团体规模、动态激励和社会链接对团体贷款影响的实证分析

本文通过实证分析,考察了团体规模、动态激励、社会链接三个重要因素对团体贷款的影响。结果表明:团体规模对团体贷款效率的影响并不显著,较大的规模更易诱发道德风险,但能降低团体总体风险;动态激励对团体贷款的有效运行具有重要作用;社会链接对团体贷款效率具有重要影响,强的社会链接可以诱致更高但不够稳定的还款意愿。     

论团体贷款对信贷市场低效率的可能改进

团体贷款以其骄人的还款率和在扶贫方面的突出表现吸引了众多经济学家和政策制定者的目光。但是 ,现有研究更多的是从不同角度来解释并不需要抵押或担保的团体贷款的还款率为何如此高 ,而忽视了团体贷款与个人贷款的效率的比较。对于“团体贷款的效率是否比个人贷款的效率更高 ?”和“团体贷款对信贷市场中的低效率问题有无改进以及是如何改进的 ?”等重要问题的回答构成了该研究领域中的核心内容。     

Foreign Aid as Prize: Incentives for a Pro-Poor Policy

The authors develop a theoretical model of foreign aid to analyze a method of disbursement of aid which induces the recipient government to follow a more pro-poor policy than it otherwise would do. In their two-period model, aid is given in the second period and the volume of it depends on the level of well-being of the target group in the first period. They find that this way of designing aid does increase the welfare of the poor. They also consider the situations where the donor and the recipient governments act simultaneously as well as sequentially, and they find that, by moving first in a sequential game, the donor country can, under certain conditions, increase the welfare of the poor and that of its own country compared to the case of simultaneous moves.     

IMF Conditionality as a Screening Device

A theoretical model is developed in which both buybacks and the adoption of an IMF programme can be used as screening devices which enable a creditor to discriminate between debtor countries which are willing to use debt relief in order to invest and repay and countries which are not. Asymmetric information is assumed. This problem can be solved if the country has sufficient resources to engage in a debt buyback and so gain the debt relief. When the country is credit constrained, an alternative screening mechanism is to undertake an IMF programme in return for debt reduction and possibly an IMF loan.     

Strategic Ignorance as a Self-Disciplining Device

We analyse the decision of an agent with time-inconsistent preferences to consume a good that exerts an externality on future welfare. The extent of the externality is initially unknown, but may be learned via a costless sampling procedure. We show that when the agent cannot commit to future consumption and learning decisions, incomplete learning may occur on a Markov perfect equilibrium path of the resulting intra-personal game. In such a case, each agent's incarnation stops learning for some values of the posterior distribution of beliefs and acts under self-restricted information. This conduct is interpreted as strategic ignorance. All equilibria featuring this property strictly Pareto dominate the complete learning equilibrium for any posterior distribution of beliefs.     

Barter Trading as a Microeconomics Teaching Device

Karpoff reports on a “barter trading game” in which students exchanged real goods over a period of seven weeks with different market constraints imposed each week. Student comments about the exercise were favorable.     

Fiscal Discipline as a Social Norm: The European Stability Pact

This paper reviews the arguments for and against the “Stability and Growth Pact.” We find the theoretical debate to be inconclusive, as both externality and credibility arguments can be used to yield opposite and plausible conclusions. Empirical evidence in favor of a Pact‐like rule is also scant. We therefore suggest the view that the Stability Pact is a public social norm, that countries obey in order to preserve reputation among the other members of the European Union. Using this extreme—but not implausible—hypothesis, we build a simple model similar in spirit to Akerlof's (1980) seminal work on social norms, and we show that reputation issues may cause the emergence of a stable but inferior equilibrium. Increased heterogenity generally has the effect of further reducing aggregate welfare; we conclude that the problems posed by the Pact/social norm are likely to increase following the enlargement, when a number of countries anxious to prove their “soundness” joined the club.     

Bankruptcy as a Control Device in Economies in Transition

We examine in this paper the design of a liquidation, or bankruptcy, policy in a partially centralized economy characterized by imperfect information. We employ a two-period model to analyze the effects of an optimal liquidation rule on the efficiency of resource allocation and choice of managerial effort when managers have private information about effort and firm productivity. First-period investment is used by the regulator to discipline the manager and to extract information. The tradeoff between disciplinary effect and information extraction might be best solved by implementing inefficient liquidation policies. Inefficiencies in liquidation policies can occur even if the regulator believes that he is facing a given type of firm with probability close to one. J. Comp. Econom., June 1995, 20(3), pp. 265-301. Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-7601.     

组织激励与知识员工的信息产出

本文以知识属性为组织激励效果的调节变量,即当个体对知识属性的认知不同时,外生激励促进个体产生知识转移的内生动机的效果不同。以江苏省两家大型商业银行信贷部门员工为对象的实证研究（N=307）支持了本文的假设。本文为冯帆、廖飞和杨忠（2007）的理论模型提供了实证依据。     

Cournot Duopoly With Multi-period Competition: Inventory as a Coordination Device

This paper analyses a Cournot duopoly model with finitely repeated competition. Each firm is allowed to hold inventories for a period. When there are more than two periods, inventory-holdings encourage firms to take collusive actions. By holding large inventories, a firm can commit to large sales in the next period, giving inventories a strategic value. When a firm deviates from collusion, the strategic value of inventories allows the non-defecting firm to become the Stackelberg leader in future markets, forcing the defecting firm to become the Stackelberg follower. Collusive sales can be attained with this threat of punishment.     

Dynamic bilateral bargaining under private information with a sequence of potential buyers

A seller owning a single, indivisible asset faces the random arrival of privately informed buyers, with whom he can bargain sequentially. Our key result is that despite the arrival of alternative buyers the Coase conjecture continues to hold under stationary strategies if the distribution of buyer valuations has convex support: Negotiations end almost immediately and the asset is sold almost at the minimum of the seller's own reservation value and the lowest possible valuation of a buyer. We also show existence of multiple stationary equilibria, though, in the special case where the support of buyers' valuations exhibits a sufficiently large “interior gap”. Taken together, our findings thus also point to a potential pitfall when analyzing only two-type distributions in more applied work.     

Dynamic stability under a dual exchange rate regime with neutral intervention operations

This paper examines the dynamic stability under dual exchange rates with neutral intervention operations. It is shown that the relationship between the stability properties and the residents' net foreign asset position depends crucially on the impact of foreign assets on the current account, and that, regardless whether the domestic economy is in a net creditor of debtor position, it is not possible for the system to have an infinite number of stable paths.     

Accounting for Income-Contingent Loans as a Policy Hybrid: Politics of Discretion and Discipline in Financialising Welfare States

Income-contingent loans (ICLs) are becoming widely adopted across higher education sectors internationally, and increasingly proposed for other policy domains. This article explores why this policy form has gained such wide popularity in the context of fiscal austerity and greater financialisation of social policy. It argues ICLs act as a policy hybrid, combining elements of a tax and a loan. The article traces the development of ICLs in their original and most developed context, Australia’s university sector. We connect the development of ICLs to changes in modes of state accounting associated with the application of private sector accounting techniques. These changes reflect financialisation inside the state, producing contradictory political dynamics. Drawing on Streeck’s conception of a shift from the ‘tax state’ to the ‘debt state’, we argue the hybrid construction of ICLs creates political tendencies in both directions, facilitating greater state discretion while also implementing market discipline. Alongside these contradictory state imperatives we highlight continued partisanship, pointing to new and ongoing forms of distributive politics. To the extent that accounting technologies allow the state to act as a special kind of creditor, we ask whether financialisation may also involve the emergence of an ‘asset state’.     

The Labor Market as a Smoothing Device: Labor Supply Responses to Crop Loss

The paper studies the way in which labor supply responses enable households to smooth consumption in the face of crop loss. The 1993 Indonesian Family Life Survey is unusual because it contains self-reported information on crop loss and on household responses to crop loss. Of those households that report a crop loss, 41.6% also report that they responded by taking an extra job. Using these self-reported measures, the authors find evidence which suggests that the income associated with this shock-induced labor supply is important in allowing the household to avoid reducing consumption expenditure. Household members, however, do not seem to increase their total hours of work. They appear to just reallocate their time from household farming to other labor market activities.     

Self-preservation as a foundation of rational behavior under risk

This paper derives an expected utility theorem from the principle of self-preservation thus providing a new interpretation of the notion of rationality underlying the von Neumann-Morgenstern theory. Self-preservation is defined as the maximization of the probability of survival in a finite horizon model where in each period the decision maker must choose a risky prospect from a feasible set of such prospects and becomes extinct if his accumulated fortune becomes non-positive. It is shown that the choice of the optimal strategy may be regarded as an expected utility maximizing behavior and that violations of the independence axiom, e.g., Allais paradox, imply that decision-makers choose a probability of survival smaller than the maximum possible given the set of acts. Furthermore, according to this approach rational attitudes toward risk are also derived from the model.     

Dynamic Incentive Contracts under No-Commitment to Periodic Auditing and a Non-retrospective Penalty System

This paper generalizes Khalil’s (1997) static model to a multiperiod one. The associated optimal dynamic contracts are derived and analyzed. At every-period’s equilibrium, the principal conducts no sure auditing. While duplication of the Baron-Myerson-type (1982) contract cannot be optimal, duplication of the Khalil-type (1997) contract can be optimal when the cheating penalty is large or discount factors are small. This implies that static contracts with no-commitment to auditing can describe players’ long-run behavior only under specific conditions. Moreover, our separating and pooling equilibria are compared with Baron and Besanko’s (1984a) and Laffont and Tirole’s (1987) equilibria, respectively.     

Institutional Design as a Commitment Device in Credit Markets with Asymmetric Information: Experimental Evidence

The aim of this experiment is to test the role of institutional design in credit markets as a commitment device against renegotiation: when there is asymmetric information does a lower degree of centralization enhance efficiency? Does decentralization alleviate the adverse selection problem in credit markets? We run a large‐scale computerized experiment involving 12 different data sets and 3 different uncertainty scenarios on a sample of 120 subjects. The results obtained confirm the superiority of a decentralized institutional framework: the number of poor projects undertaken in a decentralized market was significantly smaller than the number of poor projects undertaken in centralized markets in all the scenarios. This experimental evidence shows that the institutional design is crucial in seeking financial discipline and therefore can shed some light on the debate on ‘Anglo‐Saxon’ versus ‘German–Japanese’ credit practices. (J.E.L.: C90, D82, G21, L10).