Household formation by the young in the United States

A model of household formation by the young is specified and estimated. It was found that the headship rate for the young in the United States depends on income, the cost of housing, the number of families receiving AFDC payments, the age at first marriage for females and for males, and the percentage of males enrolled in college. Household formation by the young is much more sensitive to changes in income and the price of housing than household formation by the entire adult population. The estimated results are used to examine the change in the headship rate from 1961 to 1979 and from 1979 to 1987.     

Testing the presence and the absence of purchasing power parity: results for fixed and flexible regimes

Recent empirical studies concerning purchasing power parity (PPP), using the concept of cointegraton, have tested the null hypothesis of the absence orthe presence of PPP. The disadvantage of using either of these approaches is that the conclusion is ambiguous when not rejecting the null: the result could be due to either the null hypothesis being true or by the low power of the test and lack of information in the data. Therefore, there is substantial information to be gained by applying both approaches within the same study. This study uses the ordinary DF test with PPP as the alternative hypothesis and a recently suggested test by Kwiatkowski et al. (1992) with PPP as the null. The tests are applied to four major industrial countries real exchange rates, each split into four different samples, including fixed as well as flexible exchange rate regimes. The absence of PPP cannot be rejected while the presence can be rejected.     

Measuring country event risk compensation on BRICs international portfolio management

The BRICs nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have a strong relative economic growth pattern in the world among economic powers. The allure of globalization has made the analysis and assessment of national critical component of international portfolio management in recent years. We construct the model from comparing the relative SD of stock return whereby higher SDs are generally associated with more risk. This relative SD forms a principle component in the change of the weights on the international portfolio choice. The result shows that event jump risk not only makes the investor's allocation more conservative overall, but also it can be compensated on BRICs event risk.     

Enterprise diversification in US dairy: impact of risk preferences on scale and scope economies

Enterprise diversification has recently become a prominent feature of US dairy farms. Scope economies and risk aversion are two forces that simultaneously determine diversification. We jointly estimate scope economies and determine risk preferences under price uncertainty. We reject risk neutrality in favour of Increasing Absolute Risk Aversion (IARA) and Increasing Relative Risk Aversion (IRRA). Scope economies are significant, but diminish with farm size. Increasing returns to scale exist in the production of multiple enterprises and diminish with size. Large farms operate under decreasing returns to scale. Ignoring risk preferences, a common practice in empirical work, results in an underestimate of the effect of scope economies for large farms.     

ASEAN's New Frontiers: Integrating the Newest Members into the ASEAN Economic Community

Since Vietnam, Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR), Myanmar, and Cambodia joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the 1990s, concerns have been raised over a Development Divide. The real division is between ASEAN members participating in the integrated East Asian economy and those that do not. The older ASEAN members have become more efficient traders, and Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam must reform faster if they are to catch up. Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Myanmar are not meeting the challenge, but Vietnam may be leaving the laggards, and the Philippines is lagging the leaders. The challenge is how to avoid a two‐tier ASEAN with fast‐growing modern economies coexisting besides inward‐looking poor countries.     

Smokeless tobacco,smoking cessation and harm reduction: an economic analysis

Good estimates place ‘hard core’ smoking rates in the United States at approximately 25%, with little change over the decade of the 1990s. This paper examines the possibilities of ‘harm reduction’ with the use of smokeless tobacco. Specifically, using an econometric model we seek to determine whether an increase in the use of smokeless tobacco would lead to reduced smoking rates in the United States. Applying our model to the NHANES III (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) we find that the use of smokeless tobacco by an average U.S. male smoker would increase the average probability of smoke cessation by over 10%. Approximately 3 million additional ‘quits’ would result for 26 million smokers. Our study permits an examination of cessation by age groups and we find that males who use smokeless tobacco between 16 and 65 have a 10–14% probability of quitting but that the probability falls beyond age 66. Important implications for life extension and health costs would attend these results with, under conservative assumptions, life years saved approximating 2.16 million and health care cost-savings of about $3 billion per year.     

Source of income effects for demand decisions and taxable consumption

The relationship between sources of income and demand decisions by the household is examined here with an eye toward the ramifications on consumption tax bases. Income sources may be important when households attach psychic and transaction costs to individual purchases or when sources are assigned via a mental accounting process. In either case, general and specific sales tax bases may be affected by changes in income composition. Empirical results indicate two important findings. First, tax exemptions can introduce significant income source effects for a general consumption tax base. Second, the importance of differential tax rates for gasoline and food-at-home strongly depends on the mix of labour, capital, retirement and non-retirement transfer pay.     

Capacity utilization rates and unemployment rates: are they complements or substitutes in warning about future inflation?

This research examines capacity utilization as a measure of economic slack in the US economy. Many macroeconomists have questioned the use of capacity utilization as a measure of economics slack on several fronts. The first issue revolves around the definition and accuracy of measurement of the capacity utilization rate in the US economy. Since this research use existing Federal Reserve measures of capacity utilization no insights into the definition and measurement issues are offered other than the fact that a consistent role is found for two different Fed measures of capacity utilization in explaining inflation. The second issue effectively involves the concern as to robustness of the link between the capacity utilization rate and inflation. It was found that there is indeed reason for the Federal Reserve to take note of changes in capacity utilization when trying to determine its policy position with regard to inflation. Clearly, the high capacity measure developed in this research offers distinct information about the inflation process. The third issue raises the question as to whether the capacity utilization and unemployment rates are complements or substitutes in the inflation equation. Both rates tend to provide similar information regarding price changes at low levels of aggregate resource usage. However, as resource usage in the economy becomes increasingly close to its maximum potential, the labour market impact on inflation, as capture by unemployment rate measures, is distinctly different from that of capacity constraints. Finally, if the capacity utilization rate is indeed a useful measure of inflationary pressure, is there a threshold level of the capacity utilization rate above which policymakers should become particularly concerned about the potential of accelerating inflation? It was found that across two measures of inflation, the widely discussed capacity threshold level is in the 84-85% range.