Mass-Elite Equilibrium of Federal Constitutional Legitimacy

William Riker ((1964) Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance. Boston: Little Brown) stressed the problem of the contested nature of federal institutions and argued that federations existed amidst the ongoing challenge to their rules, that federal institutions were being continuously endogenously produced in the interaction of political parties rather than serving as self-enforceable constraints on the political process. As parties changed, so did federalism, and eventually the balance was bound to shift to either one or the other extreme as far as the degree of centralization was concerned. An alternative approach to essentially the same problem of federal instability was to conceptualize the underlying game differently, as a game of coordination, so that institutions would be accepted as constraints and would therefore be self-enforceable because they allow the players to avoid the chaos and successfully converge to an outcome with payoffs exceeding their reservation values (Hardin, 1989, Ordeshook, 1992). The third proposed solution, consociationalism, emphasizes the elite effort to overcome the conflictual nature of the institutional choice (Lijphart, 1977). Here, as in the coordination argument, the hope is that one could create incentives for politicians to view the existing rules as advantageous and to avoid redistribution by means of the institutional revision. Yet, just like the coordination argument, it is based on an implicit assumption that politicians are more easily motivated to act “cooperatively” than are their constituencies. The missing step in the literature is the mechanism by which this more or less “cooperative” behavior of elected politicians could be sustainable in the environment of popular accountability. An essential component in building the theory of institutional design is to show the possibility in a democracy of elected politicians cooperating on institutional matters even when each of their constituencies would prefer to adjust the constitutional terms to its own advantage. Elite “cooperativeness” must be sustainable even in the presence of outside challengers promising to stay closer to the constituent preferences. Here, I present a model of mass-elite equilibrium of constitutional legitimacy, which demonstrates the possibility to motivate the incumbents to sustain the institutional stability while at the same time protecting them from electoral defeat. I also discuss the difficulties and limitations that such a solution faces, in particular, in plural societies. JEL classification: H77, D02 In working on this paper, I have benefited from the discussions with Mikhail Filippov, Peter Ordeshook, Charles Kromkowski, Carol Mershon, and from the comments of the participants of the conference on ‘‘Micro-Foundations of Federal Institutional Stability’’ at the MicroIncentives Research Center at Duke University, Durham, NC, April 30–May 1, 2004, and of the Lansing Lee proseminar at the University of Virginia. The responsibility for the many remaining flaws is solely mine.     

Macroeconomic implications of modeling the Internal Revenue Code in a heterogeneous-agent framework

Tax policy analysis in heterogeneous-agent models typically involves the use of smooth tax functions to approximate complex present tax law and proposed reforms. In this paper, we explore the extent to which the tax detail omitted under this conventional approach has macroeconomic implications relevant for policy analysis. To do this, we develop an alternative approach by embedding an internal tax calculator into a large-scale overlapping generations model that, while conditioning on idiosyncratic household characteristics, explicitly models key provisions in the Internal Revenue Code applied to labor income. We find that for a debt-constant steady state analysis of a given tax policy change, both approaches generate similar policy-induced patterns of macroeconomic activity despite variation in the underlying patterns of household tax-preferred consumption and labor supply behavior. However, this variation in underlying behavior is associated with significant quantitative and qualitative differences in macroeconomic aggregates along a debt-financed transition path immediately following a policy change. Consequentially, although the use of unconditional smooth tax functions may be a reasonable modeling simplification for steady state analysis of tax policy, caution should be taken for their use in transition path analysis within heterogeneous-agent models.     

基于产出冲击的国际储备需求的跨期均衡分析——真实经济的视角

与现有研究相比,文章从真实经济的角度构造了一个简单的基于代表行为人的跨期均衡模型,探讨基于产出冲击和消费平滑的主动性储备需求的决定。研究表明:主动性储备需求与产出冲击发生的概率、产出冲击大小、代表行为人的相对风险厌恶系数以及代表行为人的主观贴现率呈正向关系,与经济增长速度呈反向关系,而与储备资产的相对价格呈现出非线性的关系。通过数值模拟发现,我国主动性储备约占2007年GDP的6%(相当于我国2007年底国际储备的12%),说明我国近年来增加的国际储备存在较大的被动持有部分,目前的国际储备持有额已经从一定程度上脱离了实体经济的基本需求。因此,除紧缩的货币政策外,我国政府还需要进一步运用汇率政策、贸易政策以及其他干预政策直接降低被动国际储备额。     

Fiscal policy,wealth divergence,and lifetime utility

Using a two-country dynamic optimization model where the less patient country decumulates and the more patient one accumulates wealth, we analyze spillover effects of lump-sum and consumption taxes. A lump-sum tax on a country definitely harms the other country through a change in the rate of interest. A lump-sum tax on either country always improves the less patient country's asset position. A consumption tax has no spillover effect, although it is Pareto-inferior. Applying these results into a closed-country context with heterogeneous agents, we also discuss policy implications of a discriminatory tax.     

Existence of a competitive equilibrium in a one sector growth model with heterogeneous agents and irreversible investment

Summary. We prove existence of a competitive equilibrium in a version of a Ramsey (one sector) model in which agents are heterogeneous and gross investment is constrained to be non negative. We do so by converting the infinite-dimensional fixed point problem stated in terms of prices and commodities into a finite-dimensional Negishi problem involving individual weights in a social value function. This method allows us to obtain detailed results concerning the properties of competitive equilibria. Because of the simplicity of the techniques utilized our approach is amenable to be adapted by practitioners in analogous problems often studied in macroeconomics. Received: September 13, 2001; revised version: December 9, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We are grateful to Tapan Mitra for pointing out errors as well as making very valuable suggestions. Thanks are due to Raouf Boucekkine and Jorge Duran for additional helpful discussions. We also thank an anonymous referee for his/her helpful comments. The second author acknowledges the financial support of the Belgian Ministry of Scientific Research (Grant ARC 99/04-235 “Growth and incentive design”) and of the Belgian Federal Goverment (Grant PAI P5/10, “Equilibrium theory and optimization for public policy and industry regulation”). Correspondence to: C. Le Van     

Welfare under friction and uncertainty: General equilibrium evaluation of temporary employment in the U.S.

Temporary contracts usually fall outside of employee protection litigation, thus they are often cheaper than permanent contracts and are offered on-demand by firms. In the last two decades, there has been a sharp growth in such contracts in the U.S. labor market. This paper investigates the welfare consequences of offering temporary contracts in the U.S., an environment with low employee protection litigation and high production risk for firms. Employee protection litigation creates firing rigidity in regular labor markets. Pairing firing rigidity with high production risk, firms reduce employment and output, which generates welfare loss. The inexpensive and flexible nature of temporary contracts offers firms a buffer strategy in making employment decisions under risk and navigating the firing rigidity of the regular labor sector, thereby reducing welfare loss. However, temporary contracts cannot fully compensate for the efficiency cost from rising firing rigidity and risk.     

On local indeterminacy and endogenous cycles in Ramsey models with heterogeneous households

It is well-known that endogenous cycles can occur in Ramsey models with heterogeneous households and borrowing constraints. In this note, we address the issue of robustness in the more general case of endogenous labor supply and we explain the occurrence of local indeterminacy under progressive taxation.

Evidence on the contrarian trading in foreign exchange markets

This paper investigates the existence and price impacts of contrarian behavior in the foreign exchange markets. By utilizing a nonlinear behavioral model where the chartists and fundamentalists coexist, evidence obtained from two sample periods significantly supports the existence of contrarian trading in the British pound, the Japanese yen and the German mark markets. The contrarian trading can only partially offset the price impacts of trend-followers, therefore the price impact of the chartists as a whole is destabilizing. The ability that the contrarians can counterbalance the extrapolation of the trend-followers differs across markets. Traders in the BP market have the highest tendency to contrarian strategy, which in turn contributes to the least deviations of the BP exchange rates departing from its PPP fundamentals. The fundamentalists' confidence in trade fades during large misalignments, which make the mean reversion function of the fundamentalists weak under the circumstances. We find the magnitudes of interventions will be affected by the price impacts of contrarians and their abilities on market stabilization.     

欠发达地区劳务外包发展前景与对策——重庆市垫江县劳务外包调研报告

在政府的大力支持下,通过代理商的积极作用,重庆市垫江县劳务外包迅速兴起。垫江县的劳务外包通过主动承接发达地区的企业外包业务,开创了农村剩余劳动力转移“离土不离乡”的新模式,开辟了一条发展县域经济,尤其是县域工业经济的新路。垫江县的劳务外包还处于业务外包的低级阶段,一方面要继续扩大劳务外包,另一方面应从低级向高级阶段升级,积极发展生产外包和物流外包。垫江县要对业务外包进行长期的科学规划;建立完善业务外包信息网络平台;制定税收、土地等方面的优惠政策,鼓励乡、镇、村级建立比较集中的、有固定场所的劳务加工点,并鼓励农民购买机器设备、建立微型家庭工厂,促进劳务外包的升级发展;进一步发挥政府主导作用,激励、扶持代理商,并加强对代理商、村长及农民的相关培训。     

品牌经营:旅行社竞争之发展战略

品牌是旅行社竞争力的核心，而我国旅行社目前缺乏品牌经营意识和科学管理，且市场化进程缓慢。因而要通过建立现代企业制度、实行科学管理、提高员工素质等措施来加强旅行社的品牌经营，提高其竞争力。