Convergence in US house prices

This paper analyses the convergence of US house prices. Our results confirm the existence of some degree of segmentation in the US housing market. We also provide robust evidence that the bursting of the housing price bubble has altered this market, observing different results when the sample includes information posterior to 2010. However, we appreciate different effects depending on the geographical level of disaggregation that is employed.     

异质性的技术俱乐部与中国地区工业增长——基于潜类别随机前沿模型的研究

本文利用中国1999~2007年30个省份工业的面板数据,以各省份的人力资本水平、对外开放程度作为类别的条件变量,通过建立潜类别随机前沿模型,考虑技术俱乐部的异质性,从而分析了我国的工业经济增长过程。结果表明,我国30个省份存在两个技术俱乐部,使用不同的技术前沿,生产函数存在巨大差异,并且俱乐部A的技术效率高于俱乐部B。技术进步是各省份工业产出变化最重要的决定因素,且B俱乐部要高于A俱乐部。投入变动起着很重要的作用,而效率变化的作用却非常小。     

Peer group effects in applied general equilibrium

Summary. In this paper, I develop an applied general equilibrium environment with peer group effects. The application I consider is schooling. The framework used here is general equilibrium with clubs. I establish the existence of equilibrium for the economy with a finite number of school types. This result is then extended to the case where the set of school types is a continuum. The two welfare theorems are shown to hold for both economies. To compute the equilibrium, I construct a Negishi mapping from the set of weights on individual type's utility to the set of transfers that support the corresponding Pareto allocations as competitive equilibria with transfers. Because this mapping is a correspondence, a version of Scarf's algorithm is used to find a competitive equilibrium. Received: June 9, 1999; revised version: March 13, 2000     

Price taking equilibrium in economies with multiple memberships in clubs and unbounded club sizes

We model an economy with clubs (or jurisdictions) where individuals may belong to multiple clubs and where clubs sizes are arbitrary—clubs may be restricted to consist of only one or two persons, or as large as the entire economy, or anything in-between. Notions of price-taking equilibrium and the core, both with communication costs, are introduced. These notions take into account that there is a small communication cost of deviating from a given outcome. We demonstrate that, given communication costs, for all sufficiently large economies the core is nonempty and the set of price-taking equilibrium outcomes is equivalent to the core.     

The bioeconomics of homogeneous middleman groups as adaptive units: Theory and empirical evidence viewed from a group selection framework

The paper presents a bioeconomics theory of homogeneous middleman groups (HMGs) as adaptive units as well as empirical evidence in the form of a number of historical case studies of HMGs functioning as adaptive units in less-developed economies lacking infrastructure. The evidence presented is not new: most of the case studies have been published [Landa (in Jenkins (Ed.) The informal sector: Including the excluded, 1988)]. What is new, however, is analyzing the phenomena of HMGs in a new way—as adaptive units viewed from a group selection perspective. In doing so, the case studies in this paper present empirical evidence of the existence and importance of group selection in human society. Target paper.