A rational rank four demand system

Past parametric tests of demand system rank employed polynomial Engel curve systems. However, by Gorman's ( 1981 ) theorem, the maximum possible rank of a utility‐derived polynomial demand system is three. The present paper proposes a class of demand systems that are utility derived, are close to polynomial, and have rank four. These systems nest rational polynomial demands, and so can be used to test ranks up to four. These systems are suitable for applications where high rank is likely, such as demand systems involving a large number of goods. A test of rank using this new class of systems is applied to UK consumer demand data. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Saving Accounts versus Stocks and Bonds in Household Portfolio Allocation

We study the structure of household portfolios of financial wealth by analyzing both the determinants of total financial wealth and the choice between risky (stocks and bonds) and riskfree assets (saving accounts). The econometric specification is a generalized trivariate Tobit model, estimated on a cross section of 3,077 households in the Netherlands in 1988. We account for endogeneity of financial wealth and for selectivity due to nonreporting. Results show that the level of financial wealth and the marginal tax rate are major determinants of the allocation between riskfree and risky assets.     

Procedures for revising management judgments forecasts

Forecast improvement is often approached by attempting to find the “best” model for a given situation. Less attention has been paid to the possibility of examining past prediction errors for patterns that may suggest forecast adjustments for the future. This empirical study involves one firm’s management judgment forecasts for product sales and the attempts made to improve their accuracy by removing certain types of bias. In three of the five series examined, error reduction averaging close to thirty percent occurs as a result of the adjustment procedure. The other two series proved to be relatively free from bias and were therefore not in need of the correction method described.     

Demographic and Economic Pressure on Emigration out of Africa*

Two of the main forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low‐wage sending regions. Our new estimates of net migration for the countries of sub‐Saharan Africa show that exactly the same forces driving African across‐border migration are at work today. The results suggest that rapid growth in the cohort of potential young emigrants, population pressure on the resource base, and slow economic growth are likely to intensify the pressure for migration out of Africa and into high‐wage OECD countries over the next two decades.     

The Falsification of Four Popular Hypotheses About the Asian Crisis

Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behaviour of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, that portfolio investors and hedge funds played a dominant role in initiating and/or spreading the crisis; that moral hazard kept efficient markets from predicting the crisis; and, finally, the common lender hypothesis of Kaminsky and Reinhart. In the process we also test implications of the Calvo-Mendoza model of rational investor ignorance. All are falsified as monocausal explanations. For example, portfolio investments that could not have been subject to substantial moral hazard continued to flow into Asia until very shortly before the crisis. Likewise, banks were a much larger source of capital outflows during the crisis than were portfolio investors. While falsified in their strongest forms, several of these hypotheses in less strong forms should play a role in a more nuanced analysis. It is necessary to move past simple single-factor approaches in order to produce a more complete, synthetic explanation of this episode.     

Background Risk and the Performance of Insurance Markets under Adverse Selection

Background risk can influence the performance of insurance markets that must deal with adverse selection when applicants are risk vulnerable, since they are more averse to bearing the insurable risk as a result of their exposures to background risk. We show that background risk always results in a lower deductible for the incentive constrained contract, and that a broader range of markets attains the stable sequential equilibrium cross-subsidized pair of separating contracts. We conclude that background risk always improves the performance of markets for coverage against (insurable) foreground risks that must deal with adverse selection. We also find, however, that these improvements are never sufficient to offset the cost to insureds of bearing the background risk.     

The evolution of rationality and the Red Queen

Strategic rationality is subjected here to natural selection. In a zero-sum repeated game of incomplete information, one long-run individual is informed of the state of the world, and plays against a sequence of short-run opponents who are not. Strategies are noisy and have bounded recall. An equilibrium in these is shown to exist. Relative to any such equilibrium, sufficiently greater recall enjoys an advantage that is not decreasing in the original level of recall, thus capturing the Red Queen effect. The selection pressure to reduce a small amount of noise is less than that to increase recall.     

Siting noxious facilities: A siting lottery with victim compensation

This paper proposes a scheme to facilitate the siting of noxious facilities. A regional government announces that it will (a) use a lottery to choose a site for a noxious facility and (b) transfer income from tenants to host-city landowners to at least partly offset the effects of the noxious facility on local property values. The government will hold the lottery only if all citizens agree, in advance, to abide by the resulting siting decision. The lottery approach is superior to the conventional approach to siting (advance notification) in the sense that the lottery approach achieves unanimous support for the siting decision with less compensation. The compensation scheme can be financed with a regionwide tenant tax or a tax on residents in the nonhost city. For “small” compensation programs, the nonhost tax is superior to the regional tax.