estimates of effective marginal tax rates on factor incomes this chapter describes a method of calculating summary measures of effective factor income tax rates in the united states using readily available data the numbers resulting from application of this method in a study are reported in the chapter and some of their possible uses are discussed the estimated factor income tax rates behave over time in a manner quite consistent with the behavior of other broad measures of federal tax policy the postwar movement in the tax rate on income from labor relative to that on income from capital or more accurately the relevant components of these tax rates provides suggestive support for the miller scholes hypothesis that the federal personal income tax has been moving in the direction of a pure consumption tax the tax rates reported in the chapter are consistent with other studies that show a decrease since the 1950s in rates of taxation at the corporate level of income from corporate held capital they are also consistent with the view that rates of taxation of such income at the noncorporate level have risen but not quite sufficiently to offset the decline in the corporate tax burden

coalitional manipulation on networks abstract we study allocation rules that are robust to coalitional manipulation by transferring merging or splitting individual characteristics among coalition partners e g merging or splitting claims in bankruptcy problems coalition formation is restricted by an exogenous network a non directed graph so that only connected subsets of agents can form a coalition we offer a full characterization of non manipulable rules without any assumption on the network structure this result yields a variety of useful corollaries for specific networks such as complete network trees and networks without a bridge and corollaries for specialized models dealing with bankruptcy surplus sharing cost sharing income redistribution social choice with transferable utility etc

sharing the proceeds from a hierarchical venture we consider the problem of distributing the proceeds generated from a joint venture in which the participating agents are hierarchically organized we introduce and characterize a family of allocation rules where revenue bubbles up in the hierarchy the family is flexible enough to accommodate a no transfer rule where no revenue bubbles up and a full transfer rule where all the revenues bubble up to the top of the hierarchy intermediate rules within the family are reminiscent of popular incentive mechanisms for social mobilization our benchmark model refers to the case of linear hierarchies but we also extend the analysis to the case in which hierarchies may convey a general tree structure and include joint ownerships

international environmental agreements for river sharing problems we study partial coalition formation and the strategic timing of membership of an iea for environmental issues in the coalitional bargaining game cbg of gomes econometrica 73 1329 1350 2005 we apply the cbg to a specific river sharing problem with two symmetric upstream agents each at a tributary and one downstream agent located at the junction of tributaries we identify five regions in the parameter space of a discount factor and a productivity parameter for water in one region the grand coalition always forms immediately in two other regions immediate formation of the grand coalition and gradual coalition formation both occur with positive probability in another two regions only gradual coalition formation occurs in one of these latter regions a region with discount factors close to one both upstream agents form a monopoly with positive probability formation of the monopoly persists in the limit as the discount factor goes to one

the ex dividend day behavior of canadian stock prices tax changes and clientele effects with some simple assumptions the ex dividend day price drop and the associated dividend can be used to measure the market s marginal tax rate previous research has estimated the implied tax rate for the u s this paper extends the analysis to canada where the tax treatment of dividends and capital gains is completely different from that in the u s the paper also presents estimates from 1970 80 to include four distinct periods when the tax treatment was different hence we include an implied test of market efficiency as well as those for the relevance of taxes and the existence of tax based dividend clienteles

non manipulable division rules in claim problems and generalizations abstract when resources are divided among agents the characteristics of the agents are taken into consideration a simple example is the bankruptcy problem where the liquidation value of a bankrupt firm is divided among the creditors based on their claims we characterize division rules under which no group of agents can increase the total amount they receive by transferring their characteristics within the group by allowing agents characteristics to be multi dimensional and choosing the meaning of variables appropriately our model can subsume a number of existing and new allocation problems such as cost sharing social choice with transferable utilities income redistribution bankruptcy with multiple types of assets probability updating and probability aggregation a number of existing and new results in specific problems are obtained as corollaries

marginal contributions and externalities in the value our concern is the extension of the theory of the shapley value to problems involving externalities using the standard axiom systems behind the shapley value for an arbitrary exogenous coalition structure leads to the identification of bounds on players payos around an externality free value in endogenizing the coalition structure we analyze a two stage process of coalition formation in whose second stage our axiomatic results are applied we find reasons to explain inecient coalition structures and provide sucient conditions for eciency

loss allocation in energy transmission networks abstract in this paper we study a cost allocation problem that is inherent to most energy networks the allocation of losses in particular we study how to allocate gas losses between haulers in gas transmission networks we discuss four allocation rules two of them have already been in place in real networks and two others that are defined for the first time in this paper we then present a comparative analysis of the different rules by studying their behavior with respect to a set of principles set forth by the european union this analysis also includes axiomatic characterizations of two of the rules finally as an illustration we apply them to the spanish gas transmission network

an econometric analysis of charitable giving with interdependent preferences in practice we are in a situation where one s own contribution is expected to influence the contributions of others a will expect that b and c may also be induced by his gifts to the same or similar objectives vickrey 1962 p 40 the estimates provide no support for the view that the total amount that an individual contributes is a function of the amount that is given by others although these results are clearly not definitive evidence against the notion of such interdependence among individuals we believe that the burden of proof now rests with those who support a theory of interdependent giving feldstein and clotfelter 1976 p 19 i introduction it is widely believed that one person s charitable contributions can be significantly influenced by the contributions of others the national survey of philanthropy for instance indicates that a sizable fraction of the population believes that people pay attention to what others give when determining their own contribution 1 fundraisers also feel that large leadership contributions by wealthy individuals can be influential in encouraging more and larger contributions by others bakal 1979 moreover interdependence among givers is central to social scientists outside of economics who study altruistic or charitable behavior psychologists for instance have learned that those who have recently witnessed an altruistic act are more likely to be altruistic and that people will be more altruistic the more others contribute 2 sociologists studying reference groups have shown that choices individuals make often depend on the choices of others who are similar in age education social status and other characteristics and that such reference groups appear to be important in determining altruistic and charitable activity 3 economic theorists have also made interdependent preferences the focus of their theoretical models of giving in some of the earliest writing on philanthropy vickrey 1962 gives an extensive discussion of the role of neighborhood effects on contributions formal models of altruism beginning with becker 1974 also assume any one contributor s choice depends on the contributions of all others largely because of the public goods aspect of charity 4 other models have generalized becker s approach to include impurely altruistic motives for giving such as a desire for acclaim status or simply a warm glow from giving where the impure altruism also depends on the contributions of others andreoni 1989 1990 outside of the literature on charity there is a long history beginning with duesenberry 1949 of economic models that assume the consumption choices of one agent are directly affected by the choices and characteristics of other agents 5 yitzhaki 1982 stark 1990 and stark and yitzhaki 1988 have shown the importance of relative deprivation in understanding economic phenomena and in related reasoning frank 1984 1985a b has shown that there is a theoretical and empirical basis for assuming that individuals care about how their consumption ranks relative to some group of peers in addition manski 1993a has shown the importance of role models and reference groups in the study of dynamic choice despite this emphasis on interdependent preferences elsewhere the empirical literature on charitable giving has been unsuccessful at finding any empirical relevance of interdependence feldstein and clotfelter 1976 are the only economists who have attempted to include variables to capture the interdependence of preferences their effort was unsuccessful as a result a large literature has developed in which equations for charitable contributions have been estimated without accounting for interdependence this method has led to a consensus that the tax price of charitable contributions and donor s income are both important in determining gifts

accrual equivalent marginal tax rates for personal financial assets this paper shows that the appropriate approach to calculating accrual equivalent marginal tax rates for nonaccrual taxes on personal financial investments is the relative reduction in the internal rate of return approach which equates the present values from the after tax returns from an investment under an accrual and a nonaccrual tax detailed comparisons are made with alternative approaches proposed by boadway bruce and mintz 1984 and by king and fullerton 1984 for the capital gains tax both find accrual tax rates that equate the present values of accrual and actual tax revenues fundamental problems are found with both alternative approaches

sources of mistrust an experimental case study of a central asian water conflict with the disintegration of the ussr a conflict arose between kyrgyzstan uzbekistan and kazakhstan over the transboundary syr darya river upstream kyrgyzstan controls the toktogul reservoir which generates hydropower demanded mainly in winter for heating downstream uzbekistan and kazakhstan need irrigation water in summer primarily to grow an export crop cotton regional agreements obliging kyrgyzstan to higher summer discharges in exchange for fossil fuel transfers from downstream riparians in winter have been unsuccessful due to lack of trust between the parties striving for self sufficiency in irrigation water uzbekistan initiated new reservoir construction this paper examines their economic impact we report a laboratory experiment modelling the syr darya scenario as a multi round three player trust game with non binding contracts payoff schemes are estimated using real life data while basinwide efficiency maximisation requires regional cooperation our results demonstrate that cooperation in the laboratory is hard to achieve uzbek reservoirs improve cooperation only weakly and their positive impact is limited to low water years

marginal federal personal and corporate income tax rates in the u s 1909 1975 abstract in this article i first report and describe the construction of two new statistical series on the marginal federal income tax rates for corporations and private individuals in the united states since the inception of those taxes and then analyze the behavior of these series over time several results on the determination of tax rates are derived these generally are not consistent with barro s theory of deficit finance

social contracts as assets a possible solution to the time consistency problem this paper presents a new solution to the time consistency problem that appears capable of enforcing ex ante policy in a variety of settings in which other enforcement mechanisms do not work the solution involves formulating a social contract institution or agreement that specifies the optimal ex ante policy the social contract is effectively sold by succesive old generations to successive young generations who pay for the social contract through the payment of taxes both old and young generations have an economic incentive to fulfill the social contract for the old generation breaking the social contract makes the social contract valueless and the generation suffers a capital loss by not being able to sell it for the young generation the economic advantage of purchasing the existing social contract exceeds its price as well as the economic gain from setting up the a new social contract

uniform externalities two axioms for fair allocation abstract positive resp negative preference externalities say that an agent always prefers his actual welfare to his virtual welfare should other agents share his preferences resp prefers his virtual to his actual welfare negative group externalities say that an agent never prefers his actual welfare to his virtual welfare should he be the sole user of the resources these two axioms unify several familiar fairness properties and yield some new ideas as well in the division of unproduced commodities and the cooperative production of a private or a public good we also discuss their compatibility with no envy and resource monotonicity

a game theoretical approach to sharing penalties and rewards in projects this paper analyzes situations in which a project consisting of several activities is not realized according to plan if the project is expedited a reward arises analogously a penalty arises if the project is delayed this paper considers the case of arbitrary nondecreasing reward and penalty functions on the total expedition and delay respectively attention is focused on how to divide the total reward penalty among the activities the core of a corresponding cooperative project game determines a set of stable allocations of the total reward penalty in the definition of project games surplus cost sharing mechanisms are used to take into account the specific characteristics of the reward penalty function at hand it turns out that project games are related to bankruptcy and taxation games this relation allows us to establish nonemptiness of the core of project games

decentralization hierarchies and incentives a mechanism design perspective separation of ownership from management multidivisional firm organizations delegation of production decisions to worker teams delegation of pricing and advertising decisions to retail franchisers reliance on intermediaries in trade or finance and distribution of regulatory authority across different agencies represent examples of organizations that delegate and distribute decision making authority instead of centralizing it this paper reviews literature on costs and benefits of delegated decision making in hierarchical organizations or contracting networks with regard to problems of incentives and coordination it starts by describing incentive and coordination costs of delegation in simple canonical examples of hierarchies where both information and incentives of different decisionmakers differ one class of models pertain to contexts where the classical revelation principle applies i e where costs of contractual complexity information processing or communication are absent agents do not collude and the mechanism designer can commit to the mechanism delegation may conceivably entail a loss of control and coordination arising from the divergence of information and incentives sufficient and necessary conditions for this loss to be mitigated entirely include risk neutrality top down contracting and monitoring of transfers or production assignments between subordinates the next class of models introduces communication costs that restrict the performance of centralized arrangements relative to delegation owing to a resulting loss of flexibility which has to be traded off against possible control losses of delegation finally consequences of collusion among agents is discussed which typically enlarge the range of circumstances under which delegation can attain optimal second best outcomes the paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of this theoretical literature to recently emerging empirical studies of industrial organizations where delegated decision making plays an important role adoption of innovative human resource management practices new information technologies and retail franchising

how burdensome are capital gains taxes abstract this paper uses capital gain realization data from individual tax returns to evaluate recent claims that sophisticated portfolio strategies permit investors to avoid capital gains taxes the results suggest important investor heterogeneity twenty percent of taxpayers with capital gains or losses face binding loss offset constraints another significant group of investors evades the capital gains tax prior to recent legislative changes forty percent of capital gains were unreported finally about forty percent of capital gains accrue to investors who report capital gains and face significant tax burdens as the traditional analysis of the capital gains tax suggests

sharing a river abstract a group of agents located along a river have quasi linear preferences over water and money we ask how the water should be allocated and what money transfers should be performed the core lower bounds require that no coalition should get less than the welfare it could achieve by using the water it controls the aspiration upper bounds demand that no coalition enjoy a welfare higher than what it could achieve in the absence of the remaining agents exactly one welfare distribution satisfies the core lower bounds and the aspiration upper bounds it is the marginal contribution vector corresponding to the ordering of the agents along the river journal of economic literature classification numbers d62 c71

monetary policy taxes and the business cycle this paper analyzes the interaction of inflation with the tax code and its contribution to aggregate fluctuations we find significant effects operating through the tax on realized nominal capital gains a tax on nominal bond income magnifies these effects our innovation is to combine monetary policy shocks with non indexed taxes in a model where the central bank implements policy using an interest rate rule monetary policy had important effects on the behavior of the business cycle before 1980 because policymakers did not exert effective control over inflation monetary policy reform around 1980 led to better control and with more stable inflation the effect of the interaction between monetary policy and the nominal capital gains tax has become negligible

some indirect evidence on effective capital gains tax rates this paper presents estimates of effective marginal tax rates on capital gains excluding housing between 1960 and 1978 in the united states concern that the inflation of the 1970s may have worked through the tax system to reduce incentives to produce and save has focused attention on the effective marginal tax rates that apply to various sources of income joines 1981 sheds light on this issue by calculating the historical effective marginal tax rates on factor incomes for the united states part of the recent debate however has focused specifically on capital gains taxes and the desirability of reducing them to enhance incentives for saving and investment the effective marginal tax rate on capital gains henceforth emtg may be the most difficult rate to measure in addition to the usual problems of how to attribute deductions exclusions and tax credits further adjustment must be made because investors pay taxes only when they realize their capital gains 1 the expected emtg this paper reports estimates of effective marginal tax rates on capital gains by comparing reported capital gains with total capital gains on an annual basis the estimates show that the effective marginal tax rates on capital gains fluctuated between 3 4 and 6 6 between 1960 and 1978 and that capital gains are held on average between 24 and 31 years before they are reported

tax motivated trading by individual investors we study the stock trades of a large number of individual investors to investigate how tax incentives affect the realization of capital gains and losses we compare investors realization behavior in their taxable and tax deferred accounts and thereby identify the effect of taxes on trading decisions we reach four conclusions first we find clear evidence of a lock in effect for capital gains in taxable accounts relative to tax deferred accounts we find evidence of the disposition effect the tendency for investors to hold losses and sell gains in both types of accounts and especially at short holding periods the lock in effect is stronger for large stock transactions than for small ones second we find tax loss selling throughout the calendar year though it is most pronounced in december tax loss trading is more pronounced among investors who have realized capital gains elsewhere in the portfolio during the year third we observe substantial heterogeneity in individual investors propensity to trade controlling for this heterogeneity however does not alter the relation between a stock s past performance and the realization decision finally we find that relatively few investors repurchase stocks that they have sold at a loss even after the 30 day wash sale holding period has expired

ordinal cost sharing abstract we ask how the best known mechanisms for solving cost sharing problems with homogeneous cost functions the value proportional and serial mechanisms should be extended to arbitrary problems we propose the ordinality axiom which requires that cost shares should be invariant under essentially all increasing transformations of the measuring scales following thevalueapproach first we present an axiomatization of the shapley shubik rule based on ordinality next we define and axiomatize two extensions of theserialmechanism which contrary to the friedman moulin rule are ordinal finally we note that the aumann shapley extension of theproportionalmechanism is not ordinal we propose and defend an alternative proportional extension which does satisfy ordinality journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d63 c71

transmission loss allocation a comparison of different practical algorithms a pool operated electricity market based on hourly auctions usually neglects network constraints and network losses while applying its market clearing mechanism this mechanism determines the accepted and nonaccepted energy bids as well as the hourly market clearing prices as a result ex post procedures are needed to resolve network congestions and to allocate transmission losses to generators and demands this paper focuses on transmission loss allocation procedures and provides a detailed comparison of four alternative algorithms 1 pro rata pr 2 marginal allocation 3 unsubsidized marginal allocation and 4 proportional sharing a case study based on the ieee rts is provided different load scenarios covering a whole year are analyzed finally conclusions and recommendations are stated

sharing a river among satiable agents abstract we consider the problem of efficiently sharing water from a river among a group of satiable agents since each agent s benefit function exhibits a satiation point the environment can be described as a cooperative game with externalities we show that the downstream incremental distribution is the unique distribution which both is fair according to the aspiration welfare principle and satisfies the non cooperative core lower bounds on the other hand the cooperative core may be empty furthermore the downstream incremental distribution satisfies all core lower bounds for all connected coalitions if and only if each agent s individual rationality constraint is independent of the behavior of the other agents

market valuation of tax timing options evidence from capital gains distributions we examine a distribution that is taxed as a capital gain rather than as a dividend since the distribution induces a realized capital gain while the price change is an unrealized gain ex day return behavior provides evidence of the value of tax timing capital gains we show that investors are compensated 7c in unrealized gains for each dollar of realized capital gains that is 1 of realized capital gains is equivalent to 93c of unrealized gains an investor with a tax rate on realized gains of 15 has an effective tax rate on unrealized capital gains of 8 6 capital gains taxes can be deferred until assets are sold this feature provides the investor who purchases a security with an option regarding the timing of the realization of capital gains and losses this option can be used to lower one s expected tax liability even if capital gains tax rates remain constant for different holding periods an investor who delays the realization of a gain effectively enjoys compound returns on the postponed taxes if capital losses are tax deductible or partially tax deductible tax timing is even more valuable since investors can follow the strategy of selling stocks with capital losses early while postponing the sale of winners recent evidence lends support to the contention that some investors respond to this tax timing option for example odean 1998 shows that u s investors are more likely to sell losers in december than other months similarly grinblatt and keloharju 2002 show that at the end of the tax year finnish investors are more likely to realize losses than gains this type of tax motivated trade seems to affect market returns as shown by poterba and weisbenner 2001 who demonstrate that end of year tax loss selling is related to return variation in the month of january

effects of capital gains taxation on life cycle investment and portfolio management we examine the impact of capital income taxation both accrual forms of taxation and taxation of realized capital gains on total savings and the demand for corporate financial instruments we find that investors may hold both debt and equity in the face of effective collection of capital gains taxation even in a flat tax system we also find that the two taxes will have substantially different effects on saving and consumption behavior making it unlikely that the tax structure can be summarized by any single equivalent accrual tax rate this paper examines the impact of income taxation on the demand for various corporate financial instruments focusing on unique features due to taxation of realized capital gains we take a life cycle view of investment behavior and examine how accrual and realization taxation jointly affect an individual s allocation of intertemporal resources we shall consider the impact on his demand for debt and equity showing that taxation of realized capital gains generates an intrapersonal tax clientele effect at any one point of time an individual will strictly prefer either to buy debt or equity but that choice may be different at different ages therefore many individuals will simultaneously hold both debt and equity we also find that any attempt to measure the effective capital gains tax rate will be difficult and that existing approaches appear flawed since they do not correspond to the pattern of distortions which we find in this explicit model of asset demand and saving this analysis deviates from earlier work on capital gains taxation in several substantial dimensions whereas much of the capital gains taxation literature focuses on how capital gains tax regulations generate arbitrage opportunities in perfect capital markets the analysis used below essentially assumes effective enforcement of the intent of capital gains taxation this is desirable since contrary to the perfect capital market implication capital gains tax revenues are nontrivial therefore in examining the nature of asset demand and choice it is reasonable to assume somewhat effective collection of the capital gains tax liabilities our analysis will assume completely effective enforcement to highlight the impact of capital gains taxation it will be clear that several types of leakages will not substantially alter the qualitative conclusions

the anti paradox of cooperation diversity may pay abstract this paper considers the stability and success of a public good agreement we allow for any type and degree of asymmetry regarding benefits and costs we ask the question whether asymmetry and which type and degree of asymmetry is conducive to cooperation we employ a simple non cooperative game theoretic model of coalition formation and derive analytical solutions for two scenarios an agreement without and with optimal transfers a central message of the paper is that asymmetry does not have to be an obstacle for successful cooperation but can be an asset we qualify two central results in the literature firstly the paradox of cooperation known since barrett 1994 and reiterated by many others afterwards stating that under those conditions when cooperation would matter most stable agreements achieve only little secondly a kind of coalition folk theorem known without proof in the literature for a long time stating that without transfers stable coalitions will be smaller with asymmetric than symmetric players we show that even without transfers the grand coalition can be stable if there is a negative covariance between benefit and cost parameters with massive gains from cooperation moreover with transfers many distributions of benefit and cost parameters lead to a stable grand coalition again some of them implying huge gains from cooperation stability and success greatly benefit from a very skewed asymmetric distribution of benefit and costs i e diversity may pay

complex losses allocation to generators and loads based on circuit theory and aumann shapley method this paper presents a new method to allocate active and reactive losses simultaneously to generators and loads the allocation is calculated for each transmission branch identifying and quantifying the buses responsibilities in losses this is a two step process in the first step generators are modeled as current injections and loads as constant admittances in order to determine generator participations in losses in the second step loads are modeled as current sources and generators as constant admittances in order to determine load participations in losses the aumann shapley and circuit theories are used to calculate the participation of each real and imaginary current component considering them as independent players in the complex losses allocation game the properties of the aumann shapley method ensure equitable allocation and recovery of the total active and reactive losses counter flow cross subsidy and negative allocation issues are discussed numerical results are presented and discussed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method

the non equalization of true gift and estate tax rates abstract before 1976 the affluent transferred most of their wealth to their heirs through bequests not gifts even though gifts faced lower statutory tax rates this suggests the affluent were not acting altruistically however bequests had the advantage that unrealized capital gains were forgiven at the moment of transfer taking this into account i derive true marginal gift and estate tax rates contrary to previous research i find that the affluent failed to equalize these true rates both before and after 1976 this represents stronger evidence that the large transfers made by the affluent were not motivated by altruism

market power in water markets abstract we model market power in water markets as multi market cournot competition with a river structure suppliers are connected through water balances which imposes resource constraints and they are connected to heterogeneous water users via a water delivery infrastructure our model captures a wide range of specific water market structures we establish conditions for existence of an equilibrium and we assess the effects of market power on water extraction delivery and water prices although the monopoly case is similar to standard economic theory three other specific water market structures illustrate that standard intuition has to be revisited

endogenous formation of coalitions the formation of coalitions is a fundamental problem in game theory by a coalition is meant a group of players e g economic or political agents which decide to act together as one unit relative to the rest of the players this includes the instances of syndicates unions cartels blocks political parties parliamentary coalitions etc we would like to emphasize that forming a coalition does not eliminate the individual players as decision makers in all interactions with the other players coalition members act as one unit it may be useful to think of a representative agent taking their place 2 however this arrangement will continue only as long as each player finds it desirable to act this way further bargaining occurs among the members of each coalition on how to divide what they obtained together thus the existence of coalitions implies that the interactions among the players will be conducted on two levels first among the coalitions and second within each coalition most of the existing models in economics and game theory assume that the coalition structure is given exogenously instead we try here to obtain it as an endogenous outcome of our model namely we want to be able to predict which coalitions will in fact form in each given situation 3 our theory combines two kinds of game theoretic concepts value and stability the basic idea is first to evaluate the players prospects in the various coalition structures and then based on these values to find which ones are stable we will call this value coalition structure value or cs value for short the reason we are considering coalition structures i e partitions of the set of players into disjoint coalitions rather than just coalitions is that in general players may find it to their advantage to join forces in some situations and to act separately in others all depending on the way the other participants are organized this implies that both the value and the stability concepts should depend on the entire coalition structure the cs value we analyze in this paper was first developed by owen 7

tradition and common property management since management of a common property resource can be undertaken only by a government of finitely lived agents studying the behaviour of such governments is a natural way to study common property management i propose that we regard the choice of management objective by such a government as a move in a game of sequential agents given this framework it is shown that subgame perfect equilibria exist in which successive governments choose the same traditional management objective these strategies enable an economy to overcome any intergenerational externality thus following a tradition of conservation may be a rational response to an intergenerational externality tradition et gestion d une ressource en propriete commune puisque la gestion d une

rational bargaining in games with coalitional externalities this paper provides a flexible strategic framework to analyze bargaining and values in environments with coalitional externalities within this framework we propose a new value that extends the shapley value to partition function form games the so called rational belief shapley rbs value we investigate the strategic foundation of the rbs value by constructing an implementation mechanism this mechanism extends existing models of multilateral bargaining by allowing players a higher degree of freedom to form coalitions the same framework of bidding and renegotiation allows for natural variations of the rbs mechanism in this way alternative shapley like values are obtained and a unified platform to analyze and compare these solutions is provided

strong tiebout equilibrium under restricted preferences domain abstract we investigate the existence and give a partial characterization of a strong tiebout equilibrium which consists of an endogenously formed partition of the individuals into disjoint jurisdictions with each jurisdiction producing and financing its own public goods and moreover there exists no group of individuals who can all benefit by establishing their own community in particular no single individual finds it desirable to migrate from his equilibrium jurisdiction the existence proof makes use of the notion of consecutive games which we introduce and show that for such games there always exists a partition with a nonempty core

capital gains taxation and the cost of capital evidence from unanticipated cross border transfers of tax base abstract in a cross border takeover the tax base associated with future capital gains is transferred from target shareholders to acquirer shareholders cross country differences in capital gains tax rates enable us to estimate the discount in target valuation on account of future capital gains we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in the capital gains tax rate reduces the value of equity by around 0 3 which suggests that the capital gains tax significantly raises firms cost of capital furthermore we find that the implied capital gains tax burden is higher at times of high economic growth and low stock market valuation

difference systems in financial futures markets many financial futures markets allow substitutions for the par grade of security at delivery substitutes are deliverable at premiums or discounts differences in commodities parlance to the futures price the rule that establishes these differences is called a difference system this paper characterizes financial futures market equilibrium with yield based difference systems and investigates particular systems in use the major finding is that currently used difference systems effectively limit deliverable supply in the futures markets and lead to futures prices which understate the cash market price of the par security in order to increase deliverable supply many financial futures markets allow the delivery of a variety of grades issues of securities in fulfillment of a financial futures contract the par grade of security on which the futures contract is based is deliverable at the futures price various other grades of securities are deliverable at premiums or discounts to the futures price in commodities parlance these premiums and discounts are called differences and the rule that establishes the set of premiums and discounts is called a difference system see hoffman 2 chapter xv for an excellent discussion of difference systems in commodity futures contracts there are two types of difference systems currently in use in financial futures markets both are based on security yields the first is called variable rate or yield maintenance pricing under this system nonpar securities are deliverable at the futures price times a factor which is the price of the delivered security relative to the par security where both are discounted by the yield of the par security selling at the futures price the second is called fixed rate or factor pricing under this system nonpar securities are deliverable at the futures price times a factor which is the price of the delivered security relative to the par security where both are discounted at the yield of the par security selling at par this paper first characterizes financial futures market equilibrium with yieldbased difference systems and then investigates theoretically and empirically the particular characteristics of factor pricing and yield maintenance pricing the major finding is that currently used differences systems produce financial futures prices which systematically understate the spot market price of the par security vice president chicago mercantile exchange this research was conducted while the author was economist financial studies section board of governors of the federal reserve system the opinions in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the board

three methods to share joint costs or surplus abstract we study cost sharing methods with variable demands of heterogeneous goods additive in the cost function and meeting the dummy axiom we consider four axioms scale invariance si demand monotonicity dm upper bound for homogeneous goods ubh placing a natural cap on cost shares when goods are homogeneous average cost pricing for homogeneous goods acph the random order values based on stand alone costs are characterized by si and dm serial costsharing by dm and ub the aumann shapley pricing method by si and acph no other combination of the four axioms is compatible with additivity and dummy journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 d62 d63

water sharing agreements sustainable to reduced flows by signing a water sharing agreement wsa countries agree to release an amount of river water in exchange for a negotiated compensation we examine the vulnerability of such agreements to reduced water flows among all wsas that are acceptable to riparian countries we find out the one which is self enforced under the most severe drought scenarios the so called upstream incremental wsa assigns to each country its marginal contribution to its followers in the river its mirror image the downstream incremental wsa is not sustainable to reduced flow at the source self enforcement problems can be solved by setting water releases and compensations contingent to water flow we apply our analysis to the aral sea basin we compute the upstream incremental compensations for the bishkek agreement and asses its vulnerability with historical flows

taxes capital structure and bondholder clienteles despite much recent progress financial theory has yet to explain the connection if any between the u s tax code and many observed characteristics of corporate bonds empirically why is there no single tax rate equating yields on corporate bonds with yields on tax exempt municipal bonds of apparently identical risks and maturities 2 specifically why does the spread in yields between corporate and municipal bonds divided by the yield on corporates a conventional measure of the marginal tax rate on corporates decrease with increasing risk and maturity more generally why are different types of bonds evidently held by clienteles of investors in tax clienteles for corporate bonds are identified in a competitive financial equilibrium under an asymmetric corporate income tax with interest preceding principal state contingent bonds with higher coupon yields are issued by firms with higher pretax cash inflows per dollar of nondebt tax shield purchased by investors in lower tax brackets and implicitly priced at lower marginal tax rates on these bonds all investors earn tax induced surpluses by contrast all other bonds have implicit tax rates typically equal to the corporate rate and yield for many investors no tax induced surpluses we gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of george constantinides kose john merton miller jim scott marti subrahmanyam and participants in seminars at baruch chicago columbia houston michigan nyu rutgers usc washington wharton the american finance association the western finance association and the johnson symposium on taxes and finance at wisconsin george constantinides was especially helpful 1 the most notable contribution is miller 1977 other recent papers include chen and kim 1979 kim lewellen and mcconnell 1979 deangelo and masulis 1980a 1980b taggart 1980 kim 1982 auerbach and king 1983 and talmor haugen and bornea 1985 black 1971 anticipates an equilibrium with clienteles 2 schaefer 1982a identifies tax induced clienteles of bondholders in the british gilt market van horne 1982 reports that implicit tax rates vary over time as the supply of discount bonds changes additional evidence is cited in trczinka 1982

the socially stable core in structured transferable utility games we consider socially structured transferable utility games for every coalition the relative strength of a player is measured by a power function the socially stable core consists of the socially and economically stable payoff vectors it is non empty if the game itself is socially stable the socially stable core consists of a finite number of faces of the core generically it consists of a finite number of payoff vectors convex tu games have a non empty socially stable core irrespective of the underlying social structure when the game is permutationally convex the socially stable core is shown to be non empty if the power vectors are permutationally consistent and is shown to contain a unique element if the power vectors are permutationally compatible we demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of the socially stable core by applying it to structured hierarchy games sequencing games and the distribution of water

a characterization of the shapley value in queueing problems a set of agents stand to receive a service no two agents can be served simultaneously a queue has been organized and agents having to wait should receive monetary compensations we characterize the rule assigning positions in the queue and compensations corresponding to the payoffs recommended by the shapley value of the associated cooperative game

on the construction of marginal federal personal and social security tax rates in the u s abstract in this article i correct and extend my earlier series on marginal federal personal income tax rates i also construct a measure of the marginal social security tax rate and add this to the income tax rate to obtain a measure of the effective marginal tax rate on income due to federal taxes finally i compare my series on marginal income tax rates and its method of construction with those of barro and sahasakul

sharing a polluted river abstract a river carries pollutants to people living along it if it is polluted to make the water in the river clean some costs are incurred this poses a question of how to split the costs of cleaning the whole river among the agents located along it to answer this question we resort to the two main advocated doctrines in international disputes the theory of absolute territorial sovereignty ats and the theory of unlimited territorial integrity uti applying these two doctrines we accordingly propose two methods the local responsibility sharing lrs method and the upstream equal sharing ues method for each method we provide an axiomatic characterization interestingly both the lrs method and the ues method coincide with the shapley value solutions to the corresponding cost games that are naturally induced according to the ats and the uti doctrines respectively

the environment as a commodity all economic activity is based ultimately on re sources found in nature whether it is consumption the point in exposing the morphology of produced or production or whether it is exchange the comgoods and services is not to construct a resource moditi es which are involved are made of constitutheory of a value there are any number of natural ents provided by nature thus the ingredients of resources and this alone precludes such an at any manufactured good are other produced goods tempted theory from being coherent my purpose labour time and skills and natural resources each rather is to use it to express surprise at the fact that of these constituent produced goods is in turn made despite the centrality of natural resources in eco up from the ingredients that went into its manufacnomic activity they find little room in economics ture namely labour time and skills natural rediscourses interest in resource economics more sources and further produced goods it follows particularly environmental economics has only that any manufactured commodity is ultimately a been intermittent and if we are currently witness combination of labour and natural resources ing a resurgence and this special issue is an ex ample of it we have also just lived through a labour too is a produced good even raw labour is decade long neglect during which much valuable an output manufactured by those natural resources research could have been done 2 we are way behind which sustain life resources such as the multitude where we should have been and could have been

sharing the costs of cleaning a river the upstream responsibility rule jorge alcalde unzu acknowledges the financial support from the spanish government through the project eco2012 34202 and fundacion ramon areces maria gomez rua acknowledges the finan cial support from the spanish government through the project eco2011 23460 and the galician government through the project 2013xgcedu08072013emer elena molis acknowledges the financial support from the spanish government through the projects eco2012 31346 and eco2013 44879 r from the consejeria de economia innovacion ciencia y empleo junta de andalucia through the projects sej 492 and sej 1436 and from the basque government through the project it568 13

measuring the average marginal tax rate from the individual income tax the economic effects of taxation depend on the configuration of marginal tax rates we consider here the appropriate measure of a marginal tax rate for the federal individual income tax which has a graduated rate structure and allows for numerous legal and illegal deductions from total income our conclusion is that the explicit marginal rate from the tax schedule is the right concept for many purposes hence we construct approximately weighted averages of these marginal tax rates for 1916 80 when weighted by adjusted gross income the arithmetic average of marginal tax rates is 5 in 1920 2 in 1930 6 in 1940 20 in 1950 23 in 1960 24 in 1970 and 30 in 1980 we also discuss the dispersion of marginal tax rates as well as the behavior of average tax rates and deductions from taxable income one noteworthy result concerns the fraction of adjusted gross income that accrues to families that face a marginal tax rate of at least 35 this fraction quadruples from 1964 to 1980 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

parental altruism and common property regulation since any regulation of a common property resource must be selected and enforced by a government of finitely lived agents a natural way to study common property regulation is to study the behavior of these governments in this paper such behavior is analyzed in an overlapping generations economy where agents are altruistic towards their children

regulation via the polluter pays principle we consider the problem of regulating an economy with environmental pollution we examine the distributional impact of the polluter pays pp principle which requires that any agent compensates all other agents for the damages caused by his or her pollution emissions with constant marginal damages we show that regulation via the pp principle leads to the unique welfare distribution that induces non negative individual welfare change and renders each agent responsible for his or her pollution impact we extend both the pp principle and this result to increasing marginal damages due to pollution we also compare the pp principle with the vickrey clark groves scheme

sharing the surplus an extension of the shapley value for environments with externalities economic activities both on the macro and micro level often entail wide spread externalities this in turn leads to disputes regarding the compensation levels to the various parties affected we propose a method of deciding upon the distribution of the gains costs of cooperation in the presence of externalities when forming the grand coalition is efficient we show that any sharing rule satisfying efficiency linearity dummy player and a strong symmetry axioms can be obtained through an average game adding an additional axiom we identify one unique rule satisfying these properties