Knowledge that Transforms

[The Rawlsian maximin is defined for situations involving risk and applied to growth with an uncertain technology. Existence and uniqueness are discussed and it is shown to unambiguously lead to at least the same savings as under certainty.]

A household time-allocative model which explicitly takes into account the economic contribution of children in agricultural areas of less-developed countries is applied to direct-level data pertaining to the rural population of India. Joint family decisions concerning fertility and the allocation of male and female child time to schooling and work activities are examined empirically in a simultaneous equations system. The properties of the formal model are used to derive inferences from the parameter estimates with respect to the shadow price configuration influencing these joint decisions.

[This paper demonstrates how a two or three component error structure can be used with seemingly unrelated regressions. Its application may be particularly useful with large panel data sets when the researcher wishes to estimate several equations simultaneously and believes that errors both between and within equations are correlated over time and across units. Relatively simple algorithms are presented for estimation of the error covariance matrix and generalized least squares coefficients.]

The exact stochastic character of observed data from a Markov process is derived for the case where only aggregate stocks, as opposed to individual transitions, are observed. Particular attention is devoted to the distinction between data generated by a panel study, where a single group of individuals is followed over time, and that generated by random sampling, where the observed groups are not identical over time. Several alternative estimators are developed which take into account the particular stochastic structure of the data.

Necessary and sufficient conditions for Pareto optimality are derived for problems involving convex criteria and convex constraints. For a wide class of convex functions, the characterization of Pareto optimality is given in terms of systems of linear programs, which, under suitable regularization conditions, reduce to a single linear program. The consideration of a system of linear programs and their duals leads naturally to a system of partial prices associated with a Pareto optimum. (Author)

change in the quality of care is primarily due to the increased demand caused by the growth of private and public insurance. The paper presents an analytic model of the hospital industry in which quality affects the demand for hospital services and in which the purchase of private insurance is endogenous. Estimates of key equations of the model based on a cross-section of time series for the individual states for the years 1958 through 1973 are presented. The price adjustment process and dynamic multipliers are discussed. THE COST OF A DAY of hospital care in the United States has increased 600 per cent in the past twenty years, an annual rate of more than 9 per cent. During the

P. C. B. Phillips, A General Theorem in the Theory of Asymptotic Expansions as Approximations to the Finite Sample Distributions of Econometric Estimators, Econometrica, Vol. 45, No. 6 (Sep., 1977), pp. 1517-1534

Takeshi Amemiya, The Maximum Likelihood and the Nonlinear Three-Stage Least Squares Estimator in the General Nonlinear Simultaneous Equation Model, Econometrica, Vol. 45, No. 4 (May, 1977), pp. 955-968