Knowledge that Transforms

Consumer theory suggests that expenditures on luxuries and durables should be more cyclical than expenditures on necessities and nondurables. Estimating luxuriouseness and durability for 57 consumer goods, we confirm this prediction in U.S. data. We exploit this finding to test predictions of cyclical utilization and increasing returns models of business cycles. Both models predict more cyclical productivity for durable luxuries, a prediction borne out in the data. The utilization model predicts procyclical relative prices for durables and luxuries; the increasing returns model does not. Prices are more procyclical for durables and luxuries, discriminating in favor of cyclical utilization.

Contracts are examined when outcomes depend on managers' choices as well as efforts. As the cost of effort shrinks relative to payoffs, the optimal contract converges to a linear payoff if the control space of the agent has full dimensionality, but not otherwise. Thus, when the agent can trade expected return for greater correlation with other returns, it is better to ignore relative performance when the cost of effort is small. When the choices include all fair gambles and hedges, the linear schedule is no more expensive than any other schedule that induces effort. Unfair gambles are examined as well.

We present analytic formulas for calculating marginal welfare costs when taxes are levied against the wages of a heterogeneous population of households and marginal tax revenue finances either the supply of a public good or lump‐sum transfers. The formulas are applied to explain the wide discrepancy between estimates of marginal welfare costs for redistribution previously obtained through computer simulation procedures. Our calculations reveal that these procedures introduced lump‐sum transfers that were not specified as part of the reforms to be simulated, but explain most of the differences between their estimates. We also show that welfare cost estimates are quite sensitive to the elasticity of labor supply with respect to exhaustive public spending.

This paper analyzes the savings and longevity impacts of mortality‐contingent claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one's life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life insurance programs, as well as the rapid increase in the life expectancy of older ages, motivates a better understanding of the incentive effects that mortality‐contingent claims have on longevity‐related behavior. We claim that these incentives in often alter the standard conclusions obtained about old‐age support when mortality is treated exogenously. In particular, we argue that annuities involve moral hazard effects that increase longevity and, among other things, introduce a positive interaction between public programs for health care and income support for the elderly‐programs that have grown enormously in developed countries

This paper estimates the impact of participation, by gender, in the Grameen Bank and two other group‐based micro credit programs in Bangladesh on labor supply, schooling, household expenditure, and assets. The empirical method uses a quasi‐experimental survey design to correct for the bias from unobserved individual and village‐level heterogencity. We find that program credit has a larger effect on the behavior of poor households in Bangladesh when women are the program participants. For Example, annual household consumption expenditure increases 18 taka for every 100 additional taka borrowed by women from these credit programs, compared with 11 taka for men.

This paper develops generalized method‐of‐moments tests for the rationality of earnings per share forecasts made by individual stock analysts. We fail to reject the hypothesis of rationality as long as we take into account two complications: (1) the correlation in a given period of analysts' forecast errors in predicting earnings for firms in the same industry and (2) discretionary asset write‐downs, which affect earnings but are intentionally ignored by analysts when they make earnings forecasts. Our results challenge earlier work by De Bondt and Thaler and by Abarbanell and Bernard that found irrationality in analysts' forecasts.

When both individual and aggregate consumer demand is uncertain and firms set prices before demand is known, price‐taking firms may offer advance‐purchase discounts. Consumers with relatively more certain demands and with relatively lower valuations have an incentive to buy in advance the presence of other consumers with higher valuations and more uncertain aggregate demand increases the price they expect to pay in the spot market. Advance‐purchase sales are made to low‐valuation customers, as predicted by traditional models of second‐degree price discrimination, without assuming that firms have market power.

An incentive contracting approach is used to characterize optimal contracts when insured individuals possess private information about their losses and are able to misrepresent permanently their loss magnitudes by engaging in the falsification of claims. We demonstrate that efficient agreements necessarily induce some falsification but that the extent of such claims inflation is mitigated partially by an indemnification schedule that overcompensates small losses while overpaying larger ones. The differential costs of generating insurance claims through falsification provide an avenue by which the heterogencous insureds can credibly signal their underlying losses and are exploited in an optimal contract to implement loss‐contingent insurance payments.

Regulating insider trading lessens the adverse selection problem facing market makers, enabling them to quote better prices. An Optimal enforcement policy must balance these benefits against the costs of enforcement. Such a policy must specify (i) the conditions under which the regulator conducts an investigation, (ii) the penalty schedule imposed if an insider is caught, and (iii) a transaction tax to fund enforcement. We derive the policy that maximizes investors welfare. This policy entails investigations following large trading volumes or large price movements or both. Insiders caught making large trades are assessed the maximum penalty, but small trades are not penalized. Given this policy, insiders trade most aggressively on news with an intermediate price impact but refrain from trading on moderate or extreme news.