infonet-economy

The paper presents a simple model to study the effects of rumours on markets. Agents in our economy communicate with their local neighbours which gives rise to the possible spread of a rumour. As the rumour affects beliefs of the agents the evolution of the rumour has a direct impact on market outcomes. Our results show that if the rumour dies out long-run equilibrium prices correspond to pre-rumour values. However, if the rumour stays present it produces a price run-up for the good that is positively targeted by the rumour. Price run-ups related to rumours have been observed in empirical studies by Rose [Rose, A.M., 1951. Rumor in the stock market. Public Opinion Quarterly 15, 461–486], Pound and Zeckhauser [Pound, J., Zeckhauser, R., 1990. Clearly heard on the street: the effect of takeover rumors on stock prices. Journal of Business 63, 291–308] and Zivney et al. [Zivney, T., Bertin, W.J., Torabzadeh, K.M., 1996. Overreaction to take-over speculation. Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 36, 89–115]. The present model provides an analytical foundation for this finding.

Is discounting of future decision-makers’ consumption utilities consistent with "pure" altruism toward those decision-makers, that is, a concern that they are better off according to their own, likewise forward-looking, preferences? It turns out that the answer is positive for many but not all discount functions used in the economics literature. In particular, "hyperbolic" discounting of the form used by Phelps and Pollak (1968) and Laibson (1997) is consistent with exponential altruism towards all future generations. More generally, we establish a one-to-one relationship between discount functions and altruism weight systems, and provide sufficient, as well as necessary, conditions for discount functions to be consistent with pure altruism.

This paper investigates the outcome of ageing on taxes and hospitalisation of the elderly using panel data on 23 Swedish county councils 1980–1999. We test two hypotheses; whether a larger share of elderly has no negative effect on bed days per elderly person and no positive effect on tax rates. We reject the first hypothesis but fail to reject the second hypothesis. Further we cannot reject the hypothesis of a unitary elasticity of the share of elderly on bed days per elderly person. These results imply that the old bear the entire cost of adjustment when the population grows older.

The conventional parameterizations of cumulative prospect theory do not explain the St. Petersburg paradox. To do so, the power coefficient of an individual’s utility function must be lower than the power coefficient of an individual’s probability weighting function.

We model income redistribution with dynamic distortions as determined by rational voting without commitment among individuals of different types and income realizations. We find that redistribution is too persistent relative to that chosen by a planner with commitment. The difference is larger, the lower is the political influence of young agents, the lower is the altruistic concern for future generations, and the lower is risk-aversion. Furthermore, there tends to be too much redistribution in the political equilibrium. Finally, smooth preference aggregation, as under probabilistic voting, produces less persistence and does not admit multiple equilibria, which occur under majority-voting aggregation.

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws. Workers who compete with children in the labor market support a child labor ban, unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income. Fertility decisions lock agents into specific political preferences, and multiple steady states can arise. The introduction of child labor laws can be triggered by skill-biased technological change, which induces parents to choose smaller families. The theory can account for the observation that, in Britain, regulations were first introduced after a period of rising wage inequality, and coincided with rapid fertility decline.

ENGLISH: Conventional wisdom views demographic change as a set of exogenous shocks impinging on social security, with the economy treated as a closed system. This contribution argues that demographics is nothing but the aggregate of individual decisions, which are influenced by social security. This claim is supported by both theoretical argument and empirical evidence with regard to decisions over the life cycle, ranging from educational effort, marriage, number of children, divorce, retirement, and effort to extend one's life. Distinguishing the effects of contributions and benefits of social security, these feedback relationships are shown to in the main hamper employment and growth, thus undermining the financial viability of today's social security schemes, with increasing openness of the economy (`globalization') exacerbating problems.

DEUTSCH: Demographischer Wandel wird üblicherweise als ein exogener Schock auf die Sozialversicherung einer geschlossenen Volkswirtschaft aufgefasst. Der vorliegende Aufsatz wählt demgegenüber eine andere Sichtweise: Er fasst demographische Entwicklung als Ergebnis individueller Optimierungsentscheidungen auf, die von der Sozialversicherung einer Volkswirtschaft beeinflusst werden. Diese Behauptung wird durch theoretische und empirische Evidenz bezüglich des gesamten Lebenszyklus bestätigt – von der Ausbildung, über die Heirat, die Anzahl der Kinder, eine mögliche Scheidung, den Übergang in den Ruhestand und schliesslich den Versuch, ein langes Leben zu erreichen. Dabei wird durchweg zwischen den Beiträgen und den Leistungen unterschieden und gezeigt, wie diese beiden Aspekte der Sozialversicherung Beschäftigung und Wachstum beeinträchtigen können. Diese Effekte gefährden das Gleichgewicht der heutigen Sozialversicherung, wobei die Globalisierung die Gefährdung noch erhöht.

We analyze the evolution of cultural traits when parents purposefully invest resources in order to socialize their children to the cultural variants that maximize child lifetime utility. We assume that children are not passive in their adoption of traits from peers. Instead they are guided by an evaluation of the merit of variants. We show that such evaluation is likely to render this process of "oblique transmission" biased. We then show that when transmission of traits from society is biased or frequency dependent, cultural diversity is sustainable even when all parents strive to transmit the same trait. We also show that demand for cultural pluralism on the part of parent does not guarantee cultural diversity.

In Germany, competitive franchising is increasingly being used to procure passenger railway services that were previously provided by a state monopolist. This paper analyzes 77 tenders that differ with respect to network size, service frequency, contract duration and the proximity to other lines that are already run by competitors of DB Regio, a subsidiary of the successor of the former state monopolist. Our analysis shows that competitors are more likely to win small networks and more recent auctions. Other controls such as contract duration and the adjacency to other lines run by entrants are insignificant.

In this paper, we introduce the fairness approach to efficiency wages into a standard model of international fragmentation. This gives us a theoretical framework in which wage inequality and unemployment rates are co-determined and therefore the public concern can be addressed that international fragmentation and outsourcing to low wage countries lead to domestic job-losses. We
develop a novel diagrammatic tool to illustrate the main labour market effects of international fragmentation. We also explore how preferences for fair wages and the size of unemployment benefits govern the employment effects of outsourcing and critically assess the role of political intervention that aims to reduce unemployment benefits under internationally fragmented production.