Knowledge that Transforms

The paper presents a theory of exploration for exhaustible resources. Exploration serves both to find new reserves and obtain information about potential reserves. Although any realized time path of the resource price fails to obey the Hotelling rule, the expected resource price does increase exponentially through time at the rate of discount. We obtain sharper results when the resource is assumed to be distributed randomly throughout the exploration region and follows a Poisson process with parameter λ. Consumption and exploration decisions are investigated for both the case where λ is known and the case where λ is unknown.

Contrary to the belief that capital over-accumulation is impossible in an economy with land—i.e. a non-reproducible factor of production, this paper shows that the possibility of dynamic inefficiency depends on the income share of land, and examines the historical tendencies of the income share of land in the U.S.

The Lucas Critique of Econometric Policy Evaluation argues that the parameters of econometric models are subject to theoretical cross-equation restrictions which follow from the fact that the endogenous variables of the models are chosen optimally by forward-looking agents. In this paper I argue that these facts alone are insufficient to generate such restrictions. I present an example of a model in which there exist multiple stationary rational expectations equilibria one of which is supported by a process-invariant forecast rule. Immunity to the Lucas Critique is proposed as a selection criterion in models with multiple equilibria.

Identification conditions for binary choice errors-in-variables models are explored. Conditions for the consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimators of binary choice models with unbounded explanatory variables are given. Two- or three-step estimators to simplify computation are also suggested.

Charles Bean, Mathias Dewatripont, John Moore; Special Issue: The Econometrics of Financial Markets, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 58, Issue 3, 1

Standard axiomatizations of expected-utility theory envision an agent with fixed probability assessments who can be observed to choose actions from varying opportunity sets (for instance, pairs of lotteries). These axiomatizations also envision that the agent's preferences among these actions depend on the state of nature only through clearly defined and observable consequences. This viewpoint may be unnecessarily restrictive as a basis for applying and evaluating the theory. We study instead the pattern of choices from a fixed set of actions as probability assessments change. Convexity and integrability conditions characterize maximization of expected state-dependent utility.

Barnett (1979a, 1981) Theil's extending (1971) work, aggregates differential demand equations in absolute (undeflated) prices. This paper extends further these results by deriving aggregate (macro) demand equations in relative prices under stated assumptions. These equations are analogous to the individual consumer's (micro) demand equations and the properties of the microcoefricients carry over.

Friedman's (1960) proposal to pay interest on (required) reserves is considered in a setting that eliminates the indeterminacy of steady-state equilibrium discussed by Sargent and Wallace (1985). In an overlapping-generations model where the real rate of interest is technologically determined, the payment of interest on reserves results in a determinate, Pareto optimal steady-state equilibrium. However, interest payments on reserves reduce the steady-state welfare of all young agents and, for many economies, result in the existence of stationary sunspot equilibria. This is the case even if such equilibria cannot exist when reserves do not earn interest.

This paper investigates the structures of strategy-proof mechanisms in general models of economies with pure public goods. Under the assumptions that the set of allocations is a subset of some finite-dimensional Euclidean space and that the admissible preferencees are continuous and convex, I establish that any strategy-proof mechanism is dictatorial whenever the decision problem is of more than one dimension. Furthermore, I establish a similar result when preference relations also satisfy the additional assumption of monotonicity. These results properly extend the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem to economies with pure public goods.

An imperfectly competitive economy is very prone to market uncertainty, including uncertainty about the liquidity (or “thickness”) of markets. We show, in particular, that there exist stochastic equilibrium outcomes in nonstochastic market games if (and only if) the endowments are not Pareto optimal. We also provide a link between extrinsic uncertainty arising in games (e.g. correlated equilibria) and extrinsic uncertainty in market economies (e.g. sunspot equilibria). A correlated equilibria to the market game is either a sunspot equilibrium or a non-sunspot equilibrium to the related securities games, but the converse is not true in general.