{"title":"Multiplicity of Dynamic Equilibria and Global Efficiency","authors":"G. Marini, P. Senesi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.556249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.556249","url":null,"abstract":"Within a one-sector, infinite-horizon representative agent model with technological externalities and a convex-concave production function, this paper derives a capital subsidy policy that simultaneously eliminates the wedge between private and social marginal products of capital, and achieves a globally efficient allocation.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133788686","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":"Facilitating Economic Development Through the Reform of Economic Instruction","authors":"Ararat L. Osipian","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1124924","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1124924","url":null,"abstract":"Economic development in many ways depends on the level of human capital in the national economy, including that of economists. Market reforms in the former Soviet Bloc urged drastic changes in economic curriculum necessary to prepare the next generation of economic leaders. This paper states that the reform of economic instruction in the Former Soviet Union should focus on both learning and action. The incorporation of mathematical methods into the new economic curriculum will occur based on close cooperation among mathematicians and economists. The new economic instruction will have an interdisciplinary character and a multidisciplinary setting. There are several second order organizational changes that need to be made. Bachelor and Master’s Degrees should replace the five-year degree. Changes in the curriculum should include separation of core courses and electives including those from other majors, detail-oriented content of the courses, a decreased number of classes per semester and increased time for each class. Faculty retraining should be coordinated both within and between the universities. Financial incentives should be created to encourage the instructors to participate in retraining, to change the content and method of the instruction, and to work effectively in the classroom.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129284590","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":"Industry and Time Specific Deviations from Fundamental Values in a Random Coefficient Model","authors":"L. Becchetti, R. Rocci, G. Trovato","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.528002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.528002","url":null,"abstract":"The paper analyzes the relationship between stock prices and fundamentals for a large sample of US stocks in the last ten years using a random coefficient model. Heterogeneity and omitted variable bias are properly taken into account with model coefficients being allowed to vary across time and industries. The random coefficient model allows to track waves of reliance on analysts forecasts and non fundamental stock price components across time.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114444221","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":"Sustainable Development: Renewable Resources and Technological Progress","authors":"Simone Valente","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.528128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.528128","url":null,"abstract":"Conflicts between optimality and sustainability are typical in the literature on sustainable development. Using the 'capital-resource' growth model, Pezzey and Withagen (1998) have proved that if natural resources are exhaustible, the time-path of consumption is single-peaked, declining from some point in time onwards. This paper extends the model to include technical progress, resource renewability, extraction costs and population growth. The main result is that, for any constant returns to scale technology, optimal paths can be sustainable only if the social discount rate does not exceed the sum of the rates of resource regeneration and augmentation. The development of resource-saving techniques is crucial for sustaining consumption per capita in the long run, whereas capital depreciation and extraction costs are neutral with respect to this sustainability condition.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131320307","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 Term Structure of Interest Rates and the Public Debt Issuance Policy: A Note","authors":"G. Piga, Giorgio Valente","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.517882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.517882","url":null,"abstract":"We estimate, using a previously unexploited set of data for the Italian public debt, quarterly yield curves over the period 1970-1996 to test the main implications of the expectations hypothesis theory (EH). Our empirical results show that short-term interest rates move according to the prediction of the EH, though the same cannot be found for long-term interest rates. In addition, using a probit model, we investigate the public debt issuance policy. We find and interpret a significant relationship between the slope of the yield curve and the probability of an increase in the aggregate duration of the outstanding debt.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126539927","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":"Could Do Better: The Effectiveness of Incentives and Competition in Schools","authors":"Gianni De Fraja, Pedro Landeras","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.503082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.503082","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies the effects of incentive mechanisms and of the competitive environment on the interaction between schools and students, in a set-up where the students' educational attainment depends on their peer group, on their effort, and on the quality of the school's teaching. We show that increasing the power of the incentive scheme and the effectiveness of competition may have the counterintuitive effect of lowering the students' effort, with ambiguous effects on their attainment. In a simple dynamic set-up, where the reputation of the schools affects recruitment, we show that increased competition leads to segregation of pupils by ability.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128310073","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":"Subjective Health Measures, Reporting Errors and Endogeneity in the Relationship between Health and Work","authors":"M. Lindeboom, M. Kerkhofs","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.502582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.502582","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the interrelation between health and work decisions of older workers. For this, two issues are of relevance. Firstly, health and work may be endogenously related because of direct effects of health on work and vice versa, and because of unobservables that may relate observed health and work outcomes. Secondly, social surveys usually contain self-assessed health measures and research indicates that these may be affected by endogenous, state-dependent, reporting behavior. A solution to the 'Health and Retirement Nexus' requires an integrated model for work decisions, health production and health-reporting mechanisms. We formulate such a model and estimate it on a longitudinal dataset of Dutch elderly.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128960520","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":"Capital Structure in South Korea: A Quantile Regression Approach","authors":"B. Fattouh, P. Scaramozzino, L. Harris","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.474941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.474941","url":null,"abstract":"Knowledge of how South Korean firms choose their capital structures has particular value due to the country's specific corporate structure and the role of leverage in the evolution of its financial crisis of 1997. Using a large panel for the years 1992-2001 we investigate the evolution and determinants of South Korean firms' capital structure and focus on the differences between firms in different quantiles of the debt-capital distribution. Although regression estimates find that standard variables for asymmetric information costs explain South Korean firms' debt-capital ratios, conventional techniques using conditional means of the variables do not take full account of the heterogeneity of the sample of firms. Conditional quantile regressions show that while variables associated with standard models are significant throughout the distribution, there are considerable differences, including differences in sign, in their impact on firms with different levels of leverage. Those observed non-linearities in the determinants of capital structure are consistent with a model of capital structure that includes both costs resulting from asymmetric information and an upper bound on the debt-capital ratio.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114869401","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":"Financial Intermediation as a Source of Aggregate Instability","authors":"Fabrizio Mattesini","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.450081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.450081","url":null,"abstract":"We consider a simple overlapping generations economy where the behavior of intermediaries, in a market characterized by asymmetric information and moral hazard, may give rise to cyclical equilibria. When capital increases output and savings also increase and therefore more capital will be available in the following period. At the same time, however, the higher supply of of savings leads to a decrease in the deposit interest rate and this will induce intermediaries to decrease the number of firms that are monitored. A larger number of firms will select low quality projects and, because of this, less capital will be produced in the following period. For some parameter values this second effect may prevail over the first one and the stock of capital in period t+1 may actually be lower than the stock of capital in period t. The model provides a rigorous interpretation of the view associated with Hyman Minsky [18], Charles Kindleberger [16], and Henry Kaufman [15], according to which expansions come to an inevitable end because of excessive or ill-considered lending that took place during the boom.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124755362","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}
V. Atella, Carlos Arias, F. Perali, Raffaella Castagnini
{"title":"Estimation of the Sharing Rule between Adults and Children and Related Equivalence Scales within a Collective Consumption Framework","authors":"V. Atella, Carlos Arias, F. Perali, Raffaella Castagnini","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.428540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.428540","url":null,"abstract":"In order to determine how much money is needed to make each household member as well off as they were before a change in living conditions, equivalence scales should be defined on the basis of individual rather than household welfare. This requires the knowledge of individual utilities that are derivable from the identification of the rule governing the intra-household allocation of resources within a collective approach. We pursue this objective using information about male, female and children clothing expenditure present in the 1999 Italian Household budget survey within the estimation of a complete demand system. The sharing rule between adults and children is estimated using a structural rather than a reduced form approach. Maximum simulated likelihood is used to estimate a collective model of individual demand equations with zero expenditures for the exclusive good clothing. The recovery of individual utilities for adults and children permits the estimation of the cost of children taking the intra-household distribution of resources into account. We show that the cost of Italian children is significantly affected by the parents’ aversion to intra-household inequality.","PeriodicalId":416571,"journal":{"name":"CEIS: Centre for Economic & International Studies Working Paper Series","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122982543","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}