Additive and Multiplicative Uncertainty Revisited: What Explains the Contrasting Biases?

above the certainty level while for additive uncertainty the price should be lower than the certainty level. This note gives an intuitive explanation for the result after first presenting a parsimonious review of the two models. We also discuss which, if either, of the two models is more realistic. Received December 14, 2001; revised version received July 16, 2002 Published online: April 30, 2003 We thank referees for helpful comments. Ciaran Driver would like to acknowledge the research facilities from ANU, Canberra for their help in writing this paper.     

Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Volatility in a Small Open Economy

We lay out a small open economy version of the Calvo sticky price model, and show how the equilibrium dynamics can be reduced to a simple representation in domestic inflation and the output gap. We use the resulting framework to analyse the macroeconomic implications of three alternative rule-based policy regimes for the small open economy: domestic inflation and CPI-based Taylor rules, and an exchange rate peg. We show that a key difference among these regimes lies in the relative amount of exchange rate volatility that they entail. We also discuss a special case for which domestic inflation targeting constitutes the optimal policy, and where a simple second order approximation to the utility of the representative consumer can be derived and used to evaluate the welfare losses associated with the suboptimal rules.     

Strategic Price Discrimination in Compulsory Insurance Markets

This paper considers price discrimination when competing firms do not observe a customer’s type but only some other variable correlated to it. This is a typical situation in many insurance markets—such as motor insurance—where it is also often the case that insurance is compulsory. We characterise the equilibria and their welfare properties under various price regimes. We show that discrimination based on immutable characteristics such as gender is a dominant strategy, either when firms offer policies at a fixed price or when they charge according to some consumption variable that is correlated to costs. In the latter case, gender discrimination can be an outcome of strategic interaction alone in situations where it would not be adopted by a monopolist. Strategic price discrimination may also increase cross subsidies between types, contrary to expectations.JEL Classification No.: L13, G22     

The Family's Financial Support as a “Poisoned Gift”: A Family Embeddedness Perspective on Entrepreneurial Intentions

We argue that greater availability of financial support by the family for creating a new venture entails stronger financial and non‐financial obligations. Cognizant of these obligations, potential founders anticipate negative performance implications for the planned firm and threats to the family system in the case of their non‐fulfillment. We thus postulate that the formation of actual entrepreneurial intentions is less likely the greater the available financial support. We confirm this by studying a sample of 23,304 respondents from 19 countries and find the negative relationship to be dependent on family cohesion and on individual entrepreneurial self‐efficacy.     

Economies in Transition: How Important Is Trade Openness for Growth?*

We investigate the effect of trade openness on economic growth in transition countries using a transparent statistical methodology that leads to data‐driven case studies. In particular, we employ synthetic control methods in a panel of transition economies and compare GDP growth in treated (that is, open) countries with growth in a convex combination of similar but untreated (that is, closed) countries. We find that trade liberalization tends to have a positive effect on the pattern of real GDP per capita. One of our most robust results shows that making the transition without opening up to trade considerably hampers growth.     

Fringe Benefits and Chinese Import Competition

While many studies have quantified the impact of Chinese import competition on U.S. wages, to my knowledge this is the first study to also estimate the effect on fringe benefits. This is important because in the United States, fringe benefits are now more than 30% of compensation. I first argue that if trade affects the share of benefits in compensation, focusing on wages and ignoring fringe benefits may give us misleading estimates of the effect of trade on workers' total compensation. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I track the subsequent outcomes of workers who were working in manufacturing in 1996. Similar to Autor et al. (2014), I find that exposure to Chinese competition negatively affects wage income. As to fringe benefits, the effect on participation in a defined benefit retirement plan and the availability of vacation days is negative and significant. The effects on other benefits are usually negative but imprecisely estimated. The effect on the overall dollar value of benefits is negative and significant. However, in percentage terms, the effect on benefits is smaller than the effect on wages. This suggests that, in percentage terms, the impact of Chinese import competition on overall compensation is less severe than the one found in Autor et al. (2014) for wages.     

On the many accounts of public happiness

Economists of the HEIRS association for Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations promote a better understanding of the fundamental importance of sociality for people’s happiness. The 2013 conference on “Public Happiness” did justice to this goal and provided an overview of stimulating new developments in the study of people’s well-being. The special issue focuses on the one hand on social comparison processes that most naturally emerge if people form interpersonal connections. On the other hand, it contributes to the conceptualization of the many different accounts of public happiness.     

Offshoring and the Skill‐premium: Evidence from Individual Workers’ Data

During the 1980s the United States has experienced an increase in both international trade and the skill‐premium. The association between these two phenomena has proven elusive in the early empirical literature on the subject. Indeed, the consensus among labour economists seems to be that trade has not been the main cause of such increase in the skill‐premium. This view has been challenged by Feenstra and Hanson (1999, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114, 3, 907) who find that offshoring sizably affects the skill‐premium. I revisit this debate using individual workers’ data from the March Current Population Survey combined with industry‐level trade data. This strategy improves upon the work of Feenstra and Hanson who do not control for the demographic characteristics of the labour force. In my results, offshoring can explain between 9 and 30 per cent of the increase in the college wage premium, relative to high‐school workers. In addition, I find that offshoring can explain 21 per cent of the increase in the relative employment of skilled labour. These results suggest that offshoring may play an important role in the increase in the relative demand of skilled workers.