Asset Accumulation in Rural Households during the Post‐Showa Depression Reconstruction: A Panel Data Analysis*

This paper investigates asset accumulation in Japanese farm households during reconstruction following the Showa Depression. After the Showa Depression, farm households emphasized accumulation of cash and quasi‐money rather than productive assets. The accumulation of cash and quasi‐money is consistent with the buffer stock hypothesis. Evidence regarding accumulation of livestock, which is sometimes used as the buffer stock in modern developing countries, is not conclusive. The presence of well‐developed financial institutions in prewar Japan may have allowed farm households to smooth consumption via cash and quasi‐money.     

Financial Access and Economic Growth: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

This study empirically analyzes the effects of financial access on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. By estimating panel data on thirty-seven countries from Sub-Saharan Africa between 2004 and 2012, we examine whether improved access to financial services has contributed to economic growth in this region. The empirical results clearly indicate that financial access has a statistically significant and robust effect on increasing economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa.     

Third-degree price discrimination,quality choice,and welfare

Employing an endogenous quality choice model, we reconsider the effect on welfare of monopolistic third-degree price discrimination. We prove that price discrimination always enhances welfare, mainly because the quality improvement owing to price discrimination increases consumer surplus. Moreover, we show that third-degree price discrimination benefits all parties, including consumers in the higher priced market if the preference differences between markets are sufficiently large.     

Efficient static replication of European options under exponential Lévy models

This study proposes a new scheme for the static replication of European options and their portfolios. First, a general approximation formula for efficient static replication as an extension of Carr P. and Chou A. (1997, 2002) and Carr P. and Wu L. (2002) is derived. Second, a concrete procedure for implementing the scheme by applying it to plain vanilla options under exponential Lévy models is presented. Finally, numerical examples in a model developed by Carr, P., Geman, H., Madan, D., and Yor M. (2002) are used to demonstrate that the replication scheme is more efficient and more effective in practice than a standard static replication method. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 29:1–15, 2009     

Failure of the index theorem in an incomplete market economy

Recently, it was proved that the index of an economy with incomplete real asset markets is typically +1$+1$ when the degree of incompleteness, which is defined as the difference between the number of states and the number of securities, is an even number. This paper considers the case where the degree of incompleteness is an odd number and proves that any odd number can be realized as the index of such an economy.     

'Let your science be human': Hume's economic methodology

This essay examines David Hume's economic methodology. The authorcharacterises Hume's understanding of human actions as interactionism.Its key point is that interactions generate the disinterestedview of ‘the spectator’ in the human mind. Humeapplies this idea of the disinterested spectator to the positionof social scientists in understanding social phenomena. ThusHume's approach to social science can be regarded as interpretive.The author also points out the difference between Hume's methodin social science and historical study. Considering this difference,the author argues that we should refer to Hume's social theoryrather than historical works in order to understand his economicmethodology.     

Public versus Private Ownership and Fund Manager Turnover

We examine the correlation between organizational structure (public vs. private) and managerial turnover in a large sample of United States offered mutual funds. Consistent with the hypothesis that publicly traded and privately held firms have different incentive structures and, as such, should differ in their treatment of internal control mechanisms, we find that public sponsors are more sensitive to prior fund performance when making replacement decisions and experience smaller post turnover performance improvements. Additional testing suggests a greater likelihood of fund manager replacement when mutual funds are team managed and when fund boards are more independent.     

A comparison of the Amemiya GLS and the Lee-Maddala-Trost G2SLS in a simultaneous-equations Tobit model

This paper proposes a class of GLS estimators for the structural parameters of a simultaneous-equations Tobit model and shows that this class contains an estimator which is asymptotically more efficient than an alternative estimator proposed by Lee, Maddala and Trost in 1980.     

A note on a heteroscedastic model

In this article the author considers a regression model where the variance of the error term is a linear combination of certain independent variables and compares four different estimators of the coefficients of this linear combination, They are (1) the estimator proposed by Goldfeld and Quant and called the Modified Glejser Method, (2) the estimator proposed by Hildreth and Houck, (3) the generalized least squares method, and (4) the maximum likelihood estimator. It is shown that the first two are asymptotically not fully efficient whereas the last two are.