Buying and selling behavior in stochastic environments with backstop markets

The author acknowledges a research grant from the research program Private Forestry and helpful comments from two anonymous referees, Mats Bergman, and Runar Brännlund, Department of Economics, University of Umeå.     

How and how not to desocialize

Murray N. Rothbard is S. J. Hall distinguished professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and editor of the Review of Austrian Economics. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Social Science Association, at a panel on The Downfall of Communism, at San Antonio, Texas, in March, 1991.     

Some economics of content protection

We are grateful to a perceptive referee for many constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper entitled The Economics of Content Protection: A Dual Approach. The usual disclaimer applies.     

The optimal intertemporal decision on industrial production and harvesting a renewable natural resource

This paper grew out of a research project financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in its program Economics of Natural Resources. This support is gratefully acknowledged. I also thank H. Wacker for helpful discussions. I also thank two anonymous referees for valuable comments on an earlier draft.     

The formation of production expectations in manufacturing industry for nine industrialized countries

Using tendency surveys in the manufacturing industry for nine countries, different production expectations formation mechanisms are tested. Simple expectations hypotheses are compared by conducting nested and non-nested tests, and whether other information than that based solely on past production and expectations, is taken into consideration. It is found that expectations in most cases are formed regressively and/or follow a combined regressive and adaptive process and that information other than past production and expectations, only influence the formation of current expectations weakly. Finally, the rational expectations hypothesis is weakly rejected.I am grateful to Trevor Breusch, Robert Gregory, Paul Grimes, Raja Junankar, Wolfgang Schneider, two anonymous refereces and participants at the Advanced Studies Program in Economic Policy Research Conference at Kiel Institute of World Economics, May 1989, for helpful comments and suggestions.     

An evolutionary contractarian view of primitive law: The institutions and incentives arising under customary Indian law

This research was supported by the Political Economy Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana, and this paper draws freely from and extends material reported in Customary Indian Law: Two Case Studies, which was written for PERC's project onProperty Rights, Constitutions, and Indian Economics. I wish to thank Terry Anderson for helpful comments.     

A model of project evaluation with limited attention

Summary This paper characterizes the optimal policy for a model in which manager may adopt an endogenous number of projects but has only limited resources to devote to their evaluation and maintenance. In any period, the manager may discard any subset of existing projects but may evaluate only one existing or one new project which is then either discarded or restored. Both its current return and the probability with which a project may be restored depends only on the number of periods since its last evaluated. For a manager whose objective is to maximize the sum of discounted returns, the optimal policy takes one of two forms. A discard policy specifies that the manager evaluate a new project in each period and discard current projects at some critical age. An age inspection policy specifies that the manager evaluate a new project only if all current projects are sufficiently young.Support from the C. V. Starr Center for Applied Economics and the Research Resource Committee of the Rutgers Graduate School of Management is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Roy Radner for valuable assistance in the early stages of the work.     

Real exchange rates and target interest rates in a simple VAR model

This paper proposes a simple vector autoregressions (VAR) model with (real) output and exchange rate shocks on interest rates. Rather than assuming non-recursive identification schemes, we test the identifying assumption of the error term decompositions. Applying the model to quarterly data on major currencies against the U.S. dollar (USD) from 1974 to 1997, interest rate shocks explain - after 3 years - 16% of Canadian dollar/USD (CAD) real exchange rate variations and less than 2% for the mark/USD and yen/USD. Positive innovations of interest rates bring about (transitory) CAD real appreciations in differences and (permanent) appreciations in levels. Canadian real output is more explained by domestic interest rate shocks (19%) than Germanys (5%) or Japans (0.2%). Canada is smaller than the other economies and CAD has been shown to suffer from fear of floating. Our findings support the proposition that domestic shocks dominate output variance under fixed exchange rates. They are also consistent with structural interpretations of the VAR.     

Demographic variables in demand systems: The case for generality

This paper provides evidence in favour of greater generality in the demographic demand literature. We propose two demographic demand procedures. One extends the Gorman model by allowing non additive interaction between overheads and Barten scaling. The other extends Price Scaling, by allowing the equivalence scale to vary with utility, and offers a test of Equivalence Scale Exactness (ESE). The rejection of ESE is robust to the assumed demand functional forms (RNLPS, QAIDS), to items chosen, and the estimation method (MLE, GMM). The results show that published cell averages yield well determined estimates of the demographic generalisation parameters.This paper was written during my visit to the UBC in Vancouver, Canada in 1992/93. I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful remarks on an earlier version. The disclaimer applies.     

Spieltheorie: Ein neues Paradigma der Sozialwissenschaft

Ohne ZusammenfassungDeutsche Fassung des Artikels Game Theory: A New Paradigm of Social Science, erschienen in New Methods of Thought and Procedure (Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer, 1967). — Diese Arbeit wurde teilweise über das Econometric Research Program der Princeton University durch das Office of Naval Research unterstützt.     

Optimal learning with costly adjustment

Summary We formulate an infinite-horizon Bayesian learning model in which the planner faces a cost from switching actions that does not approach zero as the size of the change vanishes. We recast the model as a dynamic programming problem which will always have a continuous value function and an optimal policy. We show that the planner's beliefs will converge eventually to some stochastic limit belief which, however, is not necessarily a point mass on the truth. The planner's actions will also converge, although not necessarily to an optimal action given the truth. A key implication of adjustment costs is that the planner will change her action only finitely many times. We present a simple example illustrating how adjustment costs can lead the planner to settle in the long run on an action that is far away from the optimal action given the truth and which yields a reward significantly below that of the optimal action.We would like to thank seminar and conference participants at Brown University, the Social Science Research Council Workshop on Soviet and East European Economics in Pittsburgh, the Econometric Society in Philadelphia, and the Society for Economic Dynamics and Control in Montreal. The bulk of this work was done while Mark Feldman was at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.     

Forecasting nonlinear economic time series: A simple test to accompany the nearest neighbor approach

This paper is based on a recent nonparametric forecasting approach by Sugihara, Grenfell and May (1990) to improve the short term prediction of nonlinear chaotic processes. The idea underlying their forecasting algorithm is as follows: For a nonlinear low-dimensional process, a state space reconstruction of the observed time series exhibits spatial correlation, which can be exploited to improveshort term forecasts by means of locally linear approximations. Still, the important question of evaluating the forecast perfomance is very much an open one, if the researcher is confronted with data that are additionally disturbed by stochastic noise. To account for this problem, a simple nonparametric test to accompany the algorithm is suggested here. To demonstrate its practical use, the methodology is applied to observed price series from commodity markets. It can be shown that the short term predictability of the best fitting linear model can be improved upon significantly by this method.     

An axiomatic approach to \boldsymbol{\varepsilon}-contamination

Summary.  Suppose that an economic agent is 100% certain that uncertainty she faces is characterized by a particular probability measure, but that she has a fear that, with 100% chance, her conviction is completely wrong and she is left perfectly ignorant about the true measure in the present as well as in the future. This situation is often called -contamination of confidence. The purpose of this paper is to provide a simple set of behavioral axioms under which the decision-makers preference is represented by the Choquet expected utility with the -contamination of confidence.Received: 25 November 2002, Revised: 15 November 2004, JEL Classification Numbers:   D81. Correspondence to: Hiroyuki OzakiWe are grateful to an anonymous referee. The referees comments greatly improved the exposition of the paper. The work reported here is partially supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Insitute, the Cabinet Office, the Government of Japan.     

Do they come back again? Job search,labour market segmentation and state dependence as explanations of repeat unemployment

This study investigates the causes of recurrent unemployment. Using data from the Austrian unemployment register we test the explanatory power of three different approaches which appear in the literature: job search theory, labour market segmentation and state dependence. Whereas job search theory does not seem to be able to explain anything, labour market segmentation does. However, the most powerful determinant of the risk of unemployment repetition is past unemployment history. This micro finding is not inconsistent with theories explaining the persistent high level of unemployment rates.This research was supported by the Austrian Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung under the project Dynamik der Arbeitslosigkeit und Beschäftigung. Special thanks for valuable comments go to M. Riese, V. Steiner, J. Stern and two anonymous referees.     

On the structure and diversity of rational beliefs

Summary The paper proposes that the theory of expectations be reformulated under the assumption that agents do not know the structural relations (such as equilibrium prices) of the economy. Instead, we postulate that they can observe past data of the economy and form probability beliefs based on the data generated by the economy. Using past data agents can compute relative frequencies and the basic assumption of the theory is that the system which generates the data is stable in the sense that the empirically computed relative frequencies converge. It is then shown that the limit of these relative frequencies induce a probability on the space of infinite sequences of the observables in the economy. This probability is stationary. Abelief of an agent is a probability on the space of infinite sequences of the observable variables in the economy. Such a probability represents the theory or ypothesis of the agent about the mechanism which generates the data. A belief is said to becompatible with the data if under the proposed probability belief the economy would generate the same limit of the relative frequencies as computed from the real data. A theory which is compatible with the data is a theory which cannot be rejected by the data. A belief is said to be aRational Belief if it is (i) compatible with the data and (ii) satisfies a certain technical condition. The Main Theorem provides a characterization of all Rational Beliefs.This research was supported by NSF Grant IRI-8814954 to Stanford University and by the Summer 1990 Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute. The author is thankful to Steven N. Durlauf for many stimulating conversations related to this research; to William Brock for extensive comments on an earlier draft; to Andrzej Ruszczynski, Maxwell B. Stinchcombe and an anonymous referee for valuable suggestions. Carsten K. Nielsen made invaluable contributions to the final draft.     

Judging quality by price,snob appeal,and the new consumer theory

Conclusion The analysis contained in this paper has served two purposes. First, it has demonstrated the richness of the new consumer theory by showing how this new approach can incorporate the questions of judging quality by price and price-snob appeal. And second, the paper has derived analytically the conditions under which these phenomena will yield a positively sloping demand curve in a two-commodity, two-attribute world.In traditional theory the consumer's response to a change in the price of a good is conceptually divided into an income effect and a substitution effect. The new approach to consumer theory partitions the consumer's response differently, namely, into an efficiency substitution and a utility substitution. When a general price attribute is introduced each of these divisions retains its individual validity. The conclusion that the efficiency substitution is always non-positive also remains valid. But, the traditional substitution effect may now be positive and of sufficient magnitude to make theentire response to an own-price changepositive,x _i /p _i >0. We have shown analytically, then, as the verbal discussions of traditional consumer theory lead us to believe, that judgment of quality by price and price-snob appeal can result in positively sloped demand curves.The research described in this paper was supported in part by the Econometric Research Program at Princeton University. The authors would like to thank Professors W. J. Baumol, O. Morgenstern, and R. E. Quandt, Messrs. F. D. Gately and R. J. Sweeney, and other members of the Seminar on Research in Progress, Department of Economics, Princeton University, for their helpful comments and suggestions. Of course, any errors that may remain are solely our responsibility.     

Sector-specific capital, “Bang-bang” investment,and the Filippov solution

Bang-bang investment in a two-sector growth model with immobile capital is rational and leads to a unique and globally stable long-run equilibrium along a sliding trajectory. This steady state coincides with the stationary equilibrium in the traditional model with non-sector-specific capital.This article was written while the authors were visiting scholars at Cornell University. We gratefully acknowledge financial assistance from the Erasmus University Trust Fund and the Netherlands Scientific Organization. We would like to thank, without implicating, two anonymous referees, Martijn Herrmann, Jean-Marie Viaene, Claus Weddepohl, and the participants of seminars at the University of Maryland, the University of Montreal, and Erasmus University Rotterdam for perceptive remarks and useful comments. Jeroen Hinloopen and Rien Wagenvoort provided able graphical assistance. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the World Bank.     

Seasonal cointegration,common seasonals,and forecasting seasonal series

Seasonal cointegration generalizes the idea of cointegration to processes with unit roots at frequencies different from 0. Here, common seasonals, also a dual notion of common trends, is adopted for the seasonal case. The features are demonstrated in exemplary models for German and U.K. data. An evaluation of the predictive value of accounting for seasonal cointegration shows that seasonal cointegration may be difficult to exploit to improve predictive accuracy even in cases where seasonal non-cointegration is clearly rejected on statistical grounds. The findings from the real-world examples are corroborated by Monte Carlo simulation.Part of this paper was written while the author was visiting professor at the University of California San Diego.