Knowledge that Transforms

The low estimates of the income elasticity of housing demand obtained when individual households are the unit of observation are theoretically reconciled with the high estimates obtained when metropolitan-wide averages are used. The omission of the housing price term biases the ungrouped (whether stratified by metropolitan areas or not) estimate(s) downward and the grouped estimate upward. The inclusion of a metropolitan-wide average housing price term worsens the downward bias of the unstratified ungrouped estimate. The corresponding price elasticity estimate is biased upward (toward zero). These results are interpreted in terms of the theory of residential location and used to explain the empirical evidence. For the evidence considered, the true income and price elasticities are approximately .75 and -.75, respectively.

This paper develops an econometric model of production technology in terms of the ante-ex description of production possibilities. Ex ante and ex post substitution characteristics are allowed to differ from one another and parametric representations are derived which provide arbitrary second-order approximations to the true underlying characteristics. Nested in the maintained model are the specialized putty-putty, puttyclay, and structures of technology; and hypothesis tests are developed to test for the applicability of these specialized structures. An example is provided in which the hypotheses that fossil fuel electricity generation can be characterized by putty-clay or clay-clay technologies are tested using data drawn from individual United States electricity generating plants.

If there exist heterogeneous capital goods, a steady state may be "paradoxical" in the sense that increasing the rate of interest above the Golden Rule level may lead to an increase in consumption or utility, rather than to the decrease which always occurs in one-sector models. It is shown that, in many cases, a path of capital accumulation which maximizes the minimum consumption or utility level is unlikely to converge to a paradoxi- cal steady state of this kind.

[The purpose of this paper is to present a model which explains the formation of firms in a market economy. This is done by unifying two recent developments in economic theory: the labor-managed market economy and the coalition production economy. D. Sondermann's model [30] of a coalition production economy with "increasing returns to coalition" is generalized. Specifically, the concept of coalition structures is introduced, so that the model can be naturally interpreted to represent a labor-managed market economy. Two kinds of specific interpretation are considered: one is a type of socialistic economy and the other a capitalistic economy.]

[This paper considers (i) the robustness of the @t and Durbin-Watson bounds tests for first-order autocorrelation when disturbances in the linear regression model are heteroskedastic and (ii) the robustness of the Goldfeld-Quandt and Glejser tests for heteroskedasticity when the disturbances follow a first-order autoregressive scheme.]

[Under classical assumptions, characterizations are given for two classes of instrumental variable estimators of an equation in a simultaneous system. IV estimators where all instruments are nonstochastic are expressed in terms of multinormal random vectors in exactly the same way as the 2SLS estimator of a just-identified equation. These estimators have no finite moments of positive integral order. The second class, consisting of IV estimators based on certain stochastic instruments, includes the OLS, 2SLS, and modified 2SLS estimators. The inadmissibility (under squared-error loss) of some estimators in this class is considered when the equation being estimated contains two endogenous variables.]