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Articles 121 - 150 of 207

Full-Text Articles in Economic Theory

Precautionary Saving With Changing Income Ambiguity, Atsushi Kajii, Jingyi Xue Jun 2016

Precautionary Saving With Changing Income Ambiguity, Atsushi Kajii, Jingyi Xue

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study a two-period saving model where theagent’s future income might be ambiguous. Our agent has a version of the smoothambiguity decision criterion (Klibano, Marinacci and Mukerji (2005)), where theagent’s perception about ambiguity is described by a second-order belief overfirst-order risks. We model increasing ambiguity as a spreading-out of thesecond-order belief. We show that under a “Risk Comonotonicity” condition, ouragent saves more when ambiguity in future income increases. We argue that thecondition is indispensable for our result.


Efficient Dynamic Mechanisms With Interdependent Valuations, Wei He, Jiangtao Li May 2016

Efficient Dynamic Mechanisms With Interdependent Valuations, Wei He, Jiangtao Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper considers a dynamic environment with interdependent valuations and evolving private information. Under the assumption of “independent types”, we construct an efficient, incentive-compatible mechanism that is also budget-balanced in every period of the game. Our mechanism works in environments where in each period, each agent observes her own realized outcome-decision payoff from the previous period. This extends the insight of Mezzetti (2004) to the dynamic setting.


Three Essays On Random Mechanism Design, Huaxia Zeng May 2016

Three Essays On Random Mechanism Design, Huaxia Zeng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies a standard voting formulation with randomization. Formally, there is a finite set of voters, a finite set of alternatives and a lottery space over the alternative set. Each voter has a strict preference over alternatives. The domain of preferences contains all admissible preferences. Every voter reports a preference in the domain; a preference profile is generated; and the social lottery then is determined by a Random Social Choice Function (or RSCF). This dissertation focuses on RSCFs which provide every voter incentives to truthfully reveal her preference, and hence follows the formulation of strategyproofness in [26] which requires …


A Characterization Of Single‐Peaked Preferences Via Random Social Choice Functions, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng May 2016

A Characterization Of Single‐Peaked Preferences Via Random Social Choice Functions, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proves the following result: every path-connected domain of preferences that admits a strategy-proof, unanimous, tops-only random social choice function satisfying a compromise property is single-peaked. Conversely, every single-peaked domain admits a random social choice function satisfying these properties. Single-peakedness is defined with respect to arbitrary trees. The paper provides a justification of the salience of single-peaked preferences and evidence in favor of the Gul conjecture (Barber\303\240 2010).


Entrepreneurship, Education And Credit: The Golden Triangle, Roberto M. Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun Apr 2016

Entrepreneurship, Education And Credit: The Golden Triangle, Roberto M. Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a model to evaluate the impact of college education finance on welfare, inequality and aggregate outcomes. Our model captures the stylized fact that entrepreneurs with college are more common and more profitable. Our calibration to US data suggests this is mainly because higher labor earnings allow college educated agents to ameliorate credit constraints when they become entrepreneurs. The welfare benefits of subsidizing education are greater than those of eliminating financing constraints on education because subsidies ameliorate the impact of financing constraints on would-be entrepreneurs.


Entrepreneurship, College And Credit: The Golden Triangle, Roberto M Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun Apr 2016

Entrepreneurship, College And Credit: The Golden Triangle, Roberto M Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a model to evaluate the impact of college education finance on welfare, inequality and aggregate outcomes. Our model captures the stylized fact that entrepreneurs with college are more common and more profitable. Our calibration to US data suggests this is mainly because higher labor earnings allow college educated agents to ameliorate credit constraints when they become entrepreneurs. The welfare benefits of subsidizing education are greater than those of eliminating financing constraints on education because subsidies ameliorate the impact of financing constraints on would-be entrepreneurs.


Implementation With Transfers, Yi-Chun Chen, Takashi Kunimoto, Yifei Sun Mar 2016

Implementation With Transfers, Yi-Chun Chen, Takashi Kunimoto, Yifei Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

We say that a social choice rule is implementable with (small) transfers if one candesign a mechanism whose set of equilibrium outcomes coincides with that speciÖed bythe rule but the mechanism allows for (small) ex post transfers among the players. Weshow in private-value environments that any incentive compatible rule is implementablewith small transfers. We obtain this permissive implementation result by proposinga natural extension of Abreu and Matsushima (1994) to incomplete information environments.Furthermore, in order to showcase the applicability of our results, we relatethem to the recent developments in implementation theory. Next we revisit the conjectureby Abreu and Matsushima (1994), who …


Model Selection For Explosive Models, Yubo Tao, Jun Yu Mar 2016

Model Selection For Explosive Models, Yubo Tao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the limit properties of information criteria for distinguishing between the unit root model and the various kinds of explosive models. The information criteria include AIC, BIC, HQIC. The explosive models include the local-to-unit-root model, the mildly explosive model and the regular explosive model. Initial conditions with different order of magnitude are considered. Both the OLS estimator and the indirect inference estimator are studied. It is found that BIC and HQIC, but not AIC, consistently select the unit root model when data come from the unit root model. When data come from the local-to-unit-root model, both BIC and …


Constrained Inefficiency And Optimal Taxation With Uninsurable Risks, Piero Gottardi, Atsushi Kajii, Tomoyuki Nakajima Feb 2016

Constrained Inefficiency And Optimal Taxation With Uninsurable Risks, Piero Gottardi, Atsushi Kajii, Tomoyuki Nakajima

Research Collection School Of Economics

When individuals' labor and capital income are subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risks, should capital and labor be taxed, and if so how? In a two-period general equilibrium model with production, we derive a decomposition formula of the welfare effects of these taxes into insurance and distribution effects. This allows us to determine how the sign of the optimal taxes on capital and labor depend on the nature of the shocks and the degree of heterogeneity among consumers' income, as well as on the way in which the tax revenue is used to provide lump-sum transfers to consumers. When shocks affect …


Robust Information Cascade With Endogenous Ordering, Yi Zhang Jan 2016

Robust Information Cascade With Endogenous Ordering, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We analyze a sequential decision model with endogenous ordering in which decision makers are allowed to choose the time of acting (exercising a risky investment option) or waiting. We show the existence of a unique symmetric equilibrium and characterize information cascade under endogenous ordering. Further, if there are two or more risky investment options, individuals tend to wait longer with competition. Hence, we could end up with a dilemma: more options might be worse.


Optimal Taxation And Debt With Uninsurable Risks To Human Capital Accumulation, Piero Gottardi, Atsushi Kajii, Tomoyuki Nakajima Nov 2015

Optimal Taxation And Debt With Uninsurable Risks To Human Capital Accumulation, Piero Gottardi, Atsushi Kajii, Tomoyuki Nakajima

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation and analyze the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of government debt. We show that in the presence of such risks, it is beneficial to tax both labor and capital and to issue public debt. We also assess the quantitative importance of these findings, and show that the benefits of government debt and capital taxes both increase with the magnitude of idiosyncratic risks and the degree of relative risk aversion.


Agreeing To Agree And Dutch Books, Yi-Chun Chen, Ehud Lehrer, Jiangtao Li, Dov Samet, Eran Shmaya Sep 2015

Agreeing To Agree And Dutch Books, Yi-Chun Chen, Ehud Lehrer, Jiangtao Li, Dov Samet, Eran Shmaya

Research Collection School Of Economics

We say that agreeing to agree is possible for an event E if there exist posterior beliefs of the agents with a common prior such that it is common knowledge that the agents' posteriors for E coincide. We propose a notion called Dutch book which is a profile of interim contracts between an outsider and the agents based on the occurrence of E, such that the outsider makes positive profit in all states. We show that in a finite state space, when the agents cannot tell whether Eoccurred or not, agreeing to agree is possible for E if and only …


Wealth Inequality And Financial Development: Revisiting The Symmetry Breaking Mechanism, Haiping Zhang Sep 2015

Wealth Inequality And Financial Development: Revisiting The Symmetry Breaking Mechanism, Haiping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.


Inefficiency In The Shadow Of Unobservable Reservation Payoffs, Madhav S. Aney Apr 2015

Inefficiency In The Shadow Of Unobservable Reservation Payoffs, Madhav S. Aney

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper considers the problem of allocating an object between two players in an environment with one sided asymmetric information when their reservation payoffs depend on the type of the informed player, causing the reservation payoff of the uninformed player to be unobservable to her. Inefficiency arises naturally in this setting and can be characterized by a simple condition on the reservation payoffs that is necessary and sufficient. I derive the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an implementable allocation that at least weakly dominates the reservation payoffs. Under a mild assumption on the distribution of types, I …


Nonparametric Testing For Anomaly Effects In Empirical Asset Pricing Models, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su, Yonghui Zhang Feb 2015

Nonparametric Testing For Anomaly Effects In Empirical Asset Pricing Models, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su, Yonghui Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we propose a class of nonparametric tests for anomaly effects in empirical asset pricing models in the framework of nonparametric panel data models with interactive fixed effects. Our approach has two prominent features: one is the adoption of nonparametric functional form to capture the anomaly effects of some asset-specific characteristics and the other is the flexible treatment of both observed/constructed and unobserved common factors. By estimating the unknown factors, betas, and nonparametric function simultaneously, our setup is robust to misspecification of functional form and common factors and avoids the well-known "error-in-variable" problem associated with the commonly used …


A Class Of Symmetric And Quadratic Utility Functions Generating Giffen Demand, Massimiliano Landi Jan 2015

A Class Of Symmetric And Quadratic Utility Functions Generating Giffen Demand, Massimiliano Landi

Research Collection School Of Economics

I provide a simple example of a quadratic utility function that generates a Giffen demand. The utility function is symmetric, increasing and concave. Interestingly, the Giffen effect arises in the subspace where the utility function is strictly increasing and strictly concave. A full characterization of the parameter conditions under which the Giffen demand arises is provided.


It’S Not Will You Succeed? But Can You Afford To Fail?, Girija Pande Nov 2014

It’S Not Will You Succeed? But Can You Afford To Fail?, Girija Pande

Asian Management Insights

With India and China’s economic ties no longer defined only by trade, the countries’ convergence is opening up new opportunities and challenges for businesses on either side seeking to cross the Sino-Indian border.


Mind The Liquidity Gap: Building A Better Capital Market For You, Kaushik Rudra Nov 2014

Mind The Liquidity Gap: Building A Better Capital Market For You, Kaushik Rudra

Asian Management Insights

Asian banks in most jurisdictions are currently more than adequately capitalised with respect to Basel III. However, as they are called upon to support the region’s economic growth over the next decade, they are likely to run up against capital constraints.


Optimal City Hierarchy: A Dynamic Programming Approach To Central Place Theory, Wen-Tai Hsu, Thomas J. Holmes, Frank Morgan Nov 2014

Optimal City Hierarchy: A Dynamic Programming Approach To Central Place Theory, Wen-Tai Hsu, Thomas J. Holmes, Frank Morgan

Research Collection School Of Economics

Central place theory is a key building block of economic geography and an empirically plausible description of city systems. This paper provides a rationale for central place theory via a dynamic programming formulation of the social planner's problem of city hierarchy. We show that there must be one and only one immediate smaller city between two neighboring larger-sized cities in any optimal solution. If the fixed cost of setting up a city is a power function, then the immediate smaller city will be located in the middle, confirming the locational pattern suggested by Christaller. We also show that the solution …


A Characterization Of Single-Peaked Preferences Via Random Social Choice Functions, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng Sep 2014

A Characterization Of Single-Peaked Preferences Via Random Social Choice Functions, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper proves the following result: every path-connected domain of preferences that admits a strategy-proof, unanimous, tops-only random social choice function satisfying a compromise property, is single-peaked. Conversely, every single-peaked domain admits a random social choice function satisfying these properties. Single-peakedness is defined with respect to arbitrary trees. We also show that a maximal domain that admits a strategy-proof, unanimous, tops-only random social choice function satisfying a stronger version of the compromise property, is single-peaked on a line. A converse to this result also holds. The paper provides justification of the salience of single-peaked preferences and evidence in favour of …


Econometric Analysis Of Continuous Time Models: A Survey Of Peter Phillips' Work And Some New Results, Jun Yu Aug 2014

Econometric Analysis Of Continuous Time Models: A Survey Of Peter Phillips' Work And Some New Results, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Econometric analysis of continuous time models has drawn the attention of Peter Phillips for 40 years, resulting in many important publications by him. In these publications he has dealt with a wide range of continuous time models and the associated econometric problems. He has investigated problems from univariate equations to systems of equations, from asymptotic theory to finite sample issues, from parametric models to nonparametric models, from identification problems to estimation and inference problems, from stationary models to nonstationary and nearly nonstationary models. This paper provides an overview of Peter Phillips' contributions in the continuous time econometrics literature. We review …


Unilateral Emissions Mitigation, Spillovers, And Global Learning, Shurojit Chatterji, Sayantan Ghosal, Sean Walsh, John Whalley Aug 2014

Unilateral Emissions Mitigation, Spillovers, And Global Learning, Shurojit Chatterji, Sayantan Ghosal, Sean Walsh, John Whalley

Research Collection School Of Economics

What's the role of unilateral measures in global climate change mitigation in a post-Durban, post 2012 global policy regime? We argue that under conditions of preference heterogeneity, unilateral emissions mitigation at a subnational level may exist even when a nation is unwilling to commit to emission cuts. We establish that under certain assumptions, in a global strongly connected network of countries, learning the costs of switching to a low emissions activity can result in a universal adoption of such activities. We analyze the features of a policy proposal that could accelerate convergence to a low carbon world in the presence …


Random Dictatorship Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng Jul 2014

Random Dictatorship Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

A domain of preference orderings is a random dictatorship domain if every strategy-proof random social choice function satisfying unanimity defined on the domain is a random dictatorship. Gibbard (1977) showed that the universal domain is a random dictatorship domain. We ask whether an arbitrary dictatorial domain is a random dictatorship domain and show that the answer is negative by constructing dictatorial domains that admit anonymous, unanimous, strategy-proof random social choice functions which are not random dictatorships. Our result applies to the constrained voting model. Lastly, we show that substantial strengthenings of linked domains (a class of dictatorial domains introduced in …


A Theory Of Aggregate Consumption, Yun K. Kim, Mark Setterfield, Yuan Mei Apr 2014

A Theory Of Aggregate Consumption, Yun K. Kim, Mark Setterfield, Yuan Mei

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a Keynesian model of aggregate consumption. Our theory emphasizes the importance of the relative income hypothesis and debt finance for understanding household consumption behavior. It is shown that particular importance attaches to how net debtor households service their debts, and that the treatment of debt-servicing commitments as a substitute for savings by these households creates the potential for 'sudden stops' in consumption spending (and hence aggregate demand).


Interim Equilibrium Implementation, Takashi Kunimoto Mar 2014

Interim Equilibrium Implementation, Takashi Kunimoto

Research Collection School Of Economics

A social choice rule is said to be implementable if one can design a mechanism(or institution) in which the set of outcomes prescribed by a given solutionconcept coincides with that specified by the social choice rule. I adoptinterim equilibrium (i.e., Bayesian Nash equilibrium where each agent’s interimbeliefs do not necessarily admit a prior) as the solution concept andinvestigate the corresponding implementation problem in general incompleteinformation environments. I identify arguably the weakest set of conditionsunder which implementation in interim equilibrium is possible. By doingso, I also unify the literature of the so-called Bayesian implementation andNash implementation.


A State Space Model Approach To Integrated Covariance Matrix Estimation With High Frequency Data, Cheng Liu, Cheng Yong Tang Dec 2013

A State Space Model Approach To Integrated Covariance Matrix Estimation With High Frequency Data, Cheng Liu, Cheng Yong Tang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We consider a state space model approach forhigh frequency financial data analysis. An expectationmaximization(EM) algorithm is developed for estimatingthe integrated covariance matrix of the assets. The statespace model with the EM algorithm can handle noisy financialdata with correlated microstructure noises. Difficultydue to asynchronous and irregularly spaced trading data ofmultiple assets can be naturally overcome by consideringthe problem in a scenario with missing data. Since the statespace model approach requires no data synchronization, norecord in the financial data is deleted so that it efficientlyincorporates information from all observations. Empiricaldata analysis supports the general specification of the statespace model, and simulations confirm …


Egalitarian Division Under Leontief Preferences, Jin Li, Jingyi Xue Nov 2013

Egalitarian Division Under Leontief Preferences, Jin Li, Jingyi Xue

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider the problem of fairly dividing l divisible goods among n agents with the generalized Leontief preferences. We propose and characterize the class of generalized egalitarian rules which satisfy efficiency, group strategy-proofness, anonymity, resource monotonicity, population monotonicity, envy-freeness and consistency. On the Leontief domain, our rules generalize the egalitarian-equivalent rules with reference bundles. We also extend our rules to agent-specific and endowment-specific egalitarian rules. The former is a larger class of rules satisfying all the previous properties except anonymity and envy-freeness. The latter is a class of efficient, group strategy-proof, anonymous and individually rational rules when the resources are …


Robust Virtual Implementation With Almost Complete Information, Takashi Kunimoto Oct 2013

Robust Virtual Implementation With Almost Complete Information, Takashi Kunimoto

Research Collection School Of Economics

Artemov, Kunimoto, and Serrano (2013a,b, henceforth, AKS) study amechanism design problem where arbitrary restrictions are placed on the setof first-order beliefs of agents. Calling these restrictions Δ, they adopt Δ-rationalizability (Battigalli and Siniscalchi (2003)) and show that Δ-incentivecompatibility and Δ-measurability are necessary and sufficient conditions forrobust virtual implementation. By appropriately defining Δ in order to restrictattention to complete information environments, I exploit the implicationsof AKS and show that the permissive implementation result of Abreu andMatsushima (1992a) is robust to how the underlying type space is specified.However, AKS need to fix a complete information environment throughouttheir analysis and therefore does not …


Volatility Occupation Times, Jia Li, Viktor Todorov, George Tauchen Aug 2013

Volatility Occupation Times, Jia Li, Viktor Todorov, George Tauchen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose nonparametric estimators of the occupation measure and the occupation density of the diffusion coefficient (stochastic volatility) of a discretely observed Itô semimartingale on a fixed interval when the mesh of the observation grid shrinks to zero asymptotically. In a first step we estimate the volatility locally over blocks of shrinking length, and then in a second step we use these estimates to construct a sample analogue of the volatility occupation time and a kernel-based estimator of its density. We prove the consistency of our estimators and further derive bounds for their rates of convergence. We use these results …


Economic Indices: Managing By The Numbers, Singapore Management University Jul 2013

Economic Indices: Managing By The Numbers, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Understanding indices is not just about crunching numbers, but appreciating how it is constructed