The optimistic stability of the core mapping in public goods production economies

Summary We show that in a production economy with public goods and a measure space of agents an allocation belongs to the core of the economy if and only if there exists no allocation in the core of a subeconomy that blocks it.We are indebted to Yossi Greenberg for very helpful suggestions, especially concerning the introduction of this work. We would also like to thank the referee for useful suggestions. Part of this work was done while the authors were visiting CORE, Université Catholique de Louvain. The support of CORE is gratefully acknowledged.     

von Neumann–Morgenstern stable sets of income tax rates in public good economies

This paper studies the von Neumann–Morgenstern stable sets in a public good economy, where any allocation is achieved through a proportional income tax system. The outcome of the economy is defined to be a set of tax rates. We show that whenever the core as the set of tax rates is nonempty, it is a unique stable set. When the core is empty, the set of tax rates is a stable set if and only if the set is a singleton consisting of a tax rate satisfying a certain condition. We show the existence of such stable sets. The author is grateful to Mikio Nakayama, Jun Wako and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments and suggestions. He is also grateful to Youngsub Chun, Takuya Masuzawa and Shigeo Muto for their helpful comments.     

Strategic Firm Behavior Under Average-Revenue-Lagged Regulation

Price caps have been shown to have incentive properties superior to traditional rate of return regulation. Average-revenue-lagged regulation (ARL) is attractive in that steady-state prices are known to be efficient. We show that the ARL scheme can be manipulated by the firm so as to yield the unregulated global profit maximum. While tests exist that can provide the regulator with evidence of this strategic behavior, we also demonstrate that the unregulated global profit maximum will not be attainable if Laspeyres (L) regulation is employed.Jel classification: L43, L51I would like to thank Michael Crew and an anonymous referee for their extremely helpful suggestions.     

Investment,interest rate rules,and equilibrium determinacy

Summary. By adding endogenous investment to a flexible-price, money-in-the-utility-function model, this paper studies the role that physical capital plays in stabilizing the real side of the economy when the monetary authority follows interest-rate feedback rules. We show that with inelastic labor supply equilibrium uniqueness is ensured under both active and passive monetary policies. For the case where money affects both preferences and technology, the uniqueness result remains true under active monetary policy. With endogenous labor supply, the uniqueness result holds again regardless of the stance of monetary policies for the case with separable leisure, but indeterminacy remains likely under both active and passive monetary policies when leisure is nonseparable.Received: 19 December 2001, Revised: 12 May 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: E52, O42.We are grateful to Jess Benhabib and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. Correspondence to: C.K. Yip     

A characterization of egalitarian equivalence

Summary Consider a solution (an allocation rule) for an economy which satisfies the following criteria: (1) Pareto efficiency, (2) monotonicity, in the sense that if the set of attainable allocations of the economy becomes larger then the solution makes no consumer worse-off, (3) a weak and primitive notion of fairness with respect to some commodity, say commodityh, in the sense that in an exchange economy in which the aggregate endowment consists only of commodityh, the solution is equal division. We show that in the class of economies which includes non-convex technologies the only such solution is egalitarian equivalence with respect to commodityh. It is also shown that this characterization of egalitarian equivalence holds in convex exchange economies if we add a weak version of a positive association requirement.We are grateful to William Thomson and three anonymous referees for extensive comments on an earlier version. We also acknowledge helpful comments of the participants of the Social Choice and Welfare Conference held in Caen, June 1992.     

Pareto violations of parliamentary voting systems

It has been known for a long time that many binary voting rules can select a Pareto dominated outcome, that is an outcome such that there exists some other alternative which is preferred by every voter. In this paper, we show that some of these rules can select an outcome Pareto dominated in a much stronger sense. Furthermore, our main results are concerned with the evaluation of the likelihood of Pareto dominated outcomes under four social choice rules commonly used in Parliaments or in committees. Given a set of four alternatives and a set of n individuals, we assume anonymous profiles and using analytical methods we compute the proportion of profiles at which the Pareto criterion is violated. Our results show that one should not be especially worried about the existence of the possibility as such. We are grateful to two anonymous referees for very helpful remarks and suggestions.     

New financial markets: who gains and who loses

Summary. We evaluate the effects of new financial markets in a two-period incomplete markets model with heterogenous agents. For analytical tractability, we focus on the special case where utility is exponential and risks are normally distributed. We provide a complete characterization of life-cycle consumption and portfolio choice. The effect of new financial markets on individual welfare equals the sum of what we call the portfolio effect and the price effect. The portfolio effect is proportional to the square of the difference between the average exposure to the new asset in the economy and an individual investors exposure adjusted for risk aversion. The portfolio effect is always positive and measures the improved ability of investors to transfer consumption across states. The price effect captures the effect on individual welfare of changes in asset prices. We show that new financial markets drive down the prices of all assets which raises the interest rate and thus affects the ability of investors to transfer consumption across time. The price effect is positive for net savers but can be negative for net borrowers. For net borrower households, the price effect can wipe out the portfolio effect and lead to welfare reductions.Received: 24 July 2003, Revised: 22 March 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D31, D52, G11, G12.Paul Willen: Thanks to Viral Acharaya, Alberto Bisin, Steve Davis, John Geanakoplos and a thoughtful anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to seminar audiences at Stanford, Berkeley and at the 2001 Stony Brook workshop on incomplete markets for comments and suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge research support from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago.     

The probability approach to general equilibrium with production

We develop an alternative approach to the general equilibrium analysis of a stochastic production economy when firms’ choices of investment influence the probability distributions of their output. Using a normative approach we derive the criterion that a firm should maximize to obtain a Pareto optimal equilibrium: the criterion expresses the firm’s contribution to the expected social utility of output, and is not the linear criterion of market value. If firms do not know agents utility functions, and are restricted to using the information conveyed by prices then they can construct an approximate criterion which leads to a second-best choice of investment which, in examples, is found to be close to the first best. We are grateful to participants in the 2006 Public Economic Theory Conference, Hanoi, the 2007 CARESS/COWLES workshop on General Equilibrium at Yale University, the 2007 SAET Conference at Kos, Greece, the NSF/NBER 2007 Conference on General Equilibrium at Northwestern University, and seminars at Rice University, the University of Southern California, Indiana University, and U.C. Davis for helpful comments. We particularly thank Jacques Drèze and David Cass for stimulating discussions, and a referee for helpful suggestions for improving the paper.     

Asset price volatility and trading volume with rational beliefs

Summary. This paper develops a model of speculative trading in a large economy with a continuum of investors. In our model the investors are assumed to have diverse beliefs which are rational in the sense of being compatible with observed data. We demonstrate the existence of price amplification effects and show that the equilibrium prices can be higher or lower than the rational expectation equilibrium price. It is also shown that trading volume is positively related to the directions of price changes. Moreover, we study how asset price volatility and trading volume are influenced by belief structures, short selling constraints and the amount of fund available for investment.Received: 23 January 2003, Revised: 30 April 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: D84, G12.We are grateful to Professors Mordecai Kurz, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Judd, Carsten Nielsen, Maurizio Motolese, Mark Garmaise, Jean-Michel Grandmont, Peter Hammond, Karl Shell, Jan Werner and participants of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Conference and Stanford Institute of Theoretical Economics (SITE) Conference for many helpful suggestions. Correspondence to: H.-M. Wu     

Organizations as constitutional systems

Four theoretical approaches to the study of organizations that can be identified in the relevant literature are compared: Thegoal paradigm, theexchange paradigm, thenexus of contracts paradigm, and theconstitutional paradigm. It is argued that the latter provides the more fruitful theoretical perspective in that it reconciles an individualist methodology with an account of organisations as corporate actors, as units of collective action. I would like to thank Richard E. Wagner for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.     

Market and underground activities in a two-sector dynamic equilibrium model

Summary. In this paper a two sector dynamic general equilibrium model is developed in order to evaluate the implications of the underground economy from a business cycle perspective. There are three main results. First, introducing an underground sector improves the fit of the model to the data, especially along several important labor market dimensions. Second, the model produces substantial internal propagation of temporary shocks. Third, it is shown that underground activities offer risk sharing opportunities by allowing households to smooth income through a proper labor allocation between the two sectors.Received: 17 June 2002, Revised: 25 April 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: E320, E260, J22, H200.We have benefited from the comments and suggestions of John Donaldson. We would also like to thank Paolo Siconolfi, Jean Pierre Danthine, Fausto Gozzi, Edmund Phelps, Gustavo Piga, Domenico Tosato, and the participants in the seminars at various universities, David Giles and Stefano Pisani for providing useful information on the underground data, Francesca Caponi for the comments and the information concerning the legal and fiscal aspects involved in the calibration, and Glenn Williams for the research assistance. Finally, we thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments on this and on earlier versions of the paper. Chiarini acknowledges financial support from the Ateneo Research fund of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, Dinamiche dell'integrazione europea e scelta di politica economica. All errors are ours. Correspondence to: F. Busato     

Complete characterization of Yannelis—Zame and Chichilnisky—Kalman—Mas-Colell properness conditions on preferences for separable concave functions defined inL + p andL p

Summary Properness of preferences are useful for proving existences of an equilibrium and of supporting prices in Banach Lattices. In this paper we characterize completely properness and uniform properness for separable concave functions defined inL ₊ ^p . We prove also that every separable concave function which is well-defined inL ^p is automatically continuous.The author would like to thank Rose-Anne DANA and three referees for their helpful remarks and suggestions.     

Unit-Consistent Poverty Indices

This paper characterizes unit-consistent poverty indices. The unit consistency axiom requires that poverty rankings (not poverty indices) remain unaffected when all incomes and the poverty lines are expressed in different measuring units. We consider two general frameworks of poverty measurement: the semi-individualistic framework that includes all decomposable indices and all rank-based indices; and the Dalton–Hagenaars framework that contains a subset of decomposable indices. Within the semi-individualistic framework, classes of unit-consistent poverty indices can be characterized for different value judgements about poverty measurement. Within the Dalton-Hagenaars framework, unit-consistent poverty indices are completely characterized without invoking any value judgement a priori. I thank Peter Lambert, Mike Hoy, Thesia Garner and an anonymous referee for their very helpful comments and suggestions.     

Consistent House Allocation

In practice we often face the problem of assigning indivisible objects (e.g., schools, housing, jobs, offices) to agents (e.g., students, homeless, workers, professors) when monetary compensations are not possible. We show that a rule that satisfies consistency, strategy-proofness, and efficiency must be an efficient generalized priority rule; i.e., it must adapt to an acyclic priority structure, except – maybe – for up to three agents in each object’s priority ordering. We are grateful to the Editor and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. L. Ehlers acknowledges financial support from the SSHRC (Canada)     

Balanced cycles in an OLG model with a continuum of finitely-lived individuals

This paper studies the intertemporal equilibrium of a barter economy populated with a continuum of finitely-lived overlapping generations. Assuming isoelastic preferences and zero endowments at the beginning and the end of the individuals’ life-span, it proves the existence of an Hopf bifurcation and provides sufficient conditions on parameters for its occurrenceThe authors would like to thank an anonymous referee, Alain Venditti and Francesco Ricci for helpful comments and suggestions     

Union games: technological unemployment

Summary. Given a production economy, we define union games by considering strategic behavior of the suppliers of factors. We refer to the Nash equilibria of this game as union equilibria. We analyze situations where the unemployment of factors is supported as a union equilibrium. The degree of unemployment depends on technological conditions. This allows us to model a source of unemployment which differs from the usual sources provided in the literature. We state a limit result that demonstrates that, as the market power of unions decreases, the corresponding sequence of union equilibria converges to the Walrasian equilibrium, that is, to full employment of factors. We also provide some examples that illustrate the main results.Received: 21 October 2004, Revised: 14 December 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D51, C72. Correspondence to: Emma Moreno-GarcíaE. Moreno acknowledges financial support from the Research Grant BEC2000-1388-C04-01 (Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER). G. Fernández de Córdoba and E. Moreno acknowledge financial support from the Research Grant SA091/02 from Junta de Castilla y León. We are indebted to C. Alós-Ferrer, C. Pita, D. Anisi, J. A. Ortega, F. Jimeno, J. P. Torres-Martínez, M. Steinert and C. Hervés for helpful comments and insights. We are particularly grateful to T. Kehoe and an anonymous referee for suggestions that improved this paper.     

Competitive equilibrium when preferences change over time

Summary. We show the existence of a competitive equilibrium in an economy with many consumers whose preferences may change over time. The demand correspondence of an individual consumer is determined by the set of subgame-perfect equilibrium outcomes in his intrapersonal game. For additively separable preferences with concave period utility functions that are unbounded above, this demand correspondence will satisfy the usual boundary conditions. Whenever consumers can recall their own mixed actions, this correspondence is convex-valued. This ensures the existence of a symmetric competitive equilibrium.Received: 29 July 2004, Revised: 17 November 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D51, D91, C73. Correspondence to: Thomas MariottiWe thank Michele Piccione for useful comments and suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System.     

Fiscal policy and private consumption behaviour: The Spanish case

In this article we analyse whether the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis is a valid approximation for Spains economic reality or whether there exist deviations from that situation which would be more in line with the conventional Keynesian perspective of the effects of debt on private consumption-savings decisions.Our aim is to contribute to the rather sparse empirical literature on the subject for the Spanish case. The analysis is based on annual aggregate data for Spain covering the years 1955 to 2000, and uses both the structural and the Euler equation approaches to test the neutrality proposition, and is thus to be considered as a generalization of foregoing work on the Spanish economy.The findings indicate that support for Ricardian equivalence is mixed, while we also find very little support for the Keynesian specification of consumption and fiscal policy.First revision received: March 2003 / Final version received: October 2003The authors wish to thank M. Ferré, J.M. González-Páramo, A. Marchante, P. Meguire, F. Pedraja, J.L. Raymond, J. Salinas and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions on this paper. We also thank the participants in the V Encuentro de Economía Aplicada (Oviedo, Spain, June 2002) and the XVII Simposio de Análisis Económico (Salamanca, Spain, December 2002) for their comments. Any remaining defects are our responsibility. We also are grateful to the Institute for Fiscal Studies of Spain (Ministerio de Hacienda, Secretaría de Estado de Hacienda) for its financial support.     

An efficiency characterization of plurality social choice on simple preference domains

Summary. We consider a model of social choice dealing with the problem of choosing a subset from a set of objects (e.g. candidate selection, membership, and qualification problems). Agents have trichotomous preferences for which objects are partitioned into three indifference classes, goods, bads, and nulls, or dichotomous preferences for which each object is either a good or a bad. We characterize plurality-like social choice rules on the basis of the three main axioms, known as Pareto efficiency, anonymity, and independence.Received: 29 August 2003, Revised: 3 June 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D70, D71, D72.Biung-Ghi Ju: I am grateful to William Thomson and Jianbo Zhang for their helpful comments and discussions. I also thank Brandon Dupont, the participants in seminars at Iowa State University, University of Kansas, and the Midwest Theory Meeting at University of Notre Dame. I thank an anonymous referee for detailed comments and suggestions that were very helpful in simplifying the proof of Theorem 1 and in revising the paper.