FOLK THEOREMS FOR INFINITELY REPEATED GAMES PLAYED BY ORGANIZATIONS WITH SHORT‐LIVED MEMBERS*

We consider infinitely repeated games played by organizations with short‐lived members. Each member enters the organization with no prior memory. He plays the role of taking actions for stage games in the first half of his lifetime. In the beginning of the second half, when a new member enters the organization, the existing member privately sends a message to the new member. He remains in the organization for the second half, and then retires from the game. We prove that folk theorems hold in this environment; that is, organizations essentially implement Fudenberg and Maskin strategies.     

Do households smooth expenditure over anticipated income changes? Evidence from bonus payments to public employees in Japan

This paper provides new evidence of consumers’ reaction to an anticipated sizable change in income. Until FY2002, Japanese public employees received predictable large bonus payments three times a fiscal year (in June, December, and March), but the March bonus was abolished in FY2003. We compare the seasonal patterns of public employees’ expenditure before and after the reform of the bonus payment schedule. Contrary to the prediction of the life cycle/permanent income hypothesis (LC/PIH), we find evidence that monthly patterns of household expenditure were significantly affected by the anticipated large change in income pattern. However, at closer inspection, this excess sensitivity of expenditure is observed only for expenditure subcategories of some durability, i.e., durables and semi-durables. Thus, while the LC/PIH does not appear to hold for expenditure (which we observe here), it may still hold for consumption.     

A quantile-based test of protection for sale model

This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organization. We use quantile and IV quantile regressions in our tests, using the data from Gawande and Bandyopadhyay (2000). Surprisingly, the results do not provide any evidence favoring the PFS model. We also explain why previous work may have found support for it.     

Japanese Manufacturing Strategy Competing with the Tigers

The rapid growth of the Asian "Tiger" economies and a future of increasing competition from China have long threatened the Japanese economy. What strategies were available to the Japanese to counter these threats? Taking a fifty-year perspective, this article exposes the foundations of the Japanese response - which includes outsourcing production overseas. The author puts the view that Japan "should positively support" the growth of the Asian Tigers: "based on the growth of the Asian Tigers, Japan should also grow". The depth of Japan's applied engineering skills is seen as the basis for a strategy for achieving this combination.     

A Structural Decomposition of Energy Consumption Based on a Hybrid Rectangular Input-Output Framework: Japan's Case

This paper proposes an I-O SDA model, based on a commodity technology assumption, to identify the sources of changes in the energy demand structure, the non-energy input structure, the non-energy product-mix and the non-energy final demand of embodied energy requirements. The model contains two features. First, the hybrid rectangular input-output framework expressed in both monetary and physical terms is introduced to relax the effects of different energy prices among industrial sectors on the input structure in physical terms. Second, the demand structure of the input-output system is decomposed into the structure of energy sectors and other sectors by applying the hierarchy system with feedback loops of non-energy sectors. We identify the sources of the changes in Japan's energy use structure between 1985 and 1990. The major findings are that the total energy requirement has increased, mainly because of the changes in the non-energy final demand, while the product-mix changes have opposite effects, that is, energy savings.     

Optimal timing of management turnover under agency problems

We explore the timing of the replacement of a manager as an important incentive mechanism, using a real options approach in a situation where the timing of the decision to replace the manager is related to a major change in a firm's strategies that involves spending large amounts of various sunk adjustment costs. Using a continuous-time agency setting, we show that when renegotiation is not possible, the early replacement of the manager of a lower quality project (prior to the first-best trigger level) occurs only if a moral hazard or an adverse selection problem exists. We also indicate that the possibility of renegotiation drastically changes the results.     

Does the version of the Penn World Tables matter? An analysis of the relationship between growth and volatility

Abstract .  The Penn World Tables (PWT) are an important data source for cross-country comparisons in economics. The PWT have undergone several revisions over time. This paper documents how countries' output growth rates change across four publicly available versions of the PWT. We show that for some countries the magnitude of the differences is significant and/or the sign of the growth rates changes across versions. Using as an example Ramey and Ramey (1995) , who found growth volatility has a significant negative effect on growth, we demonstrate that conclusions based on one version of the PWT may not hold under another version.     

Green Tax Reform in an Oligopolistic Industry

OECD countries reduce or eliminate certain taxes when they introduce new environmental taxes. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the incidence of such green tax reform in an oligopolistic industry. The paper shows that a rise in taxes could result in the expansion of the aggregate pollution in the presence of a large technology gap. The paper further shows that the government loses tax revenue as a result of the green tax reform if it continues to apply the same environmental standard. This implies that the government needs to raise environmental standards to keep the existing level of public spending after a green tax reform.     

On Pricing Exponential Square Root Barrier Knockout European Options

A barrier option is one of the most popular exotic options which is designedto give a protection against unexpected wild fluctuation of stock prices.Protection is given to both the writer and holder of such an option.Kunitomo and Ikeda (1992) analytically obtained a pricing formula forexponential double barrier knockout options. Since the logarithm of theirproposed barriers for the stock price process S(t), whichisassumed to be geometric Brownian motion, are nothing but straight lineboundaries, the protection provided by them is not uniform over time. Toremedy this problem, we propose square root curved boundaries±btfor the underlying Brownian motion process W(t). Since thestandarddeviation of Brownian motion is proportional to t, theseboundaries(after transformation) can be made to provide more uniform protectionthroughout the life time of the option. We will apply asymptoticexpansions of certain conditional probabilities obtained by Morimoto (1999)to approximate pricing formulae for exponential square root double barrierknockout European call options. These formulae allow us to computenumerical values in a very short time (t < 10^–6sec), whereas it takesmuch longer to perform Monte Carlo simulations to determine optionpremiums.     

The productivity effects of the liberalization of Japanese telecommunication policy

In the early 1980s, the Japanese government decided to pursue policies of liberalization that opened Japan's telecommunication market to competition and moved toward the privatization of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the dominant domestic telecommunication service provider. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of liberalization on the productive performance of NTT. To assess the productive consequences of liberalization, we first provide basic productivity measures for NTT. The Total Factor Productivity (TFP) measures are then decomposed to separate out the effects of liberalization from other factors such as scale, technology, and capacity utilization. The TFP decomposition is based on the parameter estimates of a dynamic cost model.During the 1958–87 period, NTT's TFP level increased at an average annual rate of 3.4%. However, TFP improved at a significantly faster rate following the decision to adopt policies of liberalization. The NTT's average annual TFP growth rate was 5.12% for the 1982–87 period as compared to a 0.26% per year growth rate for the previous five year (1977–82) period. The decomposition of TFP growth appears to indicate that liberalization was a major source of productivity improvement for NTT.