Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy

Abstract In our laboratory customer markets, sellers post price and buyers incur cost (controlled at zero, low and high values) when they switch to a new seller. Sellers’ production costs follow various random walks in 28 sessions, each with 50-100 trading periods. We find that prices are sticky, and sellers absorb almost half of their cost shocks. Transaction prices are about 10 percent higher when buyers face positive switch costs, and trading efficiency is slightly impaired. Experienced buyers switch about 10 percent of the time with either high or low switch costs. Buyers switch more often when they face a higher posted price, have a lower valuation for the good, face lower switch costs, have more time remaining, and have more favorable information on alternative prices. Sellers price higher when they have more attached buyers, when buyers have less information on rivals’ prices, when rivals post higher prices, and when less time remains.

Timothy N. Cason

Daniel Friedman

Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy

A Laboratory Study of Customer Markets

客户市场实验室研究

Abstract This paper uses data on the only systematic count of the homeless throughout the United States to estimate the effect on the rate of homelessness of a wide variety of potentially important determinants, including several major policy responses to homelessness that have not been included in previous studies. It improves upon estimates of the effect of previously studied determinants by using measures that correspond more closely to underlying theoretical constructs, especially by accounting for geographical price differences. It also conducts numerous sensitivity analyses and analyzes the consequences of the undercount of the homeless for point estimates and hypothesis tests. The paper's most important finding from a policy perspective is that targeting the current budget authority for housing assistance on the poorest eligible households will essentially eliminate homelessness among those who apply for assistance. Achieving this goal promptly without concentrating the poorest households in housing projects and without spending more money requires vouchering out project-based assistance. The primary methodological finding of the paper is that the 1990 Decennial Census did not produce sufficiently accurate counts, especially of the street homeless, to permit very precise estimates of the effects of many factors which surely affect the rate of homelessness. The main exception is the price of housing. Other things equal, higher housing prices lead to more homelessness.

Dirk W. Early

Edgar O. Olsen

Subsidized Housing, Emergency Shelters, and Homelessness: An Empirical Investigation Using Data from the 1990 Census

补贴住房、紧急避难所与无家可归问题：基于1990年人口普查数据的实证研究

Abstract The progressivity of the tax system has a potentially large disincentive effect on human capital accumulation. It is thus surprising that Heckman, Lochner, and Taber (1998b, 1999a,b) represent the only previous empirical work on this important topic. I build on their work a) by accounting for the tax system when estimating the model, b) by performing welfare analysis, c) by examining the transition from one steady state to another, and d) by adding a number of robustness checks. I first estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of schooling and on-the-job training on micro data. The estimates are then used to measure the extent to which the progressivity of the tax system distorts human capital. I find a small long run effect of progressivity on schooling. I find larger short run effects, but that they are short lived. The impact of the reform on human capital acquired on the job depends on how it is measured. Under one measure the effect is large, but the consequence of this on earnings seems to be small. Perhaps surprisingly, the welfare effects are typically favorable for progressive wage taxes (with flat capital taxation) versus a flat income tax in the long run. The welfare effects are different when I examine a progressive income tax as virtually all workers prefer the flat income tax to it. I also build on Heckman, Lochner, and Taber's (1998b,1999a,b) evidence on the extent to which taxation of physical capital favors human capital investment. These simulations also yield small long run effects on schooling and on human capital stocks.

Christopher Taber

Tax Reform and Human Capital Accumulation: Evidence from an Empirical General Equilibrium Model of Skill Formation

税收改革与人力资本积累：基于技能形成实证一般均衡模型的证据

Abstract This paper estimates the effects of federal research funding on research outcomes at 68 research universities. We provide a new interpretation of the instrumental variable estimate of the coefficient in a regression of the output of an institution on an input. Absent parameter heterogeneity, it captures the total change in output when an institution obtains an additional unit of the input that may be correlated with the other inputs that affect the output measure. Our instrument for research funding is alumni representation on U.S. Congressional appropriations committees. Our results suggest an increase of $1 million in federal research funding (1996$) to a university results in 10 more articles and 0.2 more patents. The change in citations per article is negative but very small and imprecisely measured. As a first approximation, increasing federal research funding on the margin results in more, but not necessarily higher quality, research output.

A. Abigail Payne

Aloysius Siow

Does Federal Research Funding Increase University Research Output?

联邦研究经费是否增加大学研究产出？

Abstract Models of corporate behavior normally assume that a firm acts in the interest of shareholders, and that shareholders care only about the returns they receive on the shares they own in that firm. But shareholders should also care about the effects of a manager's decisions on the value of shares they own in other firms, on the price they pay as consumers for the firm's output, on the costs they bear from pollutants emitted by the firm, on the value of the firm's bonds they own, on government tax revenue that finances public expenditures benefiting shareholders, etc. These effects are normally presumed to be of second order. This paper reexamines this presumption, argues that many of these effects are likely to be important, and explores the resulting implications for forecasted corporate behavior.

Roger H. Gordon

Do Publicly Traded Corporations Act in the Public Interest?

上市公司是否为公共利益行事？

Abstract This paper proposes an analysis of both doctors and patients' behavior in an agency model that accounts for the interplay between two highly debated health issues: drug advertising toward doctors and/or patients, and the serious problem of patients' noncompliance with their doctors' prescriptions. Due to the lack of individual data, we propose a structural approach inspired from the industrial organization literature. The model is estimated semiparametrically with product level data on the U.S. market for anti-glaucoma drugs. The results suggest that doctors' prescriptions are directly influenced by the probability of noncompliance, as well as advertising aimed at both doctors and patients. Advertisement toward patients (respectively, doctors) appears to have contributed to (respectively, slowed down) the reduction of the estimated average noncompliance rate.

Olivier Armantier

Soiliou Namoro

Prescription Drug Advertising and Patient Compliance: A Physician Agency Approach

处方药广告与患者依从性：医生代理方法

Abstract Economists and marketers are often interested in estimating demand for new products and in valuing other non-market goods. Due to the increasing recognition that elicited valuations are sensitive to whether decisions are hypothetical, economists have begun to utilize incentive compatible mechanisms with real goods and real money. This paper investigates preferences expressed in two of the most popular elicitation formats: experimental auctions and discrete choice experiments. We compare the bidding behavior of consumers in four different incentive compatible auctions to the behavior of consumers who made non-hypothetical discrete choices between five goods. Despite the fact that the choice task and auction mechanisms are incentive compatible, we find that auction bids were significantly lower, as much as two times lower in many cases, than valuations implied from choices. We also find that auction data imply own-price elasticities of demand for higher quality products that are significantly more elastic than those implied from choice data. Nevertheless, for the five goods evaluated, individuals' preference orderings were consistent across value elicitation methods. These findings hold important implications for economists' view of preferences and may provide some insight into retailers' prevalent use of markets with posted-prices: individuals were more willing to part with their cash when making choices versus bids.

Jayson L Lusk

Ted C. Schroeder

Auction Bids and Shopping Choices

拍卖出价与购物选择

Abstract The conventional view holds that domestic labor, not domestic capital, bears most of the long-run burden of a corporate income tax in an open economy due to the ability of capital to move across borders. This result assumes that domestic and foreign products (as well as investments) are perfect substitutes. This paper includes imperfect product substitution within a multi-sector open-economy model, and shows that much of the burden may fall on capital. To be sure, if savings falls sufficiently, much of the burden shifts to labor, but this fact also holds in a closed economy. Hence, the debate about tax incidence must focus more on the savings response and less on whether an economy is open or closed.

Jane G Gravelle

Kent A. Smetters

Does the Open Economy Assumption Really Mean That Labor Bears the Burden of a Capital Income Tax?

开放经济假设下，资本所得税的负担真的由劳动力承担吗？

Abstract If communication involves some transactions cost to both sender and recipient, what policy ensures that correct messages -- those with positive social surplus - get sent? Filters block messages that harm recipients but benefit senders by more than transactions costs. Taxes can block positive value messages, and allow harmful messages through. In contrast, we propose an ``Attention Bond,'' allowing recipients to define a price that senders must risk to deliver the initial message.The underlying problem is first-contact information asymmetry with negative externalities. Uninformed senders waste recipient attention through message pollution. Requiring attention bonds creates an attention market, effectively applying the Coase Theorem to price this scarce resource. In this market, screening mechanisms shift the burden of message classification from recipients to senders, who know message content. Price signals can also facilitate decentralized two-sided matching. In certain limited cases, this leads to greater welfare than use of even ``perfect'' filters.

Theodore Loder

Marshall Van Alstyne

Rick Wash

An Economic Response to Unsolicited Communication

对未经请求通信的经济反应

Abstract We study second-best climate agreements in the presence of technology spillovers within and across countries, where the technology externalities within each country are corrected through a domestic subsidy of R&amp;D investments. We compare the properties of two types of international climate agreements when the inter-country externalities from R&amp;D are not regulated through the climate agreement. With an international agreement on emission quotas, the equilibrium R&amp;D subsidy is lower than the socially optimal subsidy. The equilibrium subsidy is even lower if the climate agreement instead dictates that a common carbon tax should be imposed in all countries. Under a quota agreement, total quotas should be set low enough for the price of carbon to exceed the Pigovian level, whereas the opposite may be true under a tax agreement. We also show that social costs are higher under a second-best tax agreement than under a second-best quota agreement.

Rolf Golombek

Michael Hoel

Second-Best Climate Agreements and Technology Policy

次优气候协议与技术政策

出版信息	出版商: Walter de Gruyter GmbH，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 否
基本数据	创刊年份: 2003，原创研究文献占比: ，自引率:， Gold OA占比:

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