农地确权、信贷配给释缓与农村金融的深度发展*

作为一项基础性、制度环境层面的变革，农地确权帮助更多农户进入金融市场、促进农村金融宽度意义上的“量”变作用已经初步显现。但是，它是否可以提高农户贷款数量，缓解信贷配给并促进农村金融深度意义上的“质”变？这是一个重要但鲜有研究的问题。本文从供给、需求、交易成本、价格、风险配给等角度，分析了农地确权缓解信贷配给、促进农村金融深度发展的理论机理，并通过有序多分类变量回归及倾向得分匹配方法进行实证分析。研究表明，农地确权对农户金融参与深度的影响主要表现为：因降低信息成本而缓解价格配给，因弱化农户的损失规避心理而缓解风险配给；同时，数量配给和交易成本配给的释缓作用尚未充分显示。     

Public investment criteria under optimal nonlinear income taxation without commitment

In this study, we highlight that the incredibility of the government's commitment to a certain tax policy is a determinant of production inefficiency. We show that if the government cannot commit to a certain tax policy and if the types of taxpayers are completely separated, then the production efficiency theorem could be violated in an optimal solution. In this case, an incremental unit of public or private capital affects taxpayers' labor supply through wage rates. In a situation where public capital is more (less) complementary to labor than private capital, public investment tightens (relaxes) the incentive compatibility constraint more than private investment.     

Credit Rationing, Group Lending and Optimal Group Size

I develop a model of credit rationing with effort unobservable by lenders where borrowers can choose among projects of different riskiness. In such a set-up rationing that can be relaxed if borrowers put up physical collateral arises. Group lending proves to be a possible means to relax rationing and improve efficiency when physical collateral is not available. The optimal size of groups is here analysed as a function of social factors. It turns out that groups can be neither too small nor too large because in both cases the effectiveness of social sanctions on behaviour is too low to offset the negative effect on effort due to profit sharing and free riding. Individual sensitivity to social sanctions is the crucial element determining whether groups can be formed or not.     

The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister,Volume One,Minister of Housing 1964–66

While John R. Commons often referred to third sector organizations, such as associations, cooperatives, and trade unions, it is unclear how these organizations can be fitted into his transactional typology. This paper clarifies this problem by identifying two dimensions of bargaining, managerial, and rationing transactions: 1) the extent of legal equality of transactional participants, and 2) the extent of commonness of these participants' transactional interests. These dimensions enable defining the identity of the third sector in terms of a distinct variety of rationing transactions combining legal equality of transactional participants with significant commonness of their interests. The paper further explores several implications of this argument for new institutional economics, concerning the citizenship aspect of markets and hierarchies and the possibility of viewing third sector organizations as hybrids between markets and hierarchies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for further research.     

POSITIVELY RESPONSIVE COLLECTIVE CHOICE RULES AND MAJORITY RULE: A GENERALIZATION OF MAY'S THEOREM TO MANY ALTERNATIVES

May's theorem shows that if the set of alternatives contains two members, an anonymous and neutral collective choice rule is positively responsive if and only if it is majority rule. We show that if the set of alternatives contains three or more alternatives only the rule that assigns to every problem its strict Condorcet winner satisfies the three conditions plus Nash's version of “independence of irrelevant alternatives” for the domain of problems that have strict Condorcet winners. We show also that no rule satisfies the four conditions for domains that are more than slightly larger.     

Models to date the business cycle: The Italian case

The problem of dating the business cycle has recently received many contributions, with a lot of proposed statistical methodologies, parametric and non-parametric. In general, these methods are not used in official dating, which is carried out by experts, who use their subjective evaluations of the state of economy. In this work we try to apply some statistical procedures to obtain an automatic dating of the Italian business cycle in the last 30 years, checking differences among various methodologies and with the ISAE chronology. The purpose of this exercise is to verify if purely statistical methods can reproduce the turning points detection proposed by economists, so that they could be fruitfully used in official dating. To this end parametric as well as non-parametric methods are employed. The analysis is carried out both aggregating results from single time series and directly in a multivariate framework. The different methods are also evaluated with respect to their ability to timely track (ex post) turning points.     

The impact of credit rationing on the real sector: a study of the effect of mortgage rates and terms on housing starts

Various studies of the impact of credit rationing on the housing sector have examined its effect on mortgage terms and flows. If credit rationing has a significant effect on the economy, it must affect the real sector, i.e. housing starts. This paper examines the causal relationships between six different variables which describe mortgage rates and terms and single family housing starts. Two different types of tests for economic causality are used. The results indicate that neither credit rationing nor mortgage rates affect housing starts for the period 1963–1980. There is some evidence that housing prices have a causal relationship to housing starts, possibly reflecting speculative motives. On balance, the results are consistent with the rational expectations theory.     

On the theory of effective demand under stochastic rationing

The concept of effective demand under stochastic manipulable quantity rationing is shown to be compatible with the existence of nontrivial equilibrium. It is argued that stochastic rationing is unavoidable for any satisfactory definition of effective demand. Moreover, manipulability of the rationing mechanism is necessary for reasons of logical consistency, at least if the distribution over realisations for each agent depends on his own action and on the aggregate values of demand and supply only. In that case, anonymous stochastic rationing schemes reduce to those random functions, the mean value function of which is the uniform proportional rationing mechanism.     

Communication in repeated network games with imperfect monitoring

I consider repeated games with private monitoring played on a network. Each player has a set of neighbors with whom he interacts: a player's payoff depends on his own and his neighbors' actions only. Monitoring is private and imperfect: each player observes his stage payoff but not the actions of his neighbors. Players can communicate costlessly at each stage: communication can be public, private or a mixture of both. Payoffs are assumed to be sensitive to unilateral deviations. First, for any network, a folk theorem holds if some Joint Pairwise Identifiability condition regarding payoff functions is satisfied. Second, a necessary and sufficient condition on the network topology for a folk theorem to hold for all payoff functions is that no two players have the same set of neighbors not counting each other.     

Is Rationing an Option for Approaching Healthcare Services Provision? The Case of the Greek Cardiac Patients

This paper attempts to address some of the issues surrounding rationing of healthcare services, with application to Greece’s delivery of cardiac services. To this end, first, we provide highlights of the current debate concerning rationing worldwide and critically discuss them. Following that, an empirical analysis of the way ‘key’ stakeholders perceive rationing issues in Greece, is performed. Findings indicate that rationing is a highly disputed approach, subject to individualistic interpretations and moral issues. At policy level, it becomes evident that rationing is a mixture rather than a single policy concern, depending on a complicated range of locally-based reconciliation made at various levels of interested parties. Hence, no universal formula exists to fit all countries’ healthcare systems and further case-by-case research, is required.     

Credit rationing or overlending? An exploration into financing imperfection

Small and new firms are deemed to be unable to obtain sufficient bank loans. This idea finds a strong theoretical support in credit rationing theory. However, this is vigorously challenged by De Meza and Webb (1987, 2000) suggesting that firms can benefit from an excess of credit, i.e. overlending. Credit rationing or overlending? The contribution of this empirical article is twofold: to our knowledge, it is the first to make an attempt in measuring the relative importance of these two types of financing imperfection and to explore factors leading to one or the other. We exploit a rich panel data set on the access to bank credit for new French businesses during the mid-1990s. Our results show that credit rationing was not highly spread among French new firms. The story told by De Meza and Webb (1987) appears to be a much more realistic model. In addition, we identify factors, linked to the starter, the project or the industry, that are closely associated with credit rationing and/or overlending. Most factors enter into a consistent relation: when they are positively (negatively) associated with credit rationing, they are negatively (positively) associated with overlending.     

An international study of persistence in output: Parametric estimates using the data dependent systems approach

This paper parametrically obtains estimates of persistence in output using Pandit's (1977, 1982) Data Dependent Systems approach for modelling autoregressive and moving average processes. The estimates are based on over a century of annual data for the rate of change of output in nine industrialized countries. The sensitivity of estimates to various model selection criteria is examined. While persistence in output is found to be sensitive to model selection criteria, the output of all countries including the United States is found to have a substantial degree of persistence if the ARMA models are chosen according to the Schwarz Bayesian Criterion, but excluding the ARMA models whose moving average roots are near the unit root (which involves pile-up phenomenon). Moreover, the parametric estimates of persistence are shown not to have the known upward bias problem commonly associated with parametric estimates of persistence relative to nonparametric estimates.     

Asymmetric information and legal investor protection

This article analyses how legal investor protection can be used in order to resolve a credit rationing problem due to asymmetry of information between entrepreneurs and investors.     

Industrial organization implications of QR trade regimes: Evidence and welfare costs

Evidence of the relationship between trade regimes, concentration and profitability in semi-industrial countries' manufacturing sectors is reviewed. This evidence is used to justify the formulation and simulation of a three sector general equilibrium model in which the manufacturing sectors's behavior is linked to the degree of restrictiveness of the QR regime. Simulations are conducted with several variants of the model to ascertain separately the effects of introducing economies of scale, firm entry/exit, departures from competitive pricing, and interactions between entry and pricing rules. Numerical results suggest that a 20 percent rationing rate of intermediates and consumption goods can have welfare costs of about 2.0 percent of national income in the absence of economies of scale and industrial organization interactions with the trade regime. When industrial organization features are included, the costs of the same 20 percent rationing quadruples.     

Optimal credit rationing in not‐for‐profit financial institutions*

We examine the dynamic optimization problem for not‐for‐profit financial institutions (NFPs) that maximize consumer surplus, not profits. We characterize the optimal dynamic policy and find that it involves credit rationing. Interest rates set by mature NFPs will typically be more favorable to customers than market rates, as any surplus is distributed in the form of interest rate subsidies, with credit rationing being required to prevent these subsidies from distorting loan volumes from their optimal levels. Rationing overcomes a fundamental problem in NFPs; it allows them to distribute the surplus without distorting the volume of activity from the efficient level.     

Resource Curse or Not: A Question of Appropriability*

Whether natural resources are good or bad for a country's development are shown to depend on the interaction between institutional setting and, crucially, the types of resources possessed by the country. Some natural resources are, for economical and technical reasons, more likely to cause problems such as rent‐seeking and conflicts than others. This potential problem can, however, be countered by good institutional quality. In contrast to the traditional resource curse hypothesis, we show the impact of natural resources on economic growth to be non‐monotonic in institutional quality, and increasingly so for certain types of resources. In particular, countries rich in minerals are cursed only if they have low‐quality institutions, while the curse is reversed if institutions are sufficiently good. Furthermore, if countries are rich in diamonds and precious metals, these effects—both positive and negative—are larger.     

Public Sector Rationing and Private Sector Selection

We study the interaction between nonprice public rationing and prices in the private market. Under a limited budget, the public supplier uses a rationing policy. A private firm may supply the good to those consumers who are rationed by the public system. Consumers have different amounts of wealth, and costs of providing the good to them vary. We consider two regimes. First, the public supplier observes consumers’ wealth information; second, the public supplier observes both wealth and cost information. The public supplier chooses a rationing policy, and, simultaneously, the private firm, observing only cost but not wealth information, chooses a pricing policy. In the first regime, there is a continuum of equilibria. The Pareto dominant equilibrium is a means‐test equilibrium: poor consumers are supplied while rich consumers are rationed. Prices in the private market increase with the budget. In the second regime, there is a unique equilibrium. This exhibits a cost‐effectiveness rationing rule; consumers are supplied if and only if their cost–benefit ratios are low. Prices in the private market do not change with the budget. Equilibrium consumer utility is higher in the cost‐effectiveness equilibrium than the means‐test equilibrium.     

A revealed preference test of rationing

This paper derives a revealed preference test for utility maximization under rationing and can detect, for which goods rationing is binding without specifying a functional form or imposing rationing constraints prior to estimation. For UK data from 1920–55, we find evidence of utility maximization under rationing with rationing binding for food and other services. Estimated virtual prices exceed observed food prices by 16.5% in 1947 and observed prices of other services by 10.9% in 1952.     

An efficiency and welfare classification of rationing by waiting in the presence of bribery

Governments often allocate commodities at low prices and on a first-come-first-served basis (rationing by waiting), while bureaucrats who distribute the commodities usually take bribes. A model is developed to classify the efficiency implications of bribery, and socially optimal pricing schemes in rationing by waiting. If the rationed good and individual income spent on other goods (‘other’ income) are ‘complements’, then bribery may enhance allocative efficiency, and a ‘dual pricing’ scheme can augment social welfare. However, if the rationed commodity and ‘other’ income are ‘substitutes’, then bribery may not improve allocative efficiency, and distributing the rationed commodity free is socially optimal.