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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

2023-1 The Macroeconomic Consequences Of Subsistence Self-Employment, Juan Herreno, Sergio Ocampo Jan 2023

2023-1 The Macroeconomic Consequences Of Subsistence Self-Employment, Juan Herreno, Sergio Ocampo

Department of Economics Research Reports

We evaluate the aggregate effects of expansions of credit supply in environments where subsistence self-employment is prevalent. We extend a standard macro development model to include unemployment risk, which becomes a key driver of selection into self-employment. The model is consistent with the joint distribution of earnings and occupations, the reaction of wages to labor demand shocks, and the small effects of expansions in the supply of microloans on the earnings of the self-employed. We find that the elasticity of aggregate output to expansions in credit supply is proportional to the elasticity of individual earnings. This proportionality arises due to …


2023-2 Dynamic And Stochastic Rational Behavior, Nail Kashaev, Charles Gauthier, Victor H. Aguiar Jan 2023

2023-2 Dynamic And Stochastic Rational Behavior, Nail Kashaev, Charles Gauthier, Victor H. Aguiar

Department of Economics Research Reports

We analyze consumer demand behavior using Dynamic Random Utility Model (DRUM). Under DRUM, a consumer draws a utility function from a stochastic utility process in each period and maximizes this utility subject to her budget constraint. DRUM allows unrestricted time correlation and cross-section heterogeneity in preferences. We fully characterize DRUM for a panel data of consumer choices and budgets. DRUM is linked to a finite mixture of deterministic behavior represented as the Kronecker product of static rationalizable behavior. We provide a generalization of the Weyl-Minkowski theorem that uses this link and enables conversion of the characterizations of the static Random …


2023-3 Dynamic Programming For Pure-Strategy Subgame Perfection In An Arbitrary Game, Peter Streufert Jan 2023

2023-3 Dynamic Programming For Pure-Strategy Subgame Perfection In An Arbitrary Game, Peter Streufert

Department of Economics Research Reports

This paper uses value functions to characterize the pure-strategy subgame-perfect equilibria of an arbitrary, possibly infinite-horizon game. It specifies the game’s extensive form as a pentaform (Streufert 2023p, arXiv:2107.10801v4), which is a set of quintuples formalizing the abstract relationships between nodes, actions, players, and situations (situations generalize information sets). Because a pentaform is a set, this paper can explicitly partition the game form into piece forms, each of which starts at a (Selten) subroot and contains all subsequent nodes except those that follow a subsequent subroot. Then the set of subroots becomes the domain of a value function, and the …


2023-5 History Of Economic Thought's Place In Macroeconomics Revisited, David Laidler Jan 2023

2023-5 History Of Economic Thought's Place In Macroeconomics Revisited, David Laidler

Department of Economics Research Reports

The History of Economics Society was founded at a time when the History of Economic Thought was being expelled from the Economics post-graduate curriculum in many universities, and was one of the key institutions around which the sub-discipline successfully re-organised itself and continued to develop. Laidler (2003) argued that Economics itself, especially Macroeconomics, was suffering serious damage from this expulsion. It has continued to do so since.


2023-01 The Insurance Implications Of Government Student Loan Repayment Schemes, Martin Gervais, Qian Liu, Lance Lochner Jan 2023

2023-01 The Insurance Implications Of Government Student Loan Repayment Schemes, Martin Gervais, Qian Liu, Lance Lochner

Centre for Human Capital and Productivity. CHCP Working Papers

No abstract provided.


2023-02 Adverse Selection Among Early Adopters And Unraveling Innovation, Rory Mcgee Jan 2023

2023-02 Adverse Selection Among Early Adopters And Unraveling Innovation, Rory Mcgee

Centre for Human Capital and Productivity. CHCP Working Papers

I provide an equilibrium analysis of “selection markets”: where consumers not only vary in how much they are willing to pay, but also in how much they cost to the seller. The model provides a joint explanation for three empirical phenomena: low uptake of existing products, slow demand for new products, and market inactivity despite unmet demand. I characterize when early adopters are more adversely selected in new markets. This lowers demand, increases costs, and leads markets to unravel prematurely. With endogenous market entry for new products (e.g., reverse mortgages, annuities), extended patents serve as de facto time-varying subsidies.


2023-4 Macro’S Missing Link: The Unbridged Gap Between Monetarism And The Wicksell Connection, David Laidler Jan 2023

2023-4 Macro’S Missing Link: The Unbridged Gap Between Monetarism And The Wicksell Connection, David Laidler

Department of Economics Research Reports

Modern mainstream macroeconomics treats the economy “as if” always in equilibrium. Two older traditions, Monetarism and the Wicksell Connections have always dissented, arguing that how agents gather information and apply it to the coordination of their activities are prior problems requiring attention before equilibrium can, or cannot, be assumed. They have developed the implications of this claim along different lines, however, with the former dealing with questions raised by the existence of monetary exchange in general and the latter concentrating in particular on inter-temporal issues. This gap has persisted since Wicksell opened it up, and has never been satisfactorily bridged: …


2022-1 A Partial Identification Approach To Identifying The Determinants Of Human Capital Accumulation: An Application To Teachers, Nirav Mehta Jan 2022

2022-1 A Partial Identification Approach To Identifying The Determinants Of Human Capital Accumulation: An Application To Teachers, Nirav Mehta

Department of Economics Research Reports

This paper views teacher quality through the human capital perspective. Teacher quality exhibits substantial growth over teachers’ careers, but why it improves is not well understood. I use a human capital production function nesting On-the-Job-Training (OJT) and Learning-by-Doing (LBD) and experimental variation from Glewwe et al. (2010), a teacher incentive pay experiment in Kenya, to discern the presence and relative importance of these forces. The identified set for the OJT and LBD components has a closed-form solution, which depends on experimentally estimated average treatment effects. The results provide evidence of an LBD component, as well as an informative upper bound …


2022-2 Robust Contracts In Common Agency, Keler Marku, Sergio Ocampo, Jean-Baptiste Tondji Jan 2022

2022-2 Robust Contracts In Common Agency, Keler Marku, Sergio Ocampo, Jean-Baptiste Tondji

Department of Economics Research Reports

Business activities often involve a common agent managing a variety of projects on behalf of investors with potentially conflicting interests. The extent of the agent’s actions is also often unknown to investors, who have to design contracts that provide incentives to the manager despite this lack of crucial knowledge. We consider a game between several principals and a common agent, where principals know only a subset of the actions available to the agent. Principals demand robustness and evaluate contracts on a worst-case basis. This robust approach allows for a crisp characterization of the equilibrium contracts and payoffs and provides a …


2022-7 Market Power, Taxation And Product Variety In The Brazilian Automobile Industry, Daniel Chaves Jan 2022

2022-7 Market Power, Taxation And Product Variety In The Brazilian Automobile Industry, Daniel Chaves

Department of Economics Research Reports

This paper empirically assesses the impact of a discontinuous tax schedule on prices, markups and product assortment in the Brazilian automobile industry. To this end, I estimate a structural, equilibrium model of demand and supply for over a hundred different models and engine sizes of automobiles. With the model estimates of price elasticities and marginal costs I quantify how market power impacts the progressivity of the discontinuous tax schedule. I also examine how firms would reposition their products to avoid the tax and quantify the impact of this repositioning on equilibrium outcomes.


2022-5 Estimation Of Parametric Binary Outcome Models With Degenerate Pure Choice-Based Data With Application To Covid-19-Positive Tests From British Columbia, Nail Kashaev Jan 2022

2022-5 Estimation Of Parametric Binary Outcome Models With Degenerate Pure Choice-Based Data With Application To Covid-19-Positive Tests From British Columbia, Nail Kashaev

Department of Economics Research Reports

I propose a generalized method of moments type procedure to estimate parametric binary choice models when the researcher only observes degenerate pure choices-based or presence-only data and has some information about the distribution of the covariates. This auxiliary information comes in the form of moments. I present an application based on the data on all COVID-19-positive tests from British Columbia. Publicly available demographic information on the population in British Columbia allows me to estimate the conditional probability of a person being COVID-19-positively tested conditional on demographics


2022-6 Prices, Profits, Proxies, And Production, Victor H. Aguiar, Nail Kashaev, Roy Allen Jan 2022

2022-6 Prices, Profits, Proxies, And Production, Victor H. Aguiar, Nail Kashaev, Roy Allen

Department of Economics Research Reports

This paper studies nonparametric identification and counterfactual bounds for heterogeneous firms that can be ranked in terms of productivity. Our approach works when quantities and prices are latent, rendering standard approaches inapplicable. Instead, we require observation of profits or other optimizing-values such as costs or revenues, and either prices or price proxies of flexibly chosen variables. We extend classical duality results for price-taking firms to a setup with discrete heterogeneity, endogeneity, and limited variation in possibly latent prices. Finally, we show that convergence results for nonparametric estimators may be directly converted to convergence results for production sets.


2022-3 A Random Attention And Utility Model, Nail Kashaev, Victor H. Aguiar Jan 2022

2022-3 A Random Attention And Utility Model, Nail Kashaev, Victor H. Aguiar

Department of Economics Research Reports

We generalize the stochastic revealed preference methodology of McFadden and Richter (1990) for finite choice sets to settings with limited consideration. Our approach is nonparametric and requires partial choice set variation. We impose a monotonicity condition on attention first proposed by Cattaneo et al. (2020) and a stability condition on the marginal distribution of preferences. Our framework is amenable to statistical testing. These new restrictions extend widely known parametric models of consideration with heterogeneous preferences.


2022-8 Slutsky Matrix Symmetry: A New Behavioral Condition, Victor H. Aguiar, Roberto Serrano Jan 2022

2022-8 Slutsky Matrix Symmetry: A New Behavioral Condition, Victor H. Aguiar, Roberto Serrano

Department of Economics Research Reports

The Slutsky matrix function encodes all the information about local variations in demand with respect to small (Slutsky) compensated price changes. When the demand function is the result of utility maximization the Slutsky matrix is symmetric. However, symmetry does not imply rationality. Here, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for Slutsky symmetry. The new condition requires symmetric attention to compensated price-paths.


2022-9 A Rationalization Of The Weak Axiom Of Revealed Preference, Victor H. Aguiar, Per Hjertstrand, Roberto Serrano Jan 2022

2022-9 A Rationalization Of The Weak Axiom Of Revealed Preference, Victor H. Aguiar, Per Hjertstrand, Roberto Serrano

Department of Economics Research Reports

Samuelson’s (1938) weak (generalized) axiom of revealed preference– WGARP–is a minimal and appealing consistency condition of choice. We offer a rationalization of WGARP in general settings. Our main result is an exact analog of the celebrated Afriat’s theorem, but for WGARP. Its ordinal rationalization is in terms of an asymmetric and locally nonsatiated preference function. Its cardinal rationalization uses a coalitional multi-utility (CMU) maxmin representation with a coherency restriction on the coalition structure. Effectively, the CMU representation aggregates piecemeal preferences within the decision maker (multiple rationales without preference reversals that allow for transitivity violations). Basic consumer theory and welfare analysis …


2022-11 Peter Howitt – A Keynesian Still In Recovery, David Laidler Jan 2022

2022-11 Peter Howitt – A Keynesian Still In Recovery, David Laidler

Department of Economics Research Reports

Peter Howitt is best known for his contributions to growth theory, but his work in short-run economics, which began with his Ph.D thesis and still continues, is important and deserves attention. It lies firmly in the Keynesian macro-disequilibrium tradition of Clower and Leijonhufvud, and for a long time has been overshadowed by New-classical and New-Keynesian orthodoxy. However, the development of agent based modelling and behavioural economics will perhaps give disequilibrium macroeconomics a new lease on life.


2022-13 Savings After Retirement, Eric French, John Bailey Jones, Rory Mcgee Jan 2022

2022-13 Savings After Retirement, Eric French, John Bailey Jones, Rory Mcgee

Department of Economics Research Reports

Abstract: Retired households, especially those with high lifetime income, decumulate their wealth very slowly, and many die leaving large estates. The three leading explanations for the ‘retirement savings puzzle” are the desire to insure against uncertain lifespans and medical expenses, the desire to leave bequests to one’s heirs, and the desire to remain in one’s own home. We discuss the empirical strategies used to differentiate these motivations, most of which go beyond wealth to exploit additional features of the data. The literature suggests that all the motivations are present, but has yet to reach a consensus about their relative importance


2022-12 The Big Expansion Of Rural Secondary Schooling During The Cultural Revolution And The Returns To Education In Rural China, Mengbing Zhu, Terry Sicular Jan 2022

2022-12 The Big Expansion Of Rural Secondary Schooling During The Cultural Revolution And The Returns To Education In Rural China, Mengbing Zhu, Terry Sicular

Department of Economics Research Reports

During the Cultural Revolution China embarked on a dramatic, albeit temporary, expansion of secondary education in rural areas that affected tens of millions of children who reached secondary school age in the late 1960s and 1970s. The conventional wisdom is that this expansion was politicized and low quality. Using instrumental variables estimation, we exploit variation in the expansion across localities and birth cohorts to estimate the impact of Cultural Revolution education on individual outcomes. Creative use of historical county-level information matched with rich household survey data from the mid-1990s allows analysis of multiple outcomes. We find a significant, positive effect …


2022-1 The Role Of Non-Pecuniary Considerations: Location Decisions Of College Graduates From Low Income Backgrounds, Yifan Gong, Todd Stinebrickner, Ralph Stinebrickner, Yuxi Yao Jan 2022

2022-1 The Role Of Non-Pecuniary Considerations: Location Decisions Of College Graduates From Low Income Backgrounds, Yifan Gong, Todd Stinebrickner, Ralph Stinebrickner, Yuxi Yao

Centre for Human Capital and Productivity. CHCP Working Papers

We examine the initial post-college geographic location decisions of students from hometowns in the Appalachian region that often lack substantial high-skilled job opportunities, focusing on the role of non-pecuniary considerations. Novel survey questions allow us to measure the full non-pecuniary benfits of each relevant geographic location, in dollar equivalents. A new specification test is designed and implemented to provide evidence about the quality of these non-pecuniary measures. Supplementing perceived location choice probabilities and expectations about pecuniary factors with our new non-pecuniary measures allows a new approach for obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the importance of pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors for …


2022-2 A Task-Based Theory Of Occupations With Multidimensional Heterogeneity, Sergio Ocampo Jan 2022

2022-2 A Task-Based Theory Of Occupations With Multidimensional Heterogeneity, Sergio Ocampo

Centre for Human Capital and Productivity. CHCP Working Papers

I develop an assignment model of occupations with multidimensional heterogeneity in production tasks and worker skills. Tasks are distributed continuously in the skill space, whereas workers have a discrete distribution with a finite number of types. Occupations arise endogenously as bundles of tasks optimally assigned to a type of worker. The model allows us to study how occupations respond to changes in the economic environment, making it useful for analyzing the implications of automation, skill-biased technical change, offshoring, and worker training. Using the model, I characterize how wages, the marginal product of workers, the substitutability between worker types, and the …


2022-10 Computing Longitudinal Moments For Heterogeneous Agent Models, Sergio Ocampo, Baxter Robinson Jan 2022

2022-10 Computing Longitudinal Moments For Heterogeneous Agent Models, Sergio Ocampo, Baxter Robinson

Department of Economics Research Reports

Computing population moments for heterogeneous agent models is a necessary step for their estimation and evaluation. Computation based on Monte Carlo methods is usually time- and resource-consuming because it involves simulating a large sample of agents and potentially tracking them over time. We argue in favor of an alternative method for computing both cross-sectional and longitudinal moments that exploits the endogenous Markov transition function that defines the stationary distribution of agents in the model. The method relies on following the distribution of populations of interest by iterating forward the Markov transition function rather than focusing on a simulated sample of …


2022-4 Identification And Estimation Of Multinomial Choice Models With Latent Special Covariates, Nail Kashaev Jan 2022

2022-4 Identification And Estimation Of Multinomial Choice Models With Latent Special Covariates, Nail Kashaev

Department of Economics Research Reports

Identification of multinomial choice models is often established by using special covariates that have full support. This paper shows how these identification results can be extended to a large class of multinomial choice models when all covariates are bounded. I also provide a new √n-consistent asymptotically normal estimator of the finite-dimensional parameters of the model.


2022-14 Use It Or Lose It: Efficiency And Redistributional Effects Of Wealth Taxation, Fatih Guvenen, Gueorgui Kambourov, Burhan Kuruscu, Sergio Ocampo, Daphne Chen Jan 2022

2022-14 Use It Or Lose It: Efficiency And Redistributional Effects Of Wealth Taxation, Fatih Guvenen, Gueorgui Kambourov, Burhan Kuruscu, Sergio Ocampo, Daphne Chen

Department of Economics Research Reports

How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? When the return on investment is equal across individuals, a well-known result is that the two tax systems are equivalent. Motivated by recent empirical evidence documenting persistent return heterogeneity, we revisit this question. With heterogeneity, the two tax systems typically have opposite implications for both efficiency and inequality. Under capital income taxation, entrepreneurs who are more productive and therefore generate more income pay higher taxes. Under wealth taxation, entrepreneurs who have similar wealth levels pay similar taxes regardless of their productivity, which expands the tax base, shifts the tax burden toward …


Machine Learning For Stock Prediction Based On Fundamental Analysis, Yuxuan Huang, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho Dec 2021

Machine Learning For Stock Prediction Based On Fundamental Analysis, Yuxuan Huang, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Application of machine learning for stock prediction is attracting a lot of attention in recent years. A large amount of research has been conducted in this area and multiple existing results have shown that machine learning methods could be successfully used toward stock predicting using stocks’ historical data. Most of these existing approaches have focused on short term prediction using stocks’ historical price and technical indicators. In this paper, we prepared 22 years’ worth of stock quarterly financial data and investigated three machine learning algorithms: Feed-forward Neural Network (FNN), Random Forest (RF) and Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) for …


2021-2 A Category For Extensive-Form Games, Peter A. Streufert Jan 2021

2021-2 A Category For Extensive-Form Games, Peter A. Streufert

Department of Economics Research Reports

No abstract provided.


2021-6 The Inner Workings Of A Hub-And-Spoke Cartel In The Automotive Fuel Industry, Daniel Chaves, Marco Duarte Jan 2021

2021-6 The Inner Workings Of A Hub-And-Spoke Cartel In The Automotive Fuel Industry, Daniel Chaves, Marco Duarte

Department of Economics Research Reports

We analyze a hub-and-spoke cartel in the Brazilian automotivefuel industry. Using the court documents and detailed data on the supply chain we uncover three mechanisms beyond information sharing used by wholesalers (hub) to help retailers (spokes) solve the obstacles of price coordination: vertical transfers across asymmetric spokes; subsidies during punishment; and cost stabilization. We argue that wholesalers benefited from the cartel by being the exclusive supplier during the scheme. We use the synthetic control approach to quantify how successful the cartel was in increasing markups. We find that not only retailers, but wholesalers benefited from the cartel.


2021-5 Lucas (1972), A Personal View From The Wrong Side Of The Subsequent Fifty Years, David Laidler Jan 2021

2021-5 Lucas (1972), A Personal View From The Wrong Side Of The Subsequent Fifty Years, David Laidler

Department of Economics Research Reports

Lucas (1972) was a paper that permanently changed the course of macroeconomics, even though its “money supply surprise” model lost its central place in the area within a decade because of empirical difficulties. However, Lucas’s novel methodology, based on clearing markets and rational expectations, still dominates orthodox macroeconomic theorising. An unfortunate side effect of this has been that, because mainstream models have no analytic room for money to play a key role in economic activity, the theoretical case for taking that role seriously was undermined just at the time when traditional monetarist macro-models were facing empirical problems. The consequences of …


2021-2 Why Do Couples And Singles Save During Retirement?, Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, John Bailey Jones, Rory Mcgee Jan 2021

2021-2 Why Do Couples And Singles Save During Retirement?, Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, John Bailey Jones, Rory Mcgee

Centre for Human Capital and Productivity. CHCP Working Papers

No abstract provided.


2021-3 Wages, Skills, And Skill-Biased Technical Change: The Canonical Model Revisited, Audra J. Bowlus, Lance Lochner, Chris Robinson, Eda Suleymanoglu Jan 2021

2021-3 Wages, Skills, And Skill-Biased Technical Change: The Canonical Model Revisited, Audra J. Bowlus, Lance Lochner, Chris Robinson, Eda Suleymanoglu

Centre for Human Capital and Productivity. CHCP Working Papers

No abstract provided.


Investing In Entrepreneurship: The Sustainable Solution To Tunisia’S Youth Unemployment Crisis?, Hussein Noureldin Jan 2021

Investing In Entrepreneurship: The Sustainable Solution To Tunisia’S Youth Unemployment Crisis?, Hussein Noureldin

All Reports

Since the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, Tunisia’s youth unemployment crisis has worsened. As of 2020, it has the tenth highest youth unemployment rate in the world at 36.5%. Experts have long identified this as the main challenge to overcoming Tunisia’s economic woes, and reform – from the education and vocational training systems on the supply-side to the job market on the demand-side – must follow the democratic gains achieved since 2011. The failed approach in reducing regional inequality under Ben Ali had an adverse effect, creating unemployment disparities between Tunisia’s affluent coastal cities and its poorer interior regions. As such, …