The long-run relationship between private and public savings: An empirical note

This empirical note extends the recent work by Holmes (2006) in examining the long-run relationship between private and public savings in the U.S. over the post-World War II period. Standard Engle-Granger cointegration tests fail to reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration; however, once allowance is made for an endogenous break in the cointegrating relationship, the weak form of the Ricardian equivalence proposition is supported.     

Local Public Debt with Overlapping Generations

Discussions of Ricardian equivalence for local public debt have generally centered on the role of land within a particular generation. This paper examines the full neutrality of local public debt in determining whether local public debt is neutral in the resource allocation between (1) mobile and immobile individuals who belong to the same generation, and between (2) individuals belonging to different generations. We find that local debt neutrality continues to hold across generations under migration.     

Technology and endowments as determinants of comparative advantage: Evidence from Mexico

We analyze whether the pattern of Mexico's comparative advantages in manufacturing trade flows, vis-à-vis its closest competitors, are related with productivity differentials (Ricardian hypothesis) or with differences in factor endowments (Heckscher–Ohlin hypothesis). The results suggest that Heckscher–Ohlin determinants tend to be more relevant than labor productivity differentials to explain the differences in the export patterns between Mexico and its competitors. This result holds even when we restrict the analysis to Mexico and other countries with relatively small differences in factor endowments, although in this case Ricardian comparative advantages gain some relevance.     

Budget regimes and internal governance: considerations for the sustainability of fiscal policy

In a fiscal policy set-up with Ricardian equivalence and rational expectations, the decision-making of private agents is based on the knowledge that current deficits will be met with future tax increases or spending decreases. This view requires that the government's budget exhibit intertemporal balance, or that fiscal policy be sustainable. This paper examines the extent to which sustainability holds in the light of changes in the institutional structure of the budget process and changes in internal House governance rules. The results indicate that certain aspects of sustainability are related to the underlying institutional structure and governance of the budget process. The authors wish to thank the editors and three anonymous referees for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors remain our own.     

The failure of Ricardian equivalence under dynastic altruism

This paper investigates the theoretical accuracy of the Barro [Barro, R.J., 1974. Are government bonds net wealth? Journal of Political Economy, 82, 1095–1117] debt neutrality proposition. We first identify a discrepancy between the transversality condition of a social planning problem and the one of altruistically linked overlapping generations. Then, this discrepancy is exploited to construct public debt policies which affect the competitive equilibrium allocation even when bequests are strictly positive in all periods: a violation of Ricardian equivalence.     

Budget deficits and real interest rates: a regime-switching reflection on Ricardian Equivalence

This paper investigates the relevance of the Ricardian Equivalence theorem for the relationship between the budget deficit and real interest rate. In contrast to the existing literature, we focus on regime-change over a long study period and consider nonlinearities. Using a Markov regime-switching model applied to two centuries of annual data, we find evidence that the US economy switches between a Ricardian Equivalence regime, characterized by an insignificant relationship between the adjusted primary budget deficit and real long-term interest rate, and a regime characterized by the traditional view of a positive relationship. We also find evidence that the transition probabilities between regimes are time-varying insofar as a weaker level of economic activity, a lower real interest rate differential between the US and abroad, or higher national debts, is associated with a weaker relationship between budget deficits and interest rates.     

Government debt,learning and the term structure

Does a change in the public׳s holdings of government debt affect the term structure of interest rates? Empirical analysis using a VAR model indicates that a rise in these holdings of the real debt-to-GDP ratio increases both the three-month and ten-year U.S. nominal yields in a statistically significant manner. The maturity composition of debt is also found to matter: innovations in holdings of long-term debt affect the term structure, while increases in short-term debt affect inflation expectations. These effects of changes in holdings of debt on the yield curve can be derived in a general equilibrium model in which the government issues exponentially-maturing riskless debt, financed by lump-sum taxes, and the optimizing agents are adaptive learners. On calibrating the average maturity of debt in the model to match that of U.S. Treasury debt since the 1980s, I find that positive innovations in government debt lead to increases in asset yields. This is because agents do not learn the principle of Ricardian equivalence exactly, and perceive increases in holdings of government bonds as a rise in their net wealth. Imposing rational expectations on the agents eliminates this channel, and changes in holdings of government debt have no effect on yields. The learning model also implies that as the real debt-to-GDP ratio increases, and the average maturity of debt becomes longer, the agents become less likely to learn that Ricardian equivalence holds.     

CAPITALIZATION AND THE THEORY OF LOCAL PUBLIC FINANCE: AN INTERPRETIVE ESSAY

Abstract. The Tiebout hypothesis that consumer mobility and interjurisdictional competition leads to efficient provision of local services has provoked much controversy and debate in recent years. This article summarizes the opposing and conflicting viewpoints on this subject and presents a synthesis of the theoretical and empirical literature. The basic conclusion of this literature is that only under very restrictive assumptions will foot-voting and interjurisdictional competition ensure allocative efficiency in the local public sector. Nevertheless, the Tiebout mechanism offers important insights for public policy debates on the assignment of taxes and services and the design of equalization grants. Oates' suggestion that capitalization of fiscal differentials into residential property values provides an empirical test of the Tiebout hypothesis also generated an intense debate on the theoretical validity of this procedure and a heightened interest in its empirical applications. This debate is evaluated and an overview is given of the leading empirical approaches to test the efficiency and equity implications of the Tiebout mechanism. Controversial empirical issues such as the choice of the tax price term, the level of aggregation and econometric estimation problems are highlighted in this part of the survey.     

Competitive price paths of an exhaustible resource with increasing extraction costs

The paper analyzes the competitive growth paths of an economy with an exhaustible resource which is subject to increasing extraction costs, assuming perfect foresight. It establishes equivalence among the competitive present-value maximization condition for deposit holders, the generalized Hotelling rule, and the Ricardian royalty-price structure. It also proves uniqueness of a competitive growth path for the case where a backstop technology exists, in order to give some validity to the assumption of perfect foresight.     

Fiscal and monetary interdependence

Where classical economics integrates the quantity theory of money with the concept of Ricardian equivalence, the tendency of recent macroeconomic presentations is to focus either upon money and inflation or upon taxation and debt. That neglect of classical monetary–fiscal integration is surprising, given an initiative by the International Monetary Fund that set credit, money, and fiscal policy within a single structure. This article places those ‘credit counterparts of broad money’ in the context of the Great Depression and the recent global financial crisis. The upshot is a set of conclusions: that, to counter the prospect of deflation, quantitative easing is a weak policy response; that fiscal deficits are better; and that cuts in taxation are preferable to increased government spending.     

Assessing Ricardian equivalence for the New Member States: Does debt-neutrality matter?

Using a structural model based on dynamic optimizing agents, we empirically test the Ricardian equivalence proposition (REP) for 11 New EU-Member States (NMS). We extend the basic model by including the government budget constraint, thus being able to evaluate whether individuals take the evolution of public debt into account. In the basic setting we cannot reject the validity of the REP for four NMS, in the extended model the relevance of the REP changes for six countries, implying that the development of government debt and long-term sustainability of public finances matters with regard to the validity of the REP.     

Cross-entropy estimation in technical efficiency analysis

Technical efficiency analysis is a fundamental tool to measure the performance of production activity. Recently, an increasing interest in the state-contingent approach has emerged in the literature although such interest has not yet been accompanied by an increase of empirical applications. This is largely due to the fact that empirical models with state-contingent production frontiers are usually ill-posed. In this work, a discussion on the role of the generalized cross-entropy estimator within the state-contingent production framework is presented. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the example provided in this work is the first real-world empirical application on technical efficiency analysis with the state-contingent approach using the generalized cross-entropy estimator.     

FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS: A SURVEY

This paper presents a survey of the literature on the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and environmental policy. First, I focus on empirical studies that analyse the impact of environmental costs on foreign investment locations. Next, I review the main studies that attempt to explain the lack of evidence for the pollution haven hypothesis. Then, I discuss the literature on the impact of FDI on local environmental regulations by concentrating on two recent political economy models. Finally, I conclude by summarizing the main findings of the literature and suggesting some future research directions.     

DID INEQUALITY CAUSE THE U.S. FINANCIAL CRISIS?

In his widely discussed book ‘Fault Lines’ (2010), Raghuram Rajan argues that many low and middle income consumers have reduced their saving and increased debt since income inequality started to soar in the United States in the early 1980s. This has temporarily kept private consumption and employment high, but it also contributed to the creation of a credit bubble. This surge in household indebtedness turned out to be unsustainable in the financial crisis starting in 2007. Although Rajan and others emphasize the role of government in promoting credit to those households with declining relative (permanent) incomes, other strands of the literature have focused more explicitly on the implications of rising inequality for aggregate demand and households’ demand for credit. These differences in emphasis may explain why the literature on the inequality‐crisis nexus appears somewhat disparate, even though the various strands are far from mutually exclusive but rather complement each other. We therefore place the ‘Rajan hypothesis’ in the context of competing theories of consumption, and survey the empirical literature on the effects of inequality on household behaviour. We conclude that the empirical evidence calls for a renaissance of the relative income hypothesis of consumption.     

WHEN OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE MATTERS: A REVIEW OF THE EFFECTS OF INVESTOR HORIZON ON CORPORATE POLICIES

This paper surveys the literature on the impact of investor horizon on corporate policies. While the desire to encourage long-term investor ownership is shared among managers, boards and policy makers, how greater long-term investor ownership benefits corporate decisions and ultimately firm performance is still under academic investigation. The contribution of this paper is twofold. The paper's first contribution is providing an up-to-date review of theoretical and empirical findings. This paper introduces the groups of long-term and short-term investors and the related classification methodologies and investor horizon proxies used to form them. It further reviews the determinants of an investor's horizon. Then, this paper organizes the literature on the impact of investor horizon on corporate policies around three main channels: the short-term pressure hypothesis, the monitoring hypothesis, and the catering hypothesis. The paper's second contribution is identifying six major challenges ahead that need to be addressed to improve the understanding of the impact of long-term (short-term) investor ownership on corporates policies. These challenges represent opportunities for further research.     

Metonymy and cross-section demand

Cross-section consumer expenditure data are frequently used to draw conclusions about consumer demand behavior. Such conclusions, however, are justified only under certain assumptions, which are often left unstated in the empirical demand literature. An assumption of this type, the metonymy hypothesis, was stated rigorously and exploited by Härdle et al. when analyzing the monotonicity of aggregate demand functions. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the metonymy hypothesis in more detail. We prove that the distribution of demand vectors derived from a not necessarily metonymic population is identical with the distribution derived from some metonymic population. This implies, in particular, that the metonymy hypothesis cannot be rejected or confirmed on the basis of data from a single cross-section.     

学术兴趣与高校教师的工作满意度

高校教师被认为对其职业有着天然的兴趣，教育行为本身和对知识的探求能给其带来快乐，激励着他们努力工作。但本文的实证分析没能验证这一假说，也没有发现他们是在为增加收入而工作。高校教师可能主要是在为了完成考核任务而在被动地工作，因此急功近利、简单重复现象较为普遍。要提高科研效率，促进高质量的原创性成果创新，必须减少考核量，乃至对优秀教师实行终身制，赋予其充分的科研决策自主权。     

PRECAUTIONARY SAVING: A REVIEW OF THE EMPIRICAL LITERATURE

Standard macroeconomic models show that uncertainty plays a significant role in consumption and saving decisions under rather mild conditions, namely the convexity of the marginal utility of consumption. Increased uncertainty generates a positive extra saving, the so‐called ‘precautionary saving’. Although this hypothesis has been tested by a large number of authors, both at macro and micro level, the empirical results are not conclusive, and the main conclusion than can be drawn is that there is neither consensus on the intensity of that motive for saving, nor on the most appropriate measure of uncertainty. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the empirical literature discussing the main controversial issues and the different approaches followed by the studies addressing empirically the test of precautionary saving.     

Age of rental housing units and vacancy characteristics A filtering explanation

Aggregate data on rental units indicate that older units have lower vacancy frequencies and higher vacancy durations than newer units. A formulation consistent with the filtering hypothesis of the housing literature is presented that explains the above empirical regularity.     

Diagnostic Tests for the Necessity of Weight in Regression With Survey Data

To weight or not to weight in regression analyses with survey data has been debated in the literature. The problem is essentially a tradeoff between the bias and the variance of the regression coefficient estimator. An array of diagnostic tests for informative weights have been developed. Nonetheless, studies comparing the performance of the tests, especially for finite samples, are scarce, and the theoretical equivalence of some tests has not been investigated. Focusing on the linear regression setting, we review a collection of such tests and propose enhanced versions of some of them that require an auxiliary regression model for the weight. Further, the equivalence of two popular tests is established which has not been reported before. In contrast to existing reviews with no empirical comparison, we compare the sizes and powers of the tests in simulation studies. The reviewed tests are applied to a regression analysis of the family expenditure using the data from the China Family Panel Study.