Self-selection and Pareto efficient taxation

This paper analyses the set of Pareto efficient tax structures. The formulation of the problem as one of self-selection not only shows more clearly the similarity between this problem and a number of other problems (such as the optimal pricing of a monopolist) which have recently been the subject of extensive research, but also allows the derivation of a number of new results. We establish (i) under fairly weak conditions, randomization of tax structures is desirable; (ii) if different individuals are not perfect substitutes for one another in production, then the general equilibrium effects—until now largely ignored in the literature—of changes in the tax structure may be dominant in determining the optimal tax structure; in particular if the relative wage of high ability and low ability individuals depends on the relative supplies of labor, the optimal tax structure entails a negative marginal tax rate on the high ability individuals, and a positive marginal tax rate on the low ability individuals (the marnitude of which depends on the elasticity of substitution); (iii) if individuals differ in their preferences, Pareto efficient taxation may entail negative marginal tax rates for high incomes; while (iv) if wage income is stochastic, the marginal tax rate at the upper end may be 100%.Our analysis thus makes clear that the main qualitative properties of the optimal tax structure to which earlier studies called attention are not robust to these attempts to make the theory more realistic.     

A simple and effective misspecification test for the double-hurdle model

The commonly-used version of the double-hurdle model rests on a rather restrictive set of statistical assumptions, which are very seldom tested by practitioners, mainly because of the lack of a standard procedure for doing so, although violation of such assumptions can lead to serious modelling flaws. We propose here a bootstrap-corrected conditional moment portmanteau test which is simple to implement and has good size and power properties.     

A simple IID test for autoregressive conditional duration models

We propose using the rank-based variance ratio test as an easy-to-implement test for testing the independent and identically distributed assumption of autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) models. We apply the proposed test to duration data of five stocks and get the same conclusions as previous studies.     

Pareto efficient insurance contracts when the insurer's cost function is discontinuous

Summary. We consider the problem of efficient insurance contracts when the cost structure includes a fixed cost per claim. We prove existence of efficient insurance contracts and that the indemnity function in such contracts is non-decreasing in the damage. We further show that either there is no insurance, or the indemnity is positive for all losses, or efficient insurance contracts have a unique jump. We study variants of the model and provide a generalization to the case of non expected utilities. Our results are then applied to Townsend's model of deterministic auditing. Received: November 8, 2000; revised version: March 12, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We are grateful to F. Salanié for pointing out an error in the previous version of the paper and for suggesting Proposition 6 to us. Correspondence to: R.-A. Dana     

On the set of Pareto efficient allocations in economies with public goods

Summary We examine the set of Pareto-efficient allocations in economies with public goods. We show that even if preferences are continuous and strongly monotonic, it need not coincide with the set of weakly efficient allocations. We then study topological properties of the Pareto set. We show that it is neither connected nor closed in allocation space. Furthermore, if the public goods are local, the image of the Pareto set in utility space need not be closed or connected. We provide two independent sufficient conditions for the closedness of the Pareto set. The results are directly applicable to private goods economies with joint production. Our results should be of interest for general equilibrium and mechanism design theory; where for example, the properties of the efficient set are important for proving the existence of an equilibrium and for the study of the properties of monotone-path social choice correspondences.We thank Hideo Konishi, Tomoichi Shinotsuka, Nicholas Yannelis and an anonymous referee for valuable comments on previous drafts of this paper.     

A simple test of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

We propose a way to test the New Keynesian Phillips Curve without having to estimate its structural parameters. We find that it does not exist as a combination of the structural parameters consistent with the US data. This might be due to the failure of the joint hypothesis of rational expectations.     

A simple test for nonstationarity in mixed panels with incidental trends

Ng (2008) shows how the cross-sectional variance of the observed panel data can be used to construct a simple test for the proportion of non-stationary units. However, in the case with incidental trends the test is distorted. The present note shows how the distortions can be substantially reduced by the use of bias-adjustment. It also investigates the local power of the bias-adjusted test, which is shown to suffer from the same incidental trends problem previously only documented for conventional t$t$-tests.     

A simple nested test of the Almost Ideal Demand System

The MPIGLOG specification of an indirect utility function gives rise to Cooper and McLaren's (1992) Modified Almost Ideal Demand System (MAIDS) specification, which nests the Almost Ideal Demand System. Following the ‘combined’ approach outlined by Fry, Fry and McLaren (1993), we transform the deterministic equations to logratio form for estimation. This procedure not only restricts the shares implied by the model to the unit simplex, but also provides a transparent representation of the restriction implied by the Almost Ideal Demand System. We estimate MAIDS (with and without the Almost Ideal Demand System restriction imposed) using the ‘combined’ approach and proceed to test the Almost Ideal Demand System restriction.     

Critical values for the augmented efficient Wald test for fractional unit roots

This paper presents response surface estimates of finite sample critical values of the Efficient Wald test for Fractional Unit Roots of Lobato and Velasco (Econometrica 75:575–590, 2007) in the presence of deterministic components. Lag-adjusted critical values of the augmented versions of the tests illustrate that as in the context of traditional unit root and stationarity tests, incorporating adjustments for serial correlation affects the finite sample distributions of the test statistics.     

A simple spatial dependence test robust to local and distributional misspecifications

In this paper, we derive a class of modified score tests robust to local and distributional misspecifications for testing spatial error autocorrelation and spatial lag dependence. The proposed tests are general enough to include several popular tests for the spatial dependence as special cases. Moreover, we show that the popular test statistics proposed by Burridge (1980) and Anselin et al. (1996) are robust to distributional misspecification although they are derived under normality assumption.     

Manipulation and the Pareto rule

This paper examines rules that map preference profiles into choice sets. There are no agendas other than the entire set of alternatives. A rule is said to be “manipulable” if there is a person i, and a preference profile, such that i prefers the choice set obtained when he is dishonest to the one obtained when he is honest. It is “nonmanipulable” if this can never happen. The paper indicates how preferences over choice sets might be sensibly derived from preferences over alternatives, and discusses seven different notions of manipulability associated with seven different assumptions about preferences over sets of alternatives. The paper has two sections of results. In the first I show that the Pareto rule, that is, the rule that maps preference profiles into corresponding sets of Pareto optima, is nonmanipulable in four of the seven senses of manipulability, and manipulable in three of them. In the second section, I examine this conjecture: If an arbitrary rule is nonmanipulable and nonimposed, and if indifference is disallowed, then every choice set must be contained in the set of Pareto optima. The conjecture is true under the strongest definition of nonmanipulability.     

Beliefs and Pareto Efficient Sets: A Remark

We show that, in a two-period economy with uncertainty in the second period, if an allocation is Pareto optimal for a given set of beliefs and remains optimal when these beliefs are changed, then the set of optimal allocations of the two economies must actually coincide. We identify equivalence classes of beliefs, giving rise to the same set of Pareto optimal allocations. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D51, D61.     

A simple panel stationarity test in the presence of serial correlation and a common factor

This paper develops a simple test à la Pesaran (2007) for the null hypothesis of stationarity in heterogeneous panel data with cross-sectional dependence in the form of a common factor in the disturbance. We also allow for serial correlation.     

A monotonicity law for relative prices

Summary It is shown that relative prices of production, which depend on the rate of profit in a complicated manner, satisfy nevertheless a simple monotonicity law when the Hilbert's projective metric is used as a measure.     

短期内经济健康运行的帕累托最优标准

目前大都以菲利浦斯曲线和奥肯定律为"标准"判断短期内经济运行的健康与否。然而,菲利浦斯曲线、奥肯定律以及据此得出的关于目标经济增长率、目标失业率和目标通货膨胀率的"标准",都是依附于某个国家或地区个别经济实践的经验,并设有普遍的指导意义。基于帕累托最优理论,笔者认为:关于短期内经济的健康运行,其失业率和通货膨胀率的帕累托最优理论标准均为3.93%,经济增长率的帕累托最优理论标准为3.4%。这些"理论"标准,对不同国家或地区的经济实践都具有指导意义。     

Forecasting nonlinear economic time series: A simple test to accompany the nearest neighbor approach

This paper is based on a recent nonparametric forecasting approach by Sugihara, Grenfell and May (1990) to improve the short term prediction of nonlinear chaotic processes. The idea underlying their forecasting algorithm is as follows: For a nonlinear low-dimensional process, a state space reconstruction of the observed time series exhibits spatial correlation, which can be exploited to improveshort term forecasts by means of locally linear approximations. Still, the important question of evaluating the forecast perfomance is very much an open one, if the researcher is confronted with data that are additionally disturbed by stochastic noise. To account for this problem, a simple nonparametric test to accompany the algorithm is suggested here. To demonstrate its practical use, the methodology is applied to observed price series from commodity markets. It can be shown that the short term predictability of the best fitting linear model can be improved upon significantly by this method.     

A simple inflation indicator for the euro zone

This article proposes and estimates an inflation indicator for the European Monetary Union (EMU). This indicator is set up so that it is contemporarily not affected by the changes in price differentials among EMU countries. The results show that the Monetary Union Index of Consumer Prices (MUICP), which is the inflation measure that the European Central Bank (ECB) takes as a reference for monetary policy purposes, could be understating the value of the inflation in the euro zone. It is also concluded that regional peculiarities are fundamental in the evolution of prices in the different EMU countries.     

A near Pareto optimal auction with budget constraints

In a setup where a divisible good is to be allocated to a set of bidders with budget constraints, we introduce a mechanism in the spirit of the Vickrey auction. In the mechanism we propose, understating budgets or values is weakly dominated. Since the revenue is increasing in budgets and values, all kinds of equilibrium deviations from true valuations turn out to be beneficial to the auctioneer. We also show that ex-post Nash equilibrium of our mechanism is near Pareto optimal in the sense that all full winners? values are above all full losers? values.     

Serial dictatorship and Pareto optimality

In a deterministic allocation problem in which each agent is entitled to receive exactly one object, an allocation is Pareto optimal if and only if it is the outcome of a serial dictatorship. We extend the definition of serial dictatorship to settings in which some agents may be entitled to receive more than one object, and study the efficiency and uniqueness properties of the equilibrium allocations. We prove that subgame perfect equilibrium allocations of serial dictatorship games are not necessarily Pareto optimal; and generally not all Pareto optima can be implemented as subgame perfect equilibrium allocations of serial dictatorship games, except in the 2-agent separable preference case. Moreover, serial dictatorship games do not necessarily have unique subgame perfect equilibrium allocations, except in the 2-agent case, hence their outcomes are indeterminate and manipulable.