Knowledge that Transforms

This paper incorporates a model of corporate control into a general equilibrium framework for production economies with incomplete markets. The classical objective of value maximization is extended, but is indeterminate. Instead, firms are viewed as being subject to shareholder control via some decision mechanism. As long as this decision mechanism is responsive to a unanimous preference by shareholders, shareholder control is consistent with but stronger than value maximization. Next, the particular institution of majority voting by shareholders is examined. It is shown that for generic economies, a majority rule equilibrium for a firm implies that production is optimal for the largest, or dominant, shareholder. Finally, a more realistic control mechanism is considered in which majority voting by shareholders is constrained by a group of shareholders, or Board of Directors, who control the voting agenda. The result is that shareholders not on the Board have no influence on the equilibrium production choice of the firm.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the identifiability of duration models with multiple spells. We prove that the results of Elbers and Ridder (1982) and Heckman and Singer (1984) can be generalized to multi-spell models with lagged duration dependence. We also prove that without lagged duration dependence, the identification result does not depend on moment conditions or tail conditions on the mixing distribution. This result is in contrast to Ridder's (1990) result for single-spell models.

This paper develops a methodology for estimating structural time-allocation models for self-employed households and applies it to peasant family labor supply behavior in the Peruvian Sierra. The oppurtunity costs of time, or shadow wages, of household workers are explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function. Using an instrumental variables procedure, the household's structural labor supply parameters are recovered from variation in these shadow wages. The empirical results are robust to a number of alternative specifications and diagnostic tests and lend support to the rational allocation of time by peasant households. Copyright 1993 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

Consider risk-averse agents with utility functions U and V holding portfolios composed of the same two (risky and riskless) assets. Then, V is (Arrow) more risk averse if in all such portfolios V invests less in the risky asset. A natural extension of this analysis of attitudes towards risk to risk itself is to establish a relation between distributions which is necessary and sufficient to induce such investment patterns in the class of all risk-averse agents. This characterization is established in this paper for distributions with equal means. Second Degree Dominance performs a similar role for the notion of ‘more risk averse’ introduced by Pratt but it is too weak for the Arrow concept.

This paper investigates the response of the price level to random monetary shocks through a model of the fixed cost of changing a nominal price. It shows that in an inflationary environment, an expansionary monetary shock is accommodated faster than a contractionary monetary shock. Furthermore, when the average rate of monetary expansion increases, the lag in response to a positive shock decreases. The study also proves that the relationship between the expected rate of inflation and the variance of real prices is positive only above a critical level of expected inflation.

We explore a sequential offers model of n-person coalitional bargaining with transferable utility and with time discounting. Our focus is on the efficiency properties of stationary equilibria of strictly superadditive games, when the discount factor δ is sufficiently large; we do, however, consider examples of other games where subgame perfectness alone is employed. It is shown that delay and the formation of inefficient subcoalitions can occur in equilibrium, the latter for some or all orders of proposer. However, efficient stationary equilibrium payoffs converge to a point in the core, as δ → 1. Strict convexity is a sufficient condition for there to exist an efficient stationary equilibrium payoff vector for sufficiently high δ. This vector converges as δ → 1 to the egalitarian allocation of Dutta and Ray (1989).

This paper derives the explicit solution of a dynamic stochastic optimal consumption problem for infinitely-lived agents whose preferences exhibit, in the presence of non-diversifiable labour income uncertainty, a constant elasticity of intertemporal substitution and constant absolute risk aversion. The constancy of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, which implies that marginal utility at zero consumption is infinite, guarantees that the non-negativity constraint on consumption is never binding along the optimal path. The assumption of constant absolute risk aversion allows an explicit computation of human wealth, and provides a simple representation of the precautionary savings motive.

A dynamic trading problem is examined in which a monopsonistic employer tries to hire workers whose productivities and reservation wages are private information. The employer can only observe an employee's quality indirectly by monitoring a non-verifiable measure of on-the-job performance. The employer makes contract offers which employees can accept or reject. Once a contract has been accepted it is impossible for the employer to exchange messages with individual employees. On the unique stationary equilibrium path for the contracting game, the employer chooses between two mutually exclusive outcomes. In the market outcome, the employer offers long-term contracts and information is conveyed entirely through self-selection and delayed production. In the monitoring outcome, the employer offers short-term contracts, and contract renegotiation is conditioned by an employee's past performance. A simple characterization theorem is provided which illustrates the often surprising effects of improvements in information in this setting. For example, an employer who is initially offering short-term contracts to exploit performance information may stop monitoring and shift to market screening when the monitoring technology becomes more informative.

Deaton's observation that consumption appears to be “too smooth” is easily reconciled with the notion that consumption exhibits “excess sensitivity” to current income. The reconciliation invokes the plausible assumption that households forecast on the basis of a larger information set than the econometrician. The empirical case for excess smoothness is strengthened by showing that the innovations in permanent income can be inferred from an autoregression of income and saving, not only under the permanent income hypothesis, but also under the excess sensitivity model. Empirically, parameter restrictions imposed on the bivariate autoregression by the excess sensitivity model are not rejected.

This paper examines equilibrium in a market with free entry where consumers search and firms set prices on individual units of the commodity. The prices attached to newly produced goods are continuously adjusted. Prices attached to previously produced goods can only be changed at a cost. Thus inflation reduces the real price of goods in inventory awaiting sale. The presence of previously priced goods lowers the reservation price of customers. Thus, inflation cuts into the market power created by the need to search for the good. Consumer welfare is inverse u-shaped in inflation with a strictly positive optimal inflation rate.