Why is there money? Endogenous derivation of `money' as the most liquid asset: a class of examples

Summary. The monetary character of trade, use of a common medium of exchange, is shown to be an outcome of an economic general equilibrium. Monetary structure can be derived from price theory in a modified Arrow-Debreu model. Two constructs are added: transaction costs and market segmentation in trading posts (with a separate budget constraint at each transaction). Commodity money arises endogenously as the most liquid (lowest transaction cost) asset. Government-issued fiat money has a positive equilibrium value from its acceptability for tax payments. Scale economies in transaction cost account for uniqueness of the (fiat or commodity) money in equilibrium. Received: February 15, 2002; revised version: August 12, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" This paper has benefited from seminars and colleagues' helpful remarks at the University of California - Santa Barbara, University of California - San Diego, NSF-NBER Conference on General Equilibrium Theory at Purdue University, Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics at San Diego State University, Econometric Society at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, SITE at Stanford University-2001, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Midwest Economic Theory Conference at the University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign, University of Iowa, Southern California Economic Theory Conference at UC - Santa Barbara, Midwest Macroeconomics Conference at University of Iowa, University of California - Berkeley, European Workshop on General Equilibrium Theory at University of Paris I, Society for Economic Dynamics at San Jose Costa Rica, World Congress of the Econometric Society at University of Washington, Cowles Foundation at Yale University. It is a pleasure to acknowledge comments of Henning Bohn, Harold Cole, James Hamilton, Mukul Majumdar, Harry Markowitz, Chris Phelan, Meenakshi Rajeev, Wendy Shaffer, Bruce Smith, and Max Stinchcombe.     

Heterogeneous traders and the Tobin tax

To study the effectiveness of the Tobin tax, we develop a model of heterogeneous interacting agents. Traders either speculate on the basis of technical or fundamental analysis, or abstain from the market, a decision which depends on profit considerations, as well as communication between agents. Simulations generate stylized facts such as unit roots in exchange rates, fat tails for returns, or volatility clustering. The imposition of a Tobin tax leads to a crowding out of speculators and stabilizes the dynamics. However, the decreasing impact of fundamentalists triggers misalignments if tax rates are too high. RID="*" ID="*" Presented at the Economic Dynamics Workshop, Leiden, June 2002, and at the Computational Economics and Finance Workshop, Eltville, October 2002. I thank the participants for helpful discussions, especially Carl Chiarella, Cars Hommes, Seppo Honkapohja, Alan Kirman, Thomas Lux, Stefan Reitz, and Didier Sornette. I also thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.     

Schumpeter and the revival of evolutionary economics: an appraisal of the literature

During the last two decades we have seen a revival of interest in the works of Joseph Schumpeter and “evolutionary” ideas in economics more generally. A professional society honouring Schumpeter's name has been founded, and linked to it we have had for more than fifteen years now a professional journal devoted to this stream of thought. However, it has been argued that, despite these developments, the link between Schumpeter's own work and the more recent contributions to evolutionary economics is in fact rather weak. This paper considers this claim. Based on an analysis of Schumpeter's contribution to economics the paper presents an overview and assessment of the more recent literature in this area. It is argued that although there are important differences between Schumpeter's work and some of the more recent contributions, there nevertheless remains a strong common core that clearly distinguishes the evolutionary stream from other approaches (such as, for instance, so-called “new growth theory”). RID="*" ID="*" Many people have contributed to this paper in various ways. Jon Hekland at the Norwegian Research Council started it all by asking me to make an overview of the contribution from “evolutionary economics” to our understanding of contemporary economies. Several people helped me on the way by supplying written material, comments and suggestions, and I am indebted to all of them. Brian Arthur, Stan Metcalfe, Keith Pavitt, Erik Reinert, Paolo Saviotti and Bart Verspagen may be particularly mentioned. A preliminary version was presented at the conference “Industrial R&D and Innovation Policy Learning – Evolutionary Perspectives and New Methods for Impact Assessment” organised by the Norwegian Research Council (“SAKI”) at Leangkollen, Asker, April 18–19.2002. I wish to thank the discussant, Tor Jakob Klette, and the participants at the conference for useful feedback. Moreover I have benefited from comments and suggestions from the editors and referees of this journal. The final responsibility is mine, however. Economic support from the Norwegian Research Council (“SAKI”) is gratefully acknowledged.     

Interactive expectations

In modeling expectation formation, economic agents are usually viewed as forming expectations adaptively or in accordance with some rationality postulate. We offer an alternative nonlinear model where agents exchange their opinions and information with each other. Such a model yields multiple equilibria, or attracting distributions, that are persistent but subject to sudden large jumps. Using German Federal Statistical Office economic indicators and German IFO Poll expectational data, we show that this kind of model performs well in simulation experiments. Focusing upon producers' expectations in the consumption goods sector, we also discover evidence that structural change in the interactive process occurred over the period of investigation (1970–1998). Specifically, interactions in expectation formation seem to have become less important over time. RID="*" ID="*"We would like to thank Ulrich Witt, Director of the Evolutionary Economics Unit, The Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems, Jena, Germany, for providing the intellectual stimulus for this project and arranging the necessary financial support from the Max Planck Society to facilitate our collaboration. Thanks are also due to the IFO Institute for providing the data for this study. However, the usual caveat applies.     

A class of fair distribution rules à la Rawls and Sen

Summary. This paper discusses and develops “non-welfaristic” arguments on distributive justice à la J. Rawls and A. K. Sen, and formalizes, in cooperative production economies, “non-welfaristic” distribution rules as game form types of resource allocation schemes. First, it conceptualizes Needs Principle which the distribution rule should satisfy if this takes individuals' needs into account. Second, one class of distribution rules which satisfy Needs Principle, a class of J-based Capability Maximum Rules, is proposed. Third, axiomatic characterizations of the class of J-based Capability Maximum Rules are provided. Received: July 30, 1999; revised version: March 11, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We are grateful to an anonymous referee of this journal, Professors Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel, Ryo-ichi Nagahisa, Prasanta Pattanaik, Kotaro Suzumura, Koich Tadenuma, and Yongsheng Xu for their fruitful comments. An earlier version of this paper was published with the title name, “A Game Form Approach to Theories of Distributive Justice: Formalizing Needs Principle” as the Discussion Paper No. 407 of the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University, and in the proceedings of the International Conference on Logic, Game, and Social Choice held at Oisterwijk in May 1999. That version was also presented at the 3rd Decentralization Conference in Japan held at Hitotsubashi University in September 1997, at the annual meeting of the Japan Association of Economics and Econometrics held at Waseda University in September 1997, and the 4th International Conference of Social Choice and Welfare held at University of British Colombia in July 1998. This research was partially supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Correspondence to: N. Yoshihara     

Economic policy making in evolutionary perspective

Economic policy making is discussed from three different angles: the political economy of actual policy making (“what policy does do”), the analysis of policy instruments for given ends (“what policy could do”), and the debate on policy goals and their legitimization (“what policy ought to do”). Center stage in the evolutionary perspective is new, positive and normative knowledge which is unfolding during the policy making process and in its aftermath. It is argued that this implies regularities and constraints which extend and modify the comparative-static interpretations of public choice theory, economic policy making theory, and social philosophy. RID="*" ID="*" The author should like to thank three anonymous referees of this journal and the editor for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.     

Persistent unemployment and co-ordination issues: an evolutionary perspective

Abstract. In this paper we look at unemployment as a phenomenon which reflects the co-ordination problems that characterize out-of-equilibrium processes of adjustment. The analysis carried out shifts the focus from structural factors to the economic process. It shows that unemployment cannot be satisfactorily explained – and policy interventions devised – by focusing only on specific characters of the technology or confining the analysis to structural factors concerning the labour market. The co-ordination mechanisms of adjustment processes rather than the fundamentals of the economy appear, in this light, as the main determinants of differences in unemployment trends in different economies; and monetary policy comes back to the center of the stage as an essential element of the working of these mechanisms. RID="*" ID="*" We thank anonymous referees for their very useful comments, and Elena Lega for the helpful support to the simulation analysis carried out. Correspondence to: J.-L. Gaffard     

Endogenous fluctuations in the demand for education

Abstract. Enrollment rates to higher education reveal a quite large variation over time which cannot be explained by productivity shocks alone. We develop a human capital investment model in an overlapping generations framework that features endogenous fluctuations in the demand for education. Agents are heterogeneous in their beliefs about future wage differentials. An evolutionary competition between the heterogeneous beliefs determines the fraction of the newborn generation having a certain belief. Costly access to information on the returns to education induces agents to use potentially destabilizing backward looking prediction rules. Only if previous generations experience regret about their human capital investment decisions, will agents choose a more sophisticated prediction rule that dampens the cycle. Access to information becomes key for stable flows to higher education. RID="*" ID="*"We would like to thank Cars Hommes, Florian Wagener, seminar participants at the University of Amsterdam, participants of the workshop on ‘Skill Needs and Labor Market Dynamics’ at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) for helpful discussions, and an editor of this Journal and three anonymous referees for their comments. Tuinstra's research is supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under a MaG-Pionier grant. Neugart acknowledges financial support from the German Ministry of Education. Parts of the research were done while Tuinstra was visiting the WZB and when Neugart was visiting CeNDEF. Correspondence to: The research for this paper was done while the first author was affiliated with the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.     

Sunspot cycles

Summary. This paper shows new properties about the equilibria of a stationary OG economy by establishing a connection between its stationary equilibria and those of a finite economy, with and without extrinsic uncertainty. Specifically, it shows the countability and local uniqueness with respect to the sup metric of the so-called sunspot cycles introduced here, that encompass both the deterministic cycles and the usual finite Markovian stationary sunspot equilibria. These sunspot cycles are, moreover, able to generate, at a lower cost in terms of assumptions than other sunspot equilibria, time series with the recurrent but irregular fluctuations typical of economic time series. Received: July 26, 2001; revised version: March 5, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" I want to thank an anonymous referee for comments that have helped greatly to improve this paper, as well as the comments about its contents received from several audiences in different seminars and conferences (the Economic Theory seminar of the University of Pennsylvania, the 2001 Meeting of the Econometric Society held at New Orleans, the 2000 Econometric Society World Congress, the 2000 Society for Economic Design Conference) and from comments to a previous paper, Dávila [10], specially from Jim Peck at the 1997 Workshop on General Equilibrium held at the University of Venice, that eventually lead to this one.     

Theoretical perspectives on strategic environmental management

Strategic Environmental Management (SEM) incorporates into firms' core strategies the transformation of products and processes that they believe an environmentally concerned society will increasingly demand. Significant threads have to do with the discovery of cost savings and market opportunities from reducing environmental impacts. SEM, like the environmental regulation hypothesis associated with Michael Porter, implies that society's efforts to reduce external environmental costs often lead to identification of hitherto-ignored or undeveloped profit possibilities. This would be surprising from the standpoint of neoclassical economic theory, to the extent that SEM utilizes available information about the potential costs and benefits of projects. Within the framework of evolutionary, capabilities-based theories of the firm, however, this discovery and its exploitation in SEM make perfect sense. Capabilities theory would imply that firms' intrinsic path dependence may previously have obscured such opportunities. This paper examines the theory of SEM, its implications for neoclassical and capabilities theories of the firm, and survey results drawn from the author's work with member companies in a regional pollution prevention roundtable. RID="*" IDI have enjoyed the able and insightful research assistance of Justin Vernon. Cooperation from the companies that participated in the survey, and financial support from Allegheny College and its Center for Economic and Environmental Development, are gratefully acknowledged. Reviewers for this journal provided numerous, valuable suggestions. Responsibility for the material herein remains mine alone.     

Knowledge and markets

An economy is a coordinated system of distributed knowledge. Economic evolution occurs as knowledge grows and the structure of the system changes. This paper is about the role of markets in this process. Traditionally, the theory of markets has not been a central feature of evolutionary economics. This seems to be due to the orthodox view of markets as information-processing mechanisms for finding equilibria. But in economic evolution markets are actually knowledge-structuring mechanisms. What then is the relation between knowledge, information, markets and mechanisms? I argue that an evolutionary theory of markets, in the manner of Loasby (1999), requires a clear formulation of these relations. I suggest that a conception of knowledge and markets in terms of a graphical theory of complex systems furnishes precisely this.     

A Model of Financial Markets with Endogenously Correlated Rational Beliefs

This paper studies how communication amongst agents influences the equilibria of a financial economy. We set up a standard overlapping generations model with assets, while allowing for heterogeneous beliefs. The paper explicitly describes how communication causes the beliefs of the agents to be correlated. In particular, it is shown that communication may generate large fluctuations even if the unconditional probability beliefs themselves are independent. Because of the complex nature of the problem, we use simulations to examine the characteristics of the equilibria Part of the results presented in this paper is based on my Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University. I gratefully acknowledge the inspiration obtained from innumerable discussions with Mordecai Kurz about this subject over the years. Also, I appreciate comments from Kenneth J. Arrow and Peter J. Hammond as well as from the participants of the workshop at Stanford University, University of Tokyo and the 1st Illinois workshop in Economic Theory (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and the anonymous referee     

On bubbling dynamics generated by a stochastic model of herd behavior

This paper suggests a class of stochastic collective learning processes exhibiting very irregular behavior. In particular, there are multimodal long run distributions. Some of these modes may vanish as the population size increases. This may be thought of as “bubbles” persistent for a finite range of population sizes but disappearing in the limit. The limit distribution proves to be a discontinuous function of parameters determining the learning process. This gives rise to another type of “bubbles”: limit outcomes corresponding to small perturbations of parameters are different. Since an agent's decision rule involves imitation of the majority choice in a random sample of other members of the population, the resulting collective dynamics exhibit “herding” or “epidemic” features. RID="*" ID="*" We are grateful to two anonymous referees for the comments and suggestions. Correspondence to: L. Gaio     

Equilibrium in a decentralized market with adverse selection

Summary. This paper deals with trade volume and distribution of surplus in markets subject to adverse selection. In a model where two qualities of a good exist, I show that if trade is decentralized (i.e. conducted via random pairwise meetings of agents), then all units of the good are traded, and all agents have positive ex-ante expected payoffs. This feature is present regardless of the quality distribution, and persists in the limit as discounting is made negligible. This offers a sharp contrast to models of centralized trade with adverse selection (Akerlof, Wilson). Received: April 2, 2001; revised version: March 29, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" This research was funded by a grant from UQAM. I wish to thank Roberto Serrano and seminar participants at UQAM, Queen's University at Kingston, the 2001 CEME General Equilibrium Conference (Brown University), and the 2001 North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society (University of Maryland) for comments.     

Environmental tax policy in a model of growth cycles

Summary. The purpose of this paper is to consider environmental taxation which would control emissions of firms in a model of growth cycles. In the model presented below, the economy may experience two phases of growth and environmental quality: “the no-innovation growth regime” and “the innovation-led growth regime”. Aggregate capital and environmental quality remain constant in the no-innovation growth regime, while they perpetually increase in the innovation-led growth regime. The paper shows that the tax plays a key role in determining whether the economy stably converges to one of the two regimes or fluctuates permanently between them. It also shows that there is a critical level of the tax and that the economy obtains higher growth rates of capital and environmental quality by raising (or reducing) the tax if the initial tax is below (or above) the critical level. Received: April 2, 2001; revised version: March 21, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" This research reported here was conducted within the research project “Project on Intergenerational Equity” at Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University. I am deeply grateful to an anonymous referee for his or her insightful comments, which greatly improved the paper. I also thank Hiroshi Honda, Yasuo Maeda, Yuji Nakayama, and participants in workshops at Hitotsubashi University, Kyoto University, Nagoya University, Osaka University, University of Tsukuba, Yokohama National University, and University of Tokyo for their valuable comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are mine.     

A note on control costs and logit rules for strategic games

We consider best response dynamics with endogenous noise based on a finite game in strategic form. A player can reduce the noise level by expending an extra effort and incurring some disutility or control costs. We specify control costs that result in logit adjustment rules. The stochastically stable states of the dynamic process are partial Nash configurations, that is, states where at least one player plays a best response against the others. If the game has a potential, then the stochastically stable states coincide with the Nash equilibria on which the potential is maximized. RID="*" ID="*" Instructive comments of a referee are gratefully acknowledged. Correspondence to:H. Haller     

Satiation in an evolutionary model of structural economic dynamics

This paper presents the problem of satiation of consumption and technology in relation to a model of evolutionary endogenous growth. The model represents an attempt to provide an evolutionary economic micro foundation to Pasinetti's scheme of the structural economic dynamics of an economy that is based on only labour and knowledge. The micro foundation is based on a set of rules that makes endogenous the demand coefficients, the labour coefficients, and the number of available sectors. Through process innovations firms increase their productivities with respect to individual goods, but a growth slowdown takes place unless the benefits from specialisation are exploited at still higher levels. Another cause for slowdown is related to an Engelian hierarchy of goods. As the standard of living grows, existing sectors and consumption goods satiate, so new sectors need to be provided by product innovations in a sufficient pace to keep up with the labour that is displaced from old sectors.     

Evolution of harvesting strategies: replicator and resource dynamics

Abstract. Economic theories of managing renewable resources, such as fisheries and forestry, traditionally assume that individual harvesters are perfectly rational and thus able to compute the harvesting strategy that maximizes their discounted profits. The current paper presents an alternative approach based on bounded rationality and evolutionary mechanisms. It is assumed that individual harvesters face a choice between two harvesting strategies. The evolution of the distribution of strategies in the population is modeled through a replicator dynamics equation. The latter captures the idea that strategies yielding above average profits are demanded more than strategies yielding below average profits, so that the first type ends up accounting for a larger part in the population. From a mathematical perspective, the combination of resource and evolutionary processes leads to complex dynamics. The paper presents the existence and stability conditions for each steady-state of the system and analyzes dynamic paths to the equilibrium. In addition, effects of changes in prices are analyzed. A main result of the paper is that under certain conditions both strategies can survive in the long-run. Correspondence to: J. Noailly     

Recursive structure and equilibria in games with private monitoring

Summary. In each stage of a repeated game with private monitoring, the players receive payoffs and privately observe signals which depend on the players' actions and the state of world. I show that, contrary to a widely held belief, such games admit a recursive structure. More precisely, I construct a representation of the original sequential problem as a sequence of static games with incomplete information. This establishes the ground for a characterization of strategies and, hence, of behavior in interactive-decision settings where private information is present. Finally, the representation is used to give a recursive characterization of the equilibrium payoff set, by means of a multi-player generalization of dynamic programming. Received: February 11, 2002; revised version: July 22, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" I am very grateful to In-Koo Cho, Larry Epstein, Denis Gromb, Stephen Morris, Paolo Siconolfi, Lones Smith and Max Stinchcombe for several insights and suggestions. A referee's comments helped improving the exposition. Finally, I wish to thank the participants to the seminars at MEDS, NYU, Columbia University, Caltech, UCLA, University of Rochester, University of Texas-Austin, Northwestern Summer Microeconomics Conference 98, Summer in Tel Aviv 98, and NASM98.