Knowledge that Transforms

Precautionary saving has been linked to the property of prudence, and the property of temperance has been used to show how the presence of an unavoidable risk affects one's behaviour towards a second risk. These two higher order risk effects also play key roles in aversion to negative skewness and to kurtosis, respectively. This article presents a laboratory experiment to determine whether subjects are prudent and/or temperate. The experiment is based upon preferences over lottery pairs in simple 50–50 gambles. Subjects are asked in which of two states of nature they would prefer to receive a zero-mean gamble. For prudence, the choices are between a lower and higher wealth outcome. For temperance, the choices are between a state with no other risk and a state with a second (independent) risk. The results show behavioural evidence for prudence, but they also show evidence of intemperate behaviour. Implications of these results for both expected-utility and non-expected-utility models are examined.

We analyse an experimental public goods game in which group members can endogenously determine whether they want to supplement a standard voluntary contribution mechanism with the possibility of rewarding or punishing other group members. We find a significantly positive effect of endogenous institutional choice on the level of cooperation in comparison to the same exogenously implemented institutions. This suggests that participation rights enhance cooperation in groups. With endogenous choice, groups typically vote for the reward option, although punishment is even more effective in sustaining high levels of cooperation. Our results are evaluated against the predictions of social preference models.

Pigovian taxation of externalities has limited appeal if the tortfeaser has insufficient resources to pay the damage when it occurs. To defend Pigovian taxation in the presence of judgement-proof agents, its proponents point at the many institutions extending liability to third parties. Yet little is known about the validity of Pigou's analysis in this context. The paper analyses the costs and benefits of extended liability and investigates whether full internalization is called for in the presence of agency costs between potential tortfeasers and providers of guarantees. Its contribution is two-fold. It first shows that the better the firms' corporate governance and the stronger their balance sheet, the more closely taxes should track the corresponding externality. It then develops the first analysis of extended liability when guarantors themselves may be judgement-proof, and the extension of liability may give rise to further externalities. Relatedly, it derives the curvature of the optimal taxation of externalities in a multi-plant firm.

This paper studies whether the gender composition of recruiting committees matters. We make use of the unique evidence provided by Spanish public examinations, where the allocation of candidates to evaluating committees is random. We analyse how the chances of success of 150,000 female and male candidates for positions in the four main Corps of the Spanish Judiciary from 1987 to 2007 were affected by the gender composition of their evaluation committee. We find that a female (male) candidate is significantly less likely to be hired whenever she (he) is randomly assigned to a committee where the share of female (male) evaluators is relatively greater. Evidence from multiple choice tests suggests that this is due to the fact that female majority committees overestimate the quality of male candidates.

In this paper, I ask the question: Does the output-mix of countries change in response to changes in factor endowments? If so: How long does it take? Using data on capital, as well as skilled and unskilled labour employed in three-digit International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) manufacturing industries for a sample of 27 developing and developed countries over the 1973–1990 period, I find that the output-mix of countries does not change in response to endowment changes, even after 15 years. This answer raises another question: How then do countries absorb changes in factor endowments? The data show that in both the short and long runs, an increase in the supply of a production factor reduces its rate of return and makes it more intensively used in all sectors of the economy: changes in production techniques. In the long run, the point estimate is that the reduction in the rate of return is more than 50% larger than in the short run. This is consistent with induced innovations being predominantly biased towards the scarce factor.

We build a model of heterogeneous individuals—who make investments in schooling quantity and quality—to quantify the importance of differences in human capital vs. total factor productivity (TFP) in explaining the variation in per capita income across countries. The production of human capital requires expenditures and time inputs; the relative importance of these inputs determines the predictions of the theory for inequality both within and across countries. We discipline our quantitative assessment with a calibration firmly grounded on US micro evidence. Since in our calibrated model economy human capital production requires a significant amount of expenditures, TFP changes affect disproportionately the benefits and costs of human capital accumulation. Our main finding is that human capital accumulation strongly amplifies TFP differences across countries: to explain a 20-fold difference in the output per worker, the model requires a 5-fold difference in the TFP of the tradable sector, vs. an 18-fold difference if human capital is fixed across countries.

The standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent-seeking politicians. This paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent-seeking politician chooses policies. If the politician chooses extractive policies, citizens throw him out of power. We analyse the efficient sustainable equilibrium. Unlike in the standard economy, temporary economic shocks generate volatile and persistent changes in taxes along the equilibrium path. This serves to optimally limit rent-seeking by the politician and to optimally generate support for the politician from the citizens. Taxes resembling those of the benevolent government are very costly since the government over-saves and resources are wasted on rents. Political distortions thus cause the complete debt market to behave as if it were incomplete. However, in contrast to an incomplete market economy, in the long run, taxes do not converge to zero, and under some conditions, they resemble taxes under a benevolent government.

This article analyses the implications of money illusion for investor behaviour and asset prices in a securities market economy with inflationary fluctuations. We provide a belief-based formulation of money illusion which accounts for the systematic mistakes in evaluating real and nominal quantities. The impact of money illusion on security prices and their dynamics is demonstrated to be considerable even though its welfare cost on investors is small in typical environments. A money-illusioned investor's real consumption is shown to generally depend on the price level, and specifically to decrease in the price level. A general-equilibrium analysis in the presence of money illusion generates implications that are consistent with several empirical regularities. In particular, the real bond yields and dividend price ratios are positively related to expected inflation, the real short rate is negatively correlated with realized inflation, and money illusion may induce predictability and excess volatility in stock returns. The basic analysis is generalized to incorporate heterogeneous investors with differing degrees of illusion.

This paper sets out necessary and sufficient empirical conditions for rational intrinsic habits models in the revealed preference tradition of <cross-ref type="bib" refid="R41">Samuelson (1948)</cross-ref>, <cross-ref type="bib" refid="R29">Houthakker (1950)</cross-ref>, <cross-ref type="bib" refid="R3">Afriat (1967)</cross-ref>, and <cross-ref type="bib" refid="R11">Browning (1989)</cross-ref>. The conditions in the paper are shown to be computationally straightforward and to yield set identification for certain features of the model. The ideas outlined are applied to a microeconomic panel dataset. The addition of habit formation to the discounted utility model is shown to improve the rationalizability of the microdata considerably. Even if habit formation is rejected, it is shown that modest and plausible allowance for heterogeneity in prices and interest rates is sufficient to bring consumption behaviour into line with the theory.