ACCOUNTING FOR EXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCES IN THE CANADIAN SYSTEM OF NATIONAL ACCOUNTS: FLOWS, STOCKS AND PRODUCTIVITY MEASURES

The paper shows that the Canadian System of National Accounts includes exhaustible resources but treats them as if they were produced goods. Thus, the claim that conventional accounts ignore the contribution of exhaustible natural resources is partly true. To fully account for exhaustible resources, we present an alternative national accounting framework that incorporates natural resource flows and stocks. The framework modifies the measure of the net domestic product by a factor that differs from the Hartwick-Solow-Weitzman rule and leads to different estimates of GDP, national wealth, and productivity growth. An application to the Canadian oil and gas industry shows order-of-magnitude effects.     

Problemi di classificazione e connessione in una classe di grafi planari a facce esagonali

Aldo Ruscitti è mancato a Roma il 20 agosto 1978 a soli 39 anni di età. Era stato assistente ordinario e professore incaricato di Istituzioni di Analisi Matematica nella Facoltà di Scienze Statistiche Demografiche e Attuariali dell’Università di Roma. Sin dalla preparazione della tesi di laurea, i suoi interessi scientifici erano stati rivolti alle applicazioni della matematica in campo economico. Nell’ultimo periodo della sua attività si era impegnato in ricerche sulla struttura di particolari classi di grafi, settore nel quale aveva conseguito risultati a livello internazionale. Con la pubblicazione postuma di questo contributo di A. Ruscitti intendiamo rendere un affettuoso omaggio alla memoria di un caro amico che tra i primi aveva voluto entrare a far parte della famiglia dell’AMASES.

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On the problems of classification and enumeration in a class of 6-valent planar graphs

In this article the author investigates the problems of classification and enumeration of maps with the vertices of degree six and with the faces of cardinality two or three. The graphs in this class are analysed in terms of the maximal number of vertices with degree two they possess on the boundary of their faces. Special emphasis is placed on the problem of the connectivity of these graphs, according with the suggestion of B. Grünbaum and J. Zaks (see [4], p. 112): in particular the author proves that there exist 5-connected graphsG _n in this class with degreen> , for all εN.

     

Social conflict and growth

Despite the predictions of the neoclassical theory of economic growth, we observe that poor countries have invested at lower rates and have not grown faster than rich countries. To explain these empirical regularities we provide a game-theoretic model of conflict between social groups over the distribution of income. Among all possible equilibria, we concentrate on those that are on the constrained Pareto frontier. We study how the level of wealth and the degree of inequality affects growth. We show how lower wealth can lead to lower growth and even to stagnation when the incentives to domestic accumulation are weakened by redistributive considerations.     

Vicarelli’s Keynes (and today’s international disorder)

The article speculates about the legacy of Fausto Vicarelli’s interpretation of John Maynard Keynes’s work in the times of a major global crisis. In particular, it puts an emphasis on those aspects of Keynes’s “method” that Vicarelli rightly considered as revolutionary in his Keynes, of 1977, as well as in other writings. The article then turns to Vicarelli’s reconstruction of Keynes’s early work in international economics (Indian Currency and Finance, Economic Consequences of the Peace) and reflects upon the continuing relevance of the philosophy inspiring Keynes’s plans of global reform in the Forties, also in the light of Vicarelli’s (Keynes-inspired) vision of the problem of policy space at the international level.     

Self-confidence and strategic behavior

We suggest that overconfidence (conscious or unconscious) is motivated in part by strategic considerations, and test this experimentally. We find compelling supporting evidence in the behavior of participants who send and respond to others’ statements of confidence about how well they have scored on an IQ test. In two-player tournaments where the higher score wins, a player is very likely to choose to compete when he knows that his own stated confidence is higher than the other player’s, but rarely when the reverse is true. Consistent with this behavior, stated confidence is inflated by males when deterrence is strategically optimal and is instead deflated (by males and females) when luring (encouraging entry) is strategically optimal. This behavior is consistent with the equilibrium of the corresponding signaling game. Overconfident statements are used in environments that seem familiar, and we present evidence that suggests that this can occur on an unconscious level.     

The Use of Prior Information in Very Robust Regression for Fraud Detection

Misinvoicing is a major tool in fraud including money laundering. We develop a method of detecting the patterns of outliers that indicate systematic mis‐pricing. As the data only become available year by year, we develop a combination of very robust regression and the use of ‘cleaned’ prior information from earlier years, which leads to early and sharp indication of potentially fraudulent activity that can be passed to legal agencies to institute prosecution. As an example, we use yearly imports of a specific seafood into the European Union. This is only one of over one million annual data sets, each of which can currently potentially contain 336 observations. We provide a solution to the resulting big data problem, which requires analysis with the minimum of human intervention.     

Trasformata inversa di laplace per funzioni positive e problema dei momenti

Si propone un nuovo metodo per l'inversione numerica della transformata di Laplace per funzioni positive, tipicamente densità di probabilità. La funzione approssimante è ottenuta ricorrendo al principio di Massima Entropia, assumendo come informazione limitata i momenti della funzione da ricostruire, a loro volta legati da ben note relazioni alle derivate della funzione transformata. Dopo aver richiamato alcuni risultati teorici noti in letteratura concernenti l'esistenza dell'approssimante e la convergenza in entropia (e di conseguenza in normaL ₁), si presentano alcuni risultati teorici originali sul condizionamento del problema e alcuni risultati numerici che illustrano la bontà dell'approssimante.

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Summary A new method for the numerical Laplace transform inversion of positive functions, tipically probability density functions, is proposed. The approximating function is obtained resorting to the maxientropic approach, by assuming its moments as partial available information. Some known theoretical results concerning the existence and entropy convergence are reviewed. New theoretical results about the conditioning of the problem and some numerical simulations are illustrated.

     

Public spending and optimal taxes without commitment

We consider a representative agent, infinite-horizon economy where production requires private and public capital. The supply of public capital is financed through distortionary taxation. The optimal (second best) tax policy of a benevolent government is time inconsistent. We therefore introduce explicitly the constraint that at no point in time the revision of the original tax plan is desirable. We completely characterize the (third best) tax plan that satisfies this constraint, and estimate the difference in tax rate between the second and third best policy for a wide range of parameters. For some of these the difference between the second and third best tax rates is large, and so are the associated rates of economic growth.     

General equilibrium in economies with adverse selection

We model economies of adverse selection as Arrow–Debreu economies. In the spirit of Prescott and Townsend (Econometrica 52(1), 21–45, 1984a), we identify the consumption set of the individuals with the set of lotteries over net transfers. Thus, prices are linear in lotteries, but they may be non linear in commodity bundles. First, we study a weak equilibrium notion by viewing the economy of adverse selection as a pure exchange economy. The weak equilibrium set is non empty, but some of the allocations may be inefficient, and the equilibria indeterminate. Second, following Prescott and Townsend (Econometrica 52(1), 21–45, 1984a), we introduce an intermediary (firm) supplying feasible and incentive compatible measures. Equilibria are constrained efficient, but the equilibrium set is empty for an open set of economies containing the Rothschild and Stiglitz insurance economies. The research of A. Rustichini was supported by the NSF grant NSF/SES-0136556.