a general equilibrium model with external scale economies in production abstract a general equilibrium model of an urban economy is described the standard residential land use model is extended to include a well defined production employment sector external scale economies occur in the production of the city s export good the model is designed for the numerical computation of equilibria and optima

portfolio choice and liquidity constraints we study the infinite horizon model of household portfolio choice under liquidity constraints and revisit the portfolio specialization puzzle we show why the puzzle is robust to several model variations and argue that positive correlation between earnings shocks and stock returns is unlikely to provide an empirically plausible resolution we find that relatively small fixed costs for stock market entry are sufficient to deter stockholding because for a plausible range of parameter values households can achieve desired consumption smoothing with small or zero holdings of stocks such costs could arise from informational considerations sign up fees and investor inertia

a note on the linsanity of measuring the relative efficiency of national basketball association guards this note examines the productive efficiency of 62 starting guards during the 2011 12 national basketball association nba season this period coincides with the phenomenal and largely unanticipated performance of new york knicks starting point guard jeremy lin and the attendant public and media hype known as linsanity we employ a data envelopment analysis dea approach that includes allowance for an undesirable output here turnovers per game with the desirable outputs of points rebounds assists steals and blocks per game and an input of minutes per game the results indicate that depending upon the specification between 29 and 42 of nba guards are fully efficient including jeremy lin with a mean inefficiency of 3 7 and 19 2 however while jeremy lin is technically efficient he seldom serves as a benchmark for inefficient players at least when compared with established players such as chris paul and dwayne wade this suggests the uniqueness of jeremy lin s productive solution and may ex

demand for football and intramatch winning probability an essay on the glorious uncertainty of sports the aims of this study are i to identify the main determinants of the demand for french premiere division football matches using all matches played during the 1997 1998 season ii to estimate a team specific probability of success and iii to propose an updating process for the intramatch winning probability the methodology is tested empirically over an out of sample data set using matches of the 1998 1999 season the results show that football appears to be an inferior product affected by both socio economic and football variables and that the main football variables have only a tenuous explanatory power concerning the final outcome of a given match

how important is precautionary saving we estimate how much of the wealth of a sample of psid respondents is held because some households face more income uncertainty than others we begin by solving a theoretical model of saving which we use to develop appropriate measures of uncertainty we then regress measures of wealth on our measures of uncertainty and find evidence that households engage in precautionary saving finally we simulate the wealth distribution that our empirical results imply would prevail if all households had the same uncertainty as the lowest uncertainty group we find that between 39 and 46 percent of wealth in our sample is attributable to the extra uncertainty that some consumers face compared to the lowest uncertainty group

second best congestion pricing schemes in the monocentric city abstract this paper considers second best congestion pricing in the monocentric city with endogenous residential density and endogenous labour supply a spatial general equilibrium model is developed that allows consideration of the three way interactions between urban density traffic congestion and labour supply congestion pricing schemes are analysed that are second best by design and not because distortions exist elsewhere in the spatial economy like cordon charging and flat kilometre charges both for cobb douglas utility and for ces utility the analyses suggest that the relative welfare losses from second best pricing compared to first best pricing are surprisingly small

managerial quality team success and individual player performance in major league baseball this paper uses 1969 87 major league baseball data to investigate the impact of managerial quality on team winning and individual player performance managerial quality and player performance are measured as predicted pay based on salary regressions these market based measures permit conclusions about costs and benefits of managerial quality there are two major findings first when player inputs are controlled for higher quality managers lead to higher winning percentages second players tend to play better relative to their prior performance levels the higher the manager s quality these findings suggest that as emphasized by the human resource management literature the quality of management makes an important difference in the performance of organizations

measuring managerial efficiency the case of baseball in economic analysis the role of the entrepreneur is paramount to the production process the entrepreneur is engaged in a darwinian game of efficiently transforming scarce resource inputs into outputs in the modern business organization this role is delegated to managers despite the conceptual importance of the role of management in the production function very little is known about the actual effect on output of variations in managerial skill in part this is due to the lack of proprietory data in part it is due to difficulties in measuring the outputs and inputs of complex production processes in a meaningful way a number of investigators have employed the concept of the frontier production function as developed by forsund and hjalmarsson 1 and timmer 6 and more recently by schmidt and lovell 3 to measure the effect on technical and price efficiency of various property rights structures or institutional constraints to our knowledge estimates of managerial efficiency have not been obtained with firm specific data except for some regulated industries in this study we estimate managerial efficiency by manager and by firm managerial marginal revenue product the rate of change in managerial efficiency over years of experience and relative factor price efficiency we use major league baseball teams over the period 1961 1980 as our data source what is particularly appealing about the choice of major league baseball teams as the industry for analysis is that outputs win percent and inputs player skills are unambiguously measured and the production function is simply specified as shown by scully 5 our results indicate that managerial skill in baseball contributes very substantially to the production process the paper will evolve as follows first the concept of the frontier production function is briefly outlined then estimates of managerial efficiency by manager and by team are provided and discussed a managerial efficiency learning curve is estimated an estimate of managerial marginal revenue product provided and the managerial efficiency

wealth inequality and intergenerational links previous work has had difficulty generating household saving behaviour that makes the distribution of wealth much more concentrated than that of labour earnings and that makes the richest households hold onto large amounts of wealth even during very old age i construct a quantitative general equilibrium overlapping generations model in which parents and children are linked by accidental and voluntary bequests and by earnings ability i show that voluntary bequests can explain the emergence of large estates while accidental bequests alone cannot and that adding earnings persistence within families increases wealth concentration even more i also show that the introduction of a bequest motive generates lifetime savings profiles more consistent with the data

on revenue recycling and the welfare effects of second best congestion pricing in a monocentric city abstract this paper examines congestion taxes in a monocentric city with pre existing labor taxation when road toll revenue is used to finance labor tax cuts 35 of the optimal road tax in our numerical model does not reflect marginal external congestion costs but rather functions as a ramsey mirrlees tax i e an efficiency enhancing mechanism allowing for an indirect spatial differentiation of the labor tax this adds a quite different motivation to road pricing since welfare gains can be produced even in absence of congestion we find that the optimal road tax is non monotonic across space reflecting the different impacts of labor supply elasticity and marginal utility of income which both vary over space the relative efficiencies of some archetype second best pricing schemes cordon toll flat kilometer tax are high 84 and 70 respectively when road toll revenue is recycled lump sum the optimal toll lies below its pigouvian level extensions in a bimodal framework show that the optimality of using road toll revenue to subsidize public transport depends on the initial inefficiency in public transport pricing

second best policies for congestion externalities abstract this is the third in a series of three articles on the topic of congestion externalities we use an urban general equilibrium model to test the efficiency of several second best policies for congestion externalities the most efficient second best policy is a program of land use controls the program generates a welfare gain of 3 38 per household per week a unit tax on commuting is a less efficient policy with a welfare gain of 1 15

capital over the business cycle renting versus ownership we find that capital renting makes up one fifth of u s capital expenditures and it increases during downturns further we present cross country evidence that output losses after financial crises are smaller where renting is more prevalent to understand these findings we build a general equilibrium model with borrowing constraints and with the option to rent or buy capital the countercyclicality of rentals occurs because their supply increases as renting serves as an additional means of savings when credit markets malfunction moreover demand also shifts toward rentals as they become relatively cheaper by absorbing excess savings renting mitigates financial crises

asset returns with transactions costs and uninsured individual risk abstract we explore whether incorporating an explicit motive for holding liquid assets within an equilibrium asset pricing model helps explain the following features of asset returns and turnover in the post war u s economy i the low risk free real interest rate ii the large spread between returns on liquid assets and stocks and iii the greater transaction velocity of liquid assets relative to stocks we introduce a demand for liquid assets by adding uninsured individual risk together with differential costs of trading securities numerical simulations attempting to match the return data generate a ratio of liquid assets to income considerably below observed levels

optimal cordon pricing abstract this paper presents a simple spatial model of traffic congestion for a monocentric city to investigate the effects of cordon pricing on trip making and congestion level in each location optimal cordon pricing is obtained as a combination of the cordon location i e distance of the cordon from the cbd and the amount of toll charged there that maximizes the total social surplus in a city under optimal cordon pricing trips originating from locations inside the cordon are under priced those just outside the cordon are over priced and those near the urban fringe are under priced numerical simulations using the parameter values based on japanese data suggest that cordon pricing attains an economic welfare level very close to the first best optimum

the general equilibrium effects of congestion externalities abstract this is the second in a series of three articles on the topic of congestion externalities we use an urban general equilibrium model to compute two types of cities the market equilibrium city in which congestion externalities occur and the optimum city the optimum city has a more dispersed distribution of employment and a more concentrated distribution of residence if the population of the city is fixed the optimum pricing of transportation generates a per capita welfare gain of 3 78 per week if the population of the city is endogenous the internalization of congestion externalities causes the city to grow

shirking or stochastic productivity in major league baseball reply firms produce in an uncertain environment the long literature on the theory of the firm under uncertainty has focused on demand uncertainty 4 18 14 the unanimity question 8 15 or technological uncertainty 23 1 7 regarding the latter an interesting question is how that randomness enters the technology one source might be purely unpredictable factors such as the weather or accidents agricultural output for instance is dependent not only on the quantity of inputs hired but on the amount of rainfall natural disasters and the like a different source of technical uncertainty is variations in the quality and reliability of the input services hired in professional sports for example the performance of an athlete varies from game to game and season to season the reliability of capital a crucial issue in nuclear power generation is another example reflecting the stochastic nature of input productivity one economic consequence of this randomness of productivity is that an employer cannot know a priori the input s value but rather must form an estimate of its expected marginal contribution spence 20 showed how an employer uses signals such as educational attainment to determine if a worker is worth hiring once hired the firm still faces the difficulty of determining if a below average realization of productivity resulted from shirking by the employee or a bad draw from his productivity distribution this agency problem outlined in detail by alchain and demsetz 1 and holmstrom 10 has important implications to our perception of work effort especially in the presence of long term labor contracts allegations of shirking due to long term job security have been associated with seniority rights professional athletes and in the academic institution of tenure

pay and performance in major league baseball the case of the first family of free agents it is well established that a baseball player s salary is based on his performance experience star status bargaining power mobility and his team s ability to pay this paper focuses on veteran players who are on the brink of retirement and on the

spillovers complementarities and sorting in labor markets with an application to professional sports spillovers to productivity across workers may exist when workers produce in teams under certain conditions these spillovers may cause a worker s marginal product to differ across different firms empirical examination of professional basketball finds significant spillovers to offensive productivity but finds relatively little evidence for market sorting based on spillovers thus while teammate composition is important to a player s success there is no evidence for complementarity

impact of league restructuring on team sport attendances the case of rugby league an econometric analysis of attendances at rugby footbal league matches in england over the period 1966 1990 is presented the major finding is that the move from one to two leagues in 1973 had a substantial impact on attendances teams in the upper league experienced greater attendances ceteris paribuswhilst those in the lower league had reduced attendances

the paradox of liquidity the more liquid a firm s assets the greater their value in a short notice liquidation it is generally thought that a firm should find it easier to raise external finance against more liquid assets this paper focuses on the dark side of liquidity greater asset liquidity reduces the firm s ability to commit to a specific course of action as a result greater asset liquidity can in some circumstances reduce the firm s capacity to raise external finance firms with excessively liquid assets are in the best position to finance illiquid projects this leads us to a theory of financial intermediation and disintermediation based on the liquidity of assets

information asymmetries in baseball s free agent market this study examines whether baseball s free agent market has been characterized by an asymmetric distribution of information among clubs it is argued that the clubs for which players have performed have more information with which to estimate the players future performance than do clubs that have not employed the player evidence is presented which shows that free agents spend more time on the disabled list than non free agents over time it appears that club owners have adjusted their expectations of free agent performance

long term debt and optimal policy in the fiscal theory of the price level the fiscal theory says that the price level is determined by the ratio of nominal debt to the present value of real primary surpluses i analyze long term debt and optimal policy in the fiscal theory i find that the maturity structure of the debt matters for example it determines whether news of future deficits implies current inflation or future inflation when long term debt is present the government can trade current inflation for future inflation by debt operations this tradeoff is not present if the government rolls over short term debt the maturity structure of outstanding debt acts as a budget constraint determining which periods price levels the government can affect by debt variation alone in addition debt policythe expected pattern of future state contingent debt sales repurchases and redemptionsmatters crucially for the effects of a debt operation i solve for optimal debt policies to minimize the variance of inflation i find cases in which long term debt helps to stabilize inflation i also find that the optimal policy produces time series that are similar to u s surplus and debt time series to understand the data i must assume that debt policy offsets the inflationary impact of cyclical surplus shocks rather than causing price level disturbances by policy induced shocks shifting the objective from price level variance to inflation variance the optimal policy produces much less volatile inflation at the cost of a unit root in the price level this is consistent with the stabilization of u s inflation after the gold standard was abandoned

consumption and risk sharing over the life cycle a striking feature of u s data on income and consumption is that inequality increases with age this paper asks if individual specific earnings risk can provide a coherent explanation we find that it can we construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model in which households face uninsurable earnings shocks over the course of their lifetimes earnings inequality is exogenous and is calibrated to match data from the u s panel study on income dynamics consumption inequality is endogenous and matches well data from the u s consumer expenditure survey the total risk households face is decomposed into that realized before entering the labor market and that realized throughout the working years in welfare terms the latter is found to be more important than the former

coaching team production coaching team production the actual function of managers is the subject of much debate using data on more than 3000 male college basketball players their coaches and their skill levels we find a positive and significant relation between our ability to replicate an individual coach s allocation of playing time across players and his winning percentage although this result does not answer the central question of just what it is that managers contribute the results do support the property rights paradigm managers are the employees of workers and more generally sports data can be used to help understand related economic processes where quantifiable measures of inputs and outputs are more costly to obtain what is meant by performance input energy initiative work attitude perspiration rate of exhaustion or output sometimes by inspecting a team member s input activity we can better judge his output effect it is not always the case that watching input activity is the only or best means of detecting measuring or monitoring output effects of each team member but in some cases it is a useful way i introduction a major tenet of the alchian demsetz 1972 representation of the firm is that managers are hired by workers to prevent shirking and malfeasance in their own ranks absent overseers individual workers bear only a fraction of the cost of shirking and hence everyone undersupplies labor relative to its opportunity cost in this world the managerial function is to monitor inputs and meter rewards thereby reducing the incentive to shirk and raising each worker s marginal productivity the more dependence there is in the marginal products of laborers the more important the role of management this view of supervision is simultaneously intuitively pleasing and difficult to quantify this paper investigates the role of management in a setting where indisputably there is team production intercollegiate basketball 1 data on 3012 college basketball players across ten years and sixty five teams are used to replicate one aspect of coaching the allocation of playing time next we attempt to link coaching decisions to winning the goal is to determine if coaches who manage well by our standards are successful section ii motivates the paper in section iii the empirical methodology is detailed the monitoring function is estimated and related to coaching success section iv contains a summary and conclusion ii coaching decisions the essence of team production is interdependence and the inherent immeasurability of marginal productivity across workers however this does not mean that proxies for marginal productivity cannot be developed managers monitor worker inputs and deduce marginal products accordingly of course some inputs are more cheaply quantified than others attitude is hard to measure but heart rate is easy sweat is observed cheaply but workers can feign exhaustion in the famous chinese boatpullers fable the coxswain uses his whip to insure that coolies pull efficiently to persuade each worker to give the appropriate effort 2 mcmanus 1975 341 relates a story told by cheung boats are pulled upstream by a team of coolies prodded by an overseer with a whip an american lady horrified at the sight of the overseer whipping the men as they strained at their harness demanded that something be done about the brutality she was quickly informed those men own the rights to draw boats over this stretch of water and they have hired the overseer and given him his duties here the monitor uses his vision intuition and experience to determine shirking counseling the loafers with his whip but employing subjective observation is just one way to monitor

lapm a liquidity based asset pricing model the intertemporal capm predicts that an asset s price is equal to the expectation of the product of the asset s payoff and a representative consumer s intertemporal marginal rate of substitution this paper develops an alternative approach to asset pricing based on corporations desire to hoard liquidity our corporate finance approach suggests new determinants of asset prices such as the distribution of wealth within the corporate sector and between the corporate sector and the consumers also leverage ratios capital adequacy requirements and the composition of savings affect the corporate demand for liquid assets and thereby interest rates starting with the capital asset pricing model capm derived by sharpe 1964 lintner 1965 and mossin 1966 market finance has emphasized the role of consumers time preference and risk aversion in determining asset prices the intertemporal consumption based asset pricing model e g rubinstein 1976 lucas 1978 breeden 1979 harrison and kreps 1979 cox ingersoll and ross 1985 hansen and jagannathan 1991 predicts that an asset s current price is equal to the expectation conditioned on current information of the product of the asset s payoff and a representative consumer s intertemporal marginal rate of substitution imrs while fundamental this dominant paradigm for pricing assets has some wellrecognized shortcomings see below and there is clearly scope for alternative and complementary approaches this paper begins developing one such approach based on aggregate liquidity considerations 1 our starting point is that the productive and financial spheres of the economy have autonomous demands for financial assets and that their valuations for these assets are often disconnected from the representative consumer s corporate demand for financial assets is driven by the desire to hoard liquidity in order to fulfill future cash needs in contrast with the

production functions in the sports industry an empirical analysis of professional cricket production functions are estimated for english county cricket using samples of data for the county championship and the john player league in the seasons of 1981 83 results suggest possible lessons for the management and conduct of the game at the level of the individual club in particular the allocation of resources for developing playing skills the composition of playing staffs selection of teams for particular games and strategies on the field results also provide statistical evidence for some points of conventional wisdom regarding the professional game

smoothing with liquid and illiquid assets abstract a quantitative examination of the demand for liquid assets arising from consumption smoothing motives reveals that such demand is very low consumers faced with income streams calibrated to match income and unemployment data and returns and transactions costs calibrated to match us treasury bill data almost exclusively buy and hold illiquid long term assets even though the return premium on long term assets is quite small this is because with standard preferences savings are highly persistent even when risky income is not in the calibrated model the first order autocorrelation of savings is an order of magnitude larger than that of income

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

economics of a bottleneck abstract drawing on vickrey amer econ rev 59 251 261 1969 and subsequent literature this paper provides a thorough economic analysis of the simplest bottleneck model of road congestion with peak load demand in the morning rush hour a fixed number of identical individuals one per car must travel from home to work between which is a bottleneck of given capacity the costs of travel include queuing time and schedule delay time early or late for work the frequency distribution of departure times adjusts so that in equilibrium all individuals have the same travel costs the paper extends the previous literature by examining a coarse toll and solving for optimal capacities the application of congestion tolls can generate efficiency gains by altering the frequency distribution of departure times previous estimates of the efficiency gains from congestion tolling are likely to be substantially downward biased because they have ignored this effect