Knowledge that Transforms

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 paper presents a class of models in which agents may devote part of their nonleisure activities to going to school so as to increase the efficiency units of labor they supply to the firms and the wages they receive. The interaction among the technology of human capital accumulation and agents' preferences will determine endogenously the economy's rate of growth. Given a constant returns to scale technology for physical capital accumulation, we characterize the set of steady states as a ray from the origin and show the global convergence of every off-balanced path to some point on this ray. Further properties concerning the dynamic evolution of the state and control variables around the ray of steady states are also established. Our analysis is useful to understand the role played by the technologies of physical and human capital in the process of accumulation and to evaluate the impact of policies geared toward attaining higher levels of capital. Our results highlight the importance of human capital in the dynamics of growth.

This paper examines learning by doing in the context of a production function in which the other arguments are labor, human capital, physical capital, and vintage as a proxy for embodied technical change in physical capital. Learning is further decomposed into organization learning, capital learning, and manual task learning. The model is tested with time-series and cross-section data for various samples of up to 2,150 plants over a fourteen-year period.

This paper examines bidding in auctions for state highway construction contracts, in order to determine whether bid rigging occurred. Detection of collusion is possible because of limited participation in the collusive scheme. Collusion did not take the form of a bid rotation scheme. Instead, several ring members bid on most jobs. One was a serious bidder, and the other submitted phony higher bids. The bids of noncartel firms, as well as their rank distribution, were related to cost measures. In contrast, the rank distribution of higher cartel bids was unrelated to similar cost measures and differed from that of the low cartel bid.

The factor price equalization hypothesis is widely at odds with the large variation in factor prices across countries. Similarly, the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) theorem constitutes an incomplete description of trade in factor services: its predictions are always rejected empirically. These two issues are examined using a modification of the HOV model that allows for factor-augmenting international productivity differences. The empirical results are stark: this simple modification of the HOV theorem explains much of the factor content of trade and the cross-country variation in factor prices.

The authors study the problem of optimal taxation in three infinite-horizon, representative-agent endogenous growth models. The first model is a convex model in which physical and human capital are perfectly symmetric. The authors' second model incorporates elastic labor supply through a Lucas-style technology. Analysis of these two models points out the danger of assuming that government expenditures are exogenous. In their third model, the authors include government expenditures as a productive input in capital formation, showing that the limiting tax rate on capital is no longer zero. In numerical simulations, they find similar effects on growth and welfare in all three models.

This paper studies agents who consider the experiences of their neighbors in deciding which of two technologies to use. The authors analyze two learning environments, one in which the same technology is optimal for all players and another in which each technology is better for some of them. In both environments, players use exogenously specified rules of thumb that ignore historical data but may incorporate a tendency to use the more popular technology. In some cases, these naive rules can lead to fairly efficient decisions in the long run but adjustment can be slow when a superior technology is first introduced.

Trade theorists continue to puzzle over their surprisingly small estimates of the impact of trade liberalization o n imports. All explanations of the puzzle treat trade liberalization as a given but the level of trade protection is not exogenous. The theo ry of endogenous protection predicts that higher levels of import penetration will lead to greater protection. This paper finds that, when trade protection is modeled endogenously, its restrictive impact on imports is large--ten times the size obtained from treating protection exogenously.

There has been an enormous increase in auditing and accounting standards and in litigation against auditors. This paper examines some of the consequences of these changes by developing a model of the audit market relating auditors' liability to auditing standards. The paper demonstrates how equilibrium audit fees depend on both the informational value of the audit and the option value of the claim financial statement users have on the auditor's wealth in the event the audit is determined to have been substandard. Auditors' attitudes toward and responses to auditing standards are studied, and characteristics of optimal liability rules are evaluated.

This paper formulates and estimates a finite-horizon, structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low-income agricultural environments: income uncertainty, constraints on borrowing and rental markets, and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption. The model is fit to longitudinal Indian household data on farm profits, bullock stocks, and pump sets. The estimated structural parameters are used to assess th e effects on the life-cycle accumulation of bullocks, agricultural profits, and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second-best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance.