Estimating parameters of real business cycle models

The calibration technique is the most common procedure to match the data generated from an equilibrium business cycle model with actual macroeconomic time series. This paper goes a step further and tests and applies a maximum likelihood procedure, in combination with the simulated annealing, to estimate the parameters of a baseline RBC model from U.S. macroeconomic time series data. The procedure is tested on a simulated data set where the parameters are known and then applied to U.S. time series data. This permits us to evaluate the efficiency of the procedure and the extent to which the RBC model is a good representation of macroeconomic data.     

An algorithm for constructing high dimensional distributions from distributions of lower dimension

We propose a new sequential procedure for estimating multivariate distributions in cases when conventional maximum likelihood has too many parameters and is therefore inaccurate or non-operational. The procedure constructs a multivariate distribution and its pseudo-likelihood sequentially, in each step using lower-dimensional distributions with a small number of parameters. In an application, the procedure provides excellent fit when the dimension is moderate, and remains operational when the conventional method fails.     

中国信贷市场匹配机制的再设计

我国的银行信贷市场呈现二元结构--目标客户与非目标客户信贷市场.两者有着不同的运行机制.目标客户信贷市场的议价过程存在一个类似企业"求婚"的递延接受程序,市场的运行结果稳定.非目标客户信贷市场不存在导致稳定结果的分散化匹配程序,市场广度和深度不够.为提高非目标客户信贷市场的稳定性和运行效率,我们建议通过公布银行信贷方案、设立非目标客户信贷中心、设立中央化的匹配清算所等,把分散化的议价过程变成中央化的匹配程序,从而完善和降低中小企业的交易成本,为中小企业的发展拓展广阔空间.     

A simple algebraic estimation procedure for innovation diffusion models of new product acceptance

A simple algebraic estimation procedure is developed to estimate the parameters of diffusion models of new product acceptance. The procedure required knowledge of the occurrence of the point of inflection (based on actual data, analogous products, or management judgments). It is conceptually easy to use and can be implemented by using a hand calculator. Since the procedure does not employ period-by-period time-series diffusion data, it is not expected to provide the best fit to the data as compared to the maximum likelihood and nonlinear least squares estimation procedures. However, the procedure can provide very reasonable estimates about the relative magnitudes of the parameter estimates. In that respect, the procedure can be used to generate good starting values for the maximum likelihood and nonlinear least squares estimation procedures. In the absence of data, using management judgments about the point of inflection, the procedure can be implemented in a decision-support system to develop conditional diffusion curves for a new product. Data from four diverse innovations are used to illustrate the procedure.     

论我国行政强制程序谦抑

在国家行政管理中,行政强制也是一种有限的社会资源。行政强制以及实施程序的谦抑性也就成为现代行政强制程序所追求的价值目标,也是行政强制立法者所应当具备的理念。程序的存在是对权力的规制、抑制、平衡、指引,程序强调限制恣意和防止权力滥用,可以防止立法或者行政机关觊觎专擅,侵害民权的坚实堡垒。我国行政强制法中所体现的程序谦抑,结合我国社会实践中特殊典型的案例,对我国行政强制程序进行研究思考,提出完善我国行政强制程序的谦抑性的构想。     

刑事程序失灵的危害及对策

刑事诉讼法修订后已经实施十多年了,但在司法实践中各个诉讼阶段的程序保障条款仍受到不同程度的架空和规避。刑事程序的价值必须得到重视。如果继续存在刑事程序失灵问题,那么有关刑事程序的一系列司法改革都是没有意义的。对此,可以加强公安司法人员程序意识的培养和教育,建立和完善刑事诉讼程序性裁判机制以及建立健全诉讼监督机制。     

The Dynamics of Temporary Policies in a Small Open Economy

The paper corrects a subtle, but crucial, conceptual flaw in a solution procedure initially proposed in 1990 by Sen and Turnovsky to analyze anticipated regime changes in small open economies based on the intertemporal optimization of rational forward–looking agents. The problem is its failure to consider the intertemporal solvency of the economy consistently. The paper focuses on temporary shocks, although the procedure also applies to announced future permanent policy changes. Since the issue is generic and relevant to a large class of policy changes, it is important for the intertemporal solvency aspect to be incorporated consistently. The authors show that the seriousness of the error in the previous solution procedure depends upon the specific shock, and two contrasting examples are discussed.     

“Timing Is Everything” and Marital Bliss

We first show that in a marriage market, when the stability of a matching is disturbed when a new agent joins the game, natural greedy behavior defines an equilibration procedure that converges to a stable matching for the extended problem. We then consider the iterative procedure under which agents join the game sequentially, and the natural greedy procedure is applied after the entrance of each agent. It is shown that this procedure converges to a stable matching for the original (global) problem and that for each agent, if the order of all other agents is given, he/she weakly improves his/her final outcome by deferring his/her arrival time. The agent that arrives last gets his/her optimal outcome under stable matchings. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C78, C62.     

Implementing quotas in university admissions: An experimental analysis

This paper studies the implementation of quotas in matching markets. In a controlled laboratory environment, we compare the performance of two university admissions procedures that both initially reserve a significant fraction of seats at each university for a special subgroup of students. The first mechanism mimics the sequential procedure currently used by the central clearinghouse for university admissions in Germany. This procedure starts by allocating reserved seats among eligible students and then allocates all remaining seats among those who were not already assigned one of the reserved seats in the first part of the procedure. The second mechanism is based on a modified student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm in which all seats are allocated simultaneously. In theory, the two mechanisms should lead to similar outcomes. Our experimental results, however, suggest that, relative to the sequential procedure, the simultaneous mechanism significantly improves the match outcomes for the beneficiaries of reserved seats.     

Range effects and lottery pricing

A standard method to elicit certainty equivalents is the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) procedure. We compare the standard BDM procedure and a BDM procedure with a restricted range of minimum selling prices that an individual can state. We find that elicited prices are systematically affected by the range of feasible minimum selling prices. Expected utility theory cannot explain these results. Non-expected utility theories can only explain the results if subjects consider compound lotteries generated by the BDM procedure. We present an alternative explanation where subjects sequentially compare the lottery to monetary amounts in order to determine their minimum selling price. The model offers a formal explanation for range effects and for the underweighting of small and the overweighting of large probabilities.     

Strategy-proofness and Arrow's conditions: Existence and correspondence theorems for voting procedures and social welfare functions

Consider a committee which must select one alternative from a set of three or more alternatives. Committee members each cast a ballot which the voting procedure counts. The voting procedure is strategy-proof if it always induces every committee member to cast a ballot revealing his preference. I prove three theorems. First, every strategy-proof voting procedure is dictatorial. Second, this paper's strategy-proofness condition for voting procedures corresponds to Arrow's rationality, independence of irrelevant alternatives, non-negative response, and citizens' sovereignty conditions for social welfare functions. Third, Arrow's general possibility theorem is proven in a new manner.     

A procedure for adapting technological forecasting models

A simple procedure is presented for adapting available mathematical models for forecasting technological substitution. The procedure takes into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of the available models and the environmental interactions to identify a set of feasible alternative forecasts, from which a selection is to be made by the decision-maker based on judgement.     

Using Micro Data to Test the Divergence between Prices and Labour Values

An extremely robust finding in Marxian empirical economics is the 'Shaikh result' that estimates of labour values are closely correlated with prices. This result is established using input-output data together with a standard procedure in which variations in money wages are assumed to reflect labour quality. Two problems with this standard procedure can be identified. First, there is no translation between money units of wages and labour value units of output produced by different types of heterogeneous labour. Second, the standard procedure assumes perfectly competitive labour markets. In this paper, a new micro procedure for estimating labour values is developed in which both of these problems are addressed. To translate between money wage rates and the labour value of outputs a practical starting point for empirical analysis is suggested using some of the readily available tools of neoclassical economics. The assumption of perfect competition is accordingly relaxed by estimating a microeconometric wage equation using data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey. Conjoining this micro data with input-output data, estimates of labour values are used to test the Shaikh result, which is found not to hold in this particular exercise; with labour values diverging substantially from money prices.     

中日土地征收程序对比研究

日本从1951年《土地征收法》颁布至今,已形成了规范的土地征收程序。中国正处于城市化快速发展时期,土地征收程序中存在的问题日益暴露出来。在系统总结中日现行土地征收程序的基础上,对中国现行土地征收程序存在的部分问题进行了深入探讨,并借鉴日本相关方面的成功经验,结合中国国情,对中国土地征收程序的进一步完善提出了相关建议,以期促进中国土地征收程序的不断完善。     

DEMOGRAPHIC DEMAND SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATION TO EQUIVALENCE SCALES ESTIMATION AND INEQUALITY ANALYSIS: THE AUSTRALIAN EVIDENCE

This paper proposes and applies an alternative demographic procedure for extending a demand system to allow for the effect of household size and composition changes, along with price changes, on expenditure allocation. The demographic procedure is applied to two recent demand functional forms to obtain their estimable demographic extensions. The estimation on pooled time series of Australian Household Expenditure Surveys yields sensible and robust estimates of the equivalence scale, and of its variation with relative prices. Further evidence on the usefulness of this procedure is provided by using it to evaluate the nature and magnitude of the inequality bias of relative price changes in Australia over a period from the late 1980s to the early part of the new millennium.     

The Orani-Macro Interface: An Illustrative Exposition*

The paper provides on illustration of the procedure used to interface the MACRO and ORANI modules of the IMPACT Project. The main interfacing problem is that of temporal aggregation. This problem arises when information is to be passed between a dynamic disequilibrium model such as MACRO and a comparative static general equilibrium model such as ORANI. A diagrammatic treatment of the solution to this problem is presented. The procedure is then illustrated by a numerical experiment .     

A new method for assessing the sustainability of land-use systems (II): Evaluating impact indicators

In the past decade, numerous indicators and indicator sets for sustainable agriculture and sustainable land management have been proposed. In addition to their interest in comparing different management systems on an indicator by indicator basis, land managers are often interested in comparing individual indicators against a threshold, or, in order to study trade-offs, against each other. To this end it is necessary to (1) transform the original indicators into a comparable format, and (2) score these transformed indicators against a sustainability function.This paper introduces an evaluation method for land-use-related impact indicators, which was designed to accomplish these tasks. It is the second of a series of two papers, and as such it links into a larger framework for sustainability assessment of land use systems.The evaluation scheme introduced here comprises (1) a standardisation procedure, which aims at making different indicators comparable. In this procedure indicators are first normalised, by referencing them to the total impact they contribute towards, and then they are corrected by a factor describing the severity of this total impact in terms of exceeding a threshold. The procedure borrows conceptually from Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Impact Analysis methodology; (2) a valuation procedure, which judges the individual standardised indicators with regard to sustainability.This methodology is then tested on an indicator set for the environmental impact of a spinach production system in Northwest Germany. The method highlights mineral resource consumption, greenhouse gas emission, eutrophication and impacts on soil quality as the most important environmental effects of the studied system.We then explore the effect of introducing weighting factors, reflecting the differing societal perception of diverse environmental issues. Two different sets of weighting factors are used. The influence of weighting is, however, small compared to that of the standardisation procedure introduced earlier.Finally, we explore the propagation of uncertainty (defined as a variable's 95% confidence limits) throughout the standardisation procedure using a stochastic simulation approach. The uncertainty of the analysed standardised indicator was higher than that of the non-standardised indicators by a factor of 2.0 to 2.5.     

The Effects of Delays on the Stability and Rate of Convergence to Equilibrium of Oligopolies*

The stability of oligopolies is investigated using the Cournot strategy and a general output adjustment procedure. Information delays are incorporated in the adjustment procedure and their specific effects upon the dynamic stability of oligopolies is investigated. The stability of equilibrium for discrete models is unaffected by information delays and remoteness of planning horizons; however the rate of convergence to equilibrium may be slowed. For continuous models with delays, some restraints are required for stability.