Transaction costs and planner intervention

In this paper, I examine a two-period general equilibrium model in which transaction costs are incurred whenever financial contracts are traded. These transaction costs are real and convex. The presence of these transaction costs results in a Pareto inefficient equilibrium allocation. Attempting to fix this problem, the planner will intervene by scaling the transaction costs either up or down. The intervention must satisfy fiscal balance meaning that the summed value of transaction costs will remain constant. I prove that over a generic subset of household utility functions and endowments and subject to an upper bound on the number of household types, there exists an open set of planner interventions that lead to a Pareto superior allocation.     

On the design of incentive mechanisms in environmental policy

The objective of this paper is to present environmental policy as a simple game in two stages within a principal-agent framework. At the outset the authority adopts a transfer payment rule. Then the firms react by carrying out abatement activities, based on their chosen levels of emission and output. Next the authority measures the emissions (and residual profit of the industry) and revises the level of its instrument. Then the game starts again. Our purpose is to narrow the scope of ad hoc incentive schemes by characterizing families of optimal linear schemes.We thank two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions. We have also benefited from comments from I.-M. Andréasson, J. B. Opschoor, H. Verbruggen and the other members of the Task Force II: Environmental Policy instruments of the European Science Foundation Programme: Environment, Science and Society. Wang acknowledges support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).     

Transaction costs and informational cascades in financial markets

We study the effect of transaction costs (e.g., a trading fee or a transaction tax, like the Tobin tax) on the aggregation of private information in financial markets. We implement a financial market with sequential trading and transaction costs in the laboratory. According to theory, eventually all traders neglect their private information and abstain from trading (i.e., a no-trade informational cascade occurs). We find that, in the experiment, informational no-trade cascades occur when theory predicts they should (i.e., when the trade imbalance is sufficiently high). At the same time, the proportion of subjects irrationally trading against their private information is smaller than in a financial market without transaction costs. As a result, the overall efficiency of the market is not significantly affected by the presence of transaction costs.     

Transaction costs and the use of cash and credit

Summary An overlapping generations model with spatial separation and transaction costs is developed that displays steady state equilibria in which both cash (fiat currency) and trade credit are used in exchange. Equilibria in which trade credit is used are not Pareto optimal. The question of the optimal quantity of money is addressed. Deflation is found to be optimal, contrary to the result for standard overlapping generations environments.This paper is based upon my dissertation, written for the University of Minnesota. I am grateful to Kathryn Combs, Michael Dotsey, Bruce Horning, Anne Villamil and seminar participants at numerous institutions for helpful comments. Most of all, I want to thank my advisor, Neil Wallace, for the attention he gave to my work. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System.     

Transaction costs and foreign direct investment in developing countries

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been used by a number of developing countries to build a national competitive advantage in a global economy. Most of the literature on FDI in developing countries has focused on low-cost factors in these countries. But in a global economy where low cost factors are available at various locations around the globe, transaction costs related to the assumptions of "bounded rationality" and "opportunism" are becoming increasingly important in FDI decisions. These assumptions have been applied by researchers over the years to explain major changes in the organizational structure of corporations. This paper incorporates the assumptions of bounded rationality and opportunism to discuss factors that a firm considers in its decision to undertake FDI. A statistical analysis was carried out to test the validity of the arguments presented in the paper.     

K. William Kapp's theory of social costs and environmental policy: Towards political ecological economics

The paper analyzes the contribution of K. William Kapp, widely considered one of the founders of Ecological Economics. This paper will demonstrate how K. William Kapp developed his theory of social costs into a framework for environmental policy development, i.e. the basis for Political Ecological Economics. The latter provides the most comprehensive and non-utilitarian alternative to the main neoclassical approaches provided by Arthur Pigou and Ronald Coase. Kapp determined basic human needs to be necessary values operational for policymaking via politically derived and scientifically determined social minima (criteria) and socio-ecological indicators. This “rational humanism” was inspired by Weber's concept of substantive rationality and informed by John Dewey's pragmatic instrumentalism. The paper concludes that Kapp's contribution is important enough to cement its place in the broader school of Ecological Economics.     

Transaction costs and partnerships: The case of rock bands

This paper applies transaction cost economics to rock bands. It develops the importance of asset specificity. A number of phenomena in the field are shown to be explicable in terms of transactions costs.     

交易成本：软件盗版的一个经济学注释

盗版软件影响软件市场的发展,长期以来却屡禁不绝。从产权经济学上分析,软件是具有公共性的商品。矫正软件公共性所导致的交易成本过高,被认为是盗版问题的主要经济学根源,造成了在打击盗版方面执法效果不佳。只有关注交易成本的影响,才能更加合理有效的对软件产权进行保护。     

Green consumers and environmental policy

The present paper examines how improvements in consumers' environmental awareness influence the choice between output and emission taxes, within a framework of imperfect competition and endogenous choice of abatement level. We first show that in the absence of policy intervention, there exists a level of environmental awareness beyond which welfare is decreasing as market imperfections become more prominent relative to environmental concerns. We also confirm that both output and emission taxes are welfare superior to the free-market case. What is surprising, however, is that the welfare performance of an optimally chosen emissions tax is monotonically decreasing in consumers' environmental sensitivity, while the opposite is true for an output tax up to a certain level. At low levels of consumers' environmental awareness an emissions tax is welfare superior, but eventually, there is a level of environmental awareness beyond which an output-tax welfare dominates an emissions tax. Therefore, an emissions tax is better suited to societies that have not yet developed high levels of environmental awareness, while societies characterized by high levels of environmental awareness should prefer an output tax.     

Transaction cost measurement for evaluating environmental policies

Policy choice and policy design need to take account of transaction costs in order to increase the efficiency and sustainability of policies. However, transaction costs must first be measured to be included in the evaluation of alternative environmental or natural resource policies. While a number of studies measure transaction costs, there has been no systematic treatment of the fundamental issues involved. This article examines the issues involved in transaction cost measurement and makes recommendations regarding a typology of costs as well as the measurement methodologies themselves. In particular, methods used for nonmarket valuation of environmental goods may have potential for the measurement of transaction costs.     

Monetary policy with linear information costs

The paper adresses the problem of a monetary economy with costs of information, imposed in linear form. In particular, we make use of a strategic market game with money where equilibria are standardly non-Walrasian, permitting an active role to monetary policy. The imposition of information costs alters the demand of real balances since traders demand extra money for gathering and processing the necessary information. As a result, money injections could be proved welfare improving only when the induced information costs do not offset the resulted gains to trade.     

Transaction costs of carbon offset projects: A comparative study

The land-use change and forestry sector can be a cost-effective contributor to climate mitigation in at least three ways: providing carbon offsets through carbon sequestration in biomass and soils, reducing emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases, and producing biofuels that replace fossil fuels. The presence of carbon markets should help encourage these activities; however, most carbon trades to date have occurred in the energy sector. A major obstacle to carbon trades from land-use systems is the presence of high transaction costs of converting a carbon offset into a tradable commodity, so the prevailing market carbon prices may not provide enough incentive for adoption. This paper presents a model of the exchange of carbon offsets between a project developer and a group of landholders. The model is solved to derive project feasibility frontiers that show the minimum number of contracts necessary to make a project feasible at any given carbon price. The model is applied to two case studies (smallholder agroforestry in Indonesia and partial reforestation of family farms in Australia) under two types of contract (purchase of carbon flows and rental of carbon stocks). The paper concludes by identifying possible strategies to reduce transaction costs while maintaining project integrity.     

Disinflation costs in China and monetary policy regimes

This paper investigates the real effects of a disinflationary policy in China, in which we conduct a disinflation experiment in a medium-scale New Keynesian model. We highlight two key features of China's economy: the relevance of money to monetary policy rules and household inequality. For the former, we consider two monetary policy regimes: an expanded Taylor rule with money and a money supply rule. For the latter, we take into account a share of the population that is limited in its ability to participate in assets markets. Our analysis suggests that a disinflation policy is more costly when the central bank controls the money supply than the case in which the nominal interest rate is the policy instrument. Our results are driven by the different impacts of disinflation on nominal and real interest rates under the two regimes.     

Transaction costs as determinants of opportunism in integrated and independent sales forces

This study is an empirical test of the transaction cost determinants of opportunism by salespeople who sell electronic components in 169 U.S. sales districts. Opportunism by salespeople, as reported by their supervisors, is modeled as a function of (i) whether the salesperson is an employee or a manufacturers' representative; (ii) characteristics of the sales environment central to transaction cost analysis. The results generally support the transaction cost framework. They indicate that an especially powerful way to combat opportunism is to induce salespeople to perceive high goal congruence, i.e., that what benefits the company benefits them.     

Partial cross-ownership and strategic environmental policy

This paper analyzes the effect of passive investment in rival firms on the setting of cooperative and non-cooperative environmental taxes. We consider two firms located in different countries, with each firm owning the same percentage of the stock of its rival. We show that bilateral partial cross-ownership affects the taxes set by the countries in the cooperative and non-cooperative cases. When the stake that one firm has in its rival is great enough and environmental spillovers are low enough, cooperative taxes are lower than non-cooperative taxes. For the remaining values of parameters the opposite result is obtained.     

Optimal environmental taxation and enforcement policy

We study the optimal environmental taxation and enforcement policy when (i) the regulator does not know the firms’ abatement costs, (ii) penalties for tax evasion are limited, and (iii) monitoring of pollution is costly. We show that the threat of being audited alter the usual firms’ incentives to over-estimate their abatement costs. In particular, depending on the firms’ abatement costs, the optimal policy may involve over or under-deterrence compared to the full information outcome. We then investigate the properties of a pollution standard. We show that this policy comes close to an environmental tax once the economic incentives of the accompanying enforcement policy are considered.     

从交易费用角度谈物流联盟

现代物流是社会生产发展到一定阶段的产物,它的产生和发展需要有特定的环境和条件。企业改进自身物流系统的途径之一就是建立物流联盟。文章运用了交易费用理论探讨了物流联盟的形成,以便寻求现代物流发展的一般规律,适应现代物流发展的现实需要。     

Trade costs and the timing of competition policy adoption

Abstract This paper first presents stylized evidence showing how the date of the adoption of competition policy is correlated with country size. Smaller countries tend to adopt competition policy later. We then present a theoretical model with countries of different size, trade costs, and firms competing à la Cournot. In the model we show that reduced trade costs following from increasing globalization affect countries differently depending on their size. This has implications for the incentives to introduce competition policy. The predictions of the model are consistent with the empirical regularity presented.