A Technological and Organisational Explanation for the Size Distribution of Firms

This paper combines insights from the literature on the economics of organisation with traditional models of market structure to construct a theory of equilibrium firm size heterogeneity under the assumption of a homogenous product industry. It is possible that configurations consisting entirely of small firms (run by entrepreneurs with limited attention) and with larger firms (using managerial techniques to substitute away these limits to allow increasing returns technologies to become profitable) can arise in equilibrium. However, there also exist equilibrium configurations with the co-existence of large and small firms. The efficiency properties of these respective equilibria are discussed. Finally, the implications of an expanding market size are considered.     

Simpler Probabilistic Population Forecasts: Making Scenarios Work

The traditional high-low-medium scenario approach to quantifying uncertainty in population forecasts has been criticized as lacking probabilistic meaning and consistency. This paper shows, under certain assumptions, how appropriately calibrated scenarios can be used to approximate the uncertainty intervals on future population size and age structure obtained with fully stochastic forecasts. As many forecasting organizations already produce scenarios and because dealing with them is familiar territory, the methods presented here offer an attractive intermediate position between probabilistically inconsistent scenario analysis and fully stochastic forecasts.     

Minnesota-type adaptive hierarchical priors for large Bayesian VARs

Large Bayesian VARs with stochastic volatility are increasingly used in empirical macroeconomics. The key to making these highly parameterized VARs useful is the use of shrinkage priors. We develop a family of priors that captures the best features of two prominent classes of shrinkage priors: adaptive hierarchical priors and Minnesota priors. Like adaptive hierarchical priors, these new priors ensure that only ‘small’ coefficients are strongly shrunk to zero, while ‘large’ coefficients remain intact. At the same time, these new priors can also incorporate many useful features of the Minnesota priors such as cross-variable shrinkage and shrinking coefficients on higher lags more aggressively. We introduce a fast posterior sampler to estimate BVARs with this family of priors—for a BVAR with 25 variables and 4 lags, obtaining 10,000 posterior draws takes about 3 min on a standard desktop computer. In a forecasting exercise, we show that these new priors outperform both adaptive hierarchical priors and Minnesota priors.     

Characterization of a class of moral-hazard, adverse selection games

Studying a principal-agent game in which the agent alone observes the state of the world and reports it, but the moral hazard is not reducible, shows that, if the principal uses all signals, then no solution exists, i.e. there is no contract that elicits truth-telling and motivates the agent to exert effort. When the principal does not use signals on the state of the world that seem irrelevant, a solution exists in which some of the ex post signals on outcome are not used, even though they obey the informativeness condition of Holmstrom (Bell Journal of Economics, 1979, 10, 74–91).     

Prizes for basic research: Human capital,economic might and the shadow of history

We study the distribution of basic scientific research across countries and time, and explain the process that resulted in the United States becoming the undisputed leader in basic research. Our study is based on the records of scientific awards, and on the data of global economic trends. We investigate the degree to which scale/threshold effects account for the number of prizes won. We constructed a stylized model, predicting a non-linear relationship with lagged relative GDP as an important explanatory variable of a country’s share of prizes. Our empirical research findings find support for these predictions and the presence of a “winner-takes-all” effect.      

Using Limited Information to Support the Decision to Launch a New Product in the Fruit Juice Market: A Teaching Case Study

Fresh Juice Incorporated (FJI) is in the process of determining whether it should launch a new fruit juice, Genetically Enhanced (GE) Juice. The GE Juice meets consumers' demands for a tasty, nutritious product and it would be the first new juice product in the last fifteen years. Before FJI decides to launch GE Juice, it must analyze the uncertainty surrounding market size, market share, and price of GE Juice. Finally, if FJI decides to launch GE Juice, then they must decide if they will bottle the juice themselves or outsource this process. This case teaches students how to discuss the strategic implications of launching a new product and develop a net present value and financial feasibility simulation model given limited information.     

Macro Prudential Supervision in the Open Economy,and the Role of Central Banks in Emerging Markets

In this paper we explore lessons from the global liquidity crisis pertaining to the prudential supervision role of central bank in an open economy. The crisis validates the need for external debt management policy in emerging markets. Hoarding international reserves (IR) is a potent self-insurance mechanism. However, it is associated with relatively high costs and is also less efficient in absence of assertive external debt management policies. In the presence of congestion externalities associated with deleveraging, optimal external borrowing-tax-cum-IR-hoarding-subsidy reduces the cost as well as the scale of hoarding IR.     

Impact of copula choice on the modeling of crop yield basis risk

A number of problems in agricultural economics involve modeling joint distributions for which the assumption of multivariate normality may not be warranted. Yet, very little work has been conducted evaluating competing methods for modeling joint dependence. We develop a simulation framework to evaluate the bias and efficiency impacts of copula choice in the context of evaluating county‐to‐farm basis risk. The results suggest significant differences in performance across various copulas and approaches. The findings have important implications for risk analysis, insurance, and policy modeling problems in agriculture regarding the selection of method to model dependence among random variables.