The prison rule in roulette

Summary In many casinoes a bet on even money chances is not immediately lost when a zero falls. Instead, the stake is imprisoned, and the gambler has the options of demanding half his money back or letting the next spins of the wheel decide on the fate of the stake. These options are compared in respect to their winning probabilities by simple recursive methods.     

世界难题“败家逻辑”

富不过三代？二代？一代？财富和财富能力如何传递下去,是个世界级难题。     

Poverty traps, the money growth rule, and the stage of financial development

This paper investigates how monetary policy influences the emergence of local indeterminacy, local bifurcations, and multiple steady states, depending upon the degree of the commitment parameter that defines financial market imperfection, using Diamond's overlapping generations model with credit market frictions. The analytical results will show that poverty traps happen as an inevitable outcome under a wider range of money growth rates, because financial markets are less developed. Put differently, we derive analytically the positive link between financial development and per capita income.     

The pervasive absence of compensating differentials

We study the relation between individual preferences for job amenities (e.g., type of work, job security) and compensating wage differentials in cross‐section. To this end, we estimate a partial equilibrium job search model on panel data from eight European countries. There are five non‐wage job characteristics and two sources of job‐to‐job mobility: on‐the‐job search and reallocation shocks. We also allow for two types of unobserved heterogeneity. We find strong preferences for amenities, especially job security, yet, these preferences do not translate into significant wage differentials in cross‐section. Counterfactual experiments show that one would need extremely low levels of search frictions for compensating differentials to arise. Lastly, a similar exercise on the distribution of job change outcomes reveals the role of constrained job‐to‐job mobility in the absence of compensating wage differentials. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

终身监禁制度蕴含的依法治国理念

依法治国、 建设社会主义法治国家是我国宪法的重要内容,但在现实生活中,少数国家公职人员贪污受贿等腐败行为浮出水面,这是法治国家所不允许的.终身监禁入法的是依法治国的紧迫需要,也是完善刑法的措施.但是终身监禁制度还处于起步阶段,有待完善.因此,需要进一步推进司法实践,终身监禁制度的法治理念才会凸显出来.文章从终身监禁制度的基本含义及其法治理念入手,分析其入法的原因以及完善的对策,进一步认识终身监禁制度在依法治国中的意义.     

The golden rule of urban transportation investment

The purpose of this paper is to find an optimal taxation rule for transportation investment in an ever growing urban economy. First we dynamize a standard circular-city model with identical residents by introducing population growth and transportation improvements over time. Assuming that utility functions are of a constant-elasticity form and transportation investment is financed by an income tax, we prove the existence, uniqueness and stability of a balanced growth equilibrium for each given tax rate. Then, an optimal tax rate is determined so as to maximize the balanced growth equilibrium level of utility for every resident in the city. It is also shown that our simple rule remains valid in the case of two income classes.     

The modified golden rule of a multi-sector economy

We consider an n-good model of optimal accumulation determined by a technology, a utility function, and a discount factor. A technology is δ-productive if it contains an input-output pair such that the discounted output vector strictly dominates the input vector. We show that a δ-productive technology has a non-trivial modified golden rule. We also report a counter- example of David Starrett showing that the modified golden rule need not have turnpike properties, and that there may exist non-trivial periodic optimal consumption plans even when there is no non-trivial modified golden rule.     

The unanimity rule and extremely asymmetric committees

This paper analyzes how to allocate experts into committees that use the unanimity rule to make decisions. We show that an optimal allocation of experts is extremely asymmetric. To reach the optimal allocation, therefore, one needs only to rank the experts in terms of their abilities and then allocate adjacent experts such that an expert’s ability tends to vary inversely with the size of his committee. In the special case of three-member committees, we show that the optimal allocation maximizes the sum of the products of the experts’ skills in each committee.     

Nonlinearity in the Fed's monetary policy rule

This paper investigates the nature of nonlinearities in the monetary policy rule of the US Federal Reserve (Fed) using the flexible approach to nonlinear inference. We find that while there is significant evidence of nonlinearity for the period to 1979, there is little such evidence for the subsequent period. Possible asymmetries in the Fed's reactions to inflation deviations from target and the output gap in the 1960s and 1970s may tell part of the story, but do not capture the entire nature of the nonlinearity. The inclusion of the interaction between inflation deviations and the output gap, as recently proposed, appears to characterize the nonlinear policy rule more adequately. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Moving on up: The Rooney rule and minority hiring in the NFL

Detecting and quantifying racial discrimination in the labor market is difficult. The sports industry offers a wealth of data and specific hiring practices which mitigates this difficulty. The Rooney Rule requires National Football League teams to interview at least one minority candidate when hiring a head coach. We examine a unique data set of high-level assistant coaches (offensive and defensive coordinators) from the beginning of the 1970 season through the beginning of the 2009 season to determine whether race is a factor in NFL teams' decisions to promote these assistants to head coach. Using logit and hazard models that control for age, experience and performance, we conclude that conditional on a coach reaching coordinator status, there is no evidence that race influences head coach hiring decisions. We also find no evidence that the Rooney Rule has increased the number of minority head coaches.     

Works rule books in the engineering industry1

A study of works rule books indicates that their purpose, consciously or unconsciously, extends considerably beyond the mere outlining of a disciplinary code. From the management's point of view they fulfil contractual, legal, informative and expressive roles. Moreover the tone of the language in which they are couched and, where subject matter is concerned, some surprising omissions provide an additional insight into management attitudes.     

A theoretical relationship between the rank-size rule and Clark's law of urban population distribution: Duality in the rank-size rule

This paper theoretically shows the necessary and sufficient conditions for the robust rank-size rule: the rank-size rule that robustly holds for any choice of threshold urban population density by which populations of cities are determined. First, it is shown that when urban population distribution follows Clark's law, the robust rank-size rule holds if and only if the gradient parameter of the negative exponential distribution of the ith ranked city as √i times as large as that of the first ranked city and the population density at the center is the same for all cities. Second, when urban population distribution follows a certain general class of urban population distribution functions, the robust rank-size rule (of population) holds if and only if the boundary condition is satisfied and the rank-size rule holds with respect to urban areas. These two rank-size rules, the rank-size rule of population and the rank-size rule of urban areas, form the primal-dual relation. Third, if the robust rank-size rule holds, then the constant density rule holds, that is, the average population density of a city over its urban area is the same for all cities.     

An axiomatic re-characterization of the Kemeny rule

Review of Economic Design - The Kemeny rule is one of the well studied decision rules. In this paper we show that the Kemeny rule is the only rule which is unbiased, monotone, strongly...     

The conservative equal costs rule, the serial cost sharing rule and the pivotal mechanism: asymptotic welfare loss comparisons for the case of an excludable public project

We examine the asymptotic behavior of two strategyproof mechanisms discussed by Moulin for public goods – the conservative equal costs rule (CER) and the serial cost sharing rule (SCSR) – and compare their performance to that of the pivotal mechanism (PM) from the Clarke–Groves family. Allowing the individuals’ valuations for an excludable public project to be random variables, we show under very general assumptions that expected welfare loss generated by the CER, as the size of the population increases, becomes arbitrarily large. However, all moments of the SCSR’s random welfare loss asymptotically converge to zero. The PM does better than the SCSR, with its welfare loss converging even more rapidly to zero.     

On the natural selection rule in general linear models

We consider a problem of selecting the best treatment in a general linear model. We look at the properties of the natural selection rule. It is shown that the natural selection rule is minimax under to “0–1” loss function and it is a Bayes rule under a monotone permutation invariant loss function with respect to a permutation invariant prior for every variance balanced design. Some other condition on the design matrix is given so that a Bayes rule with respect to a normal prior will be of simple structure.     

Performance of investment strategies in the absence of correct beliefs

We study an evolutionary market model with long-lived assets. We show that in the absence of correct beliefs, the strategy which is “closer” to the Kelly rule cannot be driven out of the market. This means that this strategy will either dominate or at least survive. Our techniques are borrowed from the theory of random dynamical systems.