Transport tax reform, commuting, and endogenous values of time

We consider a model of urban transport with two trip purposes, commuting (assumed perfectly complementary to labour supply) and noncommuting, to analyse the effects of transport tax reform on the value of time and marginal external congestion costs. Higher commuting taxes plausibly reduce time values, but higher noncommuting transport prices will typically raise the value of time. The intuition for this latter finding is that the reduction in congestion that follows from the tax increase itself raises net wages per hour of work (inclusive of commuting time). Empirical illustrations with Belgian data show a potentially large effect of transport tax reform on time values. In quite a few of the tax reforms studied traffic levels are reduced, but the increase in time values implies that marginal external congestion costs actually increase.     

A vintage model of urban growth

This paper develops a vintage model of residential housing for an open city, where the utility level of residents is given by an exogenous function of time. Producers behave myopically in that they believe the future price per unit of housing services will equal the current price. Demolition occurs when the expected present value of profits from continuing to operate an existing structure equals the expected present value of profits from redevelopment. The model is analyzed under the assumption of Cobb-Douglas utility and production functions and constant rates of growth for income, commuting cost, the utility level, and the prices of non-land capital and agricultural land. Computer simulation provides a concrete example of a city which grows according to the model.     

Labour supply and commuting time: An empirical study

We estimate a simple labour supply model that incorporates commuting time in a utility maximizing framework. Housing prices are assumed to vary with commuting time, and the elasticity of housing prices with respect to the latter is estimated to be about 10 percent. Using this elasticity estimate the price of commuting time averaged over all individuals is $3.22 while the wage rate is $4.72; thus commuting time is implicitly valued at about two-thirds of the wage rate on average. As far as work hours are concerned, almost all individuals are on the backward bending part of their labour supply curve.     

Life‐Cycle Consumption and Children: Evidence from a Structural Estimation

I estimate by maximum likelihood a dynamic model of optimal intertemporal allocation of consumption in the presence of children using high‐quality Danish longitudinal data. The number and age of all children can affect the marginal utility of consumption while income uncertainty, credit constraints and postretirement motives also influence household behaviour. While I estimate that children have a surprisingly small effect on the marginal utility of non‐durable consumption, data simulated from the estimated model replicates similar correlations between log consumption growth and changing household composition as found in the Danish data and typically found in UK and US data. To reconcile the results with existing studies, I illustrate how ignoring precautionary motives increases the estimated importance of children. The results indicate that precautionary motives might play a larger role than children in explaining the observed consumption age profile.     

When worlds collide: Different comparative static predictions of continuous and discrete agent models with land

This paper presents a difference in the comparative statics of general equilibrium models with land when there are finitely many agents, and when there is a continuum of agents. Restricting attention to quasi-linear and Cobb–Douglas utility, it is shown that with finitely many agents, an increase in the (marginal) commuting cost increases land rent per unit (that is, land rent averaged over the consumer's equilibrium parcel) paid by the consumer located at each fixed distance from the central business district. In contrast, with a continuum of agents, average land rent goes up for consumers at each fixed distance close to the central business district, is constant at some intermediate distance, and decreases for locations farther away. Therefore, there is a qualitative difference between the two types of models, and this difference is potentially testable.     

交叉熵方法理论上的缺陷及其改进研究

本文针对传统交叉熵（CE）方法在平衡和更新社会核算矩阵（SAM）研究中存在的缺陷进行分析,提出了基于离差熵绝对值期望最小化的改进模型1和基于离差熵平方期望最小化的改进模型2。理论结果表明：传统的CE方法得到的解是本文所提出的基于离差熵绝对值期望最小化改进模型1的一种特殊情况。同时为检验模型改进前后的实际效果,本文运用蒙特卡罗方法进行模拟分析,模拟结果表明：改进后的模型2得到的SAM流量矩阵精度比传统的CE方法得到的精度更高,而改进后的模型1得到的精度却相对较低。     

边际效用递减规律的再发现

本文的成果主要体现在两个方面:第一,将时间维度导入效用函数,实现了对边际效用递减规律认识的一次真正的飞跃;第二,将需求在需求要素的层次上进行分解,使边际效用递减规律有了更为准确和牢靠的基础。在这两个成果的基础上,对效用的可测量性、商品的同质性假说等问题进生了前瞻性的探讨。     

Stackelberg equilibrium with multiple firms and setup costs

I provide conditions that guarantee that a Stackelberg game with a setup cost and an integer number of identical leaders and followers has an equilibrium in pure strategies. The main feature of the game is that when the marginal follower leaves the market the price jumps up, so that a leader’s payoff is neither continuous nor quasiconcave. To show existence I check that a leader’s value function satisfies the following single crossing condition: When the other leaders produce more the leader never accommodates entry of more followers. If demand is strictly logconcave, and if marginal costs are both non decreasing and not flatter than average costs, then a Stackelberg equilibrium exists. Besides showing existence I characterize the equilibrium set and provide a number of results that contribute to the applied literature. As the number of leaders increases, leaders produce more and eventually they deter entry. Leaders produce more than the Cournot best reply, but they may underinvest in entry deterrence. As the number of followers increases, leaders become more aggressive. When this number is large, if leaders can produce the limit quantity and at the same time have market power, then they deter entry.     

Forecasting consumer credit card adoption: what can we learn about the utility function?

How to accurately predict customers’ adoption behavior is becoming more important and challenging to many credit card marketers as competition increases. This calls for more knowledge about the consumer utility function and the corresponding decision behavior. In this study, we challenge the commonly used logit model which implies linear utility function and constant marginal rate of substitution (MRS) with a neural network model that can accommodate nonlinear utility function and changing MRS between card attributes. Using the data from a national survey of credit card usage, we find that the neural network model significantly outperforms the logit in predicting consumer card adoption decisions. Our results indicate that consumers do not make linear tradeoffs between card attributes and the MRS between card features does not remain constant even within the same demographic group.     

Valuing lead time

When do short lead times warrant a cost premium? Decision makers generally agree that short lead times enhance competitiveness, but have struggled to quantify their benefits. Blackburn (2012) argued that the marginal value of time is low when demand is predictable and salvage values are high. de Treville et al. (2014) used real-options theory to quantify the relationship between mismatch cost and demand volatility, demonstrating that the marginal value of time increases with demand volatility, and with the volatility of demand volatility. We use the de Treville et al. model to explore the marginal value of time in three industrial supply chains facing relatively low demand volatility, extending the model to incorporate factors such as tender-loss risk, demand clustering in an order-up-to model, and use of a target fill rate that exceeded the newsvendor profit-maximizing order quantity. Each of these factors substantially increases the marginal value of time. In all of the companies under study, managers had underestimated the mismatch costs arising from lead time, so had underinvested in cutting lead times.     

Estimating household demand for housing attributes in rent-controlled markets

We estimate the household’s marginal willingness to pay for housing attributes in the rent-controlled sector, so where rents are not freely market determined. The application of hedonic price approaches to obtain estimates of the household’s value of housing characteristics is then invalid. We apply an alternative estimation approach based on residential mobility. In our application, we focus on the households’ willingness to pay for number of rooms as well as the willingness to pay to avoid a long commuting distance. Our estimates appear plausible. For example, for households in the rent-controlled sector are willing to pay about 7% of their household income for an additional room. The implied marginal costs of commuting are about €0.17–€0.23 per (one-way) kilometre.     

Income taxes and urban spatial structure

This paper examines the impact of an income tax in a monocentric city where households equilibriate their allocation of time between work, commuting, and leisure. An increase in the income tax rate lowers the implicit value of time, and hence transportation costs. “Compensated equilibrium” comparative statics analysis shows that under certain conditions, this results in a larger, more dispersed urban area, with lower land rents at the city center and less population within any given distance from the center. The welfare effect of an income tax rate change is also studied, and an expression for the marginal excess burden is derived. The income tax produces welfare losses both because it induces substitution in favor of leisure and in favor of travel—the latter accompanied by excessive spatial dispersion and consumption of space. The marginal excess burden depends not only on the compensated demand elasticity for leisure, but also on that for space. Finally, the problem of benefit measurement for transportation projects in this tax-distorted spatial economy is examined. Benefit measures should be deflated to adjust for the fact that further transportation improvements lead to reduction of land use intensity, exacerbating the problem of spatial resource misallocation in an already excessively dispersed urban area.     

A Bid-Price Model for 'Non-Western' Cities: Revised Specification and Empirical Test

A bstract . A significant portion of the literature concerning intra-urban residential location has involved the development of a utility maximization bid-price model which relates income and distance to work. When distance-overcoming costs are monetary, a positive income-distance function is predicted, and studies in several Anglo-American cities have provided some confirmation. If expenses are made to be temporal, the model forecasts a negative relationship because the opportunity cost of commuting is directly variable with income. A study was conducted in Piracicaba (pop. 125,000), Brazil, and neither positive nor negative income-distance functions were encountered for any of the transportation differentiated groups. The findings indicate that the prevalence of walking, bicycling and other commuting modes which consume large amounts of time does not adequately explain the "non-western" residential pattern (negative income-distance to the Central Business District function) which is common in many Latin American cities. The results also suggest that hypotheses which consider spatial relationships between residences and sites other than the place of work may prove to be more fruitful (1).     

Nonrecursive separation of risk and time preferences

Recursive utility disentangles preferences with respect to time and risk by recursively building up a value function of local increments. This involves certainty equivalents of indirect utility. Instead we disentangle preferences with respect to time and risk by building up a value function as a non-linear aggregation of certainty equivalents of direct utility of consumption. This entails time-consistency issues which are dealt with by looking for an equilibrium control and an equilibrium value function rather than a classical optimal control and a classical optimal value function. We characterize the solution in a general diffusive incomplete market model and find that, in certain special cases of utmost interest, the characterization coincides with what would arise from a recursive utility approach. But also importantly, in other cases, it does not: The two approaches are fundamentally different but match, exclusively but importantly, in the mathematically special case of homogeneity of the value function.     

International tenders and futures hedging

This paper examines the optimal bidding and hedging decisions of a risk‐averse firm that takes part in an international tender. The firm faces multiple sources of uncertainty: exchange rate risk, risk of an unsuccessful tender, and business risk. The firm is allowed to trade unbiased currency futures contracts to imperfectly hedge its contingent foreign exchange risk exposure. We show that the firm shorts less (more) of the unbiased futures contracts when its marginal utility function is convex (concave) as compared with the case that the marginal utility function is linear. We further show that the curvature of the marginal utility function plays a decisive role in determining the impact of currency futures hedging on the firm's bidding behavior. Sufficient conditions that ensure the firm bids more or less aggressively than in the case without hedging opportunities are derived. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inter-city wage differentials and the value of air quality

This paper proposes a method of valuing air quality based on differences in wages among cities. Using an urban location model it is shown that the supply of labor to any city increases with the real wage and with air quality in the business district. If individuals have log-linear utility functions then the value at home and at work of an equal proportionate reduction in pollution throughout the city can be computed from the coefficients of the labor supply function. The computations are illustrated for one-digit labor supply functions estimated from 1970 Census data.     

Optimal decisions in foreign exchange bidding markets

I characterize optimal bidding decisions in bidding markets where each agent does not perceive she can significantly affect the market outcome. Using a foreign exchange bidding framework to provide a micro-foundation for the shape of a bidder's payoff function, I show that (1) in a discriminatory auction a bidder bids for a price that equals the value of the marginal product of her bid quantity, and (2) in a competitive auction a bidder bids for a price that equals the value of the average product of her bid quantity. An example illustrates the comparative properties of these solutions.     

Learning by doing,endogenous discounting and economic development

In this paper, we focus on a growth model where the discount rate is decreasing in capital accumulation and endogenous growth is made possible through learning by doing, knowledge accumulation being a by-product of gross investment. In such a model, the utility function has to be restricted to take positive values implying that the elasticity of marginal utility is lower than one. The presence of endogenous discounting generates a steady-state of stagnation which can be saddle-path stable or unstable depending on the marginal productivity of knowledge. In the case of long run growth, the fact that the elasticity of marginal utility is lower than one implies the existence of two asymptotic balanced growth paths: the one with the higher growth rate being a saddle point while the one with the lower growth rate not being a saddle point. We also study the optimal solution which is characterized by a unique balanced growth path. The policy consists as usual in subsidizing investment in order to internalize the externality.     

Bounds for the utility-indifference prices of non-traded assets in incomplete markets

Abstract We consider a special class of financial models with both traded and non-traded assets and show that the utility indifference (bid) price of a contingent claim on a non-traded asset is bounded above by the expectation under the minimal martingale measure. This bound also represents the marginal bid price for the claim. The key conclusion is that the bound and the marginal bid price are independent of both the utility function and initial wealth of the agent. Thus all utility maximising agents charge the same marginal price for the claim. This conclusion is in some sense the opposite conclusion to that of Hubalek and Schachermayer (2001), who show that any price is consistent with some equivalent martingale measure. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 91B28, 91B16, 60J70 Journal of Economic Literature Classification: G13     

The spatial impact of employment centres on housing markets

The spatial impact of employment centres on housing markets. Spatial Economic Analysis. Local economic growth tends to affect neighbourhood house prices unevenly. It has been observed that prime locations experience price hikes far in excess of the surrounding local area. Yet, this phenomenon is not well captured by existing economic models. This research provides a model of spatial and temporal interactions between housing and employment markets. The results show that rapid growth of employment centres increases house prices in neighbouring locations even after adjusting for fundamentals. It is concluded that spatial clustering of companies creates an option value for existing and potential employees that goes beyond ease of access for commuting purposes.