Functional forms and educational production functions

Different functional forms are proposed and applied in the context of educational production functions. Policy implications of such an approach in terms of school interventions are discussed in the paper.     

Differentiability of the cost functions is equivalent to strict quasiconcavity of the production functions

The assumption that cost functions are differentiable with respect to input prices is equivalent to the assumption that production functions are strictly quasiconcave.     

Market clearing, utility functions, and securities prices

Summary. We prove the existence of equilibrium in a continuous-time finance model; our results include the case of dynamically incomplete markets as well as dynamically complete markets. In addition, we derive explicitly the stochastic process describing securities prices. The price process depends on the risk-aversion characteristics of the utility function, as well as on the presence of additional sources of wealth (including endowments and other securities). With a single stock, zero endowment in the terminal period, and Constant Relative Risk Aversion (CRRA) utility, the price process is geometric Brownian motion; in essentially any other situation, the price process is not a geometric Brownian motion.JEL Classification Numbers: D52.This paper is part of my Dissertation (UC Berkeley). I am very grateful to my advisor Professor Robert M. Anderson. I also would like to thank Steve Evans, Roger Purves, Jacob Sagi, Chris Shannon and the participants of the 2002 NBER General Equilibrium Conference at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) for very helpful discussions and comments. This work was supported by Grant SES-9710424 from the National Science Foundation.     

The distribution approach to the aggregation of putty-clay production functions

The point of departure of the distribution approach is the efficiency distribution of the production units in an industry. From this distribution the full-capacity production function and the short-run aggregate production function of the industry are derived. The long-run production function of the industry then is derived from the full-capacity function and the short-run production function. Hence, in the context of the distribution approach the relation is analysed between the short-run, full-capacity and long-run aggregate production functions of the industry and the efficiency distribution (and related capacity distribution) of the production units in that industry. Finally, the distribution approach is applied for the case of the Japanese cotton spinning industry.     

不同类型农户借贷行为特征

本文以全国农村固定观察点的农户调查资料为基础,对17类农户的借贷水平、借贷规模、借贷发生率和借贷来源倾向、借贷用途倾向进行了分析.通过分析发现:农户借贷行为的差异主要体现在纯收入、家庭经营类型和非农化程度,这些差异主要表现为借贷规模的差异,并形成两类不同的借贷规模分布类型.同时农户的借贷规模、借贷来源倾向和借贷用途倾向均呈现出层次分明的结构性特征.由此本文提出了农户借贷行为的三种类型:被动借贷型农户、保守借贷型农户和主动借贷型农户.     

A class of changing elasticity of substitution production functions

This paper presents a new class of production functions with a changing elasticity of substitution between two input factors. Over a freely chosen number of intervals for the input factor intensity freely chosen elasticities of substitution can be imposed. The resulting production function can thus account for changing elasticities of substitution during the development of the factor intensity. The production function is applied in a calibration exercise and a novel normalization procedure is proposed. The theory behind this production technology builds on the functional normalization of CES production functions.     

Efficient strategy-proof allocation functions in linear production economies

Summary. In a linear production model, we characterize the class of efficient and strategy-proof allocation functions, and the class of efficient and coalition strategy-proof allocation functions. In the former class, requiring equal treatment of equals allows us to identify a unique allocation function. This function is also the unique member of the latter class which satisfies uniform treatment of uniforms. Received: July 10, 1997 / Revised version: November 24, 1997     

Discriminating among alternative production functions in Polish industry

Large scale econometric models for both market-type and socialist centrally planned economies generally specify production relationships in the form of an aggregate production function. This paper addresses the problem of specifying the functional form of the production function for a socialist centrally planned economy: Poland. Three production functions, Cobb-Douglas, CES and VES, are estimated and a non-nested test for functional form is performed using a pooled cross section-time series regression technique. The estimates of the Cobb-Douglas specification are slightly superior to those of the CES and VES specifications, but the latter provide important detail for historical analysis and interesting implications for growth.     

Technical efficiency and dimension of the firm: Some results on the use of frontier production functions

Estimates of the average technical efficiency on the 2-digit industry-level for France (1962) are obtained by means of a maximum likelihood estimation of the Cobb-Douglas frontier production model with composed error. The theoretical and statistical implications of a possible relationship between technical efficiency and firm-size are discussed. The computations are carried out for each industry as a whole and the results are compared with the respective results for separate size-classes.

     

Semiparametric binary random effects models: Estimating two types of drinking behavior

I propose a new estimator for cross-section semiparametric regressions containing unobserved binary random effects and apply it to alcohol consumption. The random effects (health consciousness) explain a significant proportion of otherwise unexplained variation in alcohol consumption. Education positively correlates with health consciousness.