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The evidence strongly suggests a robust negative relationship between income and fertility, and a positive relationship between income and longevity. This is puzzling for standard dynamic models. For instance, altruistic models that use the most standard preferences in macro --time separable CRRA with low elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS)-- correctly predict a positive longevity-income relationship for rich individuals, but also predict a positive fertility-income relationship, contrary to the data. We show that a non-separable formulation of preferences that allows for a low EIS but a high "elasticity of intergenerational substitution" (EGS) can simultaneously account for the evidence of declining demand for children and increasing demand for longevity as income increases. The model with a single elasticity cannot account for both. Our results suggests a major role for a new parameter in macro, the EGS. While the EIS mostly influences short-term economic decisions, the EGS influences mostly long-term economic choices.

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the nature of long-term liquidity contracts that arise between lenders and borrowers in the absence of perfect enforceability and when both parties are financially constrained. We study an infinite horizon dynamic contracting model between a borrower and a lender with the following features: The borrower, is credit-constrained, faces a stochastic project arrival process every period, can choose to renege each period, and can save through the lender. Projects are indivisible. The lender is resource- constrained, and can commit to the terms of the contract as long as it is ex-ante individually rational to do so. We show that: (i) Enforcement problems and endogenous resource constraints can severely curtail the possibility of financing projects, (ii) the economy exhibits investment cycles, (iii) credit is rationed if either the lender has too little capital or the borrower has too little financial collateral. This paper’s technical contribution is to show the existence and characterization of financial contracts that are solutions to a non- convex dynamic programming problem.

Degrowth scholars and other growth skeptics have done a considerable amount of important work exposing the many defects inherent to the dominant macroeconomics of growth (Kallis, 2011; Latouche 2009; Jackson 2009; Victor 2008; Daly 1996). In recent years a growing body of literature has also emerged exploring what structural changes could be undertaken to facilitate the emergence of a degrowth or steady-state economy (Alexander 2011a, Jackson 2009; Hamilton 2003). Very little has been written, however, on what role social or cultural evolution may need to play in providing the necessary preconditions for such structural change. The neglect of this issue is problematic for two main reasons. First, it seems highly unlikely that a degrowth or steady-state economy will ever arise voluntarily within cultures generally comprised of individuals seeking ever-higher levels of income and consumption (Hamilton and Denniss, 2005). Accordingly, before growth economics can be overcome, this significant cultural obstacle must be acknowledged, confronted, and somehow transcended. Secondly, even if notions of degrowth or steady-state economics were to gain widespread acceptance within a culture, it seems highly unlikely that a degrowth or steady-state economy would arise voluntarily unless people had some idea of what needed to be done at the personal and community levels to bring about such an economy (Trainer, 2010; Hopkins, 2008). In other words, it is not enough merely to offer a critique of existing structures of growth; it is equally important to explore the question of how one ought to live in opposition to those structures. This paper engages some aspects of these complex issues by looking into what role social movements may have to play in creating the preconditions needed for a degrowth or steady-state economy to materialize. More specifically, this paper examines the potential of the Voluntary Simplicity Movement to socially reconstruct law to that end.

In this paper, we analyze the relative importance and mutual behavior of two competing base-load electricity generation options that each are capable of contributing significantly to the abatement of global CO2 emissions: nuclear energy and coal-based power production complemented with CO2 capture and storage (CCS). We also investigate how, in scenarios developed with an integrated assessment model that simulates the economics of a climate-constrained world, the prospects for nuclear energy would change if exogenous limitations on the spread of nuclear technology were relaxed. Using the climate change economics model World Induced Technical Change Hybrid, we find that until 2050 the growth rates of nuclear electricity generation capacity would become comparable to historical rates observed during the 1980s. Given that nuclear energy continues to face serious challenges and contention, we inspect how extensive the improvements of coal-based power equipped with CCS technology would need to be if our economic optimization model is to significantly scale down the construction of new nuclear power plants.

This paper quantifies the importance of non-wage job characteristics to workers by estimating a structural on-the-job search model. The model generalizes the standard search framework by allowing workers to search for jobs based on both wages and job-specific non-wage utility flows. Within the structure of the search model, data on accepted wages and wage changes at job transitions identify the importance of non-wage utility through revealed preference. The parameters of the model are estimated by simulated minimum distance using the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). The estimates reveal that utility from non-wage job characteristics plays an important role in determining job mobility, the value of jobs to workers, and the gains from job search. More specifically, non-wage utility accounts for approximately one-third of the total gains from job mobility. These large non-pecuniary gains from search are missed by search models which assume that the wage captures the entire value of a job to a worker.

In this paper we study the economic implications of IPR protection on corporate intelligence, R&D investment and economic growth. To accomplish this objective, we present a dynamic, scale-invariant Schumpeterian model of growth with information gathering and analyze the steady-state e¤ects of introducing stronger protection for …rms con…dential information. In doing so, we introduce the trade secret into a standard quality-ladder growth model and study the long-run implications of improving the privacy of …rms’data. We …nd that reducing the set of practices of information gathering is more e¤ective in protecting …rms’privacy than strengthening trade secret.

Mathematical model of a goal-oriented thinking with feedback is described. Basic notions: decision graph, feedback hierarchy and self-duality are introduced and explained. A source of the conflict in our approach is the ignorance about the importance of decision maker’s goals. In contrast to Shafir, Simonson & Tversky [4] and Deutsch [2] conflict resolution is modeled as a problem of finding a fixed point of a self-assessment operator, i.e. without adding or removing any decision element from decision hierarchy.

The Axiom of Monotonicity (AM) is a necessary condition for a number of expected utility representations, including those obtained by de Finetti (1930), von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944), Savage (1954), and Anscombe and Auman (1963). The paper reports on experiments that directly test AM by eliminating strategic uncertainty, context, and peer effects. In one treatment, the state space is simple to formulate. Here we do not observe violations of AM. When the state space is a bit more obscure, we find significant violations of AM.

We document an increasing capacity to resist temptation in a time consistent manner from children to teenagers. Competencies develop in two steps: From age 8 on many pupils naively plan and after age 12 successfully implement strategies to resist temptation. Our evidence comes from a food choice experiment that we conducted with comparable participant pools of elementary and high school pupils in 5 different school years. We offer tangible choices in terms of apples and chocolate. On the first day pupils state their preference regarding tomorrows consumption and on the second day they pick one food item for immediate consumption. We find that most of the 6 to 7 year olds consistently choose chocolate for future and immediate consumption. With pupils age 8 to 12 we observe an increase of time inconsistent behavior - pupils naively planning to consume an apple tomorrow and then choosing chocolate for immediate consumption. From age 14 on a larger share of pupils is sophisticated in the sense that they plan to and actually do consume an apple.

This article presents an analysis of the behavior of countries defining their climate policies in an uncertain context. The analysis is made using the S-CWS model, a stochastic version of an integrated assessment growth model. The model includes a stochastic definition of the climate sensitivity parameter. We show that the impact of uncertainty on policy design critically depends on the shape of the damage function. We also examine the benefits of cooperation in the context of uncertainty: we highlight the existence of an additional benefit of cooperation, namely risk reduction.

This paper shows that the standard optimal growth model can be solved explicitly by using a utility function describing preferences for consumption and savings. Such a maximising criterion including the flow of savings can actually be strongly motivated by two arguments. First, the basic assumption of a representative agent who wishes to consume and save a part of his income each time, can be interpreted as an implicit assumption of some degree of preference for thriftiness. Second, this function formalizes also the concept of Max Weber’s spirit of capitalism (with a direct preference for wealth), which makes the model similar to the one of Heng-Fu Zou (1994) except that his specification includes the capital stock. The resulting model offers an interesting application of the Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle, as well as elegant closed form solutions.

An optimal education subsidy formula is derived using an overlapping generations model with parental altruism. The model predicts that public education subsidy is greater in economies with lesser parental altruism because a benevolent government has to compensate for the shortfall in private education spending of less altruistic parents with a finite life. On the other hand, growth is higher in economies with greater parental altruism. Cross-country regressions using the World Values Survey for altruism lend support to our model predictions. The model provides insights about the reasons for higher education subsidy in richer countries.

A considerable literature has focused on the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP), prompted by the empirical finding that TFP accounts for the bulk of long-term growth. This paper offers a deeper reason for such focus: the welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by current and anticipated future Solow productivity residuals. The equivalence holds for any specification of technology and market structure, as long as the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies total factor productivity as the right summary measure of welfare, even in situations where it does not properly measure technology, and makes it possible to calculate the contributions of disaggregated units (industries or firms) to aggregate welfare using readily available data. Based on this finding, the authors compute firm and industry contributions to welfare for a set of European countries (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain) using industry-level and firm-level data. With additional assumptions about technology and market structure (specifically, that firms minimize costs and face common factor prices), the authors show that welfare change can be further decomposed into three components that reflect, respectively, technical change, aggregate distortions, and allocative efficiency. Then, using the appropriate firm-level data, they assess the importance of each of these components as sources of welfare improvement in the same set of European countries.

This paper provides a non-technical overview of the economic arguments related to the desirability of transfer taxation and a summary of empirical evidence surrounding these issues. Understanding optimal transfer taxation throughout the distribution requires understanding the nature of a bequest motive, a topic on which there is little consensus. However, I argue that progress still can be made on the question of desirability and optimal level of estate taxation at the top of the distribution, because interpersonal externalities implied by the presence of bequest motive are irrelevant from the welfare point of view when the focus is on the wealthy. I also examine the role of negative externalities from wealth concentration in providing justification for considering this type of taxation.

Local interactions refer to social and economic phenomena where individuals' choices are influenced by the choices of others who are `close' to them socially or geographically. This represents a fairly accurate picture of human experience. Furthermore, since local interactions imply particular forms of externalities, their presence typically suggests government action. I survey and discuss existing theoretical work on economies with local interactions and point to areas for further research.

International audience; This paper studies how the assignment of patents as collateral determines the savings of firms and magnifies the effect of innovative rents on investment in research and development (R&D). We analyse the behaviour of innovative firms that face random and lumpy investment opportunities in R&D. High growth rates of innovations, possibly higher than the real rate of interest, may be achieved despite financial constraints. There is an optimal level of publicly funded policy by the patent and trademark office that minimizes the legal uncertainty surrounding patents as collateral and maximizes the growth rate of innovations.

Local interactions refer to social and economic phenomena where individuals' choices are influenced by the choices of others who are ‘close’ to them socially or geographically. This represents a fairly accurate picture of human experience. Furthermore, since local interactions imply particular forms of externalities, their presence typically suggests government action. I survey and discuss existing theoretical work on economies with local interactions and point to areas for further research.

The paper presents a model where individuals decide to become workers or entrepreneurs in the presence of capital constraints and where individuals differ in wealth levels. The model shows that the higher the initial level of inequality in wealth is, the lower the long run aggregate wealth of the economy and the higher the long run inequality will be.

The Pareto principle is often viewed as a mild requirement compatible with a variety of value judgements. In particular, it is generally thought that it can accommodate different degress of inequality aversion. We show that this is generally not true in time consistent intertemporal models where some uncertainty prevails.

Recent Melitz-type (2003) intra-industry heterogonous trade models argue that a firm fs productivity has significant effects on the firm fs exports. This paper examines how a firm fs credit constraints as well as its productivity affect its export decisions. We imbed the firm fs credit constraints into a Melitz-type general-equilibrium model by endogenizing the probability of the success of firm-specific projects. We show that, all else equal, it is easier for firms to enter the export market if (1) the probability of the success of their project is higher and consequently they have easier access to external finance from financial intermediaries; or (2) they have alternative sources, other than from financial intermediaries, to obtain funds. We test these theoretical hypotheses using firm-level data from Chinese manufacturing industries and find strong evidence supporting the predictions of the model.

We develop a tractable general theory for the study of the economic and demographic impact of epidemics, and notably its distributional consequences. To this end, we develop a three-period overlapping generations model where altruistic parents choose optimal health expenditures for their children and themselves. The survival probability of (junior) adults and children depends on such investments. Agents can be skilled or unskilled. The model emphasizes the role of orphans. Orphans are not only penalized in the face of death, they are also penalized in the access to education. Epidemics are modeled as one period exogenous shocks to the survival rates. We specifically study the consequence of a negative shock on adult survival rates in the first period. We prove that while the epidemic has no permanent effect on income distribution, it can perfectly alter it in the short and medium run. In particular, the epidemic may imply a worsening in the short and medium run of both economic performance and income distribution. Two opposite mechanisms are isolated: first, the survival rate of children at the end of the first period decreases relatively more in poor than in wealthy families. This decreases the proportion of junior adults with a low endowment of human capital in period 2. Secondly, the number of orphans in period 1 increases in both families. This decreases the proportion of junior adults with a low endowment of human capital in period 2. Therefore, the proportion of the unskilled will necessarily increase in the medium run if orphans are too penalized in the access to a high level of education.

We ask whether prime-age adult mortality due to HIV/AIDS decreases the endowment of knowledge for agricultural production in Kagera, Tanzania, reducing total factor productivity. We also quantify how much this negative effect contributes to the decrease in long-term household agricultural income growth compared to the contribution of decreased accumulation of productive assets; household members, land, and livestock. We find that prime-age adult mortality decreases the accumulation of knowledge stock as total factor productivity and the contribution of this negative effect to the decrease in agricultural income growth is larger than the contribution of decreased accumulation of each productive asset.

We consider an industry with firms that produce a final good emitting pollution to different degree as a side effect. Pollution is regulated by a tradable quota system where some quotas may have been allocated at the outset, i.e. before the quota market is opened. We study how volatility in quota price affects firm behaviour, taking into account the impact of quota price on final-good price. The impact on the individual firm differs depending on how polluting it is - whether it is `clean' or `dirty'- and whether it has been allocated quotas at the outset. In the absence of long-term or forward contracting, the optimal initial quota allocation turns out to resemble a grandfathering regime: clean firms are allocated no quotas - dirty firms are allocated quotas for a part of their emissions.With forward contracts and in the absence of wealth effects initial quota allocation has no effect on firm behaviour.

We introduce learning in a Brock–Mirman environment and study the effect of risk generated by the planner's econometric activity on optimal consumption and investment. Here, learning introduces two sources of risk about future payoffs: structural uncertainty and uncertainty due to the anticipation of learning. The latter renders control and learning nonseparable. We present two sets of results in a learning environment. First, conditions under which the introduction of learning increases or decreases optimal consumption are provided. The effect depends on the strengths and directions of the two sources of risk, which may pull in opposite directions. Second, the effects of the mean and riskiness of the distribution of the signal and initial beliefs on optimal consumption are studied.

Using an analytical model, we investigate the dynamics of a firm with market power whose advertisements and sales contribute to its customers’ stock of goodwill. An advertising campaign precedes the firm’s sales when customers are not familiar with its product, (e.g., movies), whereas sales of a new brand of a familiar product may start without advertising (e.g. Crocs shoes). For constant demand elasticity, both advertising and sales take place from the start. Two different types of solutions then emerge: one for low demand elasticity and one for high demand elasticity. These solutions are analyzed by phase diagrams. We also perform a numerical sensitivity analysis.

In this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in Italy. We use micro data on food and total non-durable household spending covering the period 1993-2004, and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in pension eligibility to correct for the endogenous nature of the retirement decision. We take a regression discontinuity design approach, and make the identifying assumption that consumption would be the same around the threshold for pension eligibility if individuals would not retire. We check in our data that a non-negligible fraction of individuals retire as soon as they become eligible, and estimate at 9.8% the part of the non-durable consumption drop that is associated with retirement induced by eligibility. We show that such fall is not driven by liquidity problems for the less well off in the population, and can be accounted for by drops in goods that are work-related expenses or leisure substitutes. However, we also show that retirement induces a significant drop in the number of grown children living with their parents, and this can account for most of the retirement consumption drop.

Psychologists report that people make choices on the basis of "decision utilities" that routinely overestimate the "experienced utility" consequences of these choices. This paper argues that this dichotomy between decision and experienced utilities may be the solution to an evolutionary design problem. We examine a setting in which evolution designs agents with utility functions that must mediate intertemporal choices, and in which there is an incentive to condition current utilities on the agent's previous experience. Anticipating future utility adjustments can distort intertemporal incentives, a conflict that is attenuated by separating decision and experienced utilities.

We consider a situation where an exhaustible-resource seller faces demand from a buyer who has a perfect substitute but there is a time-to-build delay for the substitute. We that find in this simple framework the basic implications of the Hotelling model (1931) are reversed: over time the stock declines but supplies increase up to the point where the buyer decides to switch. Under such a threat of demand change, the supply does not reflect the true current resource scarcity but leads to increased future scarcity, felt during the transition to the substitute supplies. The analysis suggests a perspective on costs of oil dependence.

We use two different approaches to measure intertemporal preferences. First we employ the classical method of inferring preferences from a series of choices (subjects choose between $X now or $Y in D days). Second we adopt the novel approach of inferring preferences using only response time data from the same choices (how long it takes subjects to choose between $X now or $Y in D days). In principle, the inference from response times should work, since choices between items of nearly equivalent value should take longer than choices between items with substantially different values. We find that choice-based analysis and response-time-based analysis yield nearly identical discount rate estimates. We conclude that response time data sheds light on both our revealed (choice-based) preferences and on the cognitive processes that implement those preferences.

Endogenous time discounting is introduced in a two-period human-capital-driven growth model: subjective discount rate depends upon the level of human capital. This assumption accords strongly with the micro-level evidence. In the model an individual optimizes consumption over two periods. Low human capital societies do not grow fast since high discount rate discourages schooling as the major form of savings. This implication is further reinforced by modeling the efficiency of schooling in the context of population pressure which is also driven by low human capital. The model may produce multiple development regimes and it illustrates wider role of education in tackling possible development traps.

The OLG model of Allais and Samuelson retains the methodological assumptions of agent optimization and market clearing from the Arrow-Debreu model, yet its equilibrium set has different properties: Pareto inefficiency, indeterminacy, positive valuation of money, and a golden rule equilibrium in which the rate of interest is equal to population growth (independent of impatience). These properties are shown to derive not from market incompleteness, but from lack of market clearing "at infinity;" they can be eliminated with land or uniform impatience. The OLG model is used to analyze bubbles, social security, demographic effects on stock returns, the foundations of monetary theory, Keynesian vs. real business cycle macromodels, and classical vs. neoclassical disputes.

We introduce a dynamic model of resource-grabbing by status-conscious agents, i.e., agents value not only their absolute consumption levels, but also the relative status within their reference group. We explore the effect of the concern for relative consumption on the growth rate and the welfare of an economy where agents appropriate from a common property resource. Our model shows that the greater is agents' concern about their relative status, the more aggressively they tend to behave. Consequently, social welfare is lower because the growth rate of the public asset is reduced due to higher extraction rate. We also consider the effect of increased heterogeneity, and show that social welfare decreases as the distribution of status-consciousness among agents widens.

What have we learned from the outpouring of literature as a result of the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change? A lot. We have explored the model space and the parameter space much more thoroughly, though there are still unexplored regions. While there are aspects of the Stern Review's analysis with which we can disagree, it seems fair to say that it has catalyzed a fundamental rethinking of the economic case for action on climate change. We are now in a position to give some conditions that are sufficient to provide a case for strong action on climate change, but need more work before we have a fully satisfactory account of the relevant economics. In particular we need to understand better how climate change affects natural capital - the natural environment and the ecosystems comprising it - and how these affect human welfare.

We develop a tractable general theory for the study of the economic and demographic impact of epidemics. In particular, we analytically characterise the short and medium term consequences of epidemics for population size, age pyramid, economic performance and income distribution. To this end, we develop a three-period overlapping generations where altruistic parents choose optimal health expenditures for their children and themselves. The survival probability of (junior) adults and children depend on such investments. Agents can be skilled or unskilled. The model emphasizes the role of orphans. Ophans are not only penalized in front of death , they are also penalized in the access to education. Epidemics are modeled as one period exogenous shocks to the survival rates. We identify three kinds of epidemics depending on how the epidemic shock alters the marginal efficiency of health expenditures. We first study the demographic dynamics, and prove that while a one-period epidemic shock has no permanent effect on income distribution, it can perfectly alter it in the short and medium run. We then study the impact of the three kinds of epidemics when they hit children and/or junior adults. We prove that while the three epidemics have significantly different demographic implications in the medium run, they all imply a worsening in the short and medium run of economic performance and income distribution. In particular, the distributional implications of the model mainly rely on orphans: if orphans are more penalized in the access to a high level of education than in front of death, they will necessarily lead to the medium-term increase in the proportion of the unskilled, triggering the impoverishment of the economy at that time horizon., Ce papier développe un modèle théorique général des effets économiques et démographiques des épidémies. En particulier nous caractérisons de façon analytique les conséquences de court et de moyen terme d'une épidémie sur la taille de la population, la pyramide des âges, la performance économique et la répartition des revenus. Pour cela nous développons un modèle à générations imbriquées à trois périodes où des parents altruistes répartissent de fa&ccdil;on optimale les dépenses de santé entre eux-mêmes et leurs enfants. Les probabilités de survie des jeunes adultes et des enfants dépendent de ces dépenses. Les agents peuvent être qualifiés ou non qualifiés. Le modèle donne un rôle important aux orphelins. Ceux-ci ne sont pas pénalisés simplement dans leur probabilité de survie mais aussi dans leur accès à l'éducation. Une épidémie est modélisée comme un choc exogène d'une période sur l'une des probabilités de survie. Nous identifions trois catégories d'épidémies en fonction de leurs effets sur l'efficacité marginale des dépenses de santé. Nous analysons d'abord la dynamique des effets démographiques et établissons que bien qu'un choc épidémiologique d'une période n'ait pas d'effet permanent sur la répartition des revenus, il peut modifier celle-ci dans le court et dans le moyen terme. Nous examinons ensuite les effets des trois types d'épidémies quand elles frappent les enfants et/ou les jeunes adultes. Nous établissons que bien que les trois types d'épidémies aient des effets démographiques différents dans le court et le moyen terme, elles impliquent toutes une détérioration des performances économiques et de la répartition des revenus à ces horizons. Les effets redistributifs passent par l'intermédiaire des orphelins : s'ils sont plus désavantagés dans leur accès à l'éducation que dans leur probabilité de survie, on aura è moyen terme une augmentation de la proportion de travailleurs non qualifiés dans la population, ce qui appauvrira l'économie.

Différentes heuristiques ont été avancées par les psychologues et les économistes afin de rendre compte des comportements sur les marchés financiers. Elles soulignent les biais cognitifs qui affectent les croyances individuelles, et s’efforcent d’expliquer dans une certaine mesure les anomalies constatées sur les marché financiers. L’expérimentation menée vise à tester les heuristiques de conservatisme, de représentativité et d’ancrage-ajustement dans un contexte dynamique de quinze périodes: les sujets reçoivent, à chaque période une information financière et révisent individuellement leurs croyances quant à la qualité d’une entreprise. Les croyances observées s’avèrent incompatibles avec l’hypothèse de révision bayésienne : les sujets ont tendance à surévaluer les petites probabilités et à sous-évaluer les fortes probabilités. L’heuristique de représentativité est, de la même manière, invalidée : le traitementement économétrique montre que les sujets sous-pondèrent les signaux les plus intenses, preuve qu’ils ne tirent pas parti de leur intensités informationelles. Les hypothèses de conservatisme et d’ancrage-ajustement sont au contraire conjointement validées : les sujets sous-pondèrent l’information nouvelle quand ils révisent leurs croyances mais ce comportement de révision est pleinement conditionné au fait que les sujets s’écartent ou se rapprochant d’une valeur d’ancrage.

Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenzen (http://www.nationallizenzen.ch), This paper analyzes the effects of technological risk on long-run growth when labor supply is elastic and production gives rise to a pollution externality. We show that the randomness of production, as well as the endogeneity of labor supply, affects the equilibrium solutions for the social planner and for the market economy. We analyze the effects of environmental policy, discuss conditions for an optimal policy, and find that the response of labor supply to changes in the model parameters and to variations in the policy instruments crucially depends on the volatility of output.

Jekyll and Hyde were in fact two people inside the same person - an obviously dynamically-inconsistent person. In the book and in the movie, the dynamic inconsistency was resolved in a rather dramatic way. We investigate its resolution in the laboratory.

We estimate discount rates of 555 subjects using a laboratory task and find that these individual discount rates predict inter-individual variation in field behaviors (e.g., exercise, BMI, smoking). The correlation between the discount rate and each field behavior is small: none exceeds 0.28 and many are near 0. However, the discount rate has at least as much predictive power as any variable in our dataset (e.g., sex, age, education). The correlation between the discount rate and field behavior rises when field behaviors are aggregated: these correlations range from 0.09–0.38. We present a model that explains why specific intertemporal choice behaviors are only weakly correlated with discount rates, even though discount rates robustly predict aggregates of intertemporal decisions.

This paper deals with credit market imperfections and idiosyncratic risks in a two-sector heterogeneous agent dynamic general equilibrium model of occupational choice. We focus especially on the effects of tightening financial constraints on macroeconomic performance, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and social mobility. Contrary to many models in the literature, our comparative static results cover the entire range of borrowing constraints, from complete markets to a perfectly constrained economy. In our baseline model, we find substantial gains in output, welfare, and wealth equality associated with relaxing the constraints, but argue that it might also prove worthwhile to examine the marginal gains from credit market improvements. Interestingly, the amount of entrepreneurial activity and social mobility increases if borrowing constraints become more tight. These results can be attributed to the general equilibrium nature of our approach, where optimal firm sizes and the demand for credit are determined endogenously. The comparative static results on the entrepreneurship rate and social mobility respond sensitively to a change in income persistence., Working papers series, ISSN 2628-1724, 2008, Heft 8

The paper argues that, from a dynamic efficiency perspective, intersections of factor price frontiers are irrelevant to the choice of techniques. Because every change in technique involves a temporary loss or gain in both profit and per capita consumption within the transition period, its profitability should be calculated by applying the present value criterion to the entire change process. With only one transition period, there is generally a unique interest rate at which the change in technique breaks even. This critical interest rate is generally the same for a profit maximizing firm as for a central planner who seeks to maximize consumption per unit of work. This critical interest rate does not generally coincide with either of the interest rates at which the factor price frontiers intersect. Therefore, common proofs of the socalled reswitching phenomenon do not stand up well from a dynamic efficiency perspective.

Many financing choices of US corporations remain puzzling even after accounting for standard determinants such as taxes, bankruptcy costs, and asymmetric information. We propose that managerial beliefs help to explain the remaining variation across and within firms, including variation in debt conservatism and in pecking-order behavior. Managers who believe that their company is undervalued view external financing as overpriced, especially equity financing. As a result, they display pecking-order preferences for internal financing over debt and for debt over equity. They may also exhibit debt conservatism: While they prefer debt to equity, they still underutilize debt relative to its tax benefits. We test these hypotheses empirically, using late option exercise by the CEO as a measure of overconfidence. We find that, conditional on accessing public markets, CEOs who personally overinvest in their companies are significantly less likely to issue equity. They raise 33 cents more debt to cover an additional dollar of financing deficit than their peers. Moreover, the frequency with which they access any external finance (debt or equity) is significantly lower, resulting in debt conservatism. The results replicate when identifying managerial overconfidence based on press portrayal as confident or optimistic. We conclude that managerial overconfidence helps to explain variation in corporate financial policies.

Technological progress has long been posited to be crucial in a country's economic growth. This paper argues that coordination failure in a country's new technology investment can be one of the barriers in a country's capital accumulation and economic growth. The global game established by Morris and Shin(2000) is extended to a two-sector overlapping generations model where capital goods can be produced by two different technologies. The first is a conventional technology with constant returns, which are perfectly revealed to economic agents. The second is a new technology exhibiting increasing return to scale due to technological externalities, whose returns economic agents only have incomplete information about. Economic agents have to choose which technology to invest in. My model reveals that under certain circumstances coordination failure in the capital goods sector will occur and be manifested as under-investment in the new technology. In this way, I explain how coordination failure in a country's technology updating process leads to slower capital accumulation and economic growth. More interestingly, the model generates a positive correlation between economic growth and volatility through a new channel associated with coordination failure. Policy implications are discussed as well.

In the last twenty years a growing body of experimental evidence has posed a challenge to the standard Exponential Discounting Model of choice over time. Attention has focused on some specific 'anomalies', notably preference reversal and declining discount rates, leading to the formulation of the model of hyperbolic discounting which is finding increasing favour in the literature. In this paper we provide a survey of both the theoretical modelling and the experimental evidence relating to choice over time. As we will show, a careful analysis of the mapping between theoretical models and experimental investigations raises questions as to whether some of the most focused upon anomalies should be indeed classified as such, or whether they are really the most challenging ones for conventional theory. New developments are emerging both at the theoretical and empirical level, opening up new exciting avenues for investigation.

We present a fairly standard general equilibrium model of endogenous growth with productive and nonproductive public goods and services. The former enhance private productivity and the latter private utility. We study Ramsey second-best optimal policy, where the latter is summarized by the paths of the income tax rate and the allocation of collected tax revenues between productivity-enhancing and utility-enhancing public expenditures. We show that the properties and macroeconomic implications of the second-best optimal policy (a) are different from the benchmark case of the social planner's first-best allocation and (b) depend crucially on whether public goods and services are subject to congestion.

A usual policy recommendation to promote sustained economic growth it to dedicate increasing resources to the investment process (i.e. high investment rates). In contrast, a well known result of neoclassical growth theory is that the only determinant of long run growth is technological progress, not capital accumulation. On the contrary, to postulate that the investment rate has an important role to play in long run growth one needs to assume, as the new theory of growth does, that investment is capable of generating increases in aggregate productivity through externalities or some other form of increasing returns to scale. However, this qualifications are not the ones that are usually invoked when it is claimed that investment is the key ingredient for long run growth, as it is usually asserted in policy debates. It is not the purpose of this paper to deny the existence of the investment growth nexus. In fact, this paper argues that in the case of our economies, because of their important contribution on macroeconomic sustainability, high investment and domestic savings rates can play a crucial role in the consolidation of the growth process. Moreover, although it is not the case of Argentina (as we illustrate quantitatively), this paper also aims to recall that potential intergenerational sub optimal situations of dynamic inefficiency can arise if the investment rate exceeds its optimal level.

Expanding credit access is a key ingredient of development strategies worldwide. Microfinance practitioners, policymakers, and donors have ambitious goals for expanding access, and seek efficient methods for implementing and evaluating expansion. There is less consensus on the role of consumer credit in expansion initiatives. Some microfinance institutions are moving beyond entrepreneurial credit and offering consumer loans. But many practitioners and policymakers are skeptical about “unproductive” lending. These concerns are fueled by academic work highlighting behavioral biases that may induce consumers to over borrow. We estimate the impacts of a consumer credit supply expansion using a field experiment and follow-up data collection. A South African lender relaxed its risk assessment criteria by encouraging its loan officers to approve randomly selected marginal rejected applications. We estimate the resulting impacts using new survey data on applicant households and administrative data on loan repayment, as well as public credit reports one and two years later. We find that the marginal loans produced significant benefits for borrowers across a wide range economic and well-being outcomes. We also find some evidence that the marginal loans were profitable for the Lender. The results suggest that consumer credit expansions can be welfare-improving.

We develop a tractable general theory for the study of the economic and demographic impact of epidemics. In particular, we analytically characterise the short and medium term consequences of epidemics for population size, age pyramid, economic performance and income distribution. To this end, we develop a three-period overlapping generations where altruistic parents choose optimal health expenditures for their children and themselves. The survival probability of (junior) adults and children depend on such investments. Agents can be skilled or unskilled. The model emphasizes the role of orphans. Orphans are not only penalized in front of death, they are also penalized in the access to education. Epidemics are modeled as one period exogenous shocks to the survival rates. We identify three kinds of epidemics depending on how th epidemic shock alters the marginal efficiency of health expenditures. We first study the demographic dynamics, and prove that while a one-period epidemic shock has no permanent effect on income distribution, it can perfectly alter it in the short and medium run. We then study the impact of the three kinds of epidemics when they hit children and/or junior adults. We prove that while the three epidemics have significatly different demographic implications in the medium run, they all imply a worsening in the short and medium run of economic performance and income distribution. In particular, the distributional implications of the model mainly rely on orphans : if orphans are more penalized in the access to a high level of education than in front of death, they will necessarily lead to the medium-term increase in the proportion of the unskilled, triggering the impoverishment of the economy at that time horizon.

Expanding credit access is a key ingredient of development strategies worldwide. Microfinance practitioners, policymakers, and donors have ambitious goals for expanding access, and seek efficient methods for implementing and evaluating expansion. There is less consensus on the role of consumer credit in expansion initiatives. Some microfinance institutions are moving beyond entrepreneurial credit and offering consumer loans. But many practitioners and policymakers are skeptical about “unproductive” lending. These concerns are fuelled by academic work highlighting behavioural biases that may induce consumers to overborrow. We estimate the impacts of a consumer credit supply expansion using a field experiment and follow-up data collection. A South African lender relaxed its risk assessment criteria by encouraging its loan officers to approve randomly selected marginal rejected applications. We estimate the resulting impacts using new survey data on applicant households and administrative data on loan repayment, as well as public credit reports one and two years later. We find that the marginal loans produced significant benefits for borrowers across a wide range economic and well-being outcomes. We also find some evidence that the marginal loans were profitable for the Lender. The results suggest that consumer credit expansions can be welfare-improving.

This paper belongs to my research program on violence and terrorism started in 1993, as a consequence of the growing concern regarding the increase in Colombian violence, and especially for its escalation during the 1990’s. After 14 years of research, particularly after developing a model of cyclical terrorist murder in Colombia 1950-2004, forecasts 2005-2019 (Gómez-Sorzano 2005, http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/134/01/MPRA_paper_134.pdf), the econometrics of violence, terrorism, and scenarios for peace in Colombia from 1950 to 2019 (Gómez-Sorzano 2006, http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/539/01/MPRA_paper_539.pdf), and Scenarios for Sustainable Peace in Colombia by year 2019 (Gómez-Sorzano 2006B, http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/135/01/MPRA_paper_135.pdf) , I claim in this paper that I have formally developed the concept of Sustainable Peace using advanced econometrics. The concept of Sustainable Peace is thus presented to the international academic community, and is based in the construction of a structural econometric model for National murder, and a model for cyclical terrorist murder that have been simultaneously used for designing Scenarios granting Sustainable Peace in Colombia by year 2019.