This paper presents an empirical investigation of adverse selection in the wholesale used car market. New car dealers (who sell both new and used cars) differ from used car dealers (who sell only used cars) in the propensity to sell trade-ins on the wholesale market. Models of adverse selection suggest that the dealer type that sells a higher proportion of its trade-ins on the wholesale market will sell, on average, cars of higher quality and receive in return a higher price. A survey of dealers' wholesale behavior and prices collected at a wholesale auction are used to test this prediction. I find weak evidence for adverse selection.
This paper studies the value of the stock market as a monitor of managerial performance. It shows that the stock price incorporates performance information that cannot be extracted from the firm's current or future profit data. The additional information is useful for structuring managerial incentives. The amount of information contained in the stock price depends on the liquidity of the market. Concentrated ownership, by reducing market liquidity, reduces the benefits of market monitoring. Integration is associated with weakened managerial incentives and less market monitoring. This may explain why shares of divisions of a firm are rarely traded. The model offers a reason why market liquidity and monitoring have both a private and a social value, a feature missing in standard finance models. This is used to study the equilibrium size of the stock market as a function of investor preferences and the available amounts of long- and short-term capital.
Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, this paper presents a simple test that provides an explicit estimate of the parameter in the utility function that reflects the strength of the precautionary saving motive, the coefficient of relative prudence. The test yields a fairly precise estimate of a small precautionary motive; in fact, the estimate is too small to be consistent with widely accepted beliefs about risk aversion. The presence of liquidity-constrained households does not appear to explain this finding, and there is some evidence that self-selection of households into risky environments also cannot explain the results.
This study is concerned with the combination of target price and acreage controls as the two major mechanisms of farm policy. Acreage controls are shown to enhance the efficiency of redistribution under a target price program. More specifically, this study demonstrates that if the traditional Cobb-Douglas production function is assumed, acreage controls do not enhance the efficiency of target price programs in the process of redistributing income to the farm sector. The study proves that if the elasticity of substitution between land and all other inputs is less than one, then the income redistributional costs are likely to be reduced. Moreover, by using an empirical estimate of the elasticity of substitution and farm data for the time period 1984-88, this study demonstrates that acreage control programs have drastically reduced the deadweight losses associated with income redistribution flowing from target price programs. These results lend strong support to the public choice notion that politicians favor efficient favor efficient redistribution schemes.
In most times and places, women on average marry older men. We propose a partial explanation for this difference and for why it is diminishing. In a society in which the economic roles of males are more varied than the roles of females, the relative desirability of females as marriage partners may become evident at an earlier age than is the case for males. We study an equilibrium model in which the males who regard their prospects as unusually good choose to wait until their economic success is revealed before choosing a bride. In equilibrium, the most desirable young females choose successful older males. Young males who believe that time will not treat them kindly will offer to marry at a young age. Although they are aware that young males available for marriage are no bargain, the less desirable young females will be offered no better option than the lottery presented by marrying a young male. We show the existence of equilibrium for models of this type and explore the properties of equilibrium.
Characteristics of business cycles are quite different across developed countries. Real wages and working hours are less sensitive to exogenous shocks in the United States than they are in Britain and Japan. Using a model with a microeconomic foundation, this paper provides an economic explanation of these differences. The cost of on-the-job training plays a crucial role. Workers seldom quit their jobs when the sunk training cost is high. In such economies variances in employment and output become small and shocks tend to be absorbed by working hours and real wages. Thus these characteristics do not necessarily indicate that the economy is more efficient.
Using data from the March Current Population Survey, we document an increase over the past 30 years in wage inequality for males. Between 1963 and 1989, real average weekly wages for the least skilled workers (as measured by the tenth percentile of the wage distribution) declined by about 5 percent, whereas wages for the most skilled workers (as measured by the ninetieth percentile of the wage distribution) rose by about 40 percent. We find that the trend toward increased wage inequality is apparent within narrowly defined education and labor market experience groups. Our interpretation is that much of the increase in wage inequality for males over the last 20 years is due to increased returns to the components of skill other than years of schooling and years of labor market experience. Our primary explanation for the general rise in returns to skill is that the demand for skill rose in the United States over this period.
It is widely believed that rent control leads to a decline in the quality of rental housing. This study examines the effect of rent control on the quality of rental housing in New York City. Quality change is linked to the suppression of rent below market levels and other characteristics of the housing unit. We develop a first-order nonstationary, heterogeneous Markov model that allows for true state dependence, observed heterogeneity, nonparametric unobserved heterogeneity, and a mover-stayer structure. The results offer some support for the belief that rent control leads to a deterioration in housing quality but suggest the need for additional investigation of this issue.