Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series最新文献

{"title":"Do Fiscal Rules Matter?","authors":"V. Grembi, T. Nannicini, Ugo Troiano","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1852523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1852523","url":null,"abstract":"Fiscal rules are laws aimed at reducing the incentive to accumulate debt, and many countries adopt them to discipline local governments. Yet, their effectiveness is disputed because of commitment and enforcement problems. We study their impact applying a quasi-experimental design in Italy. In 1999 the central government imposed fiscal rules on municipal governments, and in 2001 relaxed them below 5,000 inhabitants. We exploit the before/after and discontinuous policy variation, and show that relaxing fiscal rules increases deficit and lowers taxes. The effect is larger if the mayor can be reelected, the number of parties is higher, and voters are older.","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128044928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Menu Implementability and Practical Pricing Schemes","authors":"A. C. L. Wong","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1915752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1915752","url":null,"abstract":"In the context of monopolistic nonlinear pricing, we compare the maximum pro…ts of bundling, incremental discounts, and all-units discounts. When the number of pricing blocks is unrestricted, incremental discounts perform weakly the worst. However, if the performance of incremental discounts is not strictly worse when the number of blocks is unrestricted, then it performs the best when the number of blocks is restricted. It is because incremental discounts have the smallest \"implementation power\" and the largest \"approximation power\". These results are applications of our general theory of menu implementability, which characterizes the set of outcomes implementable by a menu of tari¤","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128153773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Quality Education and Tailor-made Skills Development is Needed to Solve Unemployment Problem in Ghana","authors":"G. Ekeha","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1885386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1885386","url":null,"abstract":"The issue of unemployment have been one of the major problems in the country for sometime now. Many opinion leaders, youth activist and other concerned groups and individuals have expressed their worries on the issue. In recent times there have been some group calling itself Unemployed Graduate Association of Ghana (UGAG) and many youth groups advocating for pressure on the governments to create jobs in the country as promised in their manifestos. Their intention was to send message out there to leaders about the fact that they have some skills to be implemented on the job markets but cannot find those jobs because there were no vacancies.The major question however is whether Ghana has various groups of unemployed youth or rather groups of unemployable youth who cannot fill the “numerous” jobs in the system.The unemployment problem of the country cannot be tackled properly when we always tried to use the same tactics to fight it over the years. We need to change our strategies because those used in the past, which are still being implemented today, do not help and would never help to defeat the cancer. We need vigorous and bold long-term strategies that would help resolve the problem in the longer future if not immediately. The various groups of politicians, with their different ideologies, should refrain from using the unemployment problems as a field for playing their political games. We also need to see our professional bodies of various fields taking the bull by the horn and collaborate with state institutions to tackle this problem. The professional institutions should be aware that tomorrows’ problems which are likely to confront our societies cannot be solved by their current competencies and that new and technologically advanced strategies are needed to tackle those problems. They have a very big role to play by ensuring that individuals who are aspiring to become members of their professional bodies have the fundamental understanding of the economic and socio-cultural problems that are currently confronting the nation and must also have skills and expertise to predict possible future confrontational socio-cultural economic problems.","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132893132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Test of Racial Bias in Capital Sentencing","authors":"A. Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1830382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1830382","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a test of racial bias in capital sentencing based upon patterns of judicial errors in lower courts. We model the behavior of the trial court as minimizing a weighted sum of the probability of sentencing an innocent and that of letting a guilty defendant free. We de?ne racial bias as a situation where the relative weight on the two types of errors is a function of defendant and/or victim race. The key prediction of the model is that if the court is unbiased, ex post the error rate should be independent of the combination of defendant and victim race. We test this prediction using an original dataset that contains the the race of the defendant and of the victim(s) for all capital appeals that became ?nal between 1973 and 1995. We ?nd robust evidence of bias against minority defendants who killed white victims: in Direct Appeal and Habeas Corpus the probability of error in these cases is 3 and 9 percentage points higher, respectively, than for minority defendants who killed minority victims.","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121256345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fine-Tuning the Equivalent Strike Framework for Bespoke CDO Pricing","authors":"Moez Mrad, Racem Triki","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1832384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1832384","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a fine-tuning of some mapping functions used in the Equivalent Strike framework. This new approach provides an equivalent strike that is independent from the index base correlation. This feature is valuable when pricing very junior and senior tranches or when computing index tranches (or index base correlation) sensitivities. Our numerical tests on realistic cases showed that the equivalent correlation provided by this new is pretty close to what is computed with common mapping functions","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"2013 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130983269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Everyone Hates Privatization, but Why? Survey Evidence from 28 Post-Communist Countries","authors":"I. Denisova, Markus Eller, Timothy Frye, E. Zhuravskaya","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1604616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1604616","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of mass support for economic reform reveal a simple conclusion: Everyone hates privatization. Yet whether respondents hold this view due to a preference for state property or concerns about the legitimacy of privatization is unclear. We test these arguments using a 2006 survey of 28,000 individuals in 28 post-communist countries and find that a lack of human capital affects support for revising privatization primarily via a preference for state property over private property; whereas transition-related hardships influence support for revising privatization due to both a preference for state property and concerns about the legitimacy of privatization. These results suggest the value of analyses that not only link respondent traits with support for policy, but that also probe the motivations that underpin this support. They also indicate that opposition to privatization should not be equated with support for renationalization.","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130953841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"GMM and OLS Estimation and Inference for New Keynesian Phillips Curve","authors":"H. Vinod","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1560622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1560622","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers estimation situations where identification, endogeneity and non-spherical regression error problems are present. Instead of always using GMM despite weak instruments to solve the endogeneity, it is possible to first check whether endogeneity is serious enough to cause inconsistency in the particular problem at hand. We show how to use Maximum Entropy bootstrap (meboot) for nonstationary time series data and check `convergence in probability' and `almost sure convergence' by evaluating the proportion of sample paths straying outside error bounds as the sample size increases. The new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation for US data finds little endogeneity-induced inconsistency and that GMM seems to worsen it. The potential `lack of identification' problem is solved by replacing the traditional pivot which divides an estimate by its standard error by the Godambe pivot, as explained in Vinod (2008) and Vinod (2010), leading to superior confidence intervals for deep parameters of the NKPC model.","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"284 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120848680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Axiomatic Foundations of Multiplier Preferences","authors":"Tomasz Strzalecki","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1523822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1523822","url":null,"abstract":"This paper axiomatizes the robust control criterion of multiplier preferences introduced by Hansen and Sargent (2001). The axiomatization relates multiplier preferences to other classes of preferences studied in decision theory. Some properties of multiplier preferences are generalized to the broader class of variational preferences, recently introduced by Maccheroni, Marinacci and Rustichini (2006). The paper also establishes a link between the parameters of the multiplier criterion and the observable behavior of the agent. This link enables measurement of the parameters on the basis of observable choice data and provides a useful tool for applications.","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127160998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Stochastic Stability in Large Populations","authors":"D. Fudenberg, Daniel A. Hojman","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1435492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1435492","url":null,"abstract":"Most work in evolutionary game theory analyzes a deterministic adjustment process on a continuum of agents. However, both the assumption of a continuum and that of no randomness are approximations, so it is important to study the behavior of adjustment processes on a large but finite population subject to small but persistent stochastic shocks. This paper characterizes the properties of the invariant distribution of birth-death processes in the double limit as the population becomes infinitely large and the perturbation vanishingly small. We show that the order of these limits does not change the conclusions for processes with 'strong basins,' which is the case when the unperturbed process is deterministic. In contrast, the order of limits does matter for processes with 'weak basins,' where the unperturbed process is stochastic except at a finite number of points.","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132127580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Impact of Climate Change on Residential Transactions in Hong Kong","authors":"R. Li","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1429727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1429727","url":null,"abstract":"Climate change is a hot topic in the world. While academic researchers generally focus on the causes of global warming such as the green house gases generated by human activities and the associated climatic problem on human and biological life, few researches have been carried out to study the impact of climatic changes on property transactions. The author studies the monthly property transactions data from Hong Kong’s Statistical Department and monthly data of temperature, humidity etc from Hong Kong Observatory in 1997 - 2006. Results indicate that there is a negative and significant relationship between property prices and temperature. This provides important information on the prediction of the property transactions for the future residential property market in Hong Kong.","PeriodicalId":221813,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Economics Department Working Paper Series","volume":"2 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120901653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}