MONETARY POLICY IN A NON‐REPRESENTATIVE AGENT ECONOMY: A SURVEY

It is well known that central bank policies affect not only macroeconomic aggregates, but also their distribution across economic agents. Similarly, a number of papers demonstrated that heterogeneity of agents may matter for the transmission of monetary policy to macro variables. Despite this, the mainstream monetary economics literature has so far been dominated by dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with representative agents. This paper aims to tilt this imbalance towards heterogeneous agents setups by surveying the main positive and normative findings of this line of the literature, and suggesting areas in which these models could be implemented. In particular, we review studies that analyse the heterogeneity of (i) households’ income, (ii) households’ preferences, (iii) consumers’ age, (iv) expectations and (v) firms’ productivity and financial position. We highlight the results on issues that, by construction, cannot be investigated in a representative agent framework and discuss important papers modifying the findings from the representative agent literature.     

Evaluating treatment protocols using data combination

In real life, individuals are often assigned to binary treatments according to existing treatment protocols. Such protocols, when designed with “taste-based” motives, would be productively inefficient in that the expected returns to treatment for a marginal treatment recipient would vary across covariates and be larger for discriminated groups. This cannot be directly tested if assignment is based on more covariates than the researcher observes, because then the marginal treatment recipient is not identified. We present (i) a partial identification approach to detecting such inefficiency which is robust to selection on unobservables and (ii) a novel way of point-identifying the necessary counterfactual distributions by combining observational datasets with experimental estimates. These methods can also be used to (partially) infer risk-preferences which may rationalize the observed treatment allocations. Specifically, existing healthcare datasets can be analyzed with the proposed tools to test the allocational efficiency of medical treatments. Using our methodology on data from the Coronary Artery Surgery Study in the US, which combined experimental and observational components, we find that after controlling for age, smokers in the observational dataset had to overcome a higher threshold of expected survival relative to nonsmokers in order to qualify for surgery.     

Bridging Africa’s income inequality gap: How relevant is China’s outward FDI to Africa?

This study examines whether: (i) the remarkable inflow of Chinese FDI to Africa matters for bridging the continent’s marked income inequality gap, (ii) Africa’s institutional fabric is effective in propelling Chinese FDI towards the equalisation of incomes in Africa and (iii) there exist relevant thresholds required for the various governance dynamics to cause Chinese FDI to equalise incomes in Africa. Our results, which are based on the dynamic GMM estimator and macrodata for 48 African countries, reveal the following. First, although Chinese FDI contributes to fairer income distribution in Africa, the effect is weak. Second, although Africa’s institutional fabric matters for propelling Chinese FDI towards the equalisation of incomes across the continent, governance mechanisms for ensuring political stability, low corruption, and voice and accountability are critical. Finally, the critical masses required for these three key governance dynamics to cause Chinese FDI and other income inequality-reducing modules to reduce income inequality are 0.8, 0.5 and 0.1, respectively. These critical masses are thresholds at which governance is necessary but no longer sufficient to complement Chinese FDI to mitigate income inequality. Hence, at the attendant thresholds, complementary policies are worthwhile. Policy recommendations are provided in the conclusion.     

The measurement of the economic performance of the US Nonfinancial Corporate Business Sector 1946–1990: an application of the shareholder value creation concept

This paper is based upon a juxtaposition of the cash flow-market value performance (alias SVC performance) and historic cost accounting (HC) performance of the US Nonfinancial Corporate Business sector 1946–90. It has two principal objectives: 1. To determine whether, judged on return and variability dimensions, the HC accounting model is an operationally acceptable surrogate for a multiperiod market-based accounting model. 2. To analyse the consequences of HC income-based distributions, i.e., corporate tax, interest and dividend payments based on conventionally-measured corporate income. Three principal conclusions are drawn: i. Notwithstanding their common cash flow component, HC performance indices are not reliable surrogates for SVC performance criteria. The former apparently do not accurately capture changes in corporate valuation and generally understate the variability of market-based returns. ii. The multiperiod HC income of a going concern characteristically overstates its coterminous multiperiod cash flows to a considerable degree. Contrary to common supposition, the former does not therefore constitute a ‘normalized’ or ‘smoothed’ version of a firm's ‘primitive’ cash flows in the sense that the cumulative (multiperiod) values of the two measures tend to converge. iii. As a consequence of ii, HC income and its near relation, taxable earnings, are dubious bases for measuring interest-paying, tax-paying and dividend-paying capacities. Corporate income-distribution decisions based on HC accruals-based profit measures frequently trigger external financing which may cause shareholder wealth losses and wealth transfers from shareholders to lenders. However, ‘fiscal drag’ appears to be the most serious consequence of HC accruals-based income distribution decisions.     

Nonparametric inference for counterfactual means: Bias-correction,confidence sets,and weak IV

This paper supplements Manski (1990) and Manski and Pepper (2000) and contributes to the literature by introducing the concept of weak IV for the partially identified mean counterfactual outcomes when an instrumental variable (IV) or a monotone instrumental variable (MIV) is available (IV or MIV assumption respectively); developing asymptotically uniformly valid confidence sets for the counterfactual mean outcomes and average treatment effects under the assumptions; correcting biases of estimates of bounds on the counterfactual mean outcomes under the assumptions. We apply the confidence sets to further examining the effect of family intactness on a child’s high school graduation originally studied in Manski et al. (1992).     

Write-offs and Profitability in Private Firms: Disentangling the Impact of Tax-Minimisation Incentives

Private firms are likely to use the financial reporting process more for other objectives, such as tax savings, than for communicating performance. However, observing firms choosing accounting policies for tax-minimisation purposes is not straightforward due to (i) tax and non-tax costs of reporting lower income (ii) accounting policies that result in lower reported income and no tax savings but generate non-tax benefits (iii) preparers' multiple incentives and (iv) econometric issues. We observe a large sample of 20,505 private firms writing off assets in two separate regimes, one that generates tax savings and one that does not. Firms significantly decrease, but continue to use, write-offs after the adverse change in tax treatment of write-offs. The exogenous tax change should not affect other reporting incentives. This allows us to disentangle the tax-minimisation incentive from other (un-observable) incentives, including debt contracting, dividends and employee relations that contribute to the observed anomalous positive relationship between write-offs and profitability. We show that for private firms (i) obtaining tax savings is important overall (ii) non-tax costs and benefits are probably also important and (iii) earnings informativeness for future cash flows increases after the adverse tax legislation change.     

Relative income,absolute income and the life satisfaction of older adults: do retirees differ from the non‐retired?

We examine life‐satisfaction of older adults using a representative sample of Canadian individuals aged 45+. Our findings confirm a long line of employment relations research on the importance of ‘relational concerns’ in that: (i) income relative to the average for a given person's gender, age, region and marital status (relative income) matters more in improving life satisfaction as a whole than does absolute personal income; (ii) the relationship between relative income and happiness is much stronger for the non‐retired than retired persons, likely reflecting the importance of comparisons among peers at the workplace; and (3) absolute personal income does have a small positive relationship with life satisfaction but only for retirees and not for the non‐retired.     

Long-run consequences of debt

Empirical evidence suggests that both public and private debt may have long-run detrimental effects on the economy. However, theoretical works have not provided a unique explanation to the issue. In this paper, therefore, we propose a framework that is able to describe the long-run effects of different kinds of debt. We introduce a stock-flow consistent dynamic model where the economy is represented as a network of trading relationships among agents. Debt contracts are one of such relationships. The model is characterized by a unique and stable steady-state and predicts that: (i) aggregate income is always limited from the above by the money supply; (ii) debts cause in the long-run a redistribution of borrowers’ wealth and income in favor of lenders; (iii) the redistribution is magnified by the level of the interest rate and (iv) by the degree of debt persistence. In the aggregate this may also lower the average marginal propensity to spend and nominal income, providing therefore a clear-cut explanation to the empirical evidence.     

Inequality and catching-up under decreasing marginal impatience

This paper examines how endogenous time preference interacts with inequalities in economic development. We consider two distinct groups of households with intrinsic inequality (e.g., capitalists and workers), and show that (i) under decreasing marginal impatience (DMI), an unequal society may be preferable for poor households than an egalitarian one in which every household owns an equal share of asset; (ii) poor households tend to benefit more under DMI than CMI (constant marginal impatience) from positive shocks; (iii) inequality exhibits a sharp inverted-U shape as more people become rich, which should be good news for developing countries in catching up; and (iv) a tax on capital income reduces poor households’ income when the fraction of the rich is sufficiently small. We also examine immigration and discuss capital mobility.     

Penalized Quantile Regression with Semiparametric Correlated Effects: An Application with Heterogeneous Preferences

This paper proposes new ?₁‐penalized quantile regression estimators for panel data, which explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity associated with covariates. Existing fixed‐effects estimators can potentially suffer from three limitations which are overcome by the proposed approach: (i) incidental parameters bias in nonlinear models with large N and small T ; (ii) lack of efficiency; and (iii) inability to estimate the effects of time‐invariant regressors. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to assess the small‐sample performance of the new estimators and provide comparisons of new and existing penalized estimators in terms of quadratic loss. We apply the technique to an empirical example of the estimation of consumer preferences for nutrients from a demand model using a large transaction‐level dataset of household food purchases. We show that preferences for nutrients vary across the conditional distribution of expenditure and across genders, and emphasize the importance of fully capturing consumer heterogeneity in demand modeling. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multilevel IRT models for the analysis of satisfaction for distance learning during the Covid-19 pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic played a relevant role in the diffusion of distance learning alternatives to “traditional” learning based on classroom activities, to allow university students to continue attending lessons during the most severe phases of the pandemic. In such a context, investigating the students' perspective on distance learning provides useful information to stakeholders to improve effective educational strategies, which could be useful also after the end of the emergency to favor the digital transformation in the higher educational setting.Here we focus on the satisfaction in distance learning for Italian university students. We rely on data comprising students enrolled in various Italian universities, which were inquired about several aspects related to learning distance.We explicitly take into account the hierarchical nature of data (i.e., students nested in universities) and the latent nature of the variable of interest (i.e., students' learning satisfaction) through a multilevel Item Response Theory model with students' and universities' covariates.As the main results of our study, we find out that distance learning satisfaction of students: (i) depends on the University where they study; (ii) is affected by some students' socio-demographic characteristics, among which psychological factors related to Covid-19; (iii) is affected by some observable university characteristics.     

Considering interrelationships in strategic decisions

Accounting-based valuation studies of US firms tend to support Ohlson's proposition that residual income and book value numbers have information content in explaining observed market values. But European evidence also suggests that the conservative/liberal orientation of accounting tradition can produce significant national differences in associations between accounting performance measures and stock prices - in earnings behaviour, coefficient values and parameter sensitivity. We address these issues from an equity valuation perspective using Swedish data to assess the additional information content of Ohlson's information dynamics and analysts' forecasts in relation to market valuations in a more conservative accounting environment than the US. The study compares the explanatory and predictive power of Ohlson's (1995) residual income model (RIV) with a linear information dynamics version (LIM) that specifies both residual income and non-accounting information as autoregressive processes. Both versions are applied with, and without, future performance expectations from non-accounting sources (analysts' forecasts). As with US evidence, we find that the inclusion of analysts' forecasts improves both (i) cross-sectional correlations with current prices for both RIV and LIM models and (ii) the predictive power of RIV models in relation to future annual cross-sectional stock returns. The contribution of linear information dynamics is significant but varies across approaches. We also find significant differences between Swedish and US firms in earnings behaviour and associations between accounting numbers and market equity prices.     

Flat tax reform: A quantitative exploration

This paper explores quantitatively the general equilibrium implications of a revenue neutral tax reform in which the current income and capital income tax structure in the U.S. is replaced by a flat tax, as proposed by Hall and Rabushka (1995), (The Flat Tax, 2nd ed. Hoover). The central aspects of such reform, the impact of tax reform on capital accumulation and labor supply, as well as its distributional consequences, are analyzed in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Main results are that, (i) the elimination of the actual taxation of capital income has an important and positive effect on capital accumulation; (ii) mean labor hours are relatively constant across tax systems, but aggregate labor in efficiency units increases; (iii) in all circumstances analyzed, the distributions of earnings, income and especially wealth become more concentrated.     

Understanding Italian Inequality Trends*

This article develops a unifying framework for analysing the effects of: (i) the changing distribution of individual incomes by main factor sources, (ii) the increasing participation of wives in the labour force, and (iii) the changing distribution of family types on the distinctive trends towards inequality in equivalent household income in Italy between 1977 and 2004. Changes in the distribution of work and pension incomes explain most of the trend. The higher average likelihood of wage‐earning wives had an unequalizing effect on households on the left tail of the income distribution. Little is explained by the changing distribution of family types.     

The winners and losers of tax reform: An assessment under financial integration

I quantify the macroeconomic and redistributive effects of the unilateral elimination of the capital income tax in a two-country, heterogeneous-agent incomplete markets model with progressive labor income taxes. Home, by implementing the reform, induces government responses where labor income is taxed in Home and mostly subsidized in Foreign. In addition, post-reform price dynamics reduce Home’s wealth and suppress households’ ability to do consumption smoothing, with negative effects on the majority—particularly on the poor. In turn, Foreign accumulates wealth, and price movements work particularly in favor of the poor. As a result, a large majority in Home prefers the status quo whereas Foreign supports the reform unanimously. These findings are robust to alternative scenarios where (i) the borrowing constraints are relaxed, (ii) both countries jointly eliminate capital income taxes, (iii) foreign interest income is taxed, and (iv) Home capital income tax is reduced from 40% to 35%.     

Relative Value Relevance of Alternative Accounting Treatments for Unrealized Gains: Implications for the IASB

We investigate the relative value relevance of the alternative accounting methods for unrealized gains on investment properties in New Zealand (NZ). Using both the Likelihood‐ratio test and the F‐test, we find that, while preferred by the NZ standard setter, recognition of unrealized gains in the income statement is not superior to (or significantly different from) recognition of unrealized gains in revaluation reserve in terms of their value relevance. The results are robust to the different research methods we used. Our results have implications for the International Accounting Standards Board in terms of: (i) recognizing changes in fair values of investment properties in the income statement under the revised IAS 40: Investment Property in countries where “realization” refers to net income available for distribution; (ii) its intent to issue a standard on a single statement of comprehensive income; and (iii) its initiative to reduce or eliminate alternative accounting treatments for similar fact situations in its standards.     

Information rigidity in growth forecasts: Some cross-country evidence

We document information rigidity in forecasts of real GDP growth in 46 countries over the past two decades. We also investigate: (i) whether rigidities differ across countries, particularly between advanced countries and emerging markets; (ii) whether rigidities are lower around turning points in the economy, such as in times of recessions and crises; and (iii) how quickly forecasters incorporate news about growth in other countries into their growth forecasts, with a focus on the way in which advanced countries’ growth forecasts incorporate news about emerging market growth, and vice versa.     

Inequity-averse preferences in general equilibrium

We study the stability with respect to the introduction of opportunity-based inequity aversion à la Dufwenberg et al. (2011) of three welfare properties satisfied by competitive equilibria in self-regarding economies: (i) Pareto efficiency may not be a stable property; (ii) undomination with respect to income redistribution is a stable property whenever the marginal indirect utility of income has no extreme variations; and (iii) generically (endowment-wise) market-constrained efficiency is a stable property.     

Stakeholders’ environmental influence. An empirical analysis in the Spanish hotel industry

We draw on the insights of stakeholder theory to explore the extent to which environmental management practices are driven by (i) an attempt to enhance a firm's legitimacy, and (ii) a response to pressures arising from powerful stakeholders. The material for this investigation has been gathered from a sample of 279 Spanish hotels. The hotel industry which is only marginally affected by environmental regulation and is thus a widely neglected setting in this context, could be a particularly interesting subject for investigation, able to throw some light on the extent to which firms produce different responses to the environmental concerns of their stakeholders. Our results reveal that corporate environmental management practices may be a response to genuine environmental concerns, and we then speak of explicit environmental management, or there may also be reasons different from the environmental, in which case we speak of tacit environmental management. Our findings suggest that explicit and tacit environmental management account for a variety of organizational responses to the environmental demands of stakeholders, depending on (i) the stakeholders’ power regarding environmental issues, (ii) the stakeholders’ use of power to protect the environment, and (iii) the perceived economic advantages of environmental management activities.