A refinement of ballot theorems

Abstract

Interest in ballot theorems arose in 1887, not as problem in the theory of probability, but as a mathematical puzzle. Little was it realized at that time that, in the subsequent analysis of this problem, ballot theorems would have many interesting applications in the theory of probability.     

A structural compendium on service quality and customer satisfaction: A survey of banks in India

ABSTRACT

The core aim of the research is to measure and analyze the quality of services offered by the top three public- and private-sector banks in India and to attempt to know how bank services quality affects customer satisfaction. By administering both questionnaires and personal interviews, researchers garnered the opinions of a total of 600 respondents with BANKQUAL statement. The authors applied Cronbach’s alpha to test reliability and the selected hypotheses have been proven with Chi-square tests and t-tests. All the public-sector banks chosen for the study lead in the satisfaction index over the private-sector banks by demonstrating differences in the dimensions of credibility, influence, and geographic spread. The research is most precious to diverse stakeholders of the Indian banking industry, particularly to banks who want to know about their existing service quality for further improvement. For the first time, the researchers introduced the comprehensive BANKQUAL statement to test out the quality of bank services in India.     

Injecting rational bubbles

This paper proves two theorems about economies with a finite number of infinitely lived agents who trade a complete set of one-period Arrow securities and several infinitely lived securities at each date, subject to short-sales constraints. The first theorem in the paper considers an equilibrium to an economy of this kind. It proves that there exists another economy with perturbed short-sales constraints in which there is an allocation-equivalent equilibrium in which asset prices have a bubble. The second theorem extends to the result to the case in short-sales constraints are endogenously determined in the sense of Alvarez and Jermann [Efficiency, equilibrium, and asset pricing with risk of default, Econometrica 68 (2000) 775-797].     

Nonseparable preferences and optimal social security systems

In this paper, we consider economies in which agents are privately informed about their skills, which evolve stochastically over time. We require agents' preferences to be weakly separable between the lifetime paths of consumption and labor. However, we allow for intertemporal nonseparabilities in preferences like habit formation. In this environment, we derive a generalized version of the Inverse Euler Equation and use it to show that intertemporal wedges characterizing optimal allocations of consumption can be strictly negative. We also show that preference nonseparabilities imply that optimal differentiable asset income taxes are necessarily retrospective in nature. We show that under weak conditions, it is possible to implement a socially optimal allocation using a social security system in which taxes on wealth are linear, and taxes/transfers are history-dependent only at retirement. The average asset income tax in this system is zero.     

Efficient Allocations with Hidden Income and Hidden Storage

We consider an environment in which individuals receive income shocks that are unobservable to others and can privately store resources. We provide a simple characterization of the unique efficient allocation of consumption in cases in which the rate of return on storage is sufficiently high or, alternatively, in which the worst possible outcome is sufficiently dire. We show that, unlike in environments without unobservable storage, the symmetric efficient allocation of consumption is decentralizable through a competitive asset market in which individuals trade risk-free bonds among themselves.     

On the robustness of laissez-faire

This paper considers a model economy in which agents are privately informed about their type: their endowments of various goods and their preferences over these goods. While preference orderings over observable choices are allowed to be correlated with an agent's private type, we assume that the planner/government is both uncertain about the nature of this joint distribution and unable to choose among multiple equilibria of any given social mechanism. We model the planner/government as having a maxmin objective in the face of this uncertainty.Our main theorem is as follows: Once we allow for this kind of uncertainty and assume no wealth effects in preferences, the uniquely optimal social contract is laissez-faire, in which agents trade in unfettered markets with no government intervention of any kind.