The paper reports on an experimental investigation of four methods of allocating public goods. The two basic processes studied are direct contribution and a public goods auction process. Both of these processes are studied with and without an additional unanimity feature. The results suggest that the auction process outperforms direct contribution. The effect of unanimity is to decrease the efficiency of both processes. Much of the paper is focused on an analysis of these results.
This paper presents a theory of the disciplinary role of takeovers based on an explicit model of managerial incentive problems stemming from a symmetric information. It is argued that an informed raider can reduc e incentive problems by making managerial compensation more sensitive to information unavailable to shareholders. The paper also highlight s the importance of specifying the source of contractual inefficienci es when analyzing the effect of takeovers on incentives.
Estimation of limited dependent variable models with dependent observations has received relatively little attention due to the computational complexity of the maximum likelihood estimator. We develop a computationally attractive and relatively efficient estimator for this case that utilises the orthogonality conditions. The resulting Generalized Conditional Moment (GCM) estimators can be applied with a known or an unknown disturbance covariance matrix. Although the paper considers only the probit model, the approach is easily generalized to other limited dependent variable models.
A model of monopolistic competition in an inflationary environment is developed which embodies optimal sequential search, price dynamics and entry on the part of consumers and firms respectively. Equilibrium price strategies are (S, s); these bounds increase continuously with consumer search costs, and so does price dispersion. Indeed, the whole equilibrium varies smoothly from the competitive (Bertrand) to the monopolistic (Diamond (1971)) end of the spectrum. The latter's paradoxical result is explained as a limiting case where frictions on firms' side of the market (price adjustment costs) but not on buyers' (search costs) tend to zero. A positive relationship between (smooth and perfectly anticipated) inflation and price dispersion or uncertainty is established.
The paper is concerned with conditions under which the proportion of a given asset in the optimal portfolio of a risk averse agent is at least as large as some given proportion. The paper provides a condition that is necessary and sufficient for such a result to hold. The analysis is then confined to portfolios in which the distributions of assets differ by either a first-degree stochastic dominance shift or by a mean-preserving shift. Examples are provided to show that under some conditions a risk averter may invest a smaller proportion of his wealth in the dominating asset than in the dominated asset. The paper then provides conditions that are necessary and sufficient for a risk averter to invest more in the dominating asset.
Labour mobility may be caused by shifts in the derived demand for labour on the part of firms or sectors, or it may be caused by mismatches between workers and their jobs. Both reasons may be important, and this paper merges them into one model. It explores the consequences for (a) wage-tenure relationships and (b) the issue of sluggishness of wages caused by the implied selectivity of workers into preferred jobs and sectors.
This paper examines the effects of terms-of-trade changes on the external adjustment of a small open economy where each consumer has a life-cycle saving function. The supply side of the economy is given by the standard two-sector model with two primary factors: labour and capital. It is shown that, when both commodities are produced, a terms-of-trade deterioration leads to a current account deficit (surplus) if the export (import) sector is more labour intensive. 1.
We examine long-term wage contracts between a risk-neutral firm and a risk-averse worker when both can costlessly renege and buy or sell labour at a random spot market wage. A self-enforcing contract is one in which neither party ever has an incentive to renege. In the optimum self-enforcing contract, wages are sticky: they are less variable than spot market wages and positively serially correlated. They are updated by a simple rule: around each spot wage is a time invariant interval, and the contract wage changes each period by the smallest amount necessary to bring it into the current interval.
In repeated principal-agent models, long-term contracts can improve on short-term contracts only if they commit either principal or agent to a payoff in some future circumstance lower than could be obtained from a short-term contract negotiated if that circumstance occurs. We show that efficient contracting under moral hazard alone does not require long-term commitment from the principal. Provided a short-term contract can punish the agent sufficiently (in a sense made precise), it requires no commitment from the agent either. Then linking payoffs in one period to outcomes in previous periods does not improve the tradeoff between incentives and risk sharing.
There is an extensive empirical literature on political business cycles, but its theoretical foundations are grounded in pre-rational expectations macroeconomic theory. Here we show that electoral cycles in taxes, government spending and money growth can be modeled as an equilibrium signaling process. The cycle is driven by temporary information asymmetries which can arise if, for example, the government has more current information on its performance in providing for national defence. Incumbents cheat least when their private information is either extremely favourable or extremely unfavourable. An exogeneous increase in the incumbent party's popularity does not necessarily imply a damped policy cycle.