The role of role uncertainty in modified dictator games

We compare behavior in modified dictator games with and without role uncertainty. Subjects choose between a selfish action, a costly surplus creating action (altruistic behavior) and a costly surplus destroying action (spiteful behavior). While costly surplus creating actions are the most frequent under role uncertainty (64%), selfish actions become the most frequent without role uncertainty (69%). Also, the frequency of surplus destroying choices is negligible with role uncertainty (1%) but not so without it (11%). A classification of subjects into four different types of interdependent preferences (Selfish, Social Welfare maximizing, Inequity Averse and Competitive) shows that the use of role uncertainty overestimates the prevalence of Social Welfare maximizing preferences in the subject population (from 74% with role uncertainty to 21% without it) and underestimates Selfish and Inequity Averse preferences. An additional treatment, in which subjects undertake an understanding test before participating in the experiment with role uncertainty, shows that the vast majority of subjects (93%) correctly understand the payoff mechanism with role uncertainty, but yet surplus creating actions were most frequent. Our results warn against the use of role uncertainty in experiments that aim to measure the prevalence of interdependent preferences.     

Gender wage gap studies: consistency and decomposition

This paper reviews the empirical literature on the gender wage gap, with particular attention given to the identification of the key parameters in human capital wage regression models. This is of great importance in the literature for two main reasons. First, the main explanatory variables in the wage model, i.e., measures of work experience and time-out-of-work, are endogenous. As a result, applying traditional estimators may lead to inconsistent parameter estimates. Second, empirical evidence on the gender wage gap hinges on estimates of the parameters of interest. Accordingly, their economic meaning may be limited by restrictive assumptions included in wage models. This challenges both researchers and policymakers who require precise measures of the gender wage gap in order to create and enforce efficient equality policies. This paper is a substantially revised version of the first chapter of my thesis. I am grateful to Christian Dustmann and Wendy Carlin for their great support and comments. I also thank Bernd Fitzenberger, colleagues at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and IZA, and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

Policy Discrimination with and without Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility

Can the Pareto criterion guide policymakers who do not know the true model of the economy? If policymakers specify ex ante preferences for agents, then Pareto improvements from a distorted status quo are usually possible, and with more commodities than states, one can implement almost every Pareto optimum. Unlike the standard second welfare theorem, planners cannot dictate allocations: agents must trade. Unfortunately ex ante preferences impose interpersonal comparisons. If policymakers merely aim to maximize some social welfare function then optimal policies form an open set; hence small changes in the environment do not necessitate any policy response. Planners with symmetric information about agents can sometimes intervene without making interpersonal comparisons.     

A social morality for mortals: A review essay of <Emphasis Type="Italic">the order of public reason: A theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world</Emphasis>

This essay praises Gerald Gaus’s The Order of Public Reason as a building block for all normative explorations into the institutional foundations of human sociability. It evaluates the normative implications put forth by Gaus in terms of the Kirzner’s “finder’s keeper’s ethic.” This raises a question about the relationship between the moral order and the political order that underlies market processes. Examining the role of entrepreneurship in the market process in relation to Kirzner’s “finder’s keeper’s principle” suggests a deeper ethical foundation that underpins the institutional conditions of “social morality.”     

China’s house price: Affected by economic fundamentals or real estate policy?

Many theory and empirical literature conclude that house price can reflect economic fundamentals in the long-term. However, by using China’s panel data of 35 main cities stretching from 1998 to 2007, we find that there is no stable relationship between house price and economic fundamentals. House price has deviated upward from the economic fundamentals since government started macro-control of the real estate market. We consider that the mechanism between the house price and economic fundamentals is distorted by China’s real estate policy, especially its land policy. Meanwhile the policy itself is an important factor in explaining the changes of China’s house price. Then we estimate the dynamic panel data model on house price and the variables which are controlled by real estate policy. The result shows: land supply has negative effects on house price; financial mortgages for real estate have positive effects on house price; and the area of housing sold and the area of vacant housing, which reflects the supply and demand of the housing market, has negative effects on house price. We also find some differences in house price influence factor between eastern and mid-western cities. Finally, we propose policy suggestions according to the empirical results.     

What is unemployment in Europe? Concepts and measurement in the European community household panel

The purpose in this article is to evaluate the consistency between two measures of unemployment in a cross-country context. We use the European Community Household Panel to identify unemployment at an individual level based as well on the ILO criteria for being classified as unemployed as on the individual respondent reporting to be unemployed. This opens a unique opportunity to compare unemployment measured in two different ways based on a cross European Union panel study covering the years 1994 to 2001. The two main questions addressed in this article are to which extent the two unemployment measures differ and whether transition rates out of unemployment depend on which concept we use. Both questions are answered in the affirmative. The overall conclusion is that it is important, especially in some of the EU countries, to include both measures of unemployment as guidelines and indicators for policy.     

Social status,human capital formation and the long-run effects of money

This study examines the effects of monetary policy in a two-sector cash-in-advance economy of human capital accumulation. Agents concern about their social status represented by the relative physical capital and relative human capital. We find that if the desire for social status depends only on relative physical capital, money is superneutral in the growth-rate sense. However, if the desire for social status depends on relative human capital, the money growth rate will have a positive effect on the long-run economic growth rate. Furthermore, an increase in the desire to pursue human capital will raise the long-run growth rate, but an increase in the desire to pursue physical capital will lower it.     

Patterns of Investor-State Dispute Settlement Decisions

This paper examines the pattern of settlements, investor wins and state wins in investor-state dispute settlement cases, focusing on the impact of arbitration rules, the resources and experience of the litigants, the type of treaty breach under investigation, and the pattern of state intervention. Logistic regression results show that settlements are more likely when investors do not disclose their allegations publicly, when the host state has been involved in a greater number of past cases, and when the respondent state has a higher control-of-corruption rating. Panel awards to investors are more likely in cases of alleged direct expropriation and less likely for indirect expropriation. Panel decisions favoring the state increase with higher per capita income and rule-of-law ratings.     

Component efficient solutions in line-graph games with applications

Recently, applications of cooperative game theory to economic allocation problems have gained popularity. We investigate a class of cooperative games that generalizes some economic applications with a similar structure. These are the so-called line-graph games being cooperative TU-games in which the players are linearly ordered. Examples of situations that can be modeled like this are sequencing situations and water distribution problems. We define four properties with respect to deleting edges that each selects a unique component efficient solution on the class of line-graph games. We interpret these solutions and properties in terms of dividend distributions, and apply them to economic situations. This research has been done while the third author was visiting Tinbergen Institute at the Free University, Amsterdam. The research is part of the Research Programme “Strategic and Cooperative Decision Making” at the Department of Econometrics. Financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in the framework of the Russian-Dutch programme for scientific cooperation, is gratefully acknowledged. The third author also appreciates partial financial support from the Russian Leading Scientific Schools Fund (grant 80.2003.6) and Russian Humanitarian Scientific Fund (grant 02-02-00189a). We thank three anonymous referees for their valuable comments.     

Community-Based Tradable Permits for Localized Pollution

This paper considers the assignment of tradable permits—representing property rights of an environmental good—to community members who are harmed by pollution generated by firms. These community members can in turn sell permits to polluters according to their personal preferences. For a special case with a sole household, market transactions between the household and polluters achieve an efficient pollution level. However, for a group of households, the decentralized market solution fails to yield social efficiency because of competitive consumption of the environmental goods. We design a revenue-sharing mechanism akin to unitization, under which market transactions also achieve efficient resource allocation. Importantly, in some cases, efficiency can be achieved even when regulators are ignorant of the private valuation of the environmental good.