Favouritism towards the poor and a discontinuous tax structure

This article aims to theoretically clarify two points. First, even though the government shows favouritism to the poor and wants to exempt low-income taxpayers and to secure the necessary income tax revenue by taxing only high-income taxpayers, the government nevertheless ends up taxing the poor. This is in opposition to favouritism and arises because of the government’s inability to observe the individual taxpayer’s income levels. Second, even without observing each taxpayer’s income level, if favouritism is sufficiently strong, then the government can discontinuously resolve such unintentional taxation.     

Stock exchange mergers and market efficiency

The aim of this article is to examine the impact of stock exchange mergers on the degree of informational efficiency. For this purpose, we apply the generalized spectral shape test for the martingale difference hypothesis to the stock returns before and after the 31 domestic and cross-border mergers completed from 1997 to 2011. The test is conducted with moving subsample windows, allowing us to detect the periods of (in)efficiency, and thus to conduct a comparative analysis for pre-merger and post-merger periods. We find that higher levels of efficiency are less frequent than lower levels of efficiency after a stock exchange merger. We also find that the impact on the level of efficiency depends on a range of merger characteristics such as the level of development, size, geographical diversification and industrial diversification of stock exchange.     

金融支持路径对风电产业技术创新影响的比较研究

寻找有效的金融支持路径对我国风电产业突破技术瓶颈具有重要意义。以风电产业为研究对象,建立协整与误差修正模型,分析金融支持与技术创新间的长期及短期均衡关系,在此基础上应用典型相关分析对金融支持与技术创新的具体关系进行讨论。研究表明：金融支持与技术创新间存在长期正向均衡关系,当技术创新水平偏离均衡状态时,误差修正项的反向修正机制可使其恢复到长期均衡;政府补贴对代表技术创新产出的专利数有正向推动作用,银行信贷额对研发支出和固定资产投入具有正向推动作用,股票市场对技术创新的作用不显著。     

The micro-foundations of intertemporal price discrimination

Summary. This paper investigates the optimality of intertemporal price discrimination for a durable-good monopoly in a model where infinitely-lived households face an intertemporal budget constraint, and consume both durable goods and non-durable goods. We prove that the optimal price of the durable good is not constant, and may decrease or increase over time. Some households may choose to purchase the durable good at a later date, and pay lower or higher prices, since the gain in discounted utility of consuming more of the non-durable good more than compensates for the loss in utility from delaying the consumption of the durable good.Received: 12 March 2004, Revised: 7 January 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: D40, D42, D91.I would like to thank C.D. Aliprantis, the Editor, and an anonymous referee for their generous advice, and constructive comments and suggestions. I have also enjoyed discussions with John Quah on the subject. Research support from the Wharton-SMU Research Centre, Singapore Management University, is gratefully acknowledged.     

Impacts of an EC carbon/energy tax and deregulating thermal power supply on CO2, SO2 and NOx emissions

Emission of CO₂, SO₂ and NO_x are all closely linked to the burning of fossil fuels. Here we report on simulations done by linking a Sectoral European Energy Model (SEEM), covering energy demand in nine Western European countries, with the emission-transport-deposition model RAINS developed by IIASA. The study analyses emissions of CO₂, SO₂ and NO_x, deposition of sulphur and nitrogen and the extent of areas where the critical load for sulphur is exceeded in year 2000 under four different energy scenarios. Two different sets of future behavioural patterns for the thermal electric power production sector are considered. In one regime, called the plan-efficient regime, the sector is assumed to follow official plans with regard to investment in new capacity. In the other regime, called the cost-efficient regime, the thermal power sector is assumed to behave in a cost minimizing manner. The effects of the proposed EC carbon/energy tax are studied under both regimes, giving rise to altogether four scenarios.In both regimes the effect of the EC tax is to reduce emissions by between 6 and 10 per cent in year 2000 relative to the scenarios without the tax. A change of regime, from the regulated, plan-efficient regime to the market-based, cost-efficient regime, will, by itself, reduce emissions of CO₂ and NO_x by approximately 3 per cent, while SO₂ emissions are reduced by 13 per cent. The EC tax will reduce sulphur deposition by more than 5 per cent in the nine model countries under the plan-efficient regime. A change of regime further reduces the total deposition by 9 per cent. The area where depositions exceed the critical load is reduced by approximately 6 per cent in year 2000 by the tax in both regimes. Changing from the plan-efficient to the cost-efficient regime has a similar impact.Although the emission reductions due to the EC tax may seem modest, they are shown to have a sizeable effect on the technological abatement costs of reaching targets like those prescribed in the Sofia protocol on the stabilisation of NO_x emissions, and the Helsinki protocol on SO₂ emission reductions. This is part of what can be considered to be secondary benefits of the EC carbon/energy tax.     

Approximate tâtonnement processes

Summary We introduce a probabilistic model for price adjustment in an exchange economy which approximates the classical Walras tâtonnement process while avoiding many of its unrealistic features. The model is decentralized in that the trades permitted to an agent and the resulting price changes depend only on the commodity vector currently held by that agent, and not on the commodity vectors held by the other agents in the economy. Our results will show that the Walras tâtonnement process can be decentralized without changing its behavior on the macroeconomic scale. Our model has a finite set of commodities, a market maker who adjusts prices, and a large finite set of agents who trade only with the market maker. Each agent has a demand function depending on his commodity vector and the price vector. At each discrete time, one agent is chosen at random and exchanges his current commodity vector for his demand vector. Then the market maker adjusts the price vector by an amount which depends on the selected agent's commodity vector and the current price. Prices are adjusted rapidly enough to avoid prolonged trading at the wrong price, but slowly enough so that a substantial price change will depend on a significant simple of agents. The main result shows that with probability arbitrarily close to one the price will rapidly approach and then remain close to an equilibrium value, following a path which is close to the price path of the corresponding tâtonnement process.     

Australian Capital City Real House Prices, 1979–1993

Real house prices have increased by 35 per cent in Australian capital cities during the last 15 years, with Brisbane, Canberra, and Sydney experiencing rises of 48 to 61 per cent and Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth having increases of 20 per cent or less. This article estimates a single model for the six cities to explain the divergent real price behaviour over time and space. It is concluded that the fundamental forces driving real house prices are the growth rate in real wage income (primarily due to employment growth) and the growth in population caused by net overseas migration.     

ON AGGREGATION METHODS FOR INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

This paper brings together discussions of Geary–Khamis indexes now available only in scattered sources, and considers their application to a range of uses. The first section traces the development of the method from its initial proposal by Geary in 1953, with the aid of a numerical example illustrating differences among various formulations. The second section considers the least squares properties of Geary-Khamis indexes and some related variants. The final section considers adjustments to the method required for regionalization and spatio-temporal bilateral and multilateral comparisons, as well as to take account of the nature of available data.