Treasury auctions in Spain: a linear approach

Abstract. The majority of Treasuries use discriminatory auctions to sell government debt. A few Treasuries use uniform auctions. The Spanish Treasury is the only one that uses a hybrid format of discriminatory and uniform auctions. All Treasury auctions are multiple-unit multiple-bid auctions, usually assumed to be common and unknown value auctions. Taking in account these features, we analyze the Spanish auction format, taking a linear approximation to bidders' multiple bids, and characterize a parameter set in which the Spanish format gives higher expected seller's revenue than discriminatory and uniform auctions. Policy implications are obtained by calibrating theoretical results with data. We thank S. Nu?ez, and seminar participants at GREQAM, CEFI, the 1999 CEF meeting in Boston and the 57th European Meeting of the Econcometric Society for suggestions. We are especially grateful to two anonymous referees for detailed comments that greatly improved the paper. Any error is our responsability. The authors express their thanks for financial support to Ministerio de Ciencia y Teconologia from Proyecto SEC2000-0723, n_o 9114.     

Conditions for equivalence between sequentiality and subgame perfection

We characterize the class of finite extensive forms for which the sets of Subgame Perfect and Sequential equilibrium strategy profiles coincide for any possible payoff function. In addition, we identify the class of finite extensive forms for which the outcomes induced by these two solution concepts coincide. We thank Luis Corchón, Francesco De Sinopoli, Herbert Gintis, Sjaak Hurkens, Francisco Marhuenda, Eric Maskin and four anonymous referees for helpful comments. Carlos thanks the financial support of the Spanish MEC through its FPI Grant BES-2003-0822. Cristian thanks the grant Plan de Formación de Personal Investigador de la Comunidad de Madrid and the financial support from project No. SEJ2004-00968/ECON from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. The usual disclaimer applies.     

A contribution to duality theory,applied to the measurement of risk aversion

This paper determines the precise connection between the curvature properties of an objective function and the ray-curvature properties of its dual. When the objective function is interpreted as a Bernoulli or cardinal utility function, our results characterize the relationship between an agent’s attitude towards income risks and her attitude towards risks in the underlying consumption space. We obtain these results by developing and applying a number of representation theorems for concave functions.The work of Juan E. Martínez-Legaz has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and the FEDER, project BEC2002-00642, and by the Departament d’Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació, Direcció General de Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya, project 2001SGR-00162. He also thanks the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA for its support. John Quah would like to acknowledge with gratitude the financial support of the ESRC (grant number R000271171). He would also like to thank the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley, whose hospitality he enjoyed while completing this project. Both authors would like to thank Simon Cowan for pointing the way to some important references. They are also very grateful to the referee whose insightful suggestions led to a much improved paper     

Procedurally fair and stable matching

Summary. We motivate procedural fairness for matching mechanisms and study two procedurally fair and stable mechanisms: employment by lotto (Aldershof et al. , 1999) and the random order mechanism (Roth and Vande Vate, 1990, Ma, 1996). For both mechanisms we give various examples of probability distributions on the set of stable matchings and discuss properties that differentiate employment by lotto and the random order mechanism. Finally, we consider an adjustment of the random order mechanism, the equitable random order mechanism, that combines aspects of procedural and endstate fairness.Received: 9 September 2003, Revised: 12 December 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C78, D63. Correspondence to: Flip KlijnWe thank two referees and a co-editor for helpful comments and suggestions. B. Klauss and F. Klijns research has been supported by Ramón y Cajal contracts of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología. The work of the authors has also been partially supported by Research Grant BEC2002-02130 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and by the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA. This paper is part of the Polarization and Conflict Project CIT-2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Programme. This article reflects only the authors views and the Community is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.     

Outliers - robust ECM cointegration tests based on the trend components

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of the ECM non-cointegration test when there are additive outliers in the time series under different co-breaking situations. We show that the critical values of the usual ECM test are not robust to the presence of transitory shocks and we suggest a procedure based on signal extraction to bypass this problem. These procedure renders ECM tests with a left tail of distribution under the null that is robust to the presence of additive outliers in the series. The small sample critical values and the empirical power of the test are analyzed by Monte Carlo simulations for several low frequency filters. The proposed empirical methodology is applied to the CPI-based US/Finland real exchange rate.JEL Classification: C22, C12, C15, C52, C51 Corresponding author: Alvaro EscribanoWe thank A. Lucas for kindly providing us with the data for the empirical example. Previous drafts of this paper have greatly improved thanks to the comments of two anonymous referees and the Associate Editor. The first author wishes to thank members of Department of Statistics and Econometrics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and Department of Economics, University of Maryland at College Park. The second author acknowledeges support from the following grants: Spanish MCyT BEC2002-00279, The European TMR-ERB-40618C97-0994 and the Secretaría de Estado de Universidades PR2003-0305. This paper was finished while Alvaro Escribano was visiting the Department of Economics, Georgetwon University, Washington DC, USA.     

Discounting long run average growth in stochastic dynamic programs

Summary. Finding solutions to the Bellman equation often relies on restrictive boundedness assumptions. In this paper we develop a method of proof that allows to dispense with the assumption that returns are bounded from above. In applications our assumptions only imply that long run average (expected) growth is sufficiently discounted, in sharp contrast with classical assumptions either absolutely bounding growth or bounding each period (instead of long run) maximum (instead of average) growth. We discuss our work in relation to the literature and provide several examples. Received: July 26, 2000; revised version: July 10, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" I am specially grateful to Cuong Le Van and to anonymous referee for detecting an error in a previous version of this paper and for suggestions that sensibly improved the paper. Comments and suggestions are also acknowledged to Michele Boldrin, Raouf Boucekkine, Fabrice Collard, Tim Kehoe, Omar Licandro, and Luis Puch. I am also indebted to participants to the III Summer School on Economic Theory held at the Universidade de Vigo, the Macroeconomics Workshop at the Universitat Autò}noma de Barcelona, and the Econometrics Seminar at Tilburg University. Financial support from the Belgian government, under project PAI P4/01, at the IRES-UCL, from a European Marie Curie fellowship, Grant HPMF-CT-1999-00410, at the CEPREMAP, and from IVIE and Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER, under project BEC2001-0535, at the Universidad de Alicante, is gratefully acknowledged.     

Labour segregation and immigrant and native-born wage distributions in Spain: an analysis using matched employer–employee data

This article carries out an empirical examination of the origin of the differences between immigrant and native-born wage structures in the Spanish labour market. Special attention is given in the analysis to the role played by occupational and workplace segregation of immigrants. Legal immigrants from developing countries exhibit lower mean wages and a more compressed wage structure than native-born workers. By contrast, immigrants from developed countries display higher mean wages and a more dispersed wage structure. The main empirical finding is that the disparities in the wage distributions for the native-born and both groups of immigrants are largely explained by their different observed characteristics, with a particularly important influence in this context of workplace and, specially, occupational segregation. Hipólito Simón, Esteban Sanromá and Raúl Ramos wish to thank the support received from the Ministerio de Fomento and the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia through the projects T 75/2006 (Plan Nacional de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Científica), SEJ2004-05860/ECON and SEJ2005-04348/ECON, respectively. A previous version of this paper was published as an IVIE Working Paper (WP-EC 2007-03).     

Labor supply, child care, and welfare in Spanish households

This paper presents a household model in which both spouses work and care for their children, thereby obtaining a measure of household welfare. Applying this model to the Spanish case allows for drawing some basic conclusions. That is, the highest efficiency in caring for children is obtained when time is offered by the mother. Moreover, the time dedicated to child care by the father is considered as leisure time in a higher proportion than time dedicated by the mother. Also, a direct and strong relationship is detected between monetary income and welfare. Household welfare is greater when the children are older, and welfare increases when the father dedicates less time to work outside the home.The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. The authors are also indebted to the Ministerio Español de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales for its financial support.     

A market game approach to differential information economies

In this paper we recast a differential information economy as a strategic game in which players propose net trades and prices. Pure strategy Nash equilibria are strong and determine both consumption plans and commodity prices that coincide with the Walrasian Expectations equilibria of the underlying economy. The authors acknowledge support by research grants BEC2003-09067-C04-01 (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and FEDER), PGIDT04XIC30001PN (Xunta de Galicia) and SA070A05 (Junta de Castilla y León). JP Torres-Martínez is also grateful to CNPq-Brazil and University of Vigo for financial support. We are indebted to N.C. Yannelis for helpful comments and insights.     

Corrigendum to “On randomized matching mechanisms” [Economic Theory 8(1996)377–381]

Ma (in Econ. Theory 8, 377–381, 1996) studied the random order mechanism, a matching mechanism suggested by Roth and Vande Vate (Econometrica 58, 1475–1480, 1990) for marriage markets. By means of an example he showed that the random order mechanism does not always reach all stable matchings. Although Ma's (1996) result is true, we show that the probability distribution he presented – and therefore the proof of his Claim 2 – is not correct. The mistake in the calculations by Ma (1996) is due to the fact that even though the example looks very symmetric, some of the calculations are not as “symmetric.” We thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. B. Klaus’s and F. Klijn’s research was supported by Ramón y Cajal contracts of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología. The work of the authors was also partially supported through the Spanish Plan Nacional I+D+I (BEC2002-02130 and SEJ2005-01690) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (SGR2005-00626 and the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA).     

Price and tick size preferences in trading activity changes around stock split executions

We investigate the low prices preferences and the optimal relative tick size hypotheses, as possible explanations of the stock split execution effects in a pure order-driven and multi-tick market. Using intraday data for the Spanish Stock Exchange during 1997-2001, we find that stock splits do not improve liquidity but do change trading composition. Following splits, small trades from retail investors increase significantly, especially in the larger stock splits. However, we find that this effect seems to disappear with the new tick-size rules adopted by Spanish market in 1999. We extend the optimal relative tick size hypothesis for a multi-tick market by considering the effects of stock splits on the absolute tick size. We observe that the increase in small trades occurs only in those splits that increase the relative tick and decrease the tick-size simultaneously. Our findings suggest that small investors are attracted by stock splits that cause an absolute tick-size reduction, which are those with relatively lower transaction costs.JEL Classification: G19, G32, G35We thank two anonymous referees and the editor, J.M. Campa, for their comments and for providing us very helpful guidance on how to improve the paper. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Dirección General de Investigación del Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, grant BEC2002-03797. A first version of this study has been published in the working paper series of the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, IVIE. Any remaining errors are the authors responsibility.     

Environmental regulation: choice of instruments under imperfect compliance

Compliance is an important issue in environmental regulation. We discuss some of the key elements of the problem and analyze a situation where emissions are not random and firms are risk-neutral. We study the firm’s decision on emissions and compliance when the environmental regulation is based on standards and the enforcement agency audits the firm with a certain probability. We compare total emissions when environmental regulation is based on different instruments: standards, taxes, and tradable permits. We show that when compliance is an issue, environmental taxes are superior to the other instruments, and we analyze the (static) efficiency of the solution. This paper originated from the AEE/REE presidential address for the XXX Simposio de Análisis Económico (Murcia 2005). It builds on the research project on optimal enforcement in environmental problems done in collaboration with David Pérez-Castrillo. I would like to thank David Pérez-Castrillo and Pau Olivella for their useful comments. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (BEC2003-01132) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (Barcelona Economics - CREA and 2005SGR-00836).     

Term structure and the estimated monetary policy rule in the Eurozone

In this paper we estimate a standard version of the New Keynesian Monetary (NKM) model augmented with term structure in order to analyze two issues. First, we analyze the effect of introducing an explicit term structure channel in the NKM model on the estimated parameter values of the model, with special emphasis on the interest rate smoothing parameter using data for the Eurozone. Second, we study the ability of the model to reproduce some stylized facts such as highly persistent dynamics, the weak comovement between economic activity and inflation, and the positive, strong comovement between interest rates observed in actual Eurozone data. The Sect. 3 implemented is a classical structural method based on the indirect inference principle. We are grateful to Eduardo Ley, two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the XXXI Simposio de Análisis Económico (Oviedo, Spain) and Bank of Spain for their useful comments. Financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and Universidad del País Vasco (Spain) and Fundación Séneca through projects SEJ2004-04811/ECON, 9/UPV00035.321-13511/2001 and I02937/PHCS/05, respectively, is gratefully acknowledged. The first author also thanks Fundación Ramón Areces for financial support.     

The effect of family background on children's level of schooling attainment in Spain

This paper provides microeconomic estimates of the role played by family background in determining children's level of schooling attainment in Spain. We use an ordered logit model to explore the effects of family background and other supply factors on the probability of various educational outcomes. Our estimates are based on household data obtained from the ECVT, Living and Working Conditions Survey (Ministerio de Economía y Hacienda, 1985), a Spanish nation-wide household survey conducted at the end of 1985. In general, and given the Spanish capital constraints, parental income, social class, and family size, explain children's level of schooling. These results are consistent with those of the literature that focuses on the role of family background in determining schooling attainment.     

Fiscal policy and private consumption behaviour: The Spanish case

In this article we analyse whether the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis is a valid approximation for Spains economic reality or whether there exist deviations from that situation which would be more in line with the conventional Keynesian perspective of the effects of debt on private consumption-savings decisions.Our aim is to contribute to the rather sparse empirical literature on the subject for the Spanish case. The analysis is based on annual aggregate data for Spain covering the years 1955 to 2000, and uses both the structural and the Euler equation approaches to test the neutrality proposition, and is thus to be considered as a generalization of foregoing work on the Spanish economy.The findings indicate that support for Ricardian equivalence is mixed, while we also find very little support for the Keynesian specification of consumption and fiscal policy.First revision received: March 2003 / Final version received: October 2003The authors wish to thank M. Ferré, J.M. González-Páramo, A. Marchante, P. Meguire, F. Pedraja, J.L. Raymond, J. Salinas and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions on this paper. We also thank the participants in the V Encuentro de Economía Aplicada (Oviedo, Spain, June 2002) and the XVII Simposio de Análisis Económico (Salamanca, Spain, December 2002) for their comments. Any remaining defects are our responsibility. We also are grateful to the Institute for Fiscal Studies of Spain (Ministerio de Hacienda, Secretaría de Estado de Hacienda) for its financial support.     

Post-earnings announcement drift: Spanish evidence

This paper analyses whether earnings announcements in the Spanish stock market are followed in subsequent months by a return drift in the same direction as the earnings surprise. Two alternative earnings surprise measures are used and they both provide strong post-earnings announcement drifts. In order to find an explanation for this anomaly we first make several unconditional adjustments, which include the CAPM, the Fama–French (J Financ Econ 33:3–56, 1993) three-factor model, a liquidity factor, controlling portfolios by size and book-to-market ratio, and controlling for the momentum effect. Second, we make a conditional analysis following two different approaches: (i) studying the relation with the business cycle and (ii) studying whether this phenomenon can be explained through a conditional version of the CAPM and the Fama-French model. None of these adjustments are able to satisfactorily capture the Spanish post-earnings announcement drift. A final analysis offers some slight evidence in favour of the limits-to-arbitrage explanation. A previous version of this paper is available in the Working Paper Series of FUNCAS (no. 221, 2005), who we thank for their collaboration in the research diffusion in Spain. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (SEJ2005-09372/ECON), Conselleria d’Empresa, Universitat i Ciència (GV06/196) and University of Alicante (GRJ06-03). This version has benefited from interesting comments made by Gonzalo Rubio, Belén Nieto, Natividad Blasco, Renata Herrerías and Carina Sponholtz, as well as by various anonymous referees. Any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.     

The optimality of the Common Fisheries Policy: the Northern Stock of Hake

We evaluate the management of the Northern Stock of Hake during 1986-2001. A stochastic bioeconomic model is calibrated to match the main features of this fishing ground. We show how catches, biomass stock and profits would have been if the optimal Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) consistent with the target biomass implied by the Fischler's Recovery Plan had been implemented. The main findings are: i) an optimal CFP would have generated profits of more than 667 millions euros, ii) if side-payments are allowed (implemented by ITQ's, for example) these profits increase 26%. JEL Classification: Q22, Q28 We thank two anonymous referees whose comments and suggestions have substantially improved the paper, and to Javier Pereiro from Instituto Oceanográfico de Vigo for making available part of data available to us. Financial support from the Instituto de Estudios Económicos de Galicia, Pedro Barrie de la Maza, FEDER, Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, SEC2002-4318-C02-01 (José María Da-Rocha), CICYT 1393-12254/2000 and SEC2003-02510/ECO (María José Gutiérrez), Fundación BBVA 1/BBVA 00044.321-15466/2002 (María José Gutiérrez) and from Universidad del País Vasco, 9/UPV00035.321-13511/2001 (María José Gutiérrez) is gratefully acknowledged.     

Mathematical utility theory and the representability of demand by continuous homogeneous functions

The resort to utility-theoretical issues will permit us to propose a constructive procedure for deriving a homogeneous of degree one continuous function that gives raise to a primitive demand function under suitably mild conditions. This constitutes the first self-contained and elementary proof of a necessary and sufficient condition for an integrability problem to have a solution by continuous (subjective utility) functions.The work of José C. R. Alcantud has been supported by FEDER and Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia under the Research Project SEJ2005-0304/ECON, and by Consejería de Educación (Junta de Castilla y León) under the Research Project SA098A05. Carlos R. Palmero acknowledges financial support by FEDER and Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia under the Research Project SEJ2005-08709/ECON, and by Consejería de Educación (Junta de Castilla y León) under the Research Project VA017B05.     

Bankruptcy games and the Ibn Ezra’s proposal

Summary. This paper explores an old solution for bankruptcy problems, described by Ibn Ezra in the XII century. Particularly, we introduce a new way of extending the Ibn Ezras proposal, the Generalized Ibn Ezra solution, by imposing that the general distribution principle from which it is inspired remains fixed. In this context, we follow the interpretation of bankruptcy problems in terms of TU games given in ONeill (1982), and propose the analysis of the Transition Game associated to bankruptcy problems to provide a characterization for the Generalized Ibn Ezra solution.Received: 14 October 2003, Revised: 26 May 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C71, D63, D71. Correspondence to: José Alcalde: alasur@merlin.fae.ua.esWe are grateful to Carmen Herrero, Juan de Dios Moreno, William Thomson and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Authors work is partially supported by the Institut Valenciá dInvestigacions Económiques. Alcalde and Silva acknowledge support by FEDER and the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura under project BEC 2001-0535. Marco acknowledges support by the Fundación Séneca, and the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura under projects SEC2000-0838 and BEC 2001-0781.     

Equilibrium theory with asymmetric information and infinitely many states

Radner (Econometrica 36, 31–58 1968) proved existence of a competitive equilibrium for differential information economies with finitely many states. We extend this result to economies with infinitely many states of nature. Each agent observes a public and a private signal. The publicly observed signal may take infinitely many values but, in order to get existence, we assume that private signals only take finitely many values. Actually, there is no hope to get a general existence result since Podczeck et al. (Vienna University Working Papers 2008) already proposed non-existence results. We would like to thank a referee and the Associate Editor for valuable suggestions and remarks. The actual version of the paper has benefited from their comments. This work commenced while V.F. Martins-da-Rocha and P.K. Monteiro were visiting RGEA. Carlos Hervés Beloso acknowledges support from BEC2003-09067-C04-01 (Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER) and PGIDT04XIC30001PN (Xunta de Galicia). V.F. Martins-da-Rocha acknowledges partial financial support from PRONEX. P.K. Monteiro acknowledges the financial support of CNPq/Edital Universal 02/2006.