Indivisible commodities and the nonemptiness of the weak core

We consider a sufficient condition for the nonemptiness of the weak core in a finite exchange economy where every commodity is available only in integer quantities. We show that if the aggregate upper contour set is discretely convex, then the weak core is nonempty. In addition, we give two sufficient conditions for the aggregate upper contour set to be discretely convex. One is that every upper contour set of every agent is M^?${\text{M}}^{?}$-convex. The other is that the number of commodities is two and every agent’s preference relation is weakly monotone and discretely convex.     

Trade Creation Effects of Regional Trade Agreements: Tariff Reduction versus Non‐tariff Barrier Removal

This study uses the most disaggregated tariff line‐level trade data in a large number of countries in the world to empirically decompose the trade creation effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs) into those owing to tariff reduction and those owing to non‐tariff barrier (NTB) removal. Specifically, utilizing our detailed dataset, we employ the standard gravity equation and identify those effects by estimating the trade creation effects of RTAs for ineligible and eligible products for RTA preferential schemes separately. Our major findings are as follows. First, for the whole sample, there are significantly positive trade creation effects owing to tariff reduction while the effects for NTB removal are weak. Second, the trade creation effects of tariff reduction and NTB removal are substantially large in the case of trade among low‐income countries but weak among high‐income countries.     

Testing for the principal’s monopsony power in agency contracts

We develop a test for the presence of the monopsony power of the livestock integrator (principal) on the market for contract growers (agents) and estimate the model with the data on swine industry contract settlements. A natural test for the monopsony power of the principal would compare the estimated values of the marginal revenue products with the actual payments that agents receive for their services. The problem with implementing this approach comes from the fact that agents’ abilities and actions are unobservable. Our approach is based on estimating the slope of the inverse supply function for grower input using generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators. The model specifies the relationships between the observable consequences and unobservable grower characteristics imposing the first order conditions for principal’s profit maximization. The results show that the null hypothesis of no market power cannot be rejected.

Conservation Auctions and Compliance: Theory and Evidence from Laboratory Experiments

Many agri-environmental conservation programs are faced with the problem of imperfect monitoring. This provides farmers with an incentive for noncompliance, because they can receive subsidies without implementing the conservation scheme. In this paper, bidding behavior and auction performance are compared for discriminatory-price and uniform-price auctions in an imperfect monitoring environment. Our theoretical analysis suggests that auction performances are equalized between the discriminatory-price and uniform-price auctions. However, laboratory experiments reveal that, although the discriminatory-price auction has an advantage in terms of reducing policy costs, it is more likely to cause adverse selection. As a result, the uniform-price auction tends to have higher efficiency and cost-effectiveness when compliance behavior is taken into account.     

Do Workers’ Remittances Promote Access to Finance? Evidence from Asia-Pacific Developing Countries

This study empirically analyzes the impact of remittance inflows on access to formal financial services using panel data on thirty-eight developing countries in Asia and Oceania between 2001 and 2012. Our results indicate that remittances help to enlarge the national branch network of commercial banks. These findings are robust to changes in the dependent variable, namely, the number of commercial bank branches per person or per area, as well as the estimation method. With regard to control variables, we find that income level and economic openness have positive impacts on the number of bank branches, whereas the inflation rate has a negative impact.     

老龄化与日本的社会保障

日本今年3月发生的大地震和核发电站的泄露事故,给政府和国民敲响警钟,震灾后的复兴,同时也是日本社会保障、社会福利的复兴。本文就日本的老龄化、社会保障、社会福利服务的现状进行分析,同时提出了社会保障构造改革后社会保障政策的诸多问题,并就日本社会保障未来的发展方向提出了思考和建议。     

Does Globalization Foster Economic Growth?

This article examines the effects of globalization, by especially focusing on the relaxation of local equity requirements (LERs) in developing countries. By constructing an endogenous growth model, where profit leakage to the South through LERs plays a key role, we obtain the following results. First, the relaxation of LERs in the South drives the relocation of firms from the North to the South, yielding a U‐shaped growth rate. Second, our numerical simulations suggest that a sufficient relaxation of LERs is beneficial for the South, although the shared profit of joint ventures is maximized through the use of LERs.     

Information criteria for impulse response function matching estimation of DSGE models

We propose new information criteria for impulse response function matching estimators (IRFMEs). These estimators yield sampling distributions of the structural parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models by minimizing the distance between sample and theoretical impulse responses. First, we propose an information criterion to select only the responses that produce consistent estimates of the true but unknown structural parameters: the Valid Impulse Response Selection Criterion (VIRSC). The criterion is especially useful for mis-specified models. Second, we propose a criterion to select the impulse responses that are most informative about DSGE model parameters: the Relevant Impulse Response Selection Criterion (RIRSC). These criteria can be used in combination to select the subset of valid impulse response functions with minimal dimension that yields asymptotically efficient estimators. The criteria are general enough to apply to impulse responses estimated by VARs, local projections, and simulation methods. We show that the use of our criteria significantly affects estimates and inference about key parameters of two well-known new Keynesian DSGE models. Monte Carlo evidence indicates that the criteria yield gains in terms of finite sample bias as well as offering tests statistics whose behavior is better approximated by the first order asymptotic theory. Thus, our criteria improve existing methods used to implement IRFMEs.