Knowledge that Transforms

In this paper we show that up to an arbitrary small neighbourhood of the boundary of the set of prices any given excess demand function can be considered as the excess demand of an economy with any large enough but finite number of individuals having identical preferences. Moreover, the individual endowments can be chosen collinear and in such a way that they yield any arbitrary price independent distribution of relative wealth.

This paper examines the influence of corporate tax exhaustion on the firm's financial and investment decisions. A dynamic programming model is used to establish effective marginal tax rates in the presence of a tax system that permits the carry forward of losses to future periods. The paper demonstrates that internal optimal financial structures may result which do not require the imposition of external constraints. The cost of capital is highly sensitive to the current taxable earnings of the firm and the implications of this for such tax transfer activities as leasing are discussed.

Policy problems require the specification of government choice variables, which may be prices or quantities, and the representation of preferences e.g. direct utility or distance functions. The purpose of this note is to provide an appropriate framework for switches between different descriptions of the optimization problem. We first assemble the relevant results on the matrices (Slutsky, Hessian and Antonelli) which arise in the different formulations. We then use the results to show the relationships between various analyses in the literature and finally point out how the results, whilst formally equivalent can lead to different emphases and interpretations (or misinterpretations).

A framework for distinguishing between the quantity of information and its quality or type is presented in which information is an indivisible differentiated commodity for which satiation occurs at one unit. Uncountably many types of information are possible which can be costlessly combined by agents. Similarity of information is expressed by a metric which reflects substitution possibilities among different information structures. In the model, traders desire information only because it helps them to maximize state dependent utilities under uncertainty. Then the individual demand for information is well defined, but possibly nonconvex valued because of the indivisibilities.

The paper provides an informal introduction to some of the main themes of the recent literature on "non-cooperative" or "sequential" bargaining models. It focuses in particular on the relationship between the new approach and the traditional axiomatic approach exemplified by "Nash bargaining theory" It illustrates the new insights offered by the non-cooperative approach, by reference to a detailed analysis of the manner in which the presence of an outside option available to one of the parties will affect the negotiated outcome. Finally, the difficulties which arise in extending this analysis to two-person bargaining with incomplete information, and to n-person bargaining, are discussed. This is a revised version of the fourth Review of Economic Studies Lecture presented in April 1985 at the joint meeting of the Association of University Teachers of Economics and the Royal Economic Society held in Oxford. The choice of lecturer is made by a panel whose members are currently Professors Hahn, Mirrlees and Nobay, and the paper is refereed in the usual way.

We examine how incentives for two duopolists to honestly share information change depending upon the nature of competition (Cournot or Bertrand) and the nature of the information structure. While in earlier papers uncertainty is about an unknown common demand intercept, in the present paper uncertainty is about unknown private costs. The different information structure reverses the incentives to share information. While with unknown common demand sharing is a dominant strategy with Bertrand competition and concealing is a dominant strategy with Cournot competition, with unknown private costs sharing is a dominant strategy with Cournot competition and concealing is a dominant strategy with Bertrand competition.

An asset pricing model with overlapping generations is developed in order to study the relationship of risk aversion and risk premia and to derive some comparative dynamic results. The main result is that greater risk aversion does not necessarily imply a greater risk premium in this type of model.

In this note we present an example of a repeated partnership game with imperfect monitoring in which all supergame equilibria with positive discount rates are bounded away from full efficiency uniformly in the discount rate, provided the latter is strictly positive. On the other hand, if the players do not discount the future, then every efficient one-period payoff vector that dominates the one-period equilibrium payoff vector can be attained by an equilibrium of the repeated game. Thus the correspondence that maps the players' discount rate into the corresponding set of repeated-game equilibrium payoff vectors is discontinuous at the point at which the discount rate is zero.

In the first part of the paper we outline a method for estimating a class of models in which “news” or “surprises” appear and expectations are formed rationally. The method is an extension of the “errors-in-variables” method of McCallum and Wickens. As a by-product some of Pagan's results on the circumstances under which the commonly used “two-step” method of estimating “surprise” models is efficient are shown to be a consequence of well-known theorems on the efficiency of sub-system estimation when a subset of equations are exactly identified. In the second part of the paper the method is applied to Hall's random-walk model of consumption, which is extended to allow for stochastic interest rates and for leisure and government spending to be substitutes for private spending. The extended formulation is a great deal more successful at capturing the salient features of the data. We also derive approximate restrictions across the parameters of the model due to the rational expectations hypothesis but find that they are marginally rejected by the data. Finally, we evaluate the ability of the life-cycle with rational expectations model to encompass alternative models.

A general equilibrium model of imperfectly competitive financial intermediaries is constructed and used to study the effects of some standard policy experiments. One-time increases in the growth rate and in the level of the stock of money have non-neutral (and sometimes surprising) effects on interest rates, the quantity of intermediated borrowing and lending, the number of intermediary firms, inflation and the price level. Optimal government macroeconomic policy is shown to reflect a tradeoff between public sector frictions and the capital market distortion created by increasing returns to scale and imperfect competition in private intermediation.