Choosing and using payment instruments: evidence from German microdata

Germans are still very fond of using cash. Of all direct payments transactions in 2008, cash accounted for an astounding 82 % in terms of number and for 58 % in terms of value. With a dataset that combines transaction information with survey data on payment behaviour of German consumers, we shed light on how individuals decide on their cash usage. We employ a two-stage empirical framework which jointly explains payment card ownership and the use of cash. Our results indicate that cash usage is compatible with systematic economic decision making. Consumers decide on the adoption of payment cards and then use available payment media according to transaction characteristics, the relative costs of cash and card usage, socio-demographic characteristics and their assessment of payment instruments’ characteristics. Importantly, older consumers use significantly more cash than younger consumers. We show that this difference in payment behaviour is not attributable to age as such but largely to differences in the characteristics of older and younger consumers. This suggests that the high cash intensity of older consumers cannot fully be attributed to the role of habit or to their slow adoption to new payment technologies.     

Government popularity and the economy: first evidence from German microdata

This is one of the first studies to estimate a popularity function at the microlevel. Using German microlevel data for the years 1991, 1992, 1998, and 2008, we show that a positive assessment of the economy significantly improves government popularity, while negative evaluations decrease satisfaction with the government. Voters take the (current and expected) national and personal economic situation into account. We find no evidence for a grievance asymmetry, i.e., voters not only punish the government for a bad economy but also reward them in good times. Finally, we show that popularity functions are only very crude proxies for vote functions, with the latter being mostly driven by party identification.     

Precautionary saving under liquidity constraints: evidence from Italy

I empirically investigate precautionary savings under liquidity constraints in Italy using a unique indicator of subjective variance of income growth to measure the strength of the precautionary motive for saving, and a variety of survey-based indicators of liquidity constraints. The main contribution of the paper is twofold. First of all, I attempt to differentiate between the standard precautionary saving caused by uncertainty from the one due to liquidity constraints using an endogenous switching regression approach, which allows me to cope with endogeneity issues associated with sample splitting techniques. Second, I move one step further with respect to previous studies on consumption behaviour by taking explicitly expected liquidity constraints into account. I eventually found the precautionary motive for savings to be stronger for those households who face binding constraints, or expect constraints to be binding in the future. Indeed, a complementarity relation exists between precautionary savings and liquidity constraints.     

Fashion and wealth accumulation

Summary. This paper examines the influence of fashion on wealth accumulation in an economy with two groups of agents. Fashion is modelled as an externality generated by a particular dependence of individual agents' time preference on the two groups' per-capita consumption habits. It is shown that fashion causes excessive wealth fluctuations in the sense that stronger and more persistent fashion is more likely to generate limit cycles in wealth. Opposite to intuitive arguments , however, the externality in fashion does not necessarily generate instability in wealth. In a special case, equilibrium consumption and wealth are stable but the optimal ones that internalize the externality are locally unstable. Whether equilibrium consumption is excessive relative to optimal consumption depends on the distribution as well as the aggregate level of wealth. Received: December 15, 1995; revised version: July 21, 1998     

Power laws in top wealth distributions: evidence from Canada

This article investigates Pareto power law (PPL) behavior at the top of the Canadian wealth distribution. To this end, Canadian Business data on the wealthiest 100 Canadians for the years 1999–2008 are used. The resulting estimates of the PPL exponent ranged from approximately 1.0 to 1.3 depending on the year of analysis and the estimation method used. These estimates are roughly comparable to those based on Forbes’ list of the wealthiest 400 Americans. Furthermore, whereas modified OLS and maximum likelihood estimates of the power law exponents conform to Zipf’s law, the OLS estimates do not. These results raise some concerns about deducing the magnitudes of and trends in the power law exponents based on a single estimation method and highlight the importance of extensive hypothesis testing for model adequacy. The battery of diagnostic tests pertaining to PPL behavior at the top of the Canadian wealth distribution yields some conflicting results.     

The nonlinear effect of financial literacy on wealth: evidence from Germany

Empirica - This paper investigates the nonlinearity in the relationship of financial literacy and wealth and addresses the potentially inadequate measurement of financial literacy. Using data from...     

Impact of strategy switching on wealth accumulation

Various investment strategies coexist in financial markets. Fluctuations in the profitability of strategies rationalize investors’ strategy switching behaviors. Under bounded rationality and limited information, such behavior is usually driven by comparing the past performance of different strategies. But at what pace should investors change their strategies? Does a frequent strategy switching lead to a higher wealth in the end? To answer these questions, a discrete dynamic heterogeneous agent model is proposed, in which agents follow heuristic rules and a market maker adjusts the price of a risky asset. Agents are classified by their propensity of strategy switching. It is found that agents with a higher propensity adopt the better strategy more often, but end up with less final wealth. This counter-intuitive phenomenon is caused by the inconsistency between short-run profit and long-run wealth accumulation.     

Workplace risks and wages: Canadian evidence from alternative models

Three alternative models of compensating wage premiums for risk are estimated: the conventional OLS wage regression; an endogenous risk model that accounts for the simultaneity that may occur if workers of high potential earnings prefer safer jobs; and a self-selection model to account for the possibility that workers sort into jobs based on unobserved tolerance for risk that affects their productivity in dangerous work environments. The results suggest that the existing Canadian estimates, which have been based on the basic model, may seriously underestimate the wage premium for risk and hence the implied cost of fatal and non-fatal injuries. JEL Classification: J28, J31
Risques au travail et salaires: résultats canadiens pour plusieurs modèles. Les auteurs calibrent trois modèles pour évaluer la compensation salariale pour les risques au travail: l'équation conventionnelle de régression des salaires estimée par la méthode des moindres carrés ordinaires; un modèle de risque endogène qui tient compte de la simultanéité qui peut se produire si les travailleurs dont les revenus potentiels sont élevés préfèrent les emplois où il y a moins de risques; un modèle d'auto-sélection où les travailleurs se répartissent entre les emplois sur la base d'une tolérance non-observée pour le risque qui affecte leur productivité dans des environnements de travail dangereux. Les résultats suggèrent que les évaluations canadiennes en vogue, qui sont fondées sur le modèle de base, peuvent sous-estimer sérieusement la prime salariale de risque et donc les coûts des blessures mortelles ou non que les accidents entraînent.     

Smoking,wealth accumulation and the propensity to plan

We investigate the relationship between wealth, smoking, and individual propensities to plan. Planning propensity affects wealth but not smoking, suggesting that planning is not an all-purpose skill. Financial planning may draw on different abilities than those that facilitate smoking cessation.     

Distribution of wealth and incomplete markets: Theory and empirical evidence

This paper analyses the equilibrium distribution of wealth in an economy where firms’ productivities are subject to idiosyncratic shocks, returns on factors are determined in competitive markets, households have linear consumption functions and government imposes taxes on capital and labour incomes and equally redistributes the collected resources to households. The equilibrium distribution of wealth is explicitly calculated and its shape crucially depends on market incompleteness. With incomplete markets it follows a Paretian law in the top tail and the Pareto exponent depends on the saving rate, on the net return on capital, on the growth rate of population, and on portfolio diversification. The characteristics of the labour market crucially affects the bottom tail, but not the upper tail of the distribution of wealth in the case of completely decentralized labour market. The analysis also suggests a positive relationship between growth and wealth inequality. The theoretical predictions find a corroboration in the empirical evidence of United States in the period 1989-2004.     

The causal effect of religious piety on shareholder wealth: evidence from acquirer returns and historical religious identification

Prior research shows that religion promotes honesty. Honesty in turn motivates managers to view an expropriation from shareholders as self-serving, opportunistic and unethical, thereby alleviating the agency conflict. Religious piety is thus expected to discourage agency-driven acquisitions that reduce shareholder wealth. We exploit the variation in religious piety across US counties (and states) and show that firms located in a more religious environment are indeed less likely to make poor acquisitions, measured by the stock market reactions to the acquisition announcement. To draw a causal inference, we use historical religious piety as far back as 1952 as our instrument. The two-stage least squares (2SLS) analysis confirms that religious piety induces firms to make better acquisitions. Our analysis based on propensity score matching also corroborates the conclusion.     

Financing constraints and investment efficiency: evidence from a panel of Canadian forest firms

This article examines the financial constraint of 18 listed Canadian forest firms between 2000 and 2014 following the stochastic frontier approach. Empirical results support the observation that Canadian forest firms have a strong dependence of using both equity financing and debt financing as the coefficients of both equity and debt financing mean functions are significant at 1% level. The distribution of investment efficiency index (IEI) of all 18 firms demonstrates a loss of around 40% of the rate of investment due to financing constraints. Regional analysis demonstrates that the time-varying patters of IEI of three provinces are significantly different.     

R&D spillovers and productivity: Evidence from U.S. manufacturing microdata

This paper deals with the estimation of the impact of technology spillovers on productivity at the firm level. Panel data for American manufacturing firms on sales, physical capital inputs, employment and R&D investments are linked to R&D data by industry. The latter data are used to construct four different sets of `indirect' R&D stocks, representing technology obtained through spillovers. The differences between two distinct kinds of spillovers are stressed. Cointegration analysis is introduced into production function estimation. Spillovers are found to have significant positive effects on productivity, although their magnitudes differ between high-tech, medium-tech and low-tech firms. First version received: April 1997/final version received: April 1999     

Effects of government expenditure on private investment: Canadian empirical evidence

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between government expenditures and private investment in Canada during the period 1961 to 2000. To this end, effects of five categories of government expenditures on investment are examined within the cointegration and error-correction framework. The empirical results show that government expenditure on education and health has positive effects whereas government expenditures on capital and infrastructure have negative effects on private investment. The other expenditure categories, including government expenditure on protection of persons and property, expenditure on debt charges, and expenditure on government and social services have no significant effects on private investment.I wish to thank Baldev Raj for his valuable comments on this study which have led to an important improvement in the paper. I would also like to thank my colleagues Tomson Ogwang, Paul Bowles, Jalil Safaei, and an anonymous referee for their comments. However, the usual disclaimer applies.First version Received: May 2002/Final version received:20 May 2004     

The dynamics of food insecurity and overall health: evidence from the Canadian National Population Health Survey

The paper explores whether the responses to household food insecurity questions in cycles two and three of the Canadian National Population Health Survey help explain the links between socioeconomic status and health at the individual level. Short-term transitions in food insecurity status are correlated with changes in health status. There is some evidence for females but not for males that conditional on current health, current household food insecurity can lead to lower future health status, even in the short run. There is stronger evidence for both males and females that conditional on current household food insecurity status, lower current health status can lead to an increased probability of future household food insecurity.     

Subsidy design: wealth versus benefits

A government would like to subsidize an indivisible good. Consumers’ valuations of the good vary according to their wealth and benefits from the good. A subsidy scheme may be based on consumers’ wealth or benefit information. We translate a wealth-based policy to a benefit-based policy, and vice versa, and give a necessary and sufficient condition for the pair of policies to implement the same assignment: consumers choose to purchase the good under the wealth-based policy if and only if they choose to do so under the translated benefit-based policy. General taxation allows equivalent policies to require the same budget.     

Effects of financial innovations on the money demand function: a Canadian evidence

A money demand function for the Candian economy has been estimated to explore if recent financial innovations have caused any significant change in the structural relationship between the demand for money and its determinants. Two sets of estimation results have been analysed: the first set is obtained by estimating a standard money demand function for several overlapping sample periods and the other set is obtained by estimating a modified version which included a dummy or a ratchet variable to capture the effects of innovations. The estimated equations have been used to generate ex-post simulations and forecasts. The results suggest that innovations have displaced the money demand function in the early 1980s. It also appears that the incorporation of approriate innovation variables improves the predictive performance of the money demand function.     

An options-based approach to forecast competing bids: evidence for Canadian takeover battles

During takeover battles, a tender offer provides a call option right to the target’s shareholders: it guarantees the offered price but maintains the chance of a higher offer. We present an options-based approach to estimate the probability and expected value of higher competing takeover bids using target stock price data. Analysing Canadian takeover battles in the period 1997 to 2007 we find that during the 5 trading days prior to the occurrence of an increased takeover bid, the estimated probability of a higher bid exceeds 80% on average and the expected value of a potential competing bid almost matches the realized value.