The status of happiness

Ever since the advent of advanced commercial societies in the West, writers and thinkers have speculated upon and theorised about the relationship between status and happiness. For example, in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the principal source of human unhappiness was our tendency to make invidious comparisons with each other when isolated individuals in the presocial state of nature were forced together by circumstances. This increased proximity fuelled competition for standing in the eyes of others which is the origin of the pervasive unhappiness that he believed was one of the hallmarks of modern civilisation. I argue that this account is partly correct and partly incorrect. On the one hand, there is now substantial credible evidence that supports the view that relative position matters much more to individuals than do absolute levels of wealth. The competition for status that Rousseau saw as a defining feature of modern civilisation has left the vast majority of people much less happy than they would otherwise be by fostering costly expenditure arms races that reduce objective welfare and significantly increase stress and anxiety. On the other hand, there is also mounting evidence that he was wrong that this situation is unnatural. According to some evolutionary biologists, human beings evolved in an environment of scarcity and intense resource competition, where each individual??s position was closely linked to his/her prospects for survival and reproductive success. For most of human history having high relative standing was instrumental in helping individuals to achieve the objectives they instinctively care most deeply about, namely survival and reproductive success.     

Delegation and the Regulation of Risk

Political principals typically use low-cost “fire-alarm” signals transmitted by the media, interest groups, and disaffected constituents to monitor the activities of regulatory agencies. We argue that regulatory decision making is biased and inconsistent if the instruments of political oversight are simple and the information flows to the principal are coarse relative to the complexity of the regulatory environment.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D72, L51.     

Coca Substitution and Free Trade in Bolivia: The Pending Crisis

This paper uses the factors proportion model of production and trade with ten inputs to analyze the potential impact of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) on the coca substitution program in Bolivia. With six crops including coca, the model produces comparative statics elasticities of changing prices on factor prices and output. Results show that the coca substitution program with free trade will result in large income redistribution in the coca‐producing region as a result of increased competition from larger and more efficient economies. Increased subsidies and institutional changes will be needed to sustain the coca substitution program in the long run.     

Do movie contents influence box-office revenues?

This article studies the determinants of box-office revenues in the motion picture industry. We first adopt an approach that takes into account quality signals (e.g. talent concentration, movie budget and Oscar awards, among others) to analyse the empirical relationship between category-specific parenthood ratings (R-ratings) and box-office revenues. Then, by matching movie contents with economic performance records, our original approach reveals that offensive contents like profanity or nudity may be a hindrance to achieve economic returns, while violent contents seems to enhance box-office revenues. Further research is needed to clarify the interaction in this regard between production budget and movie contents.     

Optimal Lending Contracts and Firm Dynamics

We develop a general model of lending in the presence of endogenous borrowing constraints. Borrowing constraints arise because borrowers face limited liability and debt repayment cannot be perfectly enforced. In the model, the dynamics of debt are closely linked with the dynamics of borrowing constraints. In fact, borrowing constraints must satisfy a dynamic consistency requirement: the value of outstanding debt restricts current access to short-term capital, but is itself determined by future access to credit. This dynamic consistency is not guaranteed in models of exogenous borrowing constraints, where the ability to raise short-term capital is limited by some prespecified function of debt. We characterize the optimal default-free contract—which minimizes borrowing constraints at all histories—and derive implications for firm growth, survival, leverage and debt maturity. The model is qualitatively consistent with stylized facts on the growth and survival of firms. Comparative statics with respect to technology and default constraints are derived.     

Unobservable persistent productivity and long term contracts

We study the problem of a firm that faces asymmetric information about the persistent productivity of its potential workers. In our framework, a worker's productivity is either assigned by nature at birth, or determined by an unobservable initial action of the worker that has persistent effects over time. We provide a characterization of the optimal dynamic compensation scheme that attracts only high productivity workers: consumption—regardless of time period—is ranked according to likelihood ratios of output histories, and the inverse of the marginal utility of consumption satisfies the martingale property derived in [Rogerson, William P., 1985. Repeated moral hazard. Econometrica 53 (1) 69–76]. However, in the case of i.i.d. output and square root utility we show that, contrary to the features of the optimal contract for a repeated moral hazard problem, the level and the variance of consumption are negatively correlated, due to the influence of early luck into future compensation. Moreover, in this example long-term inequality is lower under persistent private information.     

Incentive Regulation of Prices When Costs are Sunk

We present a model featuring irreversible investment, economies of scale, uncertain future demand and capital prices, and a regulator who sets the firm’s output price according to the cost structure of a hypothetical replacement firm. We show that a replacement firm has a fundamental cost advantage over the regulated firm: it can better exploit the economies of scale because it has not had to confront the historical uncertainties faced by the regulated firm. We show that setting prices so low that a replacement firm is just willing to participate is insufficient to allow the regulated firm to expect to break even whenever it has to invest. Thus, unless the regulator is willing to incur costly monitoring to ensure the firm invests, revenue must be allowed in excess of that required for a replacement firm to participate. This contrasts with much of the existing literature, which argues that the market value of a regulated firm should equal the cost of replacing its existing assets. We also obtain a closed-form solution for the regulated firm’s output price when this price is set at discrete intervals. In contrast to rate of return regulation, we find that resetting the regulated price more frequently can increase the risk faced by the firm’s owners, and that this is reflected in a higher output price and a higher weighted-average cost of capital.     

EDGAR on the internet: The welfare effects of wider information distribution in an experimental market for risky assets

Policies such as the SEC’s Fair Disclosure Rule, and technologies such as SEC EDGAR, aim to disseminate corporate disclosures to a wider audience of investors in risky assets. In this study, we adopt an experimental approach to measure whether this wider disclosure is beneficial to these investors. Price-clearing equilibrium models based on utility maximization and non-revealing and fully-revealing prices predict that in a pure exchange economy, an arbitrary trader would prefer that no investors are informed rather than all are informed; non-revealing theory further predicts that an arbitrary trader would prefer a situation in which all traders are informed rather than half the traders are informed. These predictions can be summarized as “None > All > Half”. A laboratory study was conducted to test these predictions. Where previous studies have largely focused on information dissemination and its effects on equilibrium price and insider profits, we focus instead on traders’ expected utility, as measured by their preferences for markets in which none, half, or all traders are informed. Our experimental result contradicts the prediction and indicates “Half > None > All”, i.e. subjects favor a situation where a random half is informed. The implication is that in addition to testing predictions of price equilibrium, experiments should also be used to verify analytical welfare predictions of expected utility under different policy choices. JEL Classification D82, D53, G14, L86 This work was largely completed while this author was at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.