Abstract Reviews the book "Management Planning and Control," edited by Kenneth R. Ferris and J. Leslie Livingstone.

An expected-utility-maximizing investor spends his portfolio income on commodities and real balances. Commodity prices and asset payoffs are determined endogenously in general equilibrium. The impact of commodity prices on investor welfare yields surprising relationships among the expected returns required on financial assets. Real (monetary) disturbances can generate a neg ative (positive) correlation between inflation and equity payoffs, but the expected nominal return on the equity can still be less (greater) than the nominal interest rate. The expected nominal return on an indexed bond can be greater than on a nominal bond. The expected real return on an equity can be lower than on an indexed bond. Copyright 1988 by American Economic Association.

Spot asset trading is studied where the only external source of value is an independent draw from a common information dividend distribution at the end of each of fifteen trading periods. Fourteen of twenty-two experiments exhibit price bubbles. This tendency to bubble decreases with trader experience. The regression of changes in mean price on lagged excess bids (bids minus offers in the previous period) supports the hypothesis that the intercept is minus the one-period expected dividend value, and the slope is positive, where excess bids measures excess demand attributable to homegrown capital gains expectations. Copyright 1988 by The Econometric Society.

In the presence of aggregate demand spillovers, an imperfectly competitive form's profit is positively related to aggregate income, which in turn rises with profits of all firms in the economy. This pecuniary externality makes a dollar of a firm's profit raise aggregate income by more than a dollar since other firms' profits also rise, and in this way gives rise to a "multiplier." Since such multipliers are ignored by firms making investment decisions, privately optimal investment decisions under uncertainty will not in general be socially optimal. Under reasonable conditions, investment is too low.

This paper analyzes the strategic and intertemporal interaction between two economic agents who have "overlapping" concerns, such as altruistic concerns for each other's welfare. The agents may be two individuals, a social bureau and a client, or two units in an organization. The authors show how the presence of such common concerns may lead to socially inefficient outcomes, in which one economic agent "free rides" on the other's concerns. They also brief ly discuss how this inefficiency and free riding, in the context of interaction between individuals, might be mitigated by compulsory social security systems. As another example, the authors interpret th e inefficiency in terms of Janos Kornai's "soft budget constraints" within organizations. Copyright 1988 by University of Chicago Press.

Robert W. Staiger, Alan V. Deardorff, Robert M. Stern, The Effects of Protection on the Factor Content of Japanese and American Foreign Trade, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Aug., 1988), pp. 475-483

Abstract ABSTRACT: This paper provides empirical evidence on a truth-inducing pay scheme widely discussed and analyzed in the Incentive contracting literature. An experiment was conducted in which subjects acted as subordinates who performed e production task. Budgets were participatively set under either a truth-inducing or slack-inducing pay scheme and either the presence or absence of a superior-subordinate Information asymmetry about subordinate performance capability. Slack was defined as expected performance minus the participatively set budget. The results showed that, when the information asymmetry was absent, slack did not differ significantly between the pay schemes. However, when the Information asymmetry was present, slack was significantly lower under the truth-inducing scheme. Similarly, the pay scheme and information asymmetry variables Interacted to affect performance.

ABSTRACT This paper introduces an estimator of stock price volatility that eliminates, at least asymptotically, the biases that are caused by the discreteness of observed stock prices. Assuming that the observed stock prices are continuously monitored, an estimator is constructed using the notion of how quickly the price changes rather than how much the price changes. It is shown that this estimator has desirable asymptotic properties, including consistency and asymptotic normality. Also, through a simulation study, the authors show that it outperforms natural estimators for the low‐ and middle‐priced stocks. Furthermoret, he simulation study demonstratest hat the proposed estimator is robust to certain misspecifications in measuring the time between price changes.

This paper introduces an estimator of stock price volatility that eliminates, at least asymptotically, the biases that are caused by the discreteness of observed stock prices. Assuming that the observed stock prices are continuously monitored, an estimator is constructed using the notion of how quickly the price changes rather than how much the price changes. It is shown that this estimator has desirable asymptotic properties, including consistency and asymptotic normality. Also, through a simulation study, the authors show that it outperforms natural estimators for the low- and middle-priced stocks. Furthermoret, he simulation study demonstratest hat the proposed estimator is robust to certain misspecifications in measuring the time between price changes.