Recursive utility with unbounded aggregators

A new framework is presented for the study of the existence and uniqueness of solutions to the Koopmans’ equation in the unbounded case, that is based on the contraction mapping approach. In the bounded below case with bounded consumption streams, uniqueness of the solution in the whole class of weak-star continuous utility functions is obtained. When the aggregator is unbounded below and/or consumption streams are unbounded, existence of a weak-star continuous solution is shown, and a simple criterium to check the sufficient conditions for existence is provided. Juan Pablo Rincón-Zapatero and Carlos Rodríguez-Palmero gratefully acknowledge financial support by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and FEDER funds under Research Projects MTM2005-06534 and SEJ2005-08709/ECON, respectively, and by Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Castilla y León under Research Projects VA99/04 and VA017B05, respectively. This paper has substantially benefited from the comments of an anonymous referee. Particular and special thanks are due to Robert Becker for his very helpful comments and valuable suggestions.     

A market game approach to differential information economies

In this paper we recast a differential information economy as a strategic game in which players propose net trades and prices. Pure strategy Nash equilibria are strong and determine both consumption plans and commodity prices that coincide with the Walrasian Expectations equilibria of the underlying economy. The authors acknowledge support by research grants BEC2003-09067-C04-01 (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and FEDER), PGIDT04XIC30001PN (Xunta de Galicia) and SA070A05 (Junta de Castilla y León). JP Torres-Martínez is also grateful to CNPq-Brazil and University of Vigo for financial support. We are indebted to N.C. Yannelis for helpful comments and insights.     

Labour segregation and immigrant and native-born wage distributions in Spain: an analysis using matched employer–employee data

This article carries out an empirical examination of the origin of the differences between immigrant and native-born wage structures in the Spanish labour market. Special attention is given in the analysis to the role played by occupational and workplace segregation of immigrants. Legal immigrants from developing countries exhibit lower mean wages and a more compressed wage structure than native-born workers. By contrast, immigrants from developed countries display higher mean wages and a more dispersed wage structure. The main empirical finding is that the disparities in the wage distributions for the native-born and both groups of immigrants are largely explained by their different observed characteristics, with a particularly important influence in this context of workplace and, specially, occupational segregation. Hipólito Simón, Esteban Sanromá and Raúl Ramos wish to thank the support received from the Ministerio de Fomento and the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia through the projects T 75/2006 (Plan Nacional de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Científica), SEJ2004-05860/ECON and SEJ2005-04348/ECON, respectively. A previous version of this paper was published as an IVIE Working Paper (WP-EC 2007-03).     

Term structure and the estimated monetary policy rule in the Eurozone

In this paper we estimate a standard version of the New Keynesian Monetary (NKM) model augmented with term structure in order to analyze two issues. First, we analyze the effect of introducing an explicit term structure channel in the NKM model on the estimated parameter values of the model, with special emphasis on the interest rate smoothing parameter using data for the Eurozone. Second, we study the ability of the model to reproduce some stylized facts such as highly persistent dynamics, the weak comovement between economic activity and inflation, and the positive, strong comovement between interest rates observed in actual Eurozone data. The Sect. 3 implemented is a classical structural method based on the indirect inference principle. We are grateful to Eduardo Ley, two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the XXXI Simposio de Análisis Económico (Oviedo, Spain) and Bank of Spain for their useful comments. Financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and Universidad del País Vasco (Spain) and Fundación Séneca through projects SEJ2004-04811/ECON, 9/UPV00035.321-13511/2001 and I02937/PHCS/05, respectively, is gratefully acknowledged. The first author also thanks Fundación Ramón Areces for financial support.     

Income measurement and comparisons

The purpose of this paper is to provide a way for better measuring a country's global income when official statistics fail to account for the existence of a thriving underground, or black economy. Another purpose of this research is to discuss adequate ways to perform international comparisons of income, and income per head, and to correct for depreciation. Besides the general interest of this problem, there are two more specific reasons behind this work. First, the allocation of development funds by international agencies (for example, the structural funds in the European monetary system) are conditioned on this measure. Second, the measurement of unemployment may be totally distorted by failing to account for the hidden economy. This paper has benefitted from comments by the participants at the Forty-Seventh International Atlantic Economic Conference, Vienna, Austria, March 16–23, 1999, and especially Michael Pickhardt. Financial support is acknowledged from the Dirección General de Ciencia y Tecnología, under project SEC 98-1112, and the Junta Castilla y León, under project SA 29/99. Comments by the participants at the 1997 Applied Econometrics Association conference on public deficits are also acknowledged. The authors are solely responsible for any remaining errors.     

The Consumption/Wealth and Book/Market Ratios in a Dynamic Asset Pricing Contex

This paper addresses new insights into the predictability of financial returns. In particular, we analyze two aspects of the controversial forecasting literature. On the one hand, we demonstrate a positive and contemporaneous link between aggregate book/market and consumption/wealth ratios. On the other hand, we show that real estate and human capital, as the present value of all future salaries, are key components of the consumption/wealth ratio in Spain. Specifically, we find that the cointegrating residuals of consumption, asset holdings, real estate holdings, and our measure of human capital provide a better forecast of future returns than does the standard proxy of the consumption/wealth ratio. This result is important because it clarifies the importance of country-specific components of wealth for cases in which the consumption/wealth ratio is employed as an instrument in conditional asset pricing models.Belén Nieto: Financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología grant SEJ2005-09372 is gratefully acknowledged.Rosa Rodríguez: Financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología grant SEC2003-06457 is gratefully acknowledged.     

Optimal accident compensation schemes

This paper considers the way in which accident compensation is offered as insurance against personal injury due to accidents. We begin by setting up a simple microeconomic model in which accident compensation schemes can be studied. Using this model, the accident compensation scheme that maximizes the expected utility of the insured for a given expected outlay of the scheme (that is, for a budget constraint for the insurer) is characterized. We show that, in order for the optimal schedule of indemnities to be increasing (more severe accidents lead to greater compensation) then, contrary to what has been assumed in the literature, the marginal utility of wealth must be decreasing in health. In particular, if the marginal utility of wealth is non-decreasing in health, then an optimal indemnity schedule cannot provide full compensation, in the sense that utility in each state is a constant. Financial support from Secretaría de Estado de Universidades e Investigación del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia is gratefully acknowledged by F. J. Vázquez.     

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.     

Valuation and Management of Fishing Resources Under Price Uncertainty

The traditional expected-net-present-value methods cannot properly capture the management flexibility and strategic value aspects of a fishery, and may understate its value. Instead, this paper develops a Real Options model to conceptualize and evaluate fishery exploitation flexibility. Specifically, general models to value the opportunity to either exploit or invest in a fishery are presented. They suffice to determine not only these values, but also the optimal policy for opening, closing, delaying and setting its harvest rate. The sustainable case in which the harvest rate equals the natural net growth function is also considered. Concerning the exploitation decision, it is found that, as could be expected, the higher the resource price the higher the value of this opportunity in both models (general and sustainable). However, the resource stock affects both models differently. As to the investment opportunity, its value is always lower than the exploitation opportunity because of investment costs. Finally, numerical simulations are run in order to illustrate the nature of the solution. Sensitivity analysis concerning the influence of the tax rate, convenience yield, risk-free interest rate and price volatility on the value of the fishery is also reported. Earlier versions of this paper have benefited from conference participants at the Young Economists Conference 2000 (Oxford University), Tenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (Oregon State University), XXV Simposio de Análisis Económico (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain) and Seminar at the Dpt. Fundamentos del Análisis Económico (Universidad del País Vasco, Spain). We especially thank Prof. Ian Bateman and two anonymous referees whose insightful comments have enabled us to eliminate several errors and to improve the presentation. Murillas gratefully acknowledges doctoral fellowship from Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (AP96), and financial support from the Xunta de Galicia (PGIDT01PXI30004PR) and from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Teconología (SEC 2001-3700). The usual disclaimer applies.     

The optimality of the Common Fisheries Policy: the Northern Stock of Hake

We evaluate the management of the Northern Stock of Hake during 1986-2001. A stochastic bioeconomic model is calibrated to match the main features of this fishing ground. We show how catches, biomass stock and profits would have been if the optimal Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) consistent with the target biomass implied by the Fischler's Recovery Plan had been implemented. The main findings are: i) an optimal CFP would have generated profits of more than 667 millions euros, ii) if side-payments are allowed (implemented by ITQ's, for example) these profits increase 26%. JEL Classification: Q22, Q28 We thank two anonymous referees whose comments and suggestions have substantially improved the paper, and to Javier Pereiro from Instituto Oceanográfico de Vigo for making available part of data available to us. Financial support from the Instituto de Estudios Económicos de Galicia, Pedro Barrie de la Maza, FEDER, Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, SEC2002-4318-C02-01 (José María Da-Rocha), CICYT 1393-12254/2000 and SEC2003-02510/ECO (María José Gutiérrez), Fundación BBVA 1/BBVA 00044.321-15466/2002 (María José Gutiérrez) and from Universidad del País Vasco, 9/UPV00035.321-13511/2001 (María José Gutiérrez) is gratefully acknowledged.     

Post-earnings announcement drift: Spanish evidence

This paper analyses whether earnings announcements in the Spanish stock market are followed in subsequent months by a return drift in the same direction as the earnings surprise. Two alternative earnings surprise measures are used and they both provide strong post-earnings announcement drifts. In order to find an explanation for this anomaly we first make several unconditional adjustments, which include the CAPM, the Fama–French (J Financ Econ 33:3–56, 1993) three-factor model, a liquidity factor, controlling portfolios by size and book-to-market ratio, and controlling for the momentum effect. Second, we make a conditional analysis following two different approaches: (i) studying the relation with the business cycle and (ii) studying whether this phenomenon can be explained through a conditional version of the CAPM and the Fama-French model. None of these adjustments are able to satisfactorily capture the Spanish post-earnings announcement drift. A final analysis offers some slight evidence in favour of the limits-to-arbitrage explanation. A previous version of this paper is available in the Working Paper Series of FUNCAS (no. 221, 2005), who we thank for their collaboration in the research diffusion in Spain. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (SEJ2005-09372/ECON), Conselleria d’Empresa, Universitat i Ciència (GV06/196) and University of Alicante (GRJ06-03). This version has benefited from interesting comments made by Gonzalo Rubio, Belén Nieto, Natividad Blasco, Renata Herrerías and Carina Sponholtz, as well as by various anonymous referees. Any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.     

Corrigendum to “On randomized matching mechanisms” [Economic Theory 8(1996)377–381]

Ma (in Econ. Theory 8, 377–381, 1996) studied the random order mechanism, a matching mechanism suggested by Roth and Vande Vate (Econometrica 58, 1475–1480, 1990) for marriage markets. By means of an example he showed that the random order mechanism does not always reach all stable matchings. Although Ma's (1996) result is true, we show that the probability distribution he presented – and therefore the proof of his Claim 2 – is not correct. The mistake in the calculations by Ma (1996) is due to the fact that even though the example looks very symmetric, some of the calculations are not as “symmetric.” We thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. B. Klaus’s and F. Klijn’s research was supported by Ramón y Cajal contracts of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología. The work of the authors was also partially supported through the Spanish Plan Nacional I+D+I (BEC2002-02130 and SEJ2005-01690) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (SGR2005-00626 and the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA).     

Characterization and incentive compatibility of Walrasian expectations equilibrium in infinite dimensional commodity spaces

Summary. We consider a differential information economy with infinitely many commodities and analyze the veto power of the grand coalition with respect the ability of blocking non-Walrasian expectations equilibrium allocations. We provide two different Walrasian expectations equilibrium equivalence results. First by perturbing the initial endowments in a precise direction we show that an allocation is a Walrasian expectations equilibrium if and only if it is not privately dominated by the grand coalition. The second characterization deals with the fuzzy veto in the sense of Aubin but within a differential information setting. This second equivalence result provides a different characterization for the Walrasian expectations equilibrium and shows that the grand coalition privately blocks in the sense of Aubin any non Walrasian expectations equilibrium allocation with endowment participation rate arbitrarily close to the total initial endowment participation for every individual. Finally, we show that any no free disposal Walrasian expectations equilibria is coalitional Bayesian incentive compatible. Since the deterministic Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie model is a special case of the differential information economy model, one derives new characterizations of the Walrasian equilibria in economies with infinitely many commodities.Received: 29 October 2003, Revised: 24 February 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D51, D82, D11. Correspondence to: Emma Moreno-GarcíaThe authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for his/her careful reading and helpful comments and suggestions.C. Hervés and E. Moreno acknowledge support by Research Grant BEC2000-1388-C04-01 (Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER); and support by the Research Grant SA091/02 (Junta de Castilla y León).     

Environmental regulation: choice of instruments under imperfect compliance

Compliance is an important issue in environmental regulation. We discuss some of the key elements of the problem and analyze a situation where emissions are not random and firms are risk-neutral. We study the firm’s decision on emissions and compliance when the environmental regulation is based on standards and the enforcement agency audits the firm with a certain probability. We compare total emissions when environmental regulation is based on different instruments: standards, taxes, and tradable permits. We show that when compliance is an issue, environmental taxes are superior to the other instruments, and we analyze the (static) efficiency of the solution. This paper originated from the AEE/REE presidential address for the XXX Simposio de Análisis Económico (Murcia 2005). It builds on the research project on optimal enforcement in environmental problems done in collaboration with David Pérez-Castrillo. I would like to thank David Pérez-Castrillo and Pau Olivella for their useful comments. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (BEC2003-01132) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (Barcelona Economics - CREA and 2005SGR-00836).     

Equilibrium theory with asymmetric information and infinitely many states

Radner (Econometrica 36, 31–58 1968) proved existence of a competitive equilibrium for differential information economies with finitely many states. We extend this result to economies with infinitely many states of nature. Each agent observes a public and a private signal. The publicly observed signal may take infinitely many values but, in order to get existence, we assume that private signals only take finitely many values. Actually, there is no hope to get a general existence result since Podczeck et al. (Vienna University Working Papers 2008) already proposed non-existence results. We would like to thank a referee and the Associate Editor for valuable suggestions and remarks. The actual version of the paper has benefited from their comments. This work commenced while V.F. Martins-da-Rocha and P.K. Monteiro were visiting RGEA. Carlos Hervés Beloso acknowledges support from BEC2003-09067-C04-01 (Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER) and PGIDT04XIC30001PN (Xunta de Galicia). V.F. Martins-da-Rocha acknowledges partial financial support from PRONEX. P.K. Monteiro acknowledges the financial support of CNPq/Edital Universal 02/2006.     

Conditions for equivalence between sequentiality and subgame perfection

We characterize the class of finite extensive forms for which the sets of Subgame Perfect and Sequential equilibrium strategy profiles coincide for any possible payoff function. In addition, we identify the class of finite extensive forms for which the outcomes induced by these two solution concepts coincide. We thank Luis Corchón, Francesco De Sinopoli, Herbert Gintis, Sjaak Hurkens, Francisco Marhuenda, Eric Maskin and four anonymous referees for helpful comments. Carlos thanks the financial support of the Spanish MEC through its FPI Grant BES-2003-0822. Cristian thanks the grant Plan de Formación de Personal Investigador de la Comunidad de Madrid and the financial support from project No. SEJ2004-00968/ECON from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. The usual disclaimer applies.     

An empirical investigation of the effect of borrowing constraints on Spanish consumption

Abstract. This work analyses the relevance of borrowing constraints on the intertemporal behaviour of Spanish non-durable consumption. We estimate Euler equations with cohort data extracted from the “Encuesta Continua de Presupuestos Familiares” (ECPF) for the period 1985–1993. The results are robust to the use of different estimators to eliminate fixed individual effects, to different specifications of the model, to the effect of uncertainty and to the presence of habits in consumption. Our results allow us to conclude that non-durable consumption of a considerable fraction of the Spanish population is affected by borrowing constraints. At the same time, and in accordance with similar results for other countries, we confirm that borrowing constraints are especially important for the young. The author acknowledges the grant received from the Conselleria de Cultura, Educación y Ciencia de la Generalitat Valènciana, as part of its grant's programme for stays in foreign universities and the financial support by DGICYT grants SEC99-0820 and SEC 2002-00667. The author also acknowledges the hospitality of the Department of Economics at University College London (UCL) and of the Departamento de Análisis Económico de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. This work has been presented in the XXV Simposio de Análisis Económico, held in Bellaterra (Spain) in December 2000. Finally, the author acknowledges comments by J. E. Boscá and two anonymous referees that have contributed to improving the final version of the paper.     

Discounting long run average growth in stochastic dynamic programs

Summary. Finding solutions to the Bellman equation often relies on restrictive boundedness assumptions. In this paper we develop a method of proof that allows to dispense with the assumption that returns are bounded from above. In applications our assumptions only imply that long run average (expected) growth is sufficiently discounted, in sharp contrast with classical assumptions either absolutely bounding growth or bounding each period (instead of long run) maximum (instead of average) growth. We discuss our work in relation to the literature and provide several examples. Received: July 26, 2000; revised version: July 10, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" I am specially grateful to Cuong Le Van and to anonymous referee for detecting an error in a previous version of this paper and for suggestions that sensibly improved the paper. Comments and suggestions are also acknowledged to Michele Boldrin, Raouf Boucekkine, Fabrice Collard, Tim Kehoe, Omar Licandro, and Luis Puch. I am also indebted to participants to the III Summer School on Economic Theory held at the Universidade de Vigo, the Macroeconomics Workshop at the Universitat Autò}noma de Barcelona, and the Econometrics Seminar at Tilburg University. Financial support from the Belgian government, under project PAI P4/01, at the IRES-UCL, from a European Marie Curie fellowship, Grant HPMF-CT-1999-00410, at the CEPREMAP, and from IVIE and Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER, under project BEC2001-0535, at the Universidad de Alicante, is gratefully acknowledged.     

Price setting and the steady-state effects of inflation

This paper examines how price setting plays a key role in explaining the steady-state effects of inflation in a monopolistic competition economy with transactions-facilitating money. Three pricing variants (optimal prices, indexed prices, and unchanged prices) are introduced through a generalization of the Calvo-type setting that allows price indexation. We found that in an economy with less indexed prices, the steady-state negative impact of inflation on output is higher. Regarding welfare analysis, our results support a long-run monetary policy aimed at price stability with a close-to-zero inflation target. This finding is robust to any price setting scenario.JEL Classification: E13, E31, E50The writing of this paper commenced during the time I spent on the Research Visitors Programme 2001 of the European Central Bank and an earlier version of the paper became ECB Working Paper No. 140. I would like to thank Bennett T. McCallum, Frank Smets, and Oscar Bajo-Rubio for their valuable comments and suggestions, and the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología of Spain for its financial support (Research Project 2002/00954).     

Forward induction and entry deterrence: an experiment

The Dixit (Econ J 90:95–106, 1980) hypothesis that incumbents use investment in capacity to deter potential entrants has found little empirical support. Bagwell and Ramey (J Econ 27:660–680, 1996) propose a model where, in the unique game-theoretic prediction based on forward induction or iterated elimination of weakly-dominated strategies, the incumbent does not have the strategic advantage. We conduct an experiment with games inspired by these models. In the Dixit-style game, the incumbent monopolizes the market most of the time even without the investment in capacity. In our Bagwell-and-Ramey-style game, the incumbent also tends to keep the market, in contrast to the predictions of an entrant advantage. Nevertheless, we find strong evidence that forward induction affects the behavior of most participants. The results of our games suggest that players perceive that the first mover has an advantage without having to pre-commit capacity. In our Bagwell–Ramey game, evolution and learning do not drive out this perception. We back these claims with data analysis and a theoretical framework for dynamics. Financial support by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia and Tecnología (SEC2002-01352 and SEJ2006-11665-C02-01) and the Barcelona Economic Program of CREA and excellent research assistance by David Rodríguez are gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank Aurora García Gallego and Armin Schmutzler for helpful comments.