突发事件下个体抢购物品现象的经济学分析

利用前景理论建立突发事件下信息对个体心理预期影响的理论模型,可对危机中的“抢购”行为进行理论分析。结果表明:危机事件下的“抢购”行为直接与人们的心理预期有关;私人信息会影响个体心理预期并产生过度反应;尽早公开信息有利于遏制私人信息影响;信息对个体风险感知的影响取决于个体接受信息的状态。     

Demand for different types of public goods: evidence from Nigeria

Preferences of Nigerian households vary across different types of public goods. For example, some prefer roads while others favor education even after controlling for the existing supply of these goods. What explains this variation? We argue that the perceived distributional consequences of specific public goods differ conditional on the personal characteristics of households. In particular, households demand the type of public good that (a) increases the utility of assets they already own and (b) resonates with their past experiences involving the lack of particular public goods. We test our argument with data on 123,000 Nigerian households. We find strong evidence for our argument across six types of public goods.     

The European Union's debt question: A conceptional viewpoint

The state can be conceived as an organization to protect personal freedom and to provide public goods. Consequently, we expect a constitution to consist of two different sets of rules; rules on personal freedom and rules for making collective decisions on public goods (mostly budgetary rules). The constitution of the European Union as laid down in the treaty of Maastricht (1992) provides both types of rules, but the emphasis is mainly on the former rules. This paper investigates budgetary rules, in particular the welfare economic logic of deficit spending.     

Equilibrium in a durable goods market with lumpy adjustment

Durable goods are an important component of the business cycle. Equilibrium models of durable goods markets are made difficult by the lumpy nature of individual purchases. We show that a straightforward approximation of the distribution of durable goods holdings gives rise to a tractable equilibrium model. We analyze the case of competition as well as that of a monopoly producer.     

What are we learning from the life satisfaction literature?

The recent availability of cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data on life satisfaction in a large number of countries gives us the opportunity to verify empirically (and not just to assume) what matters for individuals and what economists and policymakers should take into account when trying to promote personal and societal well-being. We now have ample evidence, generally robust to different cultural backgrounds, on the effects of some important happiness drivers (income, health, unemployment, marital status, etc.) which can be considered “quasi-stylized facts” of happiness. If economic policies, for many obvious reasons, cannot maximize self-declared life satisfaction as such, we are nonetheless learning a lot from these findings. In particular, results on the relevance of relational goods, on the inflation/unemployment trade-off in terms of welfare and, more in general, on the measurement of the shadow value of non-market goods obtained with life satisfaction estimates are conveying relevant information about individual preferences and what is behind utility functions. Such findings suggest that the anthropological reductionism characterizing most economic models can be misleading and that target indicators of economic policies have to be refocused if we want to minimize the distance between economic development and human progress.     

Public goods in networks

This paper considers incentives to provide goods that are non-excludable along social or geographic links. We find, first, that networks can lead to specialization in public good provision. In every social network there is an equilibrium where some individuals contribute and others free ride. In many networks, this extreme is the only outcome. Second, specialization can benefit society as a whole. This outcome arises when contributors are linked, collectively, to many agents. Finally, a new link increases access to public goods, but reduces individual incentives to contribute. Hence, overall welfare can be higher when there are holes in a network.     

The Impact of Liberalizing Trade in Services on Trade in Goods: An Empirical Investigation

In this paper we use a large dataset to explore whether the liberalization of trade in services is beneficial for the international trade in goods. We find empirical evidence supporting this notion. We investigate which types of trade in services are more important for the international trade in goods and find that trade in transportation and communication services generate the largest impacts on trade in goods. We also investigate which types of trade in goods are likely to benefit from the liberalization of trade in services and find that, under the 2‐digit ISTC classification, all the categories are likely to exhibit a positive impact.     

PRIMARY VERSUS SECONDARY PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES IN U.S. MANUFACTURING

In this paper we analyze the determinants of material inputs into individual production activities as a function of their outputs. We use observations on a large cross-section of U.S. manufacturing plants from the Census of Manufactures, including those that make goods primary to other industries, to study differences in production techniques. We find that in most cases material requirements do not depend on whether goods are made as primary products or as secondary products. We thus elucidate support for the commodity technology model as a useful working hypothesis.     

Tiebout bias on the demand for local public goods

Empirical work estimating the demand for local public goods has been based upon the median voter model. It has generally proceeded with little consideration given to the possibility of Tiebout-type migration emphasized in the property value literature. In this paper we raise the question of how valid the typical cross section demand estimation procedures are when possible Tiebout-like migration among jurisdictions is taken into account. We find that such procedures are not in fact consistent with a model in which people vote with their feet as well as with ballots. We also show that, if a full Tiebout equilibrium has been achieved in a set of communities, there is a simple and obvious way to estimate demands for local public goods which is different from the median voter approach. This technique has not, to our knowledge, been used in existing studies, and, moreover, has some practical as well as theoretical advantages. If the workings of the Tiebout process are not taken into account, more is involved than just impracticality: we show that the estimated effects of personal characteristics will generally be biased, and that that direction of the bias can usually be determined.     

A SPECIFICATION SEPARATING FAMILY SIZE AND INDIVIDUAL AGE EFFECTS ON SUBJECTIVE EQUIVALENCE SCALES: A NOTE

This paper analyses the Kapteyn and Van Praag method of estimating equivalence scales with respect to the way family size and age composition are incorporated into the scales according to rank and age of each family member. It becomes evident that the Kapteyn/Van Praag procedure fails to distinguish between household size and individual age effects with the result that personal weights can not be used for recomposition of household types other than wife and husband families, nor can they be interpreted as showing real age dependence of personal income equivalence. For these reasons another specification of the general approach, separating both effects, is outlined. This specification distinguishes between several consumption classes within each household. Within each class, economies of scale are attached to similar individuals while differences in individual need are obtained by comparing individuals with the same rank in the different classes.     

An experiment on protecting intellectual property

We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether the protection of intellectual property (IP) incentivizes people to create non-rivalrous knowledge goods, foregoing the production of other rivalrous goods. In the contrasting treatment with no IP protection, participants are free to resell and remake non-rivalrous knowledge goods originally created by others. We find that creators reap substantial profits when IP is protected and that rampant pirating is common when there is no IP protection, but IP protection in and of itself is neither necessary nor sufficient for generating wealth from the discovery of knowledge goods. Rather, individual entrepreneurship is the key.     

Persistence of prices in the Eurozone capital cities: Evidence from the Economist Intelligence Unit City Data

Using the Economist Intelligence Unit City Data, this paper studies price differences in the Eurozone by comparing the prices of individual goods between twelve Eurozone countries. To estimate the persistence of prices, I employ a cross-sectionally augmented panel unit root test that accounts for contemporaneous as well as serial correlation. Based on the test, the estimated half-lives are 13 months for traded goods and 16 months for non-traded goods. Price differences for certain traded goods such as food or cars revert to parity much faster than prices for alcohol. To further refine the persistence estimates, I use the sequential panel selection method to determine the stationarity of individual cross-sections for each good that rejects the unit root. The distribution of stationary cross-sections between the Eurozone countries appears fairly balanced. The half-lives based only on stationary-cross-sections are reduced to 6 months for traded goods and 7 months for non-traded goods.     

Product quality and the theory of comparative advantage

We develop a simple model to investigate the possibility that two countries that differ significantly in income levels may be unable to gain from trading with each other. We consider two countries with identical preferences and different technologies. There are two types of goods: one homogeneous, and one quality-differentiated. We show that if one country has an absolute advantage in both types of goods, then no trade may be possible between the two countries, despite differences in relative autarky prices.     

Information externalities and intermediaries in frictional search markets

In frictional matching markets with heterogeneous buyers and sellers, sellers incur discrete showing costs to show goods to buyers who incur discrete inspection costs to assess the suitability of the goods on offer. We study how brokers can help reduce these costs by managing the level and mix of goods in their inventory. Intermediaries emerge and improve social welfare when there is sufficient heterogeneity in the types of goods and preferences. Learning and inventory management enable search intermediaries to internalize information externalities generated in unintermediated private search.     

Is cooperation instinctive? Evidence from the response times in a public goods game

We use data on response times from a public goods experiment to test the hypothesis that cooperation is instinctive, under the assumption that the longer the time of the decision, the less instinctive the choice. Results seem to support the hypothesis that cooperation is instinctive, while defection is ‘rational’. Moreover, as the experiment is designed also to assess the effects of the consumption of relational goods on cooperation, we are also able to state that some types of relational goods, like team working, produce additional cooperation, but make it less spontaneous. We also detect that females seem to behave less instinctively than males.     

Efficient Intra-Household Allocations and Distribution Factors: Implications and Identification

This paper provides an exhaustive characterization of testability and identifiability issues in the collective framework in the absence of price variation; it thus provides a theoretical underpinning for a number of empirical works that have been developed recently. We first provide a simple and general test of the Pareto-efficiency hypothesis, which is consistent with all possible assumptions on the private or public nature of goods, all possible consumption externalities between household members, and all types of interdependent individual preferences and domestic production technology. The test is proved to be necessary and sufficient. We then provide conditions for the identification of the sharing rule and the Engel curves of individual household members for a variety of different observational schemes.     

基于G-E-S-N分析的区域可持续发展模式

市场经济条件下地球上各种经济社会区域实际上是被不同属性的物品所占据或分割着,因而,区域构成又可以看成物品的空间构成。在特定自然和人文环境下交织在一起的具有不同外部性的物品及空间构成,对区域可持续发展往往起着重要支配作用。按是否具有排他性和竞争性划分物品类型,据此来探悉物品的基本空间属性和典型结构,文章提出了一种基于G-E-S-N分析,亦即物品空间外部性分析的框架方法,并以登封—少林实验区为例,初步验证了这种理论方法诠释的区域可持续发展模式。     

Positional goods and social welfare: a note on George Pendleton Watkins’ neglected contribution

Watkins's analysis of adventitious utility contains many aspects that are connected to the contemporary debate on positional goods. First, Watkins adventitious utility emerges from a process of social exclusion and can create negative externalities, in the sense that positive consumption of one individual implies negative consumption by another individual. Not only it creates negative externalities on other individuals, but it can initiate a race-to-the-bottom, where individuals waste an increasing amount of money on goods which do not possess any real utility.     

Household tax evasion

Household members share public goods and make intra-household transfers. We show how these features of the household interact with the tax evasion decision, and identify the dimensions in which household evasion differs from individual evasion. In the model we present two members of a household choose how much to contribute to a household public good and how much self-employment income to evade. We are interested in how different evasion possibilities interact with the contribution decisions to the household public good and the role of income transfers within the household. We show the household evasion decision differs from the individual decision because it affects the outcome of the household contribution game. When household members are taxed as individuals neutrality applies when choices are not constrained. If the evasion level of one household member is constrained then an income transfer can generate a Pareto improvement. When the household members are jointly taxed there is a couple constraint on strategies and corner solutions can emerge.     

Passports for sale: The political economy of conflict and cooperation in a meta-club

Some of the member states of the European Union sell citizenship or residence to wealthy foreign investors. We analyze these “golden-passport” programs as a study in the political economy of conflict and cooperation in an international meta-club. Seen through the lens of club goods theory, the EU is a club of nations, each of which can be interpreted as itself a club. Each single nation reserves the right to govern the admission of new individual members into its own club, and new members automatically benefit from the EU wide meta-club good. We characterize the unique equilibrium when individual clubs that may differ in membership size are free to choose the terms on which they admit members, and evaluate it from the point of view of the wellbeing of the set of clubs as a whole. We identify club size and benefits as well as differences in cost externalities as the key determinants. We also consider how the set of clubs as a whole can respond to the economic inefficiency problems such a situation creates.