Inflation or monetary overhang?: Planners' preferences in china

Two models, based on utility maximization of economic planners, are developed to explain the stock of households' money holdings and rate of open inflation in China for the period 1954–85. Planners' preferences are found to be biased in favour of monetary overhang. This bias was reinforced when the bargaining strength of planners vis-a-vis households was weakened and during the post-Mao reform period. This could help to explain the increase in the value of rents and level of corruption during the reform period.     

Considerations on Inequality,Corporate Governance,and Financialization

Abstract

Disjunctures between corporate governance, increasingly dominated by financial considerations, and social inequality have been among the motor forces of current world-wide “populist” voter revolts. This article looks for clues for the relation between economic inequality, corporate governance, and financialization by re-examining the work of Karl Marx and of Adolphe Berle and Gardiner Means. Marx is widely considered, in Japan, to have pointed out that the division of profit into the wages of management and the profit of enterprise is considered as a path to the association. However, this general interpretation in Japan may not be sufficient for capturing capitalism’s contemporary reality. This presentation develops an alternative interpretation of this chapter by combining Marx’s explanation with the theory of the separation of ownership and management proposed by Berle and Means. We then explore causal relations among income inequality, corporate governance, and financialization.     

Setting trigger price in emissions permit markets equipped with a safety valve mechanism

This study develops an analytical model of emissions markets equipped with a safety valve mechanism. It examines how a regulator can control emission reductions by emitters by setting two policy parameters: emission targets and trigger prices. I demonstrate that the capabilities of these two policy parameters are greatly affected by uncertainty regarding unconstrained aggregate emissions. I also show that there exists a specific combination of target and trigger-price settings that eliminates the need to consider uncertainty regarding unconstrained aggregate emissions when regulators set emission reduction goals. The model and its findings identify a rule for setting trigger prices with respect to the total design of tradable permit systems and thus offer practical guidance in designing a permit market.     

Capital Tax Competition and Cooperation with Endogenous Capital Formation

Incorporating consumption–savings choices under a general concave utility function and hence an endogenous capital supply into a model of capital tax competition, we re‐investigate Nash equilibrium and compare it with the optimum under cooperative tax policy. In contrast to the case of fixed capital supply, it is shown that if savings sufficiently increase with the interest rate, a Nash equilibrium may be more efficient than a cooperative tax policy. Therefore, the distortionary effects of capital supply are important to issues of tax policy coordination.     

Deregulation and labour earnings: Three motor carrier industries in Japan

We empirically examine the effect of product market deregulation on wages. The difference-in-difference approach is used with wage data from three motor carrier industries (the taxi, bus and trucking industries) in Japan to obtain the following findings. First, deregulations in the 1990s and 2000s caused the relative wages of taxi and bus drivers to decline, but this was not the case for truck drivers. Second, the large decline in the relative wages of taxi drivers can be explained by the deterioration of economic conditions; their wages are more sensitive to labour market conditions than those of drivers in other industries.     

Money,national debt,and economic growth

This paper develops a dynamic model which allows for government spending, taxation, and the endogeneity of the money supply. As an example of an application of our framework, we consider the well known stability problem of the two asset (money and physical assets) neoclassical “money-and-growth” literature. We conclude, among other things, that the usual saddle-point instability result under myopic perfect foresight with proportional savings behavior can be reversed by introducing a third asset (securities). It is further argued that this result is “robust” as it holds under various policy rules (including the traditional case of national debt growing at a constant rate).     

The FUGI macroeconomic model and world trade to 1990

The economic model presented here was designed to explore and simulate trade between (in this version) 62 countries or regions. The main structural elements and equations are described, and some results concerning national GDP growth and inter-regional trade levels are given.     

Minimum wage regulation and economic growth

This paper investigates the long-run growth implications of minimum wage regulation (MWR) enforced nationally using a familiar aggregate growth model. The paper shows that MWR, if it is effective, always lowers the rate of growth, and that the minimum wage floor, if it is sufficiently high, causes the economy to decay all the way toward the origin. The effects of a “wage-mark-up” policy, a variation of MWR, are also examined.     

The Efficiency Principle in Non-Cooperative Coalitional Bargaining

Applying the non-cooperative theory of coalitional bargaining, I examine a widely held view in economic literature that an efficient outcome can be agreed on in voluntary bargaining among rational agents in the absence of transaction costs. While this view is not always true, owing to the strategic formation of subcoalitions, I show that it can hold under the possibility of successive renegotiations of agreements. Renegotiation may, however, motivate bargainers to form a subcoalition first and to exploit the first-mover rent. This strategic behaviour in the process of renegotiation may distort the equity of an agreement.
JEL Classification Numbers: C72, C78, D23, D61, D63.