External information sources of product enthusiasts: Differences between variety seekers,variety neutrals,and variety avoiders

The external information sources of enthusiasts are examined. Enthusiasts who frequently switch their purchases of wine from different regions are compared with those who switch their purchases less frequently. Findings indicate that variety-seeking enthusiasts use a significantly larger number of information sources than variety neutrals, and variety neutrals use a significantly larger number of sources than variety avoiders. Differences concerning wine consumption, the use of print media, interpersonal sources, and trial information sources are also noted. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Prenatal care: Mechanisms and impacts on infant health and health care utilization

We estimate that prenatal care has positive impacts on health measured at birth, shifts the distribution of future health care utilization away from inpatient care, and find that some of these impacts likely come from an informational mechanism. We also find well child visits are used in a complementary fashion with emergency department care in the production of infant health, suggesting that factors beyond barriers to access may drive the demand for emergency care. Finally, we find differential impacts of prenatal care across racial groups with evidence that the information mechanism may be particularly important for black mothers.     

Competition and Fan Substitution Between Professional Sports Leagues

Review of Industrial Organization - A peculiarity in professional sports is the fact that leagues regularly hold monopoly power within their sports. However, whether and to what extent these...     

If ‘money matters’, what about the monetary base?

Crucial to the debates on monetarism is the money aggregate relevant to its key propositions, in particular those that relate to the determination of nominal national income and inflation. In his influential work on ‘market monetarism’, Scott Sumner has accorded a privileged position to the monetary base in the key monetarist propositions. This article argues that, on the contrary, in a modern economy the role of cash is so small, as well as so clandestine, that the monetary base does not play any direct role in the determination of national income and inflation.     

Constrained dynamic futures portfolios with stochastic basis

Annals of Finance - We study the problem of dynamically trading multiple futures contracts on different underlying assets subject to portfolio constraints. The spreads between futures and spot...     

Optimal insurance under maxmin expected utility

We examine a problem of demand for insurance indemnification, when the insured is sensitive to ambiguity and behaves according to the maxmin expected utility model of Gilboa and Schmeidler (J. Math. Econ. 18:141–153, 1989), whereas the insurer is a (risk-averse or risk-neutral) expected-utility maximiser. We characterise optimal indemnity functions both with and without the customary ex ante no-sabotage requirement on feasible indemnities, and for both concave and linear utility functions for the two agents. This allows us to provide a unifying framework in which we examine the effects of the no-sabotage condition, of marginal utility of wealth, of belief heterogeneity, as well as of ambiguity (multiplicity of priors) on the structure of optimal indemnity functions. In particular, we show how a singularity in beliefs leads to an optimal indemnity function that involves full insurance on an event to which the insurer assigns zero probability, while the decision maker assigns a positive probability. We examine several illustrative examples, and we provide numerical studies for the case of a Wasserstein and a Rényi ambiguity set.

     

Budget support to the health sector—The right choice for strong institutions? Evidence from panel data

This article examines the relationship of sector budget support to the health sector and the infant mortality rate for developing countries. Project-type interventions have been widely used in developing countries in the past decades. These smaller-scale interventions often did not bring the results that the donors would have wanted, at least on a macro level. At the beginning of the millennium, forums on aid effectiveness proposed new principles to increase the effectiveness of aid. Many scholars agreed that one of the answers would be budget support. This article tries to answer whether budget support is the efficient aid modality in countries with strong institutions. In the baseline scenario, a panel data analysis is applied, which includes 113 countries between 2010 and 2018. This dynamic linear panel model is estimated by using ordinary least squares (OLS) and system generalized method of moments (GMM). Health sector aid, in general, has a significant and negative effect on the infant mortality rate in the average country. Sector budget support is insignificant in the baseline estimation and when interacted with a governance variable. In contrast, project-type interventions exhibit significant and negative effects on the outcome variable. The results indicate that sector budget support might not be the superior choice among the aid modalities in the health sector, even in countries with good governance.     

Do macroeconomic and financial governance matter? Evidence from Germany, 1950–2019

This study hypothesises that economic governance matters for economic performance; neglecting its role in creating positive synergies between macro- and microeconomic institutions has underlain significant coordination failures and costs. This study examines economic governance in the context of mutual feedback between macro-financial governance (FGV), macro-non-financial governance (NFGV), and micro-financial development (FND) in Germany in the period 1950–2019. The study uses an institutionalist approach, introducing two modes of economic governance based on institutional complementarities and tests its hypotheses using both an exhaustive structuralist analysis and a time-series quantitative technique based on the Autoregressive Distributed Lag cointegration model and the Vector Error Correction Mechanism. The study concludes that (i) the German model of economic governance based on the positive complementarities between FGV, NFGV and FND in the period 1950–1982 significantly enhanced real economic performance, that (ii) the fragmentation of the model became a key determinant of the country’s weak economic performance in the periods 1983–2019 and 1990–2019, and that (iii) the path-dependence of coordinational mechanisms and underlying institutional dynamics, though fragmented, prevented the genesis and embedding of an irrational exuberance in the country.

     

Correction to: Do macroeconomic and financial governance matter? Evidence from Germany, 1950–2019

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - A Correction to this paper has been published: 10.1007/s11403-022-00356-7     

Is it time to reboot welfare economics? Overview

The contributions of economists have long included both positive explanations of how economic systems work and normative recommendations for how they could and should work better. In recent decades, economics has taken a strong empirical turn as well as having a greater appreciation of the importance of the complexities of real-world human behaviour, institutions, the strengths and failures of markets, and interlinkages with other systems, including politics, technology, culture and the environment. This shift has also brought greater relevance and pragmatism to normative economics. While this shift towards evidence and pragmatism has been welcome, it does not in itself answer the core question of what exactly constitutes ‘better’, and for whom, and how to manage inevitable conflicts and trade-offs in society. These have long been the core concerns of welfare economics. Yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, debates on welfare economics seemed to have become marginalised. The articles in this Fiscal Studies symposium engage with the question of how to revive normative questions as a central issue in economic scholarship.