Immaterielle und materielle Faktoren der Entwicklung

Ohne ZusammenfassungDie Autoren schulden Dank dem US-National Institute of Health, der University of Virginia, der Österreichischen Forschungsstiftung für Entwicklungshilfe, der Österreichischen Bundeswirtschaftskammer und dem Institut für höhere Studien in Wien für die Hilfe, welche diese Arbeit ermöglichte. Zu besonderem Dank sind sie Herrn Prof. E. O. Attinger von der University of Virginia für zahlreiche Anregungen, für Ermutigung und Unterstützung verpflichtet.     

When does Strategic Debt-service Matter?

Recent work in corporate finance has suggested that strategic debt-service by equity-holders works to lower debt values and raise yield spreads substantially. We show that this is not quite correct. With optimal cash management, defaults occassioned by deliberate underperformance (strategic defaults) and those forced by inadequate cash (liquidity defaults) work as substitutes: allowing for strategic debt-service leads to a decline in the equilibrium likelihood of liquidity defaults. In some cases, this decline is sufficiently sharp that equilibrium debt values actually increase and yield spreads decline. We provide an intuitive explanation for these results in terms of an interaction of optionalitiesExpanded versions of this paper were presented in conferences and seminars at the Scottish Institute for Research in Finance, European Finance Association, Western Finance Association, Financial Management Association, 10th Derivative Securities Conference, Santa Clara University, Virginia Tech, the Norwegian School of Management, the Norwegian School of Business and Economics, Duke University, and Carnegie-Mellon University. We benefitted greatly from the comments of participants at these seminars and would particularly like to thank Francesca Cornelli, Kose John, Pete Kyle, Sanjay Unni, and Raman Uppal in this context     

On the monotonicity of the labour-capital ratio in Sraffa's model

Work done in part while visiting (1988–1989) the Department of Mathematics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, U.S.A. One of the authors (E. S.) wishes to thank Paolo Caravani for bringing the subject matter of Caravani and DeLuca (1987), in an earlier version, to his attention; and David Rosenblatt for illuminating correspondence on aggregation.     

Rules for choosing among public goods: A contractarian approach

This paper asks what rules for supplying and financing public goods would be chosen by individuals at the constitutional level. A new principle of decision-making is proposed. This separates decisions about how much to spend on public goods from decisions about how to allocate this spending among different public goods; the latter decision is made by allowing each individual to determine how his own tax payment will be spent. Analogies are drawn between this principle and proportional representation, tax relief for charities, and certain procedures for providing state support for political parties and churches. The first draft of this paper was written while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations at the Australian National University. I am grateful for the Centre's support. A later version was presented at a Liberty Fund symposium on Liberty and Constitutionalism in Arlington, Virginia in July 1989. I wish to thank Geoffrey Brennan, James Buchanan, Douglas Heckathorn, Hartmut Kliemt, Richard Langlois, Manfred Tietzel, Viktor Vanberg, Richard Wagner, Richard Wallace and Albert Weale for their comments.     

Mechanism Design with Interdependent Valuations: Surplus Extraction

If valuations are interdependent and agents observe their own allocation payoffs, then two-stage revelation mechanisms expand the set of implementable decision functions. In a two-stage revelation mechanism agents report twice. In the first stage - before the allocation is decided - they report their private signals. In the second stage - after the allocation has been made, but before final transfers are decided - they report their payoffs from the allocation. Conditions are provided under which an uninformed seller can extract (or virtually extract) the full surplus from a sale to privately informed buyers, in spite of the buyers’ signals being independent random variables. This research was started when I was visiting the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Venice, and continued while visiting the European University Institute in Florence. Their financial support is gratefully acknowledged.     

The economic implications of exaptation

Accounts of economic change recognize that markets create selective pressures for the adaptation of technologies in the direction of customer needs and production efficiencies. However, non-adaptational bases for technological change are rarely highlighted, despite their pervasiveness in the history of technical and economic change. In this paper the concept of exaptation -a feature co-opted for its present role from some other origin - is proposed as a characteristic element of technological change, and an important mechanism by which new markets for products and services are created by entrepreneurs. Exaptation is a missing but central concept linking the evolution of technology with the entrepreneurial creation of new markets and the concept of Knightian uncertainty.JEL Classification: O3, M13, D8, D52Correspondence to: Nicholas DewThe authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Batten Institute of the Darden School of Business Administration, University of Virginia, for carrying out this research. We also wish to thank Rama Velamuri and an anonymous referee for their comments, which significantly improved this paper. All remaining faults are the sole responsibility of the authors.     

IS THERE A (DOWNWARD SLOPING) DEMAND CURVE FOR VOLUNTEER LABOUR?

ABSTRACT * * I would like to thank the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy and the Irwin Foundation for financial support for my dissertation, which led to many of the ideas contained in this paper, as well as my dissertation advisors at Boston College. I would also like to thank my colleagues at John Carroll University and at the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Case Western Reserve University, for their advice and comments on previous versions of this paper. All errors, however, remain my own responsibility.
: Are organizations that use volunteers content to accept all of the volunteer labour offered to them, or do they make some sort of demand-side decision as to how much volunteer labour to use? This paper looks for evidence of such a demand curve for volunteer labour in data collected by the Urban Institute in the early 1980s. Evidence is found that organizations are consistent over time in their use of volunteer labour.     

Labor Market Segmentation and the Implications for Public Sector Retrenchment Programs

Despite the importance placed on reducing public sector employment in sub-Saharan Africa, remarkably little is known about the labor market transition paths of departing public sector workers. This paper uses household survey data from Conakry, Guinea to establish evidence of labor market segmentation between the wage and nonwage sectors. An empirical model of the unemployment durations experienced by departing public sector workers finds that transition paths vary significantly according to personal characteristics that also affect the resulting earnings opportunities in segmented labor markets. Particularly, there is a marked tendency of females to enter quickly the nonwage sector, relative to males, and a negative influence of severance payments on wage sector employment acceptance.J. Comp. Econom.,December 1997,25(3), pp. 385–402. Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Virginia Tech University, 208 Hutcheson Hall, Blacksburg, Virginia 24060-0401 and Cornell University, 3M28 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853.     

Protection and the Future of Australian Manufacturing

This article was written by Richard H. Snape, Professor of Economics, Monash University. It is a revised version of a paper presented at the convention of the Institute of Industrial Economics (University of Newcastle) on 'The Future of Manufacturing Industry In Australia', Terrigal, 29 April to 1 May, 1977.     

国际形势演变与新时期中国周边战略

2014年6月28日,广东国际战略研究院在广州举办了“国际形势演变与新时期中国周边战略”学术研讨会,来自清华大学、复旦大学、中国人民大学、吉林大学、中山大学、暨南大学、广东外语外贸大学、中国社会科学院、中国现代国际关系研究院、中国国际问题研究所、上海国际问题研究院、国防大学的专家学者参加了此次研讨会。与会专家学者围绕当前国际形势演变的主要趋势和方向、中国面临的国际环境与主要挑战、中国周边战略的顶层设计与主要思路、中国周边战略的突破方向和策略选择进行了深入、热烈的探讨。提出了不少真知灼见和深层次战略思考。本刊在此辑要发表部分与会专家学者的主要观点,希望有助于更好地理解当前国际形势的演变,并对中国周边外交战略规划提供有价值的参考意见。     

Evolutionary choice of markets

We consider an economy where a finite set of agents can trade on one of two asset markets. Due to endogenous participation the markets may differ in the liquidity they provide. Traders have idiosyncratic preferences for the markets, e.g.due to differential time preferences for maturity dates of futures contracts. For a broad range of parameters we find that no trade, trade on both markets (individualization) as well as trade on one market only (standardization) is supported by a Nash equilibrium. By contrast, whenever the number of traders becomes large, the evolutionary process selects a unique stochastically stable state which corresponds to the equilibrium with two active markets and coincides with the welfare maximizing market structure. We are grateful to Thorsten Hens, Fernando Vega-Redondo and a referee for valuable comments. We also thank seminar participants at the University of Zurich, the CES research seminar at the University of Munich, the Koc University in Istanbul as well as conference participants at the SAET conference in Ischia, the ESEM in Lausanne and the ESF workshop on Behavioural Models in Economics and Finance in Vienna. A first version of the paper was written while Marc Oliver Bettzüge was visiting the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich. Financial Support by the Swiss Banking Institute and by the National Centre of Competence in Research “Financial Valuation and Risk Management” (NCCR FINRISK) is gratefully acknowledged. The NCCR FINRISK is a research program supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.     

P2P网贷平台信息披露水平、投资人信任与投资风险

P2P网贷平台问题频发损害了投资人的利益,为规范中国网络借贷市场,政府将信息披露列为监管的重点。本文依据目前现有信息披露准则,首次对中国P2P网贷平台的信息披露水平进行评价,实证分析P2P网贷平台信息披露水平与投资人对平台的信任、有关平台的投资风险之间有关系。研究结果表明,平台信息披露程度越高,越容易吸引当期的投资人参与交易,提升平台的成交量;同时,平台信息披露水平有助于投资人降低有关平台的投资风险。此外,投资人在选择平台时忽略了产品信息披露的重要性。研究结果对中国P2P网贷平台监管政策的实施提供了有益的参考。     

浅谈《墙上的斑点》的写作特点

《墙上的斑点》是英国著名的意识流小说家伍尔夫的短篇小说代表作之一。以《墙上的斑点》为例,来说明意识流小说叙述主体的转换、对自然和社会的深刻体会以及具有核心功能的联想这三方面的写作特点。     

Bounded rationality in laboratory bargaining with asymmetric information

Summary. This paper reports an experiment on two-player sequential bargaining with asymmetric information that features some forces present in multi-round monopoly pricing environments. Buyer-seller pairs play a series of bargaining games that last for either one or two rounds of offers. The treatment variable is the probability of continuing into a second round. Equilibrium predictions do a poor job of explaining levels of prices and treatment effects. As an alternative to the conventional equilibrium model, we consider models that allow for bounded rationality of subjects. The quantal response equilibrium model captures some of the important features of the results.Received: 30 April 2003, Revised: 10 December 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C78, D82, D42, C91. Correspondence to: Timothy N. CasonThis research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (SBR-9809110). The experiments were run at the Economic Science Laboratory of the University of Arizona and the Krannert Laboratory for Experimental Economic Research at Purdue University, using the z-Tree software developed at the Institute for Empirical Research at the University of Zurich (Fischbacher [8]). David Cooper, Rachel Croson, Charles Noussair, an anonymous referee, and conference participants at the Economic Science Association and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory meetings provided helpful comments. Timothy ONeill Dang, Thomas Wilkening and Marikah Mancini provided expert research assistance.     

A framework for the decomposition of poverty differences with an application to poverty differences between countries

We propose an Oaxaca-Blinder-like decomposition of poverty differences. The decomposition is based on a parametric model of the income distribution and can be used to decompose differences in poverty rates across countries or years. Poverty differences are decomposed into differences in the underlying distribution of poverty-relevant characteristics and differences in the incidence of poverty conditional on these characteristics. We illustrate our method by comparing levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. Our results suggest that the higher aggregate poverty rates in the USA and in Britain relative to Germany were mostly accounted for by higher poverty rates conditional on characteristics, which were partly offset by a more favourable distribution of poverty-relevant characteristics, in particular higher employment rates.This paper is part of the research programme of the TMR Network ‘Living Standards, Inequality and Taxation’. Financial support from the European Union (Contract #ERBFMRXCT980248), the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the University of Essex, and the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG) is gratefully acknowledged. The data used in this study were made available by Cornell University (Cross-National Equivalent File), the University of Michigan (Panel Study of Income Dynamics), the UK Data Archive (British Household Panel Survey), and the German Institute for Economic Research (German Socio-Economic Panel). Martin Biewen would like to thank the Institute for European Studies and the Department for Policy and Management at Cornell University, in particular Jonas Pontusson, Richard Burkhauser and Dean Lillard, for their hospitality and support. We are also grateful for comments by Bernd Fitzenberger, Joachim Winter, Christoph M. Schmidt, an anonymous referee and seminar participants in Essex, Heidelberg and Mannheim. Last but not least, we thank Nick Cox for providing us with updated versions of his Stata programs for drawing quantile plots.First version received: May 2003/Final version received: December: 2003     

Multiple equilibria in a growth model with monopolistic competition

Summary The standard neoclassical growth model is modified by introducing a market structure characterized by monopolistic competition and variable demand elasticities. In equilibrium, the price elasticity of the demand schedule facing a typical firm is a function of the aggregate savings rate. The latter feature results from an assumed wedge between the elasticity of substitution across goods in productive activities and that in consumption. In contrast with most examples in the literature our model does not require increasing returns (internal or external) in order to generate multiple equilibria.Thanks are due to Jess Benhabib, Duncan Foley, Oded Galor and participants in seminars at the Econometric Society Summer Meetings (Boston, 1993), NBER 1993 Summer Institute, CORE, UAB, and European University Institute for helpful comments.     

When inefficiency begets efficiency

Summary. Collective consumption decisions taken by the members of a household may prove inefficient. The impact on market performance depends on whether household inefficiencies are caused by inefficient net trades with the market or by inefficient distribution of resources within households. Inefficient internal distribution always results in inefficient equilibrium allocations. This leads us to consider competitive forces as disciplinary device for households. Competition of households for both resources and members can eliminate or reduce inefficient internal distribution.Received: 5 February 2003, Revised: 12 January 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D10, D51, D62.This paper is an abbreviated and revised version of Gersbach and Haller (2003). It addresses issues raised during seminar presentations at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Center for Economic Studies (CES), Munich. The hospitality and financial support of CES, the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna, and the Institute of Economics, University of Copenhagen, is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Clive Bell for helpful comments and two referees for thoughtful suggestions.     

Equilibrium dynamics in discrete-time endogenous growth models with social constant returns

The existing literature establishes possibilities of local determinacy and dynamic indeterminacy in continuous-time two-sector models of endogenous growth with social constant returns. The necessary and sufficient condition for local determinacy is that the factor intensity rankings of the two sectors are consistent in the private/physical and social/value sense. The necessary and sufficient condition for dynamic indeterminacy is that the final (consumable) good sector is human (pure) capital intensive in the private sense but physical (consumable) capital intensive in the social sense. This paper re-examines the dynamic properties in a discrete-time endogenous growth framework and finds that conventional propositions obtained in continuous time need not be valid. It is shown that the established necessary and sufficient conditions on factor intensity rankings for local determinacy and dynamic indeterminacy are neither sufficient nor necessary, as the magnitudes of time preference and capital depreciation rates both play essential roles. We have benefitted from discussion with Robert Becker, Eric Bond, Michael Kaganovich, Karl Shell and participants of the Midwest Macroeconomic Conference in Chicago and the Midwest Economic Theory and International Trade Meetings at Indiana University. The fourth author acknowledges financial support from the Institute of Economics and Business Administration of Kobe University and the Institute of Economic Research of Kyoto University to enable this international collaboration.     

Screening Ethics when Honest Agents Keep their Word

Using a principal-agent setting, we introduce honesty that requires pre-commitment. The principal offers a menu of mechanisms to screen ethics. Agents may misrepresent ethics. Dishonest agents may misrepresent the match with the assigned task (good or bad), while honest agents reveal the match honestly if they have pre-committed. Ethics-screening, that allows for match-screening with dishonest agents while leaving a lower rent to honest agents, is optimal if both honesty and a good match are likely. Otherwise the optimal mechanism is the standard second-best or the first-best (where dishonest agents misrepresent the match), if dishonesty is likely or unlikely respectively.An earlier version of this paper was entitled “Honest Agents and Equilibrium Lies.” We are grateful to seminar participants at MIT, Université de Caen, University of St Andrews, University of Virginia, and ESEM 99, and two anonymous referees for useful comments.     

The preference reversal phenomenon: Response mode,markets and incentives

Summary This paper addresses the apparent conflict between the results of experiments on individual choice and judgement and the results of market experiments. Data are reported for experiments designed to analyze the effects of (a) economic incentives, repetition, feedback and information and (b) choice and valuation response modes on (c) subjects' decisions in paired market and nonmarket environments. Causes of divergent market and nonmarket behavior are identified in the context of the preference reversal phenomenon (PRP). Study of the PRP is extended to two types of market environments. The PRP is observed on the first repetition in a market setting (second price auction) with immediate feedback, both with and without financial incentives. However, after five repetitions of the auction, the subjects' bids are generally consistent with their choices and the asymmetry between the rates of predicted and unpredicted reversals disappears. An individual pricing task using the BDM mechanism yields similar results on the first repetition but results which differ from the second price auction on the fifth repetition. Choice tasks produce lower rates of reversals than do pricing tasks in both market and individual decision making settings.We are grateful for financial support from the National Science Foundation (grant no. SES-8820552) and the California Institute of Technology. Research facilities were provided by the Economic Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Valuable computer programming was provided by Sean Coates and Shawn LaMaster. We thank Professor Jeffrey Dubin for his help in setting up the software for the generalized Tobit model, and Professors Joyce Berg, Graham Loomes, and Charles R. Plott for helpful comments.