Sunspot equilibria and the transfer paradox

Summary. We show that for international economies with two countries, in which agents have additively separable utility functions, the existence of sunspot equilibria is equivalent to the occurrence of the transfer paradox. This equivalence enables us to provide some new insights on the relation of the existence of sunspot equilibria and the multiplicity of spot market equilibria.Received: 1 October 2003, Revised: 1 April 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C62, D52, F3, F20, 012.Correspondence to: Thorsten HensWe would like to thank Anke Gerber for carefully checking and improving our arguments. Moreover, we are grateful to Piero Gottardi for his encouragement and his comments, to Andreu Mas-Colell and Mike Jerison for very fruitful discussions and to Klaus Schenk-Hoppé for his support in using . All remaining errors are ours.     

The productivity paradox and the new economy: The Spanish case

This paper studies the impact of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on economic growth in Spain using a dynamic general equilibrium approach. Contrary to previous works, we use a production function with six different capital inputs, three of them corresponding to ICT assets. Calibration of the model suggests that the contribution of ICT to Spanish productivity growth is very relevant, whereas the contribution of non-ICT capital has been even negative. Additionally, over the sample period 1995–2002, we find a negative TFP growth and productivity growth. These results together aim at the hypothesis that the Spanish economy could be placed within the productivity paradox.     

Harmonic sequence paradox

Summary. Informal evidence suggests that individuals are willing to pay only a finite and, typically, very low price for a specific lottery that converges to an infinite payment with probability one. The established decision theories (expected value, expected utility theory, cumulative prospect theory) cannot satisfactorily explain this low willingness to pay. The presented paradox strengthens the original and the super St. Petersburg paradox.Received: 27 Spetember 2004, Revised: 15 January 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: C91, D81.I am grateful to Peter Wakker, whose suggestions helped to simplify significantly the exposition of the main idea, and to the participants of a brown-bag seminar at CERGE-EI (June 23, 2004, Prague), notably Dirk Engelmann and Andreas Ortmann, who suggested interesting testable explanations for the paradox.     

Discrimination in grading: experimental evidence from primary school teachers

This paper studies the effect of teacher expectations on essay grades in an experimental setting. For this purpose, we randomly assign Turkish or German first names to a set of essays so that some teachers believe a given essay was written by a German native pupil, whereas others believe it was written by a pupil of Turkish origin. We find that the same essays obtain significantly worse grades and lower secondary school recommendations when bearing a Turkish sounding name.     

The Herodotus paradox

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the two-player case with complete and incomplete information, and in so doing identify what we call the “Herodotus paradox.”     

The Troika paradox

In three binary choice problems, people reveal a choice pattern which falsifies expected utility theory and many generalized non-expected utility theories. This new paradox challenges popular non-expected utility models analogously to how the Allais paradox challenged neoclassical expected utility theory.     

The paradox of weakness in the politics of trade integration

In his 1960 seminal contribution to game theory and its applications, The Strategy of Conflict, Thomas Schelling suggested that in international negotiations, strong international opposition may be an asset rather than a liability. Rather than constraining it, the opposition would enlarge the opportunity set thus making it easier to successfully conclude international negotiations. This property, which is also known as the Schelling-conjecture, shares some aspects with constitutional economics, namely the two-level approach suggesting that it might be beneficial for all parties to give up some power by tying one??s hands. In this paper we examine by means of a simulation study how far we can take this notion in the politics of trade integration. In explicitly marrying Schelling??s 1960 idea with the 1988 two-level approach by Putnam and embedding the result into the political economy of trade we find that the threat of a domestic opposition or national institution having a veto power frequently but not always delivers a more favorable outcome for the respective trade representative at the international table. Whether the Schelling-conjecture applies or not actually depends on the subtle interplay of a ??bully effect?? and a ??serenity effect??.     

The trade paradox persists under excise taxes

Brander and Krugman (1983) and Sertel (1988) followed by Krugman (1989), showed two sides of a ‘trade paradox’: The paradox in competition, viz. that opening trade (or increasing competition) may cause welfare to decline, and the paradox in efficiency, viz. that an increase in unit transport cost may increase welfare. In this paper, we consider the situation in an environment where interventionist trade policies are not permitted but each country is sovereign to impose an excise tax (or subsidy). The paradoxes persist under equilibrium excise taxes, reckoned both at the non-cooperative (Nash or dominant strategy) equilibrium and at the cooperative solution among tax-imposing authorities maximizing welfare. We also see that the paradoxes persist in a taxless environment where market equilibrium is Stackelberg rather than Cournot.     

The evolution of wage inequality in Italy

This article analyses the evolution of inequality in yearly and daily wages between and within groups of blue and white collar, using the INPS-ISFOL database for the period 1985 to 1999 in Italy. Between-group inequality increased in the 1990s as clerical wages grew slowly, whereas blue collars' wages remained nearly constant. Within-group inequality increased only if measured by daily wages. The covariance structure analysis shows that inequality comes from persistent differentials among older workers and from high income volatility for younger cohorts. Within inequalities in office and manual workers are driven by the growth of permanency for the older cohorts (individual abilities, say experience, matter more) and by the growth of income volatility for the younger cohorts (luck in the labour market). Within each group, low paid workers during their career acquire earning gains for their abilities and reduce differentials with respect to high paid workers.     

The nature of regional unemployment in Italy

Taking as a starting point the evidence of growing disparities for most of the 1984–2007 period, this article investigates the nature of regional unemployment in Italy. In particular, we assess whether the Italian regional unemployment rates contain a unit root and are, thus, subject to pure hysteresis, considering as alternative hypotheses both a linear and a non-linear stationary process. For that purpose, we employ three recently developed panel unit-root tests, taking account of structural breaks, cross-section dependence and non-linearities. Contrary to previous studies in the literature, our results reject the pure hysteresis hypothesis and support the characterisation of regional unemployment in Italy as a stationary but non-linear process, subject to multiple equilibria, in line with the ‘structuralist hypothesis’ advanced by Phelps (1994).     

The Piketty-Kaldor paradox of growth: Reply to Medlen

Despite the yawning gap between their time horizons, there are a few interesting similarities between Piketty and Keynes. A graph of the Piketty-Kaldor paradox of growth (where a lower growth rate leads to a higher saving rate) is similar to the familiar graph of the Keynesian paradox of thrift (where a lower saving rate leads to higher investment). Keynes showed that cautious spending can lead to recession, and Piketty showed that cautious growth can lead to maldistribution.     

Conflict technology in cooperation: The group size paradox revisited

This paper studies the implications of punishment‐induced conflict in a public goods game. It shows, under plausible assumptions, how larger group size sometimes enhances punishing behavior in social dilemmas and hence supports higher levels of cooperation. Unlike existing approaches that focus on uncoordinated punishment, I consider punishment as a coordinated activity that may be resisted by those being punished and study the implications of punishment‐induced conflict situations. Developing a conflict model of punishment and combining it with a standard public good game, I show that coordinated punishment can yield the concentration effect of punishment, leading to a larger group advantage; that is, the larger the group, the easier it becomes to organize cooperation. The key idea is that when punishers coordinate their punishment, punishers as a coalition successfully divide defectors and punish each defector one by one. Surprisingly, even when coordination among punishers decays as group size increases, as long as the rate of decaying remains relatively slow the larger group advantage still obtains.     

The expected probability of Condorcet's paradox

Let P(n,p) be the probability that there is a Condorcet winner on three alternatives for n (odd) voters. The vector p defines the probability that a randomly selected voter will have any of the six linear rankings on three alternatives as his or her preference ranking. It is shown that if all p vectors are equally likely, the expected value of P(n,p) is given by 15(n+3)²/[16(n+2)(n+4)].     

The Renaissance of Geopolitics in Post-1989 Italy

The revival of geopolitics in post-1989 Italy is at once a rather straightforward and perplexing matter. On the one hand, the renewed appeal that geopolitical thinking has enjoyed in International Relations (IR) circles has been well documented and could hardly be downplayed. On the other hand, however, the recourse to geopolitics has often boiled down to an undifferentiated and often convoluted use of its terms, approaches and theories. In this article we argue that the rationale of such a revival has been less to import geopolitical knowledge into IR and more to confer legitimacy and respectability to the analyses put forward by scholars and practitioners. It is no chance, in fact, that the geopolitics-inspired academic discourse has been progressively recognised as a way, if not the way, to discuss international affairs in post-1989 Italy. The central puzzle to be investigated behind the revival of geopolitics in Italy is thus how such a discourse has managed to gain and retain a powerful status in Italian IR academia and, most importantly, why.     

意大利创意产业的发展特点

诺贝尔经济学奖获得者西蒙认为,创意是一种思维方式,本质是解决问题的能力,“当思维引发的行动能够创造出拥有社会价值的物品时,这样的思维就应被看作是有创意的”.本文介绍了意大利创意产业的定义、模式、分类及特点;分析了创意产业对经济社会特别是摆脱经济困境的重要作用;重点研究了意大利政府和企业以科技和创新推动产业发展,以及在知识产权保护、人才培养、评价体系等软环境建设方面所采取的举措;最后分析了我国应借鉴的意大利的成功经验.     

The Reform of Local Public Utilities in Italy

The Italian system of local public utilities has recently undergone an important reform process. The first round of reforms, introduced in the 1990s, represented a remarkable change in the social welfare function with regard to the management of local public utilities. The legislation was specifically designed to cut costs and reduce deficits. A second round of reforms, required by European directives, started around the mid-1990s. Several laws were passed introducing important innovations and regulating specific sectors: public transport; electricity; and gas. Article 35 of the 2002 Financial Law was the final step in a comprehensive reform of the whole local public utility sector. The main innovations of the Financial Law concerns liberalization. Article 35 states that the general rule for awarding service provision contracts is competitive tendering; the rationale is obviously that of competition for the market. The general rule as expressed by Article 35 is nevertheless limited during the transition period. In the long run, competitive tendering will become the normal way of awarding contracts for local public utility provision. Even if there are doubts that full competition will be introduced into the sector, liberalization does appear to be having an effect, forcing many local public utilities to become more efficient. The changes introduced have brought about a better and a more efficient system with a greater number of large size enterprises and on the average a more active management.
In the future, the liberalization process may come to a standstill due to an insufficient number of competitors. Strong public administrations are therefore needed to prevent opportunistic behaviour by private firms.     

The risk of falling house prices in Italy

This paper shows that Italian house market is less exposed to price shocks than the American one. Variations in the house price index in real terms have been studied along with the affordability ratio and the relation between house prices and rent levels for the period 1995–2004 in Italian provinces. Comparison with US data reveals greater overpricing in the US during the expansion phase (2000–2004). Although a speculative bubble in all US metropolitan areas considered does not emerge, US financial and economic structural factors make the US real estate sector more exposed to price shocks. To test the compatibility of Italian house prices with fundamentals an econometric model is designed to analyze the provincial house prices from 1995 to 2003.     

The effect of computer use on earnings in Italy

This paper studies the effect of computer use on earnings among a cohort of recent Italian high school graduates. The IV and Heckman techniques are used in order to control for endogeneity of computer use. Results show that the wage premium associated with computer use disappears once selection into computer use is accounted for. On the other hand, using the computer to perform a number of specific tasks leads to higher earnings. It is therefore suggested that not all individuals who use a computer at work receive a wage premium, but only those possessing complementary computer skills such as communication, networking and problem solving abilities.      

个人慈善捐赠的税收激励分析与政策思考

个人捐赠不仅受利他主义的驱使,还存在个人自利的追求.因此,许多国家制定了某些政策以支持人们的捐赠行为,其中税收优惠是各国激励个人捐赠的普遍做法.个人捐赠的多少取决于捐赠价格的高低,为鼓励人们捐赠,税收政策的制定应降低捐赠的价格.