Symposium on Social Capital: Introduction

This symposium contains three papers that discuss aspects of social capital. Social capital has become a major focus of research in many social sciences. Its increased prominence in economics reflects a general increase in interest in questions that have traditionally been deemed sociological. Regardless of one's opinion of social capital per se , this broadening of questions addressed within economics has been very salutary.     

学会用钱说话

·质量专业人员在讨论到他们的活动所产生的财务影响时，往往会感到很困难。 ·要想引起管理者的关注，质量专业人员必须学习重要的财务术语，诸如像净收益、资产回报率等，并能够理解资产负债表和收支表。     

ACCOUNTING FOR HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION: A PROTOTYPE SATELLITE ACCOUNT USING THE AMERICAN TIME USE SURVEY

This paper presents a satellite account where households are treated as production units. It extends previous work that treats consumer durables as investment and that values nonmarket household production activities such as cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Services from consumer durables and government capital related to household production are also valued. In constructing the updated accounts, this paper incorporates new time use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and the harmonized time use data from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS). This paper also discusses and incorporates recommendations made by the U.S. National Academies panel on nonmarket accounts.     

Bank loan portfolios and the Canadian monetary transmission mechanism

Abstract .  Following a monetary tightening, bank loans to consumers decrease. This is true for both mortgage and non-mortgage loans, and it is true for a tightening by the Bank of Canada that is, and is not, a response to a tightening by the Federal Reserve System. In contrast, business loans increase following a monetary tightening. The 'perverse' response of business loans cannot be explained by an increase in the demand for funds due to a reduction in real activity. These results are consistent with a change in bank portfolio behaviour in favour of business loans in response to a monetary tightening.     

The asymptotic shapley value for a simple market game

We consider the game in which b buyers each seek to purchase 1 unit of an indivisible good from s sellers, each of whom has k units to sell. The good is worth 0 to each seller and 1 to each buyer. Using the central limit theorem, and implicitly convergence to tied down Brownian motion, we find a closed form solution for the limiting Shapley value as s and b increase without bound. This asymptotic value depends upon the seller size k, the limiting ratio b/ks of buyers to items for sale, and the limiting ratio of the excess supply relative to the square root of the number of market participants. This work was sponsered in part by NSF Grant DMS-03-01795.     

Do former athletes make better managers? Evidence from a partially adaptive grouped-data regression model

The goal of this paper is to introduce a partially adaptive estimator for the grouped-data regression model based on an error structure described by a mixture of two normal distributions. The model we introduce is easily estimated by maximum likelihood using the EM algorithm adapted from the work of Bartolucci and Scaccia (Comput Stat Data Anal 48:821–834, 2005). The partially adaptive estimator is applied to data used by Long and Caudill (Rev Econ Stat 73:525–531, 1991) to examine the impact of intercollegiate athletics on income. We estimate a variation of the original regression model and find that there is a considerable financial advantage for those male athletes now working in business management. This finding is consistent with the idea that athletes acquire team-building and organizational skills that are helpful in business.     

The Role of Water in Manufacturing

Water's role in manufacturing technologies has received limited attention. A KLEM model of the sector's technology is extended to include two facets of water use: intake and recirculation. Three annual cross-sectional surveys on plant-level water use are pooled and combined with census data to estimate this extended model for the Canadian manufacturing sector over the period 1981–1991. While Canada's water allocation regulations influence private water withdrawals, statistical tests support representing water intake as a variable input. Water intake is found to be a substitute for water recirculation, energy, labour and capital. The relationship between water intake and recirculation is stronger when water intake is process-related rather than related to cooling and steam production. Technological change has been biased in the direction of increased water intake and decreased water recirculation.     

MARRIAGE,DIVORCE, AND ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION

We use data on people's valuations of options outside marriage and beliefs about spouses' options. The data demonstrate that, in some couples, one spouse would be happier and the other spouse unhappier outside of some marriages, suggesting that bargaining takes place and that spouses have private information. We estimate a bargaining model with interdependent utility that quantifies the resulting inefficiencies. Our results show that people forgo some utility in order to make their spouses better off and, in doing so, offset much of the inefficiency generated by their imperfect knowledge. Thus, we find evidence of asymmetric information and interdependent utility in marriage.     

Trading spaces: Calculating embodied Ecological Footprints in international trade using a Product Land Use Matrix (PLUM)

Nations import and export biophysical resources. With many ecosystems worldwide under mounting stress, countries may be increasingly interested in knowing the extent and origin of their ecological imports and dependencies. In this paper the Ecological Footprint is used as a tool to measure the biophysical (as opposed to financial) value of international trade flows. This paper attempts to answer the following question: How large of an Ecological Footprint does a given country exert inside the borders of each of its trading partners? Records in the UN COMTRADE bilateral trade database are multiplied by a matrix of per-product Footprint yield coefficients to translate from values in dollars and tonnes to units of hectares. The results show that the largest interregional flows are from Latin to North America, and from North America to Asia-Pacific. Grouping countries by GDP, high and middle income countries appear in Footprint terms to trade predominantly with other high and middle income countries and much less with low income countries.