Corporate financial structure and the funding of private pension plans

One strand of the literature on the employment contract focuses on the role of the contract in the efficient sharing of risk between capitalists and workers. One way capitalists can shift risk to workers is to provide part of workers' remuneration in the form of an unfunded, deferred pension. Since bonds, in the event of bankruptcy or voluntary termination, are typically senior to unfunded pension liabilities, capitalists can also affect their risk by altering the firm's debt-to-equity ratio. These observations suggest that corporate financial structure and the employment contract are interdependent. The paper has two major goals. The first is to take a step towards integrating the theory of corporate financial structure with that of the employment contract. The second is to investigate possible consequences of legislation which regulates the funding of private pensions.     

Aggregate demand, the wage gap and unemployment in LDC's

This paper begins with the Todaro framework which relates LDC urban unemployment to the existence of an urban-rural wage gap. An explanation of the wage gap is developed from aggregate demand conditions in the urban sector, providing a Keynesian theory of LDC unemployment. Various policies to alleviate LDC unemployment are considered. Aggregate demand policies are most certain of success when the response of urban output to these policies is low, a situation which has usually been held to invalidate demand policies in LDC's. Import substitution policies promote unemployment and should be reversed or even replaced by rural sector subsidization.     

Economic consequences of unfunded vested pension benefits

This paper examines the relationship between unfunded vested pension liabilities and the market value of a firm's shares. This relationship has important implications for the mechanism by which private pensions influence aggregate savings. Attention is paid to modeling the institutional determinants of this relation implied by the ERISA legislation. These considerations require a nonlinear regression model with very special properties that are developed and discussed. Estimation results suggest that ERISA has had an important effect on the relation between unfunded benefits and firm value that previous investigations have neglected.     

Transportation Policy and Panterritorial Pricing in Africa

Many African countries interfere with the spatial pattern ofagricultural prices and often mandate a spatially constant (panterritorial)price. Such policies are conceptually identical to the pricingof transport services. The pricing and transportation policiesof the Ivoirien cotton parastatal provide a case study. Theloss in producer surplus from raising current revenues by panterritorialpricing is compared with an optimal policy that minimizes producerloss. For current revenues, a switch to the optimal policy wouldprovide only small gains. At higher revenue levels, however,the gains would increase. These policies are also contrastedwith another suboptimal policy—full-cost pricing of transportwith an export tax. By dispersing production, panterritorialpricing inflates the gains from transport projects. Transportinvestment and pricing reform are therefore assessed simultaneously.The number and location of the purchasing depots are also discussed.     

Tax/subsidy policies toward vector-borne infectious diseases

Vector-borne diseases especially rife in poor countries pose sectoral tax/subsidy issues. Preventions and therapies mitigate these diseases in a numerical optimization model combining dynamic epidemiology and economics. The medical distinction between prevention and therapy does not distinguish economic properties of preventions and therapies. Some interventions increase and others decrease moving to the steady state, depending: on the utility function, the targeting of interventions and the disease process. Interventions display negative own-price but indeterminate cross-price effects. Juxtaposing the social planner's with decentralized choices quantifies externalities and shows how subsidies implement the first-best. One prevention and the therapy are equally subsidized.     

LDC participation in international financial markets: Debt and reserves

This paper analyzes LDC borrowing and reserve-holding behavior as part of a general equilibrium portfolio problem. Estimates of LDC debt and reserve demand and credit supply suggest that debt, along with reserves, serves a transactions role. Another finding is that most LDC borrowers are credit constrained. An analysis of LDC export behavior suggests that defaults are likely to be independent, uncorrelated phenomena.     

Issues in controllability and the theory of economic policy

The paper demonstrates that the concepts of dynamic controllability are useful for the theory of economic policy by establishing four propositions. First, dynamic controllability is a central concept in stabilization policy. Second, the ability to achieve a target state, even if it cannot be maintained, may be of economic interest. Third, dynamic controllability is of special interest for ‘historical’ models. Fourth, the conditions for any notion of dynamic controllability are distinct from and weaker than those for Tinbergen static controllability.