Risks, Financing Constraints, and High Savings Ratio in the Rural Economy of China: A Model Incorporating Precautionary Savings and Liquidity Constraints

This paper makes an in-depth investigation on the phenomenon of high savings rate in the rural economy of China between 1978 and 2003. On the basis of precautionary savings theory, we construct a model incorporating the risks, liquidity constrains, and aging population to explain the existence of high savings rate in the rural economy of China. We measure risks with Gini coefficient and marginal propensity to save. We find that these risk indices are positively associated with the higher savings rate and the higher degree of prudence of rural households. Our findings pose an urgency of the reform of rural financial system and the improvement in social security system in the rural economy of China. Translated from Economic Science, 2005, (1) (in Chinese)     

On the Effects of Redistribution on Growth and Entrepreneurial Risk-taking

This paper investigates the effects of redistributive taxation on occupational choice and growth. We discuss a two-sector economy in the spirit of Romer (1990). Agents engage in one of two alternative occupations: either self-employment in an intermediate goods sector characterized by monopolistic competition, or employment as an ordinary worker in this sector. Entrepreneurial profits are stochastic. The occupational choice under risk endogenizes the number of firms in the intermediate goods industry. While the presence of entrepreneurial risk results in a suboptimally low number of firms and depresses growth, nonlinear tax schemes can sometimes compensate negative effects by ex post providing social insurance.     

SELLING IN ADVANCE TO LOSS AVERSE CONSUMERS

This article examines the influence of information on market performance in an advance purchase setting. Information reduces the risk that an advance purchase results in a mismatch between consumer preferences and product characteristics. However, information may also raise the number of advance purchases by increasing firms' incentive to offer advance purchase discounts. Accounting for consumers' aversion toward losses/risks turns out to be crucial as it changes our assessment of policies aiming to improve consumers' information: Under monopoly, information can be detrimental both for efficiency and consumer surplus, whereas under competition, information is doubly beneficial because it mitigates intertemporal business stealing.     

Endogenous Product Differentiation,Market Size and Prices

This paper provides a framework to understand how market size affects firms' investments in product differentiation in a model of monopolistic competition. The theory proposes that consumers' love of variety makes them more sensitive to product differentiation efforts by firms, which leads to more differentiated products in larger markets. The framework also predicts an inverted U ‐shaped effect of trade liberalization on product differentiation, with trade liberalization leading to more differentiated products when starting from autarky but then leading to less differentiated products as the countries approach free trade.     

Imperfect common knowledge and the information value of prices

Summary. When economic agents have diverse private information on the fundamentals of the economy, prices may serve as a poor aggregator of this private information. We examine the information value of prices in a monopolistic competition setting that has become standard in the New Keynesian macroeconomics literature. We show that public information has a disproportionate effect on agents’ decisions, crowds out private information, and thereby has the potential to degrade the information value of prices. This effect is strongest in an economy with keen price competition. Monetary policy must rely on less informative signals of the underlying cost conditions.Received: 6 November 2003, Revised: 19 November 2004 JEL Classification Numbers: E31, E32, E58.This paper supersedes the discussion in the first half of our longer paper that circulated under the title “Public and Private Information in Monetary Policy Models”. We thank Andy Filardo, Marvin Goodfriend, Nobu Kiyotaki, John Moore, Stephen Morris and Lars Svensson for advice and comments at various stages of the project, and to Herakles Polemarchakis, Roko Aliprantis and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments and guidance. The views are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the BIS. The second author acknowledges support from the U.K. ESRC under grant RES 000220450. Correspondence to: H.S. Shin     

Competition over Time-Inconsistent Consumers

How do firms respond to consumers' time inconsistency? This paper studies the optimal design of nonexclusive contracts under competition. It shows that nonexclusivity creates a stark asymmetry between immediate‐costs goods and immediate‐rewards goods. For immediate‐cost goods nonexclusivity does not affect the equilibrium and, when consumers are sophisticated, the efficient allocation is achieved. When consumers are partially naive, the optimal sales tax may be either positive or negative and depends on parameters that are hard to estimate. In the case of immediate‐rewards goods, however, the equilibrium features marginal‐cost pricing and is always inefficient. Moreover, the optimal tax does not depend on the consumers' degree of naiveté and is a function of parameters that are easy to assess.     

Transfer Pricing Rules,OECD Guidelines,and Market Distortions

We study the impact of transfer pricing rules on prices, firms' organizational structure, and consumers' utility in a two‐country monopolistic competition model with source‐based profit taxes. Firms can either be multinationals and serve the foreign market through a fully controlled affiliate, or be exporters and serve the foreign market by contracting with an independent distributor. The use of the OECD's comparable uncontrolled transfer price (CUP) rule distorts firms' output and pricing decisions, because the comparable arm's length transactions between exporters and distributors—which serve as the benchmark—are not efficient. We show that the CUP rule is detrimental to consumers in the low‐tax country, yet benefits consumers in the high‐tax country when compared to the benchmark of unconstrained profit shifting. Using the OECD rule increases tax revenue at the expense of consumer surplus. Those results also hold under the alternative cost‐plus transfer pricing rule.     

Optimal consumption and the timing of the resolution of uncertainty

As is well-known, consumers want to accumulate precautionary savings in the face of income risks when their marginal utility is convex (prudence). In this paper, we explore the effect of the timing of the resolution of income uncertainty on savings. An agent faces uncertainty about his income at date t+2. What is the effect of being informed that the uncertainty will be resolved at date t+1 on the consumption at date t? We show that the effect is positive, if and only if, marginal utility is convex (prudence), when either the risk free rate is equal to the rate of pure preference for the present, or when the utility function is HARA. The intuition is that an early resolution of uncertainty allows for time-diversifying the risk. It therefore plays a role similar to a reduction of the income risk, whose effect on savings is negative under prudence.     

网络外部性、商业模式与PC市场结构

本文基于PC市场规模经济和网络外部性的特点 ,构建了扩展的豪泰林模型 ,研究了PC市场结构的决定因素和形成机理及厂商的不同商业模式 :在规模经济明显和网络外部性强的PC互补品市场上往往呈现出双寡头竞争格局 ,先进入PC市场的厂商较传统产业享有更大的成本优势和网络外部性优势 ,后来厂商不得不强化传统的价格和产品差异化等竞争手段 ,采取不同的商业模式参与竞争 ;在规模经济不明显和网络外部性弱的PC互补品市场往往呈现出多家企业进行垄断竞争的格局 ,双寡头市场上的厂商则根据不同的比较优势与垄断竞争市场的相关厂商进行合作或竞争。     

Social value of public information re-examined

As an extension of Hirshleifer's horse race example into a competitive exchange market framework, this paper quantitatively re-examines the condition under which social value of public information can be positive. For a prototype economy of two risk averse traders, we prove that their discordance of beliefs makes the social value of a certain class of inconclusive information either positive or negative depending on whether their endowments are or are not predominantly associated with states they regard as more probable, whereas it has been known that information acquisition is always socially wasteful under concordant beliefs.     

World oil: the growing case for international policy

Can the economic theory of depletion be reconciled with low petroleum prices? This article uses a revision of the theory, which reflects demand functions that rise in response to increasing world population and income. The magnitude of producers' and consumers' surplus is estimated under both competitive and monopolistic assumptions; the result indicates a present value comparable to or in excess of today's gross world economic product. Game theory suggests a framework that explains the interaction between oil pricing and military policy, and the economic incentives that result in a general pattern of recent market equilibrium crude oil prices often fluctuating with a $15–20 per barrel range. The analysis concludes that the economic incentives for political instability in the Persian Gulf will increase, and more formal methods of setting the international framework for Persian Gulf oil may be expected.     

Aggregate savings when individual income varies

This paper examines aggregate savings in a general equilibrium model where infinitely lived households face volatile (and possibly uncertain) income paths, hold a risk-free asset, and face a borrowing constraint. I first show that the equilibrium capital stock in an economy without uncertainty, but where individual income varies, can be larger than in an economy where each household's income is constant. When individual income is stochastic and uninsurable, the equilibrium capital stock is always larger than when income is constant. This additional capital accumulation has sometimes been interpreted as precautionary savings, but I argue that much of the additional savings are generated by permanent-income motives in combination with strict borrowing constraints.     

Unemployment and welfare consequences of international outsourcing under monopolistic competition

This paper challenges the conventional academic view that international outsourcing is just another form of gainful trade. Contrary to that view, we show that labour‐service outsourcing can reduce the high‐wage country's welfare even when product‐market trade is beneficial, within a model that combines involuntary unemployment and monopolistic competition. Outsourcing's impact on welfare is worsened by a definite loss of jobs and a possible contraction in the range of varieties produced worldwide. While owners of capital benefit from outsourcing under certain conditions, labour's welfare always falls.     

Price setting and the steady-state effects of inflation

This paper examines how price setting plays a key role in explaining the steady-state effects of inflation in a monopolistic competition economy with transactions-facilitating money. Three pricing variants (optimal prices, indexed prices, and unchanged prices) are introduced through a generalization of the Calvo-type setting that allows price indexation. We found that in an economy with less indexed prices, the steady-state negative impact of inflation on output is higher. Regarding welfare analysis, our results support a long-run monetary policy aimed at price stability with a close-to-zero inflation target. This finding is robust to any price setting scenario.JEL Classification: E13, E31, E50The writing of this paper commenced during the time I spent on the Research Visitors Programme 2001 of the European Central Bank and an earlier version of the paper became ECB Working Paper No. 140. I would like to thank Bennett T. McCallum, Frank Smets, and Oscar Bajo-Rubio for their valuable comments and suggestions, and the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología of Spain for its financial support (Research Project 2002/00954).     

Comment on ‘Competition Tests with a Non‐Structural Model: The Panzar–Rosse Method Applied to Germany's Savings Banks’

Abstract. In a recent issue of this journal Gischer and Stiele (2009) applied the ‘Test for “Monopoly” Equilibrium’ advanced by Panzar and Rosse (1987) to German savings banks and came up with the claim that savings banks maximize profits under conditions of monopolistic competition in the meaning of Edward Chamberlin. Their proposition is not conclusive since it would require free entry and for savings banks to operate under increasing returns to scale. Available evidence, however, shows them being subject to constant or decreasing returns to scale. The empirical findings of Gischer and Stiele can more convincingly be explained by assuming savings banks abide by their legal goals to pursue the public interest.     

Liquidity risk and financial competition: Implications for asset prices and monetary policy

This paper studies the implications of banking competition for capital markets and monetary policy. In particular, I develop a two-sector monetary growth model in which a group of agents is exposed to liquidity shocks and money is essential. Banks insure depositors against such risk and invest in the economy's assets. In this setting, I compare an economy with a perfectly competitive banking sector to an economy with a fully concentrated financial sector. Unlike previous work, banks can have market power in both deposits and capital markets. Compared to a perfectly competitive financial sector, I demonstrate that a monopolistic banking system can have substantial adverse consequences on capital formation, assets prices, and the degree of risk sharing. Furthermore, multiple steady-states can emerge and the economy becomes subject to poverty traps. More importantly, market power in financial markets may overturn the Tobin effect present under a perfectly competitive financial sector. This necessarily happens in economies with high degrees of liquidity risk and low levels of capital formation.     

Inflation and unemployment in the share economy

This note first interprets Weitzman's monopolistic competition analogy to the share economy and considers the implications of this for the nature of “excess demand” in such an economy. The discussion then focuses on the effects of the real wage flexibility induced by sharing schemes. It is observed that Weitzman's analysis is entirely in terms of real, not nominal, variables. The note concludes with remarks on possible distributional conflicts in a share economy.     

A Core‐Equilibrium Convergence in a Public Goods Economy

This paper shows a core‐equilibrium convergence in a public goods economy where consumers' preferences display warm glow effects. We demonstrate that if each consumer becomes satiated to other consumers' provision, then as the economy grows large the core shrinks to the set of Edgeworth allocations. Moreover, we show that an Edgeworth allocation can be decentralized as a warm glow equilibrium.     

Fiscal Stimulus and Endogenous Firm Entry in a Monopolistic Competition Macroeconomic Model

This paper sets up a monopolistic competition model featuring the returns to production specialization. Some novel results are derived from the analysis. First, the effect of a fiscal stimulus on consumption may be positive or negative, depending crucially upon whether the production function is characterized by increasing or decreasing returns to production specialization. Second, following a fiscal expansion, increasing returns to specialization lead to a positive linkage between real wages and aggregate output, while decreasing returns to specialization result in a negative relationship between real wages and aggregate output. Third, a fiscal expansion may raise social welfare, provided that the degree of increasing returns to production specialization is sufficiently large.