Experiments on risk attitude: The case of Chinese students

This paper examines Chinese students' risk attitudes using selling and buying experiments with lotteries. We found that subjects were more risk averse during the buying experiment than during the selling experiment, suggesting an endowment effect. In the selling experiment, subjects were risk loving when there was a low win probability and risk averse with a high win probability, whereas they were risk averse in the buying experiment. Using the prize money won during the experiment as a measure of wealth, we found decreasing absolute risk aversion. Subjects' risk attitudes as revealed in the experiments explain their risky asset holding behavior.     

Peer Effects among Swimmers

We develop a novel identification strategy and examine various aspects of peer effects using swimming data. We find that the performance of adjacent competitors positively influences swimmers' performances. In particular, swimmers are influenced by slower‐lane peers, suggesting that being chased improves one's performance. We use absenteeism data to directly compare the performances of swimmers with and without peers. We have found that swimmers swim faster with peers swimming behind them than when swimming alone, but that they swim slower with peers swimming ahead. Finally, we find that observability is a key determinant of peer effects, by comparing freestyle and backstroke competitions.     

Mommy-track backlash

"Please don't tell me that I need to have a baby to have this time off." Those words were still ringing in the ears of Jessica Gonon an hour after a tense meeting with Jana Rowe, one of her key account managers. Jessica, the vice president of sales and customer support at ClarityBase, considered Jana's request for a four-day workweek, for which she was willing to take a corresponding 20% cut in pay. Although the facts seemed simple, the situation was anything but. Just last week, Davis Bennett, another account manager, had made a similar request. He wanted a lighter workload so he could train for the Ironman Triathlon World Championship. Both Jana and Davis were well aware that Megan Flood, another account manager, had been working a reduced schedule for nearly two years. When she was hired, Megan had requested Fridays off to spend time with her two young sons. And since she came highly recommended and the talent pool was tight, Jessica had agreed to the arrangement. The eight account managers at ClarityBase were in charge of helping the company's largest clients install and maintain database applications, which often required no small amount of hand-holding and coddling. Because Megan had an abbreviated schedule, the other account managers were assigned the more difficult clients. But if Jessica agreed to a shorter workweek for Jana and Davis, who would take on the toughest customers? And what would happen if the other account managers started asking for similar deals? How can Jessica maintain the productivity of her department and meet her staff's needs for flexible work schedules while striking an equitable solution for both parents and nonparents? Four experts advise Jessica on her next move in this fictional case study.     

Payment card rewards programs and consumer payment choice

By using a unique data set that contains detailed information about consumer payment choice and consumers’ attitudes toward each payment method, we estimate the effects of payment card rewards on consumer choice of payment methods. Our approach allows us to control for consumer heterogeneity. We find the effects of rewards to be statistically significant across five retail types. Our policy experiments suggest that for the sub-population who hold both credit and debit cards, removing rewards would increase their share of paper-based payment methods (i.e., cash and checks), measured in terms of in-store transactions, by no more than 4 percentage points.     

WHO SUPPORTS REDISTRIBUTION?*

Using an original data set, we investigated the determinants of individual preferences over income redistribution in Japan. Although income level is negatively correlated with support for redistribution, it does not explain much; there are other important factors that relate to dynamics and uncertainty, such as income risk. Even after controlling for income, both risk‐averse individuals and those who expect to be unemployed in the future favour greater redistribution. Interaction of ageing and mobility prove important. The relatively poor elderly, who presumably have few prospects of upward mobility, strongly support greater redistribution, whereas younger people are less sympathetic to such a policy.     

Trade, Vertical Production Chain, and Competition Policy

The authors build a trade model that renders tractable the process in which imperfect competition in a country's downstream sector affects the rest of the world through international trade. For this purpose, internationally traded goods are viewed as middle products in the vertical chain of production, in which middle products are produced upstream and transformed into final consumption goods downstream. Suppression of competition in a country's downstream sector may serve as a beggar-thy-neighbor policy, increasing that country's own utility while reducing that of its trading partner countries.     

Life cycle and bequest savings A study of Japanese and U.S. households based on data from the 1984 NSFIE and the 1983 survey of consumer finances

This paper investigates whether the elderly save or dissave in light of two newly available sets of cross-section micro data, the 1983 “Survey of Consumer Finance” for the United States and the 1984 “National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure” for Japan. Contrary to dominant earlier findings we find for the United States that families after retirement dissave on average about a third of their peak wealth by the time of death, leaving the rest (mostly their homes) as bequests. For Japan, special handling is made to eliminate possible sample selection bias due to the different economic characteristics of the elderly forming independent households and those living with children. We find that the elderly belonging to both groups continue to save, and moreover, there appear to be significant signs of ongoing wealth transfer between the generations. The data in both countries also show that the elasticity of saving with respect to a life time income measure is significantly greater than unity, and more strongly so within higher age groups. J. Japan. Int. Econ., December 1988, 2(4), pp. 450–491. Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6297, and National Bureau of Economic Research.     

Human Capital Accumulation In the Middle-Income Country and World Trade*

I construct a dynamic three-country model of trade and growth in which a worker determines how long he takes training. the path of human capital accumulation of a worker is analyzed. I consider the case in which per capita human capital grows in the middle-income country while it stagnates in the high-income and low-income countries. Effects of the middle-income country's growth are studied.     

Using Constraint Programming to Design an Option-based Decision Support System

Financial options and futures give investors the opportunity to form complex strategies that meet their investment objectives for risk management. However, this opportunity gives rise to a difficult task: finding a desired strategy from among a large number of possible strategies. This paper describes an intelligent decision-support system for generating option-based investment strategies by using constraint programming, which is an integrated framework of Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming. In this system, constraint programming acts as a bridge between qualitative and quantitative analyses in decision processes. In qualitative analysis, logical reasoning with hypotheses is used to automatically create complex strategies through abstract matching with investors' profiles. Here, abstract matching can be regarded as symbolic computation for producing qualitatively reasonable strategies. In quantitative analysis, a set of complete solutions that satisfy user-supplied constraints are obtained by constraint satisfaction and optimization. A constraint language based on the framework of Constraint Logic Programming has been developed in order to integrate these symbolic and numerical computations in a uniform way. The resulting system written in this language has the following features. (1) Unlike rule-based expert systems, the constraint-based system can create novel investment strategies. (2) A smooth transition from qualitative to quantitative analyses can be naturally achieved due to the constraint language. (3) Qualitative analysis can reduce search complexity, because the analysis focuses on a small set of qualitative distinctions in solution space. These features indicate the usefulness of constraint programming for designing intelligent decision-support systems.