The effects of households’ and firms’ borrowing constraints on economic growth

This paper considers an endogenous growth model with asymmetric information between lenders and borrowers, that leads to credit-rationing a proportion of borrowers. However, in contrast to the existing literature, in this model, both firms and consumers face borrowing constraints. Nonetheless, the borrowing constraints facing a firm and those encountered by a consumer have opposing effects on growth. Relaxing borrowing constraints on firms is growth-promoting, as more funds become available for productive investment. In contrast, relaxing borrowing constraints facing consumers has a detrimental effect, as funds are diverted from productive investment to consumption. Such an adverse effect may offset the externality effect present in the production function that would otherwise ensure perpetual growth. Furthermore, it is shown that the interaction between households’ and firms’ borrowing constraints may give rise to endogenous cycles.     

An experimental test of observational learning under imperfect information

Summary. Nearly all observational learning models assume that individuals can observe all the decisions that have previously been made. In reality, such perfect information is rarely available. To explore the difference between observational learning under perfect and imperfect information, this paper takes an experimental look at a situation in which individuals learn by observing the behavior of their immediate predecessors. Our experimental design uses the procedures of Çelen and Kariv [9] and is based on the theory of Çelen and Kariv [10]. We find that imitation is much less frequent when subjects have imperfect information, even less frequent than the theory predicts. Further, while we find strong evidence that under perfect information a form of generalized Bayesian behavior adequately explains behavior in the laboratory, under imperfect information behavior is not consistent even with this generalization of Bayesian behavior.Received: 29 January 2002, Revised: 12 May 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C92, D8. Correspondence to: Boaçhan ÇelenWe completed most of this paper when we were both graduate students at New York University. This research was supported by the Center for Experimental Social Sciences (C.E.S.S.) and the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University. We are grateful to Andrew Schotter for his guidance and to an anonymous referee for his comments. We benefited from the expositional suggestions of William Baumol. We also acknowledge helpful discussions of Colin Camerer, Liran Einav, Xavier Gabaix, Douglas Gale, Charles Holt, David Laibson, and Matthew Rabin. We also benefited from suggestions by the participants of the 2002 International ESA Meeting and seminars at several universities.     

The impact of China's accession to the WTO on its economy: an imperfect competitive CGE analysis

To examine the impact of trade barrier reductions on the Chinese economy following its WTO accession, a single‐country, static CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) model is constructed, which incorporates certain elements of imperfect competition in China's current economic situation. China's real GDP and total employment are expected to rise by small degrees, while the general price level may decline by a few percentage points. Total imports would rise by more than 10%, whereas total exports would increase far less. China's trade surplus is, therefore, likely to shrink substantially and its dependence upon foreign trade is likely to rise by a few percentage points. A sensitivity analysis confirms the robustness of the simulation results. A comparison with other CGE studies on China's trade liberalization also shows the plausibility of this study's predictions.

JEL Classification: F17, C68     

Slanting advice and biasing recommendations for welfare gains in an imperfect world

The socially optimal biasing of point recommendations to groups of economic agents, for example extension advice to farmers or small firms, is discussed. The optimal bias depends on the comparative values of the second order derivatives of net benefits obtained by individuals within the groups from the information transmitted. While it is often uneconomic to tailor extension advice or information to individual circumstances, various conditions of diversity identified in this paper favour differentiation of recommendations.     

The feasibility of low inflation: theory with an application to the argentine case

In this paper we review the Argentine experience of hyperinflation, concentrating on understanding why stabilization took so long, and was only implemented by the most unlikely candidate. To explain these facts we present a voting model in which politicians' actions transmit information about the state of the economy and thus shape voters' behavior. We discuss the implications of the model for countries which are going through the same instability that characterized Argentina in the late 80s.     

利率作用不对称性对投资的影响研究

1996年后我国经济经历了通缩、通胀和两者共存的发展阶段,央行在货币政策工具的运用上开始逐渐重视利率的调控作用,曾在7年内7次下调贷款利率,2004年后随着经济的复苏和通胀压力的增大,我国再次进入加息周期。利率的历次变动是否发挥了货币政策对各经济变量传导功能是市场普遍关注的问题。运用1996～2007年的季度数据,在分别考察了利率下调及上升基础上,对我国资产投资的利率弹性做出定量分析,并在投资总量持续增长的条件下对投资同比增长率和利率变动的相关性进行了检验。     

Towards an information economy : The case of Singapore

Recent empirical studies have documented the emergence of information-based economies in developed countries within Europe, the U.S.A., Japan, and Australia. Casual observations suggest that the newly industrializing country of Singapore is proceeding towards a similar trend. The primary purpose of this paper is to account for the share of Singapore's national product which originates from informational activities. In particular, we define and estimate the size of Singapore's information sector within an input-output framework. Our results indicated that a sizable portion of Singapore's economy is information-based. In view of the significant penetration of informational activities in economic production, advances in communication technology and concomitant improvements in information-handling capabilities are bound to affect factor productivities and incomes with consequences for a country's pattern of employment and production structure. It is anticipated that an economics of communication becomes necessary for an awareness of communication technology as a choice variable in economic planning. We conclude our discussion with an assessment of the admissability of an information sector concept in economic analysis and the usefulness of empirical studies based on such a concept.     

开放经济条件下公司使用利率互换的动机

在开放经济条件下,以公司为背景,对利率互换的使用动机进行研究。给出了一个利率互换对利率风险控制作用的信息经济学解释,证明了利用利率互换,有利于公司利率风险暴露的降低,尤其是在债务融资时同时使用利率互换可以有效控制利率风险并减少融资成本。     

Health insurance subsidies and the expansion of an implicit marriage penalty: a regional comparison of various means-tested programmes

Any subsidy provision for healthcare premiums, including those embedded in Affordable Care Act (ACA), has the potential to result in some couples facing an implicit penalty when married relative to unmarried. To illustrate such consequences of means-tested subsidies of health insurance premiums, we construct hypothetical households earning different levels of income who are eligible for current subsidies in the USA. and compare the estimated implicit marriage penalty faced by these households to the one faced by low-income households who are eligible for various means-tested programmes (e.g. TANF, WIC, SNAP) for each of the 48 contiguous states. We find that, like very low-income households, marriage can potentially penalize couples who receive health insurance premium subsidies by decreasing their overall disposable income by as much as 14%. We find that the ACA increases the number of households subject to marriage penalties embedded in means-tested programmes for low-income couples. This distortion will exist for any future health insurance premium subsidies that are means tested at the household income level.     

The evolution of conventions under incomplete information

Summary. We formulate an evolutionary learning process with trembles for static games of incomplete information. For many games, if the amount of trembling is small, play will be in accordance with the games (strict) Bayesian equilibria most of the time. This supports the notion of Bayesian equilibrium. Often the process will select a specific equilibrium. We study an extension to incomplete information of the prototype conflict known as Chicken and find that the equilibrium selection by evolutionary learning may well be in favor of inefficient Bayesian equilibria where some types of players fail to coordinate.Received: 17 March 2003, Revised: 3 December 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C72.     

How to pay for the war in times of imperfect commitment: Adam Smith and David Ricardo on the sinking fund

The paper proposes a comparative analysis of Smith's and Ricardo's views on the sinking fund. It shows that Smith and Ricardo agreed in stressing the ineffectiveness of the sinking fund as a policy instrument targeted at public debt repayment and tax-burden relief, pointing out that its actual workings had paradoxically helped to increase rather than reduce British total debt-load. Moreover, their explanation of the sinking fund paradox integrates a defective fiscal commitment technology with powerful politicians’ incentives to siphon off the money stored in the sinking fund to meet sudden increases of public expenditure whenever the occasion arose.     

The economic effects of restrictions on government budget deficits: imperfect private credit markets

Summary. The present paper is an extension of Ghiglino and Shell [7] to the case of imperfect consumer credit markets. We show that with constraints on individual credit and only anonymous (i.e., non-personalized) lump-sum taxes, strong (or “global”) irrelevance of government budget deficits is not possible, and weak (or “local”) irrelevance can hold only in very special situations. This is in sharp contrast to the result for perfect credit markets. With credit constraints and anonymous consumption taxes, weak irrelevance holds if the number of tax instruments is sufficiently large and at least one consumer's credit constraint is not binding. This is an extension of the result for perfect credit markets. Received: August 28, 2001; revised version: March 25, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We thank Todd Keister, Bruce Smith, and two referees for helpful comments. Correspondence to: C. Ghiglino     

The value of information for auctioneers

An auctioneer wants to sell an indivisible object to one of multiple bidders, who have private information about their valuations of the object. A bidder's information structure determines the accuracy with which the bidder knows her private valuation. The main result of the paper is that the auctioneer's revenue is a convex function of bidders' information structures. One implication is that assigning asymmetric information structures instead of symmetric information structures to bidders is always revenue-enhancing. This paper generalizes a result of Bergemann and Pesendorfer [D. Bergemann, M. Pesendorfer, Information structures in optimal auctions, J. Econ. Theory 137 (2007) 580–609], who show that revenue-maximizing information structures are asymmetric.     

Monetary Regime Choice and Optimal Credit Rationing at the Official Rate: The Case of Russia

ABSTRACT

Stabilizing monetary policy in a small open economy is constrained by the open economy trilemma. In this paper, we investigate whether foreign exchange market interventions and the Central Bank’s credit rationing at the official rate (CROR) may soften this constraint and improve the results of monetary policy for different monetary regimes. We construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model appropriate for analyzing the forward-looking behavior of households facing non-zero probabilities of losing access to financial market and CROR. We have found significant credit rationing in the quarterly Russian data of 2001:Q1–2014:Q2. The probability of losing access to financial market and the probability of CROR are estimated as 22% and 66%, respectively. Using Russian data of 2001:Q1–2014:Q2 we demonstrate that CROR provoked forward-looking activity in financial market, which led to more Ruble devaluation in the crises of 2008–2009. It improved poor countercyclical performance of two Russian monetary policy rules, whereas made small effect on welfare. Welfare maximization exercises reveal a tradeoff between low-inflation and high-welfare solutions and favor of a floating exchange rate regime. We found the optimal value of the probability of CROR in both exchange rate-based and Taylor rule-based models but resulting improvement in welfare is very small.     

Inflation targeting credibility and reputation: The consequences for the interest rate

The measurement of credibility and reputation is fundamental for the analysis of countries which adopted inflation targeting. Under this perspective, the objective of this article is to illustrate which measures of credibility and reputation are most useful in predicting variations of interest rates. Given a specific inflation target, this relationship is valuable for central bankers as well as for private agents trying to predict the central bank's policies. Due to the fact that Brazil represents a potential laboratory experiment in which the effects of an adoption of inflation targeting after more than a half decade can be observed, an analysis through several indices and its relation with the basic interest rate is made. The findings denote that the credibility indices based on reputation represent an alternative in the cases where the series of inflation expectation are not available. Furthermore, the empirical evidence confirms the hypothesis that higher credibility implies lower variations in the interest rate for controlling inflation.     

The core of an exchange economy with asymmetric information

This paper studies the core of an exchange economy in which agents are asymmetrically informed about states of nature. An agent's information is modelled as part of his consumption set and thus as part of his consumption plans. If an agent joins a coalition, his information changes according to an exogenously given information rule, a concept introduced by B. Allen. It is shown that an exchange economy with asymmetric information generates a well defined cooperative game and that the core of this game and thus the core of the underlying economy is nonempty. In contrast to recent results, this holds independently of the given information rule.     

云南省大学生到村任职的现状调查与研究

选聘高校毕业生到村任职是新时期我党加强和改善农村基层政权、建设社会主义新农村、全面实现建设小康社会的重大举措。然而,目前大学生村官的状况如何？存在哪些问题？如何使大学生村官队伍建设成为长期战略行动？以云南省大学生村官、乡镇领导、村委会和村民为调查对象,通过对其生活状况、工作状况、思想状况等方面的调查,分析云南省大学生村官存在的主要问题,并提出完善云南大学生村官的建议。     

劳动价值论视角下的信息商品及其劳动分析

信息科学技术革命浪潮不仅创造出一种全新的信息商品,劳动创造价值的形式也发生巨大变化。概述了信息商品及其使用价值和价值的主要特性,并在此基础上分析其派生出来的新现象：创造信息商品价值的劳动具有不确定性;规范信息商品的实现过程成为信息产业发展中亟须解决的问题;信息服务业的劳动创造价值问题。     

The economics of information: An exposition

The study of information as a choice variable has been given much more weight by disciplines other than economics. This paper tries to lay out the essential economic characteristics of information as an economic commodity. It discusses the reasons why usual market analysis fails and some of the problems that information creates for industrial structure. It is the treatment of information as a variable and its implications for economic behavior that needs further analysis. This is done by giving a formal statement of the role of information in economic decisions based on the use of information and applying it to specific forms of payoff and cost functions. That in many cases information is about rates leads to the conclusion that the value of new technical information is related to the scale of operation. Once information has been obtained its transmission is easy. Therefore it is difficult to make information into property and the incentives to create it will be lacking. In general the analysis shows that the special properties of information as an economic good have strong implications for the very role and meaning of the firm.I want to acknowledge the support of a grant from the Sloan Foundation