GROWTH AND BUBBLES WITH CONSUMPTION EXTERNALITIES*

This paper explores the role of consumption externalities in an overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation. If consumers in each generation are concerned with other agents’ consumption behaviours, there exist intergenerational as well as intragenerational consumption externalities. It is the presence of intergenreational consumption externalities that may produce fundamental effects both on equilibrium dynamics and on steady‐state characterization of the economy. This paper demonstrates this fact in the context of a simple model of endogenously growing, overlapping‐generations economy with or without asset bubbles.     

With exhaustible resources, can a developing country escape from the poverty trap?

This paper studies the optimal growth of a developing non-renewable natural resource producer. It extracts the resource, and produces a single consumption good with man-made capital. Moreover, it can sell the extracted resource abroad and use the revenues to buy an imported good, perfect substitute of the domestic consumption good. The domestic technology is convex-concave, so that the economy may be locked into a poverty trap. We show that the extent to which the country will escape from the poverty trap depends on the interactions between its technology and its impatience, the characteristics of the resource revenue function, the level of its initial capital stock, and the abundance of the natural resource.     

Poverty dynamics in rural China revisited: do assets matter?

This paper uses an asset-based approach to examine poverty dynamics in rural China over the period 1989–2006. The analysis documents a significant structural component in the poverty dynamics of households. The lack of profitable agricultural asset accumulation plays an unneglectable role in causing households to be trapped in persistent poverty. The escape from poverty is increasingly dominated by stochastic upward mobility rather than by structural movement in terms of asset accumulation. This could threaten the prospect of poverty reduction in rural China. It is argued that future reform and policy-making should pay more attention to building households’ asset base.     

Environmental Quality,Public Debt and Economic Development

This article analyzes the consequences on capital accumulation and environmental quality of environmental policies financed by public debt. A public sector of pollution abatement is financed by a tax or by public debt. We show that if the initial capital stock is high enough, the economy monotonically converges to a long-run steady state. On the contrary, when the initial capital stock is low, the economy is relegated to an environmental poverty trap. We also explore the implications of public policies on the trap and on the long-run stable steady state. In particular, we find that government should decrease debt and increase pollution abatement to promote capital accumulation and environmental quality at the stable long-run steady state. Finally, a welfare analysis shows that there exists a level of public debt that allows a long run steady state to be optimal.     

International asset market, nonconvergence, and endogenous fluctuations

We develop an overlapping generations model with re-tradeable paper assets and capital accumulation to analyze the interaction between the real economy and an international asset market. The world consists of two homogeneous countries, which differ only in their initial levels of capital. Consumers who live for two periods transfer wealth over time and across countries by holding international mutual funds which pay stochastic dividends. The optimal portfolio decisions of consumers do not necessarily induce convergence of incomes between the two countries. Moreover, interaction through the asset market induces endogenous fluctuation of capital flows between the rich and the poor country.     

Informality and Long‐Run Growth

One of the most salient features of developing economies is the existence of a large informal sector. In this paper, we use quantitative theory to study the dynamic implications of informality on wage inequality, human capital accumulation, child labor, and long‐run growth. Our model can generate transitory informality equilibria or informality‐induced poverty traps. Its calibration reveals that the case for the poverty‐trap hypothesis arises: although informality serves to protect low‐skilled workers from extreme poverty in the short run, it prevents income convergence between developed and developing nations in the long run. Then we examine the effectiveness of different development policies to exit the poverty trap. Our numerical experiments show that using means‐tested education subsidies is the most cost‐effective single policy option. However, for longer time horizons, or as the economy gets closer to the poverty trap threshold, combining means‐tested education and wage subsidies is even more effective.     

Consumption versus asset smoothing: testing the implications of poverty trap theory in Burkina Faso

Despite solid theoretical foundations for the notion that poor, borrowing-constrained households will intertemporally manage assets to smooth consumption, the consumption-smoothing hypothesis has not always withstood empirical scrutiny. This paper reassesses the intertemporal asset management problem with a poverty trap model and shows that we would expect to see asset smoothing, not consumption smoothing, in the neighborhood of critical asset levels at which optimal accumulation behavior bifurcates. We then employ threshold estimation techniques to empirically confirm the co-existence of consumption and asset smoothing regimes using a household panel data set from West Africa. Households above the estimated threshold almost completely insulate their consumption from weather shocks, whereas those below the threshold do not. These results not only indirectly provide evidence of the existence of poverty traps but also speak to the level and incidence of the costs of uninsured risk.     

Social networks near and far: The role of bonding and bridging social capital for assets of the rural poor

With formal insurance and credit markets either absent or inaccessible to rural agents in most poor rural economies, social networks play a highly important role in mitigating the risks that agricultural households face. These kinds of informal insurance schemes are presumed to be most effective in the face of idiosyncratic risk. However, social mechanisms also exist in developing countries that may reduce locally correlated risk such as the adverse economic effects of climatic conditions that affect multiple residents in a village. This paper analyzes the role of localized (bonding) and of spatially dispersed (bridging) social capital in mitigating the impact of idiosyncratic and of locally correlated shocks on farm households’ livestock endowments. Using dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) system estimation with seven‐period panel dataset of over 400 households, we find that bonding social capital is able to protect households’ livestock assets against idiosyncratic shocks, but bridging social capital does not play a role in mitigating the impact of correlated shocks. The results hold up to multiple robustness checks. A test of different hypotheses about the nature of these assets’ trajectories rejects the asset poverty trap hypothesis, and instead finds that livestock asset dynamics are characterized by a single stable equilibrium.     

Inflation and financial deepening

Financial deepening is defined as increases in the ratio of a country's financial assets to its GDP. Financial asset accumulation simultaneously provides credit to finance real asset accumulation for the development process. The equilibrium long-run ratio of financial assets to GDP may be expressed as a simple relationship of a country's financial savings ratio and its growth rate. The present paper incorporates the effects of inflation on financial deepening. Inflation necessarily entails capital losses on all existing financial asset holdings. It is shown that unless more monetary saving is forthcoming to offset such inflation-induced capital losses, inflation will operate to reduce drastically the degree of financial deepening which a country can obtain. The process is illustrated with respect to the Korean economy.     

Does R&D spending boost tangible investment? An analysis on European firms

This article investigates the relationship between firm’s R&D intensity, expressed as R&D expenditure over sales, and investment intensity in tangible assets. It is commonly acknowledged that R&D requires additional physical investment to be implemented. R&D increases a firm’s productivity and return to tangible investments, thus, providing to the firm incentives to bear high tangible capital costs and to invest more. This represents a crucial issue for a firm’s growth, particularly considering the strong interaction between physical capital accumulation and technological progress. The analysis is based on a large sample of manufacturing firms across seven European countries in the period 2007–2009. Since the sub-sample of firms performing R&D might not be random, there may potentially be an endogeneity issue. The analysis also considers that firms may decide to spend on R&D and investment in physical capital simultaneously. The questions of both endogeneity and simultaneity are dealt with by employing an instrumental variable two-step procedure. We find a positive and significant impact of R&D intensity on firms’ tangible investment intensity. The econometric results highlight the importance of financial factors, particularly with respect to firms’ internal resources. Exposure to international trade has a negative impact on investment, possibly depending on the time-span of the sample used.

Abbreviations: Technological Innovation and R&D; Investment Capital; Industry Studies; Firm Behavior; Empirical Analysis     

知识价值增值能力研究——基于黑龙江省上市公司的证据

采用市账率指标测量企业的知识资本,并利用净资产和净利润指标分别测算了企业的有形资产和价值,将线性回归模型和二因素方差分析相结合,构建了知识价值增值能力测量模型。以2010年黑龙江省21家上市公司为样本,对知识与价值增值能力之间的关系进行了实证研究。实证分析结果表明:知识对价值形成的影响是间接的,知识通过促进有形资产的价值增值能力提升而实现价值增值;当企业的资产规模较大时,知识与有形资产在价值增值上存在交互效应,知识能够极大提高有形资产的价值增值能力;当企业资产规模较小时,知识的价值增值能力不显著。     

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE,HUMAN CAPITAL STRUCTURE,AND MULTIPLE GROWTH PATHS*

This paper presents a theoretical model to analyze the effects of technology change on growth rates of income and human capital in the uncertain environments of technology. The uncertainty comes from two sources: the possibility of a technology advance and the characteristics of new technologies. We set up an overlapping generations model in which young agents invest in both width and depth of human capital in order to adopt new technologies. The model develops explicitly the micro‐mechanism of the role of human capital in adopting new technologies as well as that of the process of human capital production in the uncertain environments. In our model, a higher level of width of human capital relative to the level of depth leads one country to a higher growth path. We also show that an economy can have different growth paths depending on the initial structure of human capital and the uncertainty about the nature of new technologies. In particular, new technologies with more uncertain characteristics may adversely affect human capital accumulation and income growth, leading the economy to a low growth trap.     

Human capital distribution, growth and convergence

This paper studies the dynamic relationship between distribution and endogenous growth in an overlapping generations model with accumulation of human and physical capital. It is shown how human capital can determine a relationship between per capita growth rates and inequality in the distribution of income. Family background effects and spillovers in the transmission of human capital generate dynamics in which aggregate variables depend not only on the stock, but also on the distribution of human capital. The evolution of this distribution over time is then characterized under different assumptions on private returns and the form of the externality in the technology for human capital. Conditions for existence, uniqueness and stability of a constant growth equilibrium with a stationary distribution are derived. Increasing returns, idiosyncratic abilities and the possibility of poverty traps are explicitely characterized in a closed form solution of the equilibrium dynamics, showing the role played by technology and preferences parameters.     

Growth, Attitudes towards Women, and Women's Welfare

The authors find that attitudes towards women are more progressive as per capita income rises and that the quality and quantity of women's human capital increases with per capita income. Prior to presenting these empirical results, the authors first demonstrate the importance of these relationships with a simple model that shows how a feedback loop between attitudes towards women, investment in women's human capital, and income affects the dynamic path of the economy. Depending on the nature of the relationship between per capita income and attitudes towards women, they identify the possibility of a gender-equity poverty trap. Finally, they extend the model to show the dynamic interplay between attitudes towards women, income, and fertility.     

资本市场的实验经济学方法论研究

随着金融市场理论研究和实践检验的不断发展，资本市场的许多基础理论受到了极大的挑战，与现有理论相悖的异象不断涌现。新近兴起的实验经济学为人们研究资本市场提供了一条更为有效的途径。本文分析了实验方法在资本市场研究中的利与弊，介绍了部分资本市场实验的设计过程，并应用该方法分析了风险与收益、资本市场的效率、市场泡沫的产生和破灭、CAPM理论，以及交易制度等。文章指出，在资本市场中运用实验方法进行研究，具有可控性、可比性以及可重复性等优点，为我们对于资本市场诸多理论进行检验提供了可能。在资本市场实验的设计中，我们不但需要考虑实验的各种交易制度，还需要考虑到被试人员的选择、交易资产的确定以及市场信息的设计等很多问题，只有对这些问题进行全面地考虑，才能保证实验结果的可信度，进而为我们对于各种金融理论的检验提供可能。     

Children’s environmental health,education, and economic development

Abstract This article aims at investigating the interplay between environmental quality, health, and economic development in a unified OLG framework. Human capital accumulation depends on the environment through its impact on children’s health and workers’ productivity. In turn, environmental quality dynamics rely upon human capital that determines maintenance efforts. This two‐way relationship generates a co‐evolution of human capital and environmental quality in the long run. Along the transition path, the dynamic interactions between economic and environmental spheres allow for replicating two different trajectories: some economies experiment an Environmental Kuznets Curve while some others are caught into the environmental poverty trap.     

The transition to a globalized economy: Poverty,human capital and the informal sector in a structuralist CGE model

Recent econometric evidence suggests that trade liberalization has an elusive relationship to growth and income distribution. This paper provides an explanation for these results via numerical simulations of a dynamic structuralist CGE. The conclusion is that if families become too poor to finance human capital accumulation, or the state too stingy to supply it at a reasonable cost, exports of skill-intensive goods can become uncompetitive and the transition to openness may involve increasing poverty, unemployment and stagnation. The model design incorporates an informal sector as well as accumulation of human capital. The paper simulates two trajectories, a “green” path in which per capita income grows steadily with a rapid rate of human capital accumulation and a reduction in the level of economic informality. A second, or “red” path is also possible, however, with a growth rate that is much lower, an expanding informal sector and an inadequate rate of human capital formation.     

Entrepreneurs, Professionals, and Growth

We examine the implications for growth and development of the existence of two types of human capital: entrepreneurial and professional. Entrepreneurs accumulate human capital through a work-experience intensive process, whereas professionals human capital accumulation is education-intensive. Moreover, the return to entrepreneurship is uncertain. We show how skill-biased technological progress leads to changes in the composition of aggregate human capital; as technology improves, individuals devote less time to the accumulation of human capital through work experience and more to the accumulation of human capital through professional training. Thus, our model explains why entrepreneurs play a relatively more important role in intermediate-income countries and professionals are relatively more abundant in richer economies. It also shows that those countries that initially have too little of either entrepreneurial or professional human capital may end up in a development trap.     

Asset Bubbles,Unemployment, and a Financial Crisis

A tractable growth model with asset bubbles is presented to demonstrate that a financial crisis caused by a bubble bursting increases unemployment rates. A bubbly asset, which is intrinsically useless, has a positive market value because purchasing the asset is a sole saving method for agents who draw insufficiently low productivity, whereas selling the asset is a fund-raising method for agents who draw high productivity to initiate an investment project. The presence of asset bubbles corrects allocative inefficiency regarding production resources, relocating investment resources from low-productivity agents to high-productivity agents. Accordingly, the presence of asset bubbles can promote capital accumulation. As capital accumulates and output increases, the number of vacant positions increases because firms acquire more funds to cover a search cost. As a result, firms are incentivized to increase employment. However, extrinsic uncertainty may burst asset bubbles and cause a self-fulfilling financial crisis, which is followed by increased unemployment.