Gold,liquidity and secured loans in a multistage economy

A multistage economy with durables with finite and with unbounded lives is considered. The importance of the existence of both asset and rental markets is considered. It is shown that without rental markets efficiency may not be achieved and a stationary state that might exist with rental markets need not exist. The meaning of the existence of a 100% backed loan is considered. The roles of gold and land as stores of value and money are considered.Research supported in part by ONR Grant N00014-86-K-0220 and by NSF Grant No. SES-8812051.     

Outsourcing, Imports and Labour Demand

This paper examines the effects of purchased services and imported intermediate materials on the labour demand for different skills in German manufacturing sectors. We derive and estimate a factor demand system based on the generalised Box–Cox cost function nesting both the normalised quadratic and the translog functional form. We find that the impacts of output and capital growth are more important in explaining the demand for heterogeneous labour than substitution effects between labour and non–labour inputs. Similarly, the increasing use of both imported materials and purchased services is a consequence of output growth rather than input substitution.
JEL classification : J 23; O 33     

Structure,Clearinghouses and Symmetry

We introduce and justify a taxonomy for the structure of markets and minimal institutions which appear in constructing minimally complex trading structures to perform the functions of price formation, settlement and payments. Each structure is presented as a playable strategic market game and is examined for its efficiency, the number of degrees of freedom and the symmetry properties of the structure     

Representation and Educational Background of European Economists in Top Journals of Economics

We assess the contribution of European authors to 10 topjournals of economics from 1980 to 1998. Despite efforts on the European Union and national levels topromote academic excellence, European authors still play a minor role in top journals. Examining the development overtime we find little evidence for an increasing share of European contributions. Particular attention has been paidto the educational background of European authors. There is still a segmentation of academic education alonglanguage barriers in continental Europe. However, a considerable proportion of European authors has received a PhD from the US.     

中国和印度不平衡发展的比较研究

本文考察了中国和印度近年来经济增长不平衡的情况,并分析了不平衡增长对不均等和贫困的影响。通过对家庭调查数据和官方加总数据的分析,本文发现增长存在不平衡——区域间、产业间和家庭层面上,这表明减贫工作进展不平衡,若增长更平衡,减贫效果可能更好;另外,收入不均等程度也在提高。本文探讨了增长不平衡及其应引起重视的原因。具体讨论围绕"有利的"和"不利的"不均等两个概念展开——不均等与不平衡增长对公平性以及长期增长与发展的有利或不利影响。我们认为,需要制定相关政策,保持有利的不均等——继续鼓励创新和投资,同时降低不利的不均等的程度,尤其是通过人力资本和农村基础设施投资,帮助贫困人口参与市场。     

PRICES AND PRICE ANALYSIS IN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS

The paper discusses the role of prices in the framework of the new System of National Accounts (SNA) in terms of three major uses: (1) deflation, (2) price indicators, and (3) price analysis. Following a brief review of the price and quantity measures required by the new SNA with its emphasis on deflation of commodity flows and input-output accounts, in addition to the more conventional deflation of final demand categories, the paper discusses some of the conceptual, methodological and data problems involved in implementing the various uses of prices in the new SNA. Implementing the use of prices as deflators depends, in part, on the concept of output selected (national versus domestic; gross versus net), and which of six concepts of valuation, ranging from purchasers'value to true factor cost, is used. Some of the difficulties in deflating nonmarket flows (e.g., interplant transfers) and industry value added, based on the double deflation method, are discussed. In concept price deflators, which have shifting weights, cannot be used as price indicators, which should have fixed weights. In practice, this is often disregarded and the deflators are used as price indicators. The paper support the SNA recommendation for the development of price indexes with fixed weights to be used as price indicators, in addition to the implicit price deflators. Research in the United States indicates that differences in weights can result in different price measures for various subperiods, components of demand and sector output. Periodic revisions in weights to provide more current fixed weights for price and quantity indexes in each subperiod may minimize the problem but it introduces a new problem—lack of comparability with the constant price tables in the SNA which have fixed weights for the entire period. The new SNA provides a comprehensive and integrated framework for price analysis including the analysis of the structure of aggregate price changes, the industrial origin of final demand prices, and the impact of price change in one sector of the economy on the rest of the economy. Some major gaps which need to be overcome in order to implement the use of the new SNA for price analysis include the development of industry capital stock estimates, separate estimates of proprietors’income, reconciliation of value added and distribution share estimates, and the development of a wide variety of information to supplement the conventional input-output tables in the SNA. Implementing the various objectives of price measures within the framework of the accounts will require a number of improvements in existing price measures and expanding the scope of coverage. “List” prices should be superseded by “transactions” prices and better techniques and data need to be developed to provide for quality adjustment of prices. Coverage will need to be expanded to include services, freight rates, trade margins, government expenditures, and also fill in gaps for many manufactured products. Finally, where possible, use of unit values as price indexes or deflators, e.g., imports and exports, should be replaced by direct price measures.     

Anarchy, efficiency, and redistribution

This paper develops a contractarian theory of the state and the existence of redistribution. The existence of rules of redistribution is explained without any recourse to the risk-aversion of agents. No veil of ignorance is needed. This avoids obligational problems inherent in most other contractarian theories of justice. Hence, this paper departs from the standard legitimization of redistribution as fundamental insurance and interprets it as stemming from a principle of reciprocity in trade. Since this paper deals with an anarchic society, the implementation of redistributional rules is constrained by the assumption of self-enforcement. We show that this assumption changes the interpretation of the state: the state is characterized by a particular design of equilibrium strategies, not by the existence of enforcement agencies.     

Slack-adjusted efficiency measures and ranking of efficient units

In non-parametric methods many units are calculated as efficient. The article suggests a method for ranking efficient units, not by their efficiency, but by importance as benchmarks for the inefficient units, in contrast to earlier suggestions in the literature which rank units high if they are specialized. However, the total potentials for improvement frequently remain unrevealed by calculating radial efficiency measures of the Farrell type only. The article therefore first develops efficiency measures that explicitly extend the radial measures to include slacks. The new measures are applied to a typical multidimensional small-sample data set for Norwegian employment offices.     

Reputation and Perfection in Repeated Common Interest Games

We consider a wide class of repeated common interest games perturbed with one-sided incomplete information: one player (the informed player) might be a commitment type playing the Pareto dominant action. As discounting, which is assumed to be symmetric, and the prior probability of the commitment type go to zero, it is shown that the informed player can be held close to her minmax payoff even when perfection is imposed on the equilibrium.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C73, D83.     

Nonlinear incentive provision in Walrasian markets: a Cournot convergence approach

The paper studies insurance with moral hazard in a system of contingent-claims markets. Insurance buyers are modelled as Cournot monopolists or oligopolists. The other agents condition their expectations on market prices, as in models of rational-expectations equilibrium with asymmetric information. Thereby they correctly anticipate accident probabilities corresponding to effort incentives induced by insurance buyers’ net trades. When there are many agents to share the insurance buyers’ risks, Cournot equilibrium outcomes are close to being second-best. In contrast, if insurance buyers are price takers, equilibria fail to exist or are bounded away from being second-best.