to the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity i study a simple widely applicable approach to handling the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear unobserved effects models rather than attempting to obtain the joint distribution of all outcomes of the endogenous variables i propose finding the distribution conditional on the initial value and the observed history of strictly exogenous explanatory variables the approach is flexible and results in simple estimation strategies for at least three leading dynamic nonlinear models probit tobit and poisson regression i treat the general problem of estimating average partial effects and show that simple estimators exist for important special cases copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

real time inflation forecasting in a changing world this article revisits the accuracy of inflation forecasting using activity and expectations variables we apply bayesian model averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of potential predictors that includes lagged values of inflation a host of real activity data term structure data relative price data and surveys in this model average we can entertain different channels of structural instability by either incorporating stochastic breaks in the regression parameters of each individual specification within this average or allowing for breaks in the error variance of the overall model average or both thus our framework simultaneously addresses structural change and model uncertainty that would unavoidably affect any inflation forecast model the different versions of our framework are used to model u s personal consumption expenditures pce deflator and gross domestic product gdp deflator inflation rates for the 1960 2011 period a real time inflation forecast

the roots of entrepreneurship and labour demand individual ability and low risk aversion the topic of entrepreneurship currently experiences a revived interest as is shown by the research agenda of today s empirical researchers there are few issues in economics which are backed up by such a rich historical knowledge base as is the case with entrepreneurship this paper aims to give an overview of some important classic contributions relating to today s and tomorrow s empirical research subjects the overview consists of answers to six research questions by six historical contributors to entrepreneurship research together these questions give some insight into the determinants of successful entrepreneurship the classic contributors considered are cantillon say marshall schumpeter knight and kirzner their views are compared to each other as well as to some recent results of empirical research into the determinants of successful entrepreneurship

fertility and female employment dynamics in europe the effect of using alternative econometric modeling assumptions we investigate the direct and long run effects of fertility on employment in europe estimating dynamic models of labor supply under different assumptions regarding the exogeneity of fertility and modeling assumptions related to initial conditions unobserved heterogeneity and serial correlation in the error terms we find overall large direct and long run effects of giving birth on employment probabilities and these effects differ considerably across countries we find that within countries the results are sensitive to the statistical assumption made on initial conditions the inclusion of serial correlation and the assumption of strict exogeneity of children however the pattern across countries is robust to these assumptions we show that such patterns are largely consistent with prevailing institutional differences related to the flexibility of the labor markets and family policies copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

inflation dynamics during the financial crisis using confidential product level price data underlying the u s producer price index ppi this paper analyzes the effect of changes in firms financial conditions on their price setting behavior during the great recession that surrounds the financial crisis the evidence indicates that during the height of the crisis in late 2008 firms with weak balance sheets increased prices significantly relative to industry averages whereas firms with strong balance sheets lowered prices a response consistent with an adverse demand shock these stark differences in price setting behavior are consistent with the notion that financial frictions may significantly influence the response of aggregate inflation to macroeconomic shocks we explore the implications of these empirical findings within a general equilibrium framework that allows for customer markets and departures from the frictionless financial markets in the model firms have an incentive to set a low price to invest in market share though when financial distortions are severe firms forgo these investment opportunities and maintain high prices in an effort to preserve their balance sheet capacity consistent with our empirical findings the model with financial distortions relative to the baseline model without such distortions implies a substantial attenuation of price dynamics in response to contractionary demand shocks

california s 2004 workers compensation reform costs claims and contingent workers the large excess fraction of difficult to diagnose injuries that occur on a monday was originally thought to reflect employees use of workers compensation to cover weekend injuries evidence has

an evaluation of the inflationary pressure associated with short and long term unemployment abstract the role of long term unemployment in inflationary pressures has been examined in academic studies and discussed by policymakers i demonstrate econometric weaknesses in previous studies propose a solution based on regional variation and present new evidence

multiple dimensions of private information evidence from the long term care insurance market we demonstrate the existence of multiple dimensions of private information in the long term care insurance market two types of people purchase insurance individuals with private information that they are high risk and individuals with private information that they have strong taste for insurance ex post the former are higher risk than insurance companies expect while the latter are lower risk in aggregate those with more insurance are not higher risk our results demonstrate that insurance markets may suffer from asymmetric information even absent a positive correlation between insurance coverage and risk occurrence the results also suggest a general test for asymmetric information

nonparametric testing for asymmetric information asymmetric information is an important phenomenon in many markets and in particular in insurance markets testing for asymmetric information has become a very important issue in the literature in the last two decades almost all testing procedures that are used in empirical studies are parametric which may yield misleading conclusions in the case of misspecification of either functional or distributional relationships among the variables of interest motivated by the literature on testing conditional independence we propose a new nonparametric test for asymmetric information which is applicable in a variety of situations we demonstrate that the test works reasonably well through monte carlo simulations and apply it to an automobile insurance dataset and a long term care insurance ltci dataset our empirical results consolidate chiappori and salanie s findings that there is no evidence for the presence of asymmetric information in the french automobile insurance market while finkelstein and mcgarry

separating moral hazard from adverse selection and learning in automobile insurance longitudinal evidence from france the identification of information problems in different markets is a challenging issue in the economic literature this paper performs tests of residual asymmetric information in the french automobile insurance market for the 1995 1997 period this market is characterized by the presence of a regulated experiencerating scheme bonus malus contract choices are strongly associated with the bonus malus of policyholders we have access to longitudinal survey data with dynamic information both on claims and accidents we propose a causality test to distinguish pathways through which a positive correlation arises between contract choice and accidents we find evidence of moral hazard among a sub group of policyholders with significant driving experience 5 15 years we distinguish this moral hazard estimate from adverse selection and learning policyholders with less experience have a combination of learning and moral hazard whereas no residual information problem is found for policyholders with more than 15 years of experience

asymmetric information in insurance general testable implications several recent articles on empirical contract theory and insurance have tested for a positive correlation between coverage and ex post risk as predicted by standard models of pure adverse selection or pure moral hazard we show here that the positive correlationproperty can be extended to general setups competitive insurance markets and cases where risk aversion is public we test our results on a french dataset our tests confirm that the estimated correlation is positive they also suggest the presence of market power

core inflation and trend inflation abstract this paper examines empirically whether the measurement of trend inflation can be improved by using disaggregated data on sectoral inflation to construct indexes akin to core inflation but with a time varying distributed lags of weights where the sectoral weight depends on the timevarying volatility and persistence of the sectoral inflation series and on the comovement among sectors the modeling framework is a dynamic factor model with time varying coefficients and stochastic volatility as in del negro and otrok 2008 and is estimated using u s data on seventeen components of the personal consumption expenditure inflation index

the death of firms exploring the effects of environment and birth cohort on firm survival in sweden this paper investigates the death of firms and seizes a long term perspective it investigates the life spans of nearly 2 200 firms in seven birth cohorts of swedish joint stock companies founded during seven separate years between 1899 and 1950 research has traditionally emphasized individual and micro oriented factors in explaining post entry performance or has often focused on the influence of firm specific structural factors firm age and size a less attended field recognizes environmental forces this paper focuses on the interaction between the micro and macro levels and combines structural and environmental factors employing a cohort approach it relates firm survival to firm age and size as well as to the effect of cohort affiliation and environmental change over time period effects during macroeconomic expansion the risk of death decreases cohort effects are also evident firms founded during times of economic crisis exhibit lower survival rates consequently cohort affiliation and environmental forces i e period effects can explain differences in death rates in different firm populations

is consumption growth consistent with intertemporal optimization evidence from the consumer expenditure survey in this paper we show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in u s household level data we propose a flexible specification of preferences that allows multiple commodities and yields empirically tractable equations we estimate preference parameters using the only u s micro data set with complete consumption information we show that previous rejections can be explained by the simplifying assumptions made in previous studies we also show that results obtained using good consumption or aggregate data can be misleading

contracts and exits in venture capital finance using a sample of european venture capital vc investments i study the relation between vc contracts and exits the data indicate that ex ante stronger vc control rights increase the likelihood that an entrepreneurial firm will exit by an acquisition rather than through a write off or an ipo my findings are robust to controls for a variety of factors including endogeneity and cases in which the vc preplans the exit at the time of contract choice my findings are consistent with control based theories of financial contracting such as aghion and bolton 1992

workers compensation and moral hazard in tunisia abstractmoral hazard is a problem of asymmetric information that plays a central role in numerous contractual relationships and may lead to suboptimal resource allocation both ex ante and ex post moral hazard problems in workers compensation wc have been extensively analysed in developed countries the main objective of this paper is to test the presence of ex post moral hazard in the tunisian context to our knowledge this is the first analysis on this topic in a developing country tunisia it is particularly important to study moral hazard problems in developing countries since the negative impacts of such problems could be exacerbated in the developing world dionne and st michel 1991 have developed a methodology for testing for the presence of ex post moral hazard in the context of a more generous wc regime in quebec the tunisian institutional context that we study is similar to that prevailing in quebec that is in 1995 there was a significant increase in the generosity of the wc regime

income tax evasion an intersectoral analysis abstract this paper develops an intersectoral model of income tax evasion with general equilibrium effects key elements of the model are imperfectly substitutable outputs from the compliant and evading sectors and workers with heterogeneous evasion costs the model allows for biased public expenditures a wide range of behavioural responses and both legitimate and criminal activities evading tax as well as tax avoidance activities qualitative and quantitative assessments are undertaken for the effects of tax rate changes on evasion activity relative output prices and real tax revenues this approach offers useful findings for taxation policy and is amenable to further analytical extensions

german and american wage and price dynamics differences and common themes abstract the theoretical section of this paper develops a new nonstructural model of wage and price adjustment that integrates several concepts that have often been treated separately including phillips curve level effects hysteresis change effects the error correction mechanism and the role of changes in labor s share that act as a supply shock the empirical analysis reaches two striking conclusions first during 1973 1990 coefficients in our german wage equations are remarkably similar to those in the u s with almost identical estimates of the phillips curve slope of the hysteresis effect and of the nairu the two countries also share similar inflation behavior in that inflation depends more closely on the capacity utilization rate than on the unemployment rate the big difference between the two countries is that there seems to be no feedback from wages to prices in germany and so high unemployment does not put downward pressure on the inflation rate during the 1970s and 1980s in germany there emerged a growing mismatch between the labor market and industrial capacity so that the unemployment rate consistent with the mean constant inflation utilization rate muru increased sharply while in the u s the muru was relatively stable

how important are banks for development national banks in the united states 1870 1900 abstract do banks matter for growth and if so how this paper examines the effects of national banks in the united states from 1870 to 1900 i use the discontinuity in entry caused by a large minimum size requirement to identify the effects of banking for the counties on the margin between getting a bank and not gaining a bank increased production per person by 10 national banks in rural areas improved agriculture over manufacturing moving counties toward geographic comparative advantage since these banks made few long term loans the evidence suggests that the provision of working capital and liquidity matters for growth

the spatial evolution of the british automobile industry does location matter this article aims to describe and explain the spatial evolution of the automobile sector in great britain from an evolutionary perspective this analysis is based on a unique database of all entries and exits in this sector during the period 1895 1968 collected by the authors cox regressions show that spinoff dynamics agglomeration economies and time of entry have had a significant effect on the survival rate of automobile firms during the period 1895 1968

second degree moral hazard in a real world credence goods market in a field experiment in the market for taxi rides we investigate a phenomenon called second degree moral hazard the tendency of the supply side in a market to react to anticipated moral hazard on the demand side by increasing the extent or price of the service our moral hazard manipulation consists of some passengers explicitly stating that their expenses will be reimbursed this has a strong positive effect on the likelihood and the amount of overcharging and consequently increases consumer expenditure our results suggest that second degree moral hazard may have a severe impact on the provision of credence goods

repeated moral hazard the role of memory commitment and the access to credit markets abstract the dynamic dimension introduces new questions in moral hazard models thus the roles of memory and commitment have recently raised a marked interest the goal of this paper is to discuss and clarify the issues at hand and to present some new results we show that two conditions are necessary for the optimal long term contract to be implementable via spot contracts first the long term optimum should be renegotiation proof second spot contracts should provide efficient consumption smoothing we discuss how the availability of credit to the agent affects these two prerequisites we also study the hitherto neglected case in which the repetition of the moral hazard problem generates hidden information at recontracting dates the optimal renegotiation proof contract then implements the minimum effort level unless it involves randomized savings

a core inflation indicator for the euro area this paper proposes a new core inflation indicator for the euro area obtained by cleaning monthly price changes from short run volatility idiosyncratic and measurement errors we use a factor model to project monthly inflation on a large panel of time series exploiting multivariate information we obtain a satisfactory degree of smoothing without using backward looking moving averages which induce a time delay in the signal the indicator forecasts inflation and is a useful tool for policy makers it outperforms other commonly used predictors at 6 months and longer horizons it tracks past policy interventions of the ecb

evidence on adverse selection equilibrium signaling and cross subsidization in the insurance market the configuration of equilibrium in the market for automobile collision insurance is examined empirically by representing the premium deductible menu and the demand function as a standard hedonic system using contractual data from a representative insurer we estimate a reduced form hedonic premium equation and the inverse of the marginal bid equation for insurance coverage the data reveal an equilibrium with adverse selection and market signaling but lead us to reject the hypothesis that high risks receive contracts subsidized by low risks

quantifying the premium externality of the uninsured in some insurance markets the uninsured can generate a negative externality on the insured leading insurance companies to pass on costs as higher premia using a novel panel data set and a staggered policy change that exogenously varied the rate of uninsured drivers at the county level in california we quantitatively investigate the effect of uninsured motorists on automobile insurance premia consistent with predictions of theory we find uninsured drivers lead to higher insurance premia specifically a 1 percentage point increase in the rate of uninsured drivers raises insurance premia by between 1 2 we also discuss corrective pigouvian taxes

adverse selection in insurance markets policyholder evidence from the u k annuity market in this paper we investigate the importance of adverse selection in insurance markets we use a unique data set consisting of all annuity policies sold by a large u k insurance company since the early 1980s to analyze mortality differences among individuals who purchased different types of policies we find systematic relationships between ex post mortality and annuity policy characteristics such as whether the annuity will make payments to the estate in the event of an untimely death and whether the payments from the annuity rise over time these mortality patterns are consistent with the presence of asymmetric information in the annuity market we find no evidence of substantive mortality differences however across annuities of different size even though models of insurance market equilibrium with asymmetric information would predict such differences we also find that the pricing of various features of annuity contracts is consistent with the self selection patterns we find in mortality rates our results therefore suggest that selection may occur across many specific features of insurance contracts and that the absence of selection on one contract dimension does not preclude its presence on others this highlights the importance of considering the detailed features of insurance contracts when testing theoretical models of asymmetric information

do agglomeration externalities affect firm survival abstractdo agglomeration externalities affect firm survival regional studies this paper analyses the impact of spatial agglomeration externalities on italian start up firms survival italy represents a relevant case study given the well known role of firm clusters in the country s economic development results obtained support the hypothesis that industry variety reduces the likelihood of firm exit specifically related variety which contributes to the generation and diffusion of new knowledge has a positive effect on firm survival in manufacturing sectors while unrelated variety which may work as a portfolio strategy plays a positive role in services sectors localization economies positively influence firm survival only in services sectors finally urban density is not robust to the control for firm characteristics

incentive effects of workers compensation insurance abstract this paper uses micro level data from the current population survey to estimate the determinants of participation in state workers compensation programs in the united states the principal finding is that higher workers compensation benefits are associated with greater participation in the workers compensation program after accounting for a variety of covariates in addition the waiting period is found to have a substantial negative effect on program participation finally time series estimates based on the cross sectional model show that the growth in workers compensation claims in the 1970s corresponds reasonably well with the growth in real benefits in this time period

workers compensation moral hazard and the composition of workplace injuries this paper provides evidence that workers compensation insurance wc affects not only the occurrence but also the composition of reported injuries in our theoretical approach wc is the source of two interrelated moral hazard problems underprovision of accident preventing efforts by the insured worker ex ante moral hazard and false reporting of injuries ex post moral hazard our model predicts that under certain assumptions the impact of wc benefits is stronger on the probability of reporting a difficult to diagnose injury than on the probability of reporting an injury that is easy to diagnose panel data on 9 800 workers in the quebec construction industry over each month of the period 1977 86 combining administrative data from the quebec construction board with data from the quebec workers compensation board are used for the estimates the parameters of the model are estimated using a threealternative logit kernel hybrid multinomial probit mnp framework with individual random effects our results confirm our theoretical pre

the role of commitment in dynamic contracts evidence from life insurance we use data on life insurance contracts to study the properties of long term contracts in a world where buyers cannot commit to a contract the data are especially suited to test a theory of dynamic contracting since they include information on the entire proele of future premiums all the patterns in the data et the theoretical predictions of a model with symmetric learning and one sided com

the efficiency effects of categorical discrimination in the insurance industry recent public policy debate has focused concern on the equity dimensions of categorical discrimination based on sex age or race in insurance and similar markets we consider the efficiency effects of such discrimination and establish that costless imperfect categorization always enhances efficiency when categorization entails a nonnegligible resource cost however no unambiguous efficiency ranking of informational regimes is possible when categorization is costless we demonstrate that government having no better information than market participants can effect redistribution without assuming dictatorial control of the market implying that a market equilibrium with costless categorization is potentially pareto superior to one without it when categorization is costly however the market may categorize when pareto improvements are not possible

adverse selection in durable goods markets we present a dynamic model of adverse selection to examine the interactions between new and used goods markets we find that the used market never shuts down the volume of trade can be large and distortions are lower than previously thought new cars prices can be higher under adverse selection than in its absence an extension to several brands that differ in reliability leads to testable predictions of the effects of adverse selection unreliable brands have steeper price declines and lower volumes of trade we contrast these predictions with those of a model where brands physically depreciate at different rates

spatial agglomeration and firm exit a spatial dynamic analysis for italian provinces the paper investigates the effect of spatial agglomeration on firm exit in a dynamic framework using a large dataset at the industry province level for italy 1998 2007 we estimate a spatial dynamic panel model via a gmm estimator and analyze the short run impact of specialization and variety on firm exit specialization negatively affects firm exit rates in the short run the effect is particularly significant for low tech firms the impact of variety on firm mortality rates at the industry level is instead less clear although still negative and significant for low tech firms

slack and cyclically sensitive inflation we investigate the flattening phillips relation by making two departures from standard specifications first we measure slack using real activity variables that are bandpass filtered or year over year changes in activity these are similar instead of gaps second we study the components of inflation instead of the standard aggregates we find that some inflation components have strong and stable correlations with the cyclical component of real activity these components tend to be relatively well measured and domestically determined other components typically prices that are poorly measured or internationally determined have weak and or unstable correlations with cyclical activity we construct a new inflation index cyclically sensitive inflation that weights the components by their joint cyclical covariation with real activity the index has strong and stable correlations with cyclical activity and provides a real time measure of cyclical movements in inflation

trend inflation indexation and inflation persistence in the new keynesian phillips curve purely forward looking versions of the new keynesian phillips curve nkpc generate too little inflation persistence some authors add ad hoc backward looking terms to address this shortcoming we hypothesize that inflation per sistence results mainly from variation in the long run trend component of inflation which we attribute to shifts in monetary policy we derive a version of the nkpc that incorporates a time varying inflation trend and examine whether it explains the dynamics of inflation when drift in trend inflation is taken into account a purely forward looking version of the model fits the data well and there is no need for backward looking components jel e12 e31 e52 in this paper we consider the extent to which guillermo calvo s 1983 model of nominal price rigidities can explain inflation dynamics without relying on arbitrary backward looking terms in its baseline formulation the calvo model leads to a purely forward looking new keynesian

workers compensation and moral hazard two types of moral hazard have been determined the first type is related to self prevention activities affecting probabilities of accidents the second type relates to the agent s activities whenever the accident occurs the authors objective consists of presenting an empirical measure of the significance of this second type of moral hazard in the workers compensation market the main challenge in isolating moral hazard consists of dividing into two parts the total variation in recovery time with respect to changes in insurance coverage 1 the variation of consumption corresponding to a given level of information and 2 the variation of consumption due to greater asymmetrical information the methodology used in this study separates these two variations copyright 1991 by mit press

transit service physical agglomeration and productivity in us metropolitan areas public transit improvements could cause more clustered and higher density employment and enable urban growth giving rise to agglomeration economies by improving labour market accessibility increasing information exchange and facilitating industrial specialisation using data on us metropolitan areas this paper traces the links from transit service to central city employment density urbanised area employment density and population and from these physical agglomeration measures to average wages and per capita gmp significant indirect productivity effects of transit service are found for example in the case of central city employment density estimated wage increases range between 1 5 million and 1 8 billion per metropolitan area yearly for a 10 per cent increase in transit seats or rail service miles per capita firms and households likely receive unanticipated agglomeration benefits from transit induced densification and growth and current benefit cost evaluations may therefore underestimate the

the macroeconomics of trend inflation most macroeconomic models for monetary policy analysis are approximated around a zero inflation steady state but most central banks target an inflation rate of about 2 percent many economists have recently proposed even higher inflation targets to reduce the incidence of the zero lower bound constraint on monetary policy in this survey we show that the conduct of monetary policy should be analyzed by appropriately accounting for the positive trend inflation targeted by policymakers we first review empirical research on the evolution and dynamics of u s trend inflation and some proposed new measures to assess the volatility and persistence of trend based inflation gaps we then construct a generalized new keynesian model that accounts for a positive trend inflation in this model an increase in trend inflation is associated with a more volatile and unstable economy and tends to destabilize inflation expectations this analysis offers a note of caution regarding recent proposals to address the existing zero lower bound problem by raising the long run inflation target jel e12 e31 e32 e52 e58

unemployment insurance meets the classical labor supply model abstract through making average income dependent on the breakdown of non employment into frequency and duration the classical labor supply model with unemployment insurance has important implications for labor force participation the duration of employment and unemployment and modes of worker behavior that are by and large consistent with empirical knowledge

workers compensation rate regulation how price controls increase costs abstract in the 1980s regulation constrained workers compensation insurance premiums in the face of rapid growth in loss costs we develop and test the hypothesis that rate suppression exacerbates loss growth leading to higher losses and premiums the empirical analysis using rating class data for eight states for the period 1985 91 confirms that rate suppression measured by lagged residual market share of payroll increased loss growth the cost increasing effects are greater in the residual market than in the voluntary market but premiums increased more rapidly in the voluntary market the resulting pattern of cross subsidies between and within classes is consistent with a simple model of political influence with subsidies to high risks and small firms at the expense of low risks and insurer equity

founder ceo succession and the paradox of entrepreneurial success in the last few decades we have developed a substantial body of knowledge about ceo succession however except for some studies of family businesses that lack direct applicability to nonfamily ceo succession the past studies of succession have not examined the very first succession event in a firm when the founder ceo is replaced on a large scale basis the critical differences between later stage succession and founder ceo succession include the higher level of attachment between founder ceos and the firms they create the much larger equity holdings of founder ceos which give them much more control of the firm the fact that many founder ceos remain in the firm even though it is being run by their successors and the fact that nearly all early stage succession events involve outside successors in contrast to later stage succession research which has focused on the insider outsider distinction these differences make it hard to extrapolate from later stage succession findings to founder ceo succession therefore in order to examine founder ceo succession i used field research and grounded theory building to study the factors that should affect founder ceo succession in internet start ups i find that there are two central intertemporal events that may affect founder ceo succession the completion of product development and the raising of each round of financing from outside investors i develop testable hypotheses about how each of these events affect the rate of succession and then test these hypotheses using an event history analysis of a unique dataset containing the succession histories of 202 internet firms my findings point to multiple paradoxes of success in which the founder ceo s success at achieving critical milestones actually causes the chance of founder ceo succession to rise dramatically

ownership of stocks and mutual funds a panel data analysis this paper analyzes the ownership dynamics of stocks and mutual funds using representative household panel data the dutch center savings survey 1993 1998 a bivariate dynamic binary choice model is introduced allowing for interactions between the two types of assets we find that unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence play a large role for both types of assets the positive relation between ownership of one type in one period and the other type in the next period is explained by correlated unobserved heterogeneity a negative state dependence effect of lagged ownership of stocks on ownership of mutual funds is found which can be explained by the costs of shifting funds across the two forms of stockholding

asymmetric information and learning evidence from the automobile insurance market this paper tests the predictions of adverse selection models using data from the automobile insurance market i find that in contrast to what recent research suggests the evidence is consistent w

rate regulation safety incentives and loss growth in workers compensation insurance we analyze the relationship between insurance rate regulation inflationary cost surges and incentives for loss control using state level data on workers compensation insurance for 24 states during 1984 90 regulators often responded to rapid loss growth during this period by denying rate increases or approving increases that were less than initially requested by insurers we test whether rate suppression increased loss growth by distorting incentives for loss control our regressions indicate a positive and statistically reliable relationship between loss growth and lagged measures of regulatory price constraints suggesting that rate regulation increased the frequency and or severity of employee injuries copyright 2000 by university of chicago press