THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON PENSION POLICY HOUSEHOLD SURVEY 1979: NET WEALTH DISTRIBUTIONS BY TYPE AND AGE FOR THE UNITED STATES

A household survey was done for the U.S. President's Commission on Pension Policy (1979-81). This paper reports on the net wealth of families in the United States for the year 1979, the first wave of the survey. The survey was begun in September 1979 and was a two-wave, nationwide random sample of households in the United States. The survey instrument gathered information on income, wealth, labor supply, participation in pension plans, vesting status, entitlement to various benefits, attitudinal views on retirement, social security wealth, and individual demographic characteristics. Details of the survey methodology are reported. A response rate of sixty-two percent was achieved among the 6,384 dwelling units in the first wave. Imputations are made to calculate the wealth embodied in private and public employee-based pensions. Included in this valuation is an adjustment for expected vesting status in the pension plan. Net wealth is examined by type and age of the head of household. The average net wealth of the family is $53,956, and the average value of retirement wealth is $3,281 which comprises about 5 to 6 percent of net wealth. The striking changes in the portfolio of net wealth are depicted over the cross-section of age cohorts. The oldest age cohort, 65 and over, is found to have for retirement wealth the lowest frequency of ownership, the lowest proportion of their portfolio in this form of wealth, and the second to lowest average value.     

Agency Costs in Apartment Property Management Contracts

Because fees for property management services are based on gross rental collections rather than on net operating incomes, property managers may not always act in the best interest of property owners. This study is an examination of the agency costs that result from the conflict of interests between owners and managers. A nationwide proprietary sample of 242 apartment properties is analyzed to compare agency costs of four distinct types of ownership structures. Agency costs, measured as operating expenses per square foot, are found to be significantly higher for institutional owners than for noninstitutional owners, but not significantly higher in cases where no competition for property management services exists. We conclude that agency costs of property management contracts are significant and the fee provisions of standard property management contracts should be changed to better align the interests of managers and owners.     

Project Evaluation and Accounting Income Forecasts

It is shown that the economically justifiable criterion for project evaluation of maximizing current net market value is equivalent to maximizing the discounted net cash equivalent flow. It is argued that the appropriate income concept for project evaluation is therefore the one used in the system devised by Chambers, 'Continuously Contemporary Accounting'.     

Do public budget deficits crowd out private capital expenditures?

Those economists who expected the increasing US budget deficits in recent years to have a negative impact on private investment spending have so far been proved wrong. Hans-Peter Fröhlich provides an analysis of what has happened and examines the interrelation between public sector deficits and private capital expenditures.     

Mobility as an influence on retail patronage behavior of the elderly: Testing conventional wisdom

While the marketplace potential of the elderly segment is tremendous, research with regard to what influences the elderly’s patronage behavior has, to date, been inconclusive. This article attempts to determine the effect lack of transportation mobility has on various patronage behaviors. The research reported here is based on a large national smaple of the elderly and incorporates the factors suggested by previous research. The study shows mobility is not a significant influence on the type of retail store frequented, but can influence switching patronage between stores of a given type. Additionally, it was found that mobility is related to the elderly’s psychographic profiles, convenience needs, and information source usage.     

Media allocation model using nonlinear benefit curves

An integral part of planning advertising campaigns involves the selection of those media vehicles that maximize the effectiveness of the advertising effort. This article describes a media allocation model designed to provide the media planner, responsible for a particular advertising campaign, with relevant information for use in selecting the most appropriate media vehicles and in determining the number of insertions in each vehicle. It is based on the derivation of nonlinear benefit curves for candidate media vehicles that can be derived from commercially available response data and from subjective estimates gathered from media planning experts. When tested in an actual advertising campaign, the results serve to provide relevant information that can make the media allocation decision a more objective one.     

Stock Market Volatility in an Emerging Market: Further Evidence from the Athens Stock Exchange

We investigate the time series properties of the daily and weekly returns from the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) index for the years 1987 to 1997. We investigate whether important time-series characteristics have changed significantly over time. The Greek market has recently undergone major changes including complete capital flow liberalization, the implementation of computerized trading, as well as significant increases in market volume and capitalization; we thus contrast the 1987–90 and 1991–97 periods. Our findings suggest the dynamics of the ASE composite index returns have changed as the market has developed.     

Enriching interactions: Incorporating outcome data into static discrete games

When modeling the behavior of firms, marketers and micro-economists routinely confront complex problems of strategic interaction. In competitive environments, firms make strategic decisions that not only depend on the features of the market, but also on their beliefs regarding the reactions of their rivals. Structurally modeling these interactions requires formulating and estimating a discrete game, a task which, until recently, was considered intractable. Fortunately, two-step estimation methods have cracked the problem, fueling a growing literature in both marketing and economics that tackles a host of issues from the optimal design of ATM networks to the choice of pricing strategy. However, most existing methods have focused on only the discrete choice of actions, ignoring a wealth of information contained in post-choice outcome data and severely limiting the scope for performing informative counterfactuals or identifying the deep structural parameters that drive strategic decisions. The goal of this paper is to provide a method for incorporating post-choice outcome data into static discrete games of incomplete information. In particular, our estimation approach adds a selection correction to the two-step games approach, allowing the researcher to use revenue data, for example, to recover the costs associated with alternative actions. Alternatively, a researcher might use R&D expenses to back out the returns to innovation.