Volkswirtschaft - Open Access LMU - Teil 01/03 Archiv

Many practitioners point out that the speculative profits of institutional traders arc eroded by the difficulty in gauging the price impact of their trades. In this paper. we develop a model of strategic trading where speculators face such a dilemma because of incomplete information about time-varying market liquidity. Unlike the competitive market makers that they trade against, informed traders do not know whether the liquidity ( "noise") trades are generated from a distribution with high or low variance. Instead, they have to learn about liquidity from past prices and trading volume. Extreme price deviations from forecasts of fundamentaIs based on public news or low trading volume tend to lead to revisions of beliefs in favor of the low liquidity state. This revision in beliefs implies that strategie trades and market statistics such as informational efficiency arc path-dependent on past market outcomes. Our paper has a number of normative implications for practitioners concerned with gauging the potential price impact of their trades.

Most economic models are based on the self-interest hypothesis that assumes that all people are exclusively motivated by their material self-interest. In recent years experimental economists have gathered overwhelming evidence that systematically refutes the self-interest hypothesis and suggests that many people are strongly motivated by concerns for fairness and reciprocity. Moreover, several theoretical papers have been written showing that the observed phenomena can be explained in a rigorous and tractable manner. These theories in turn induced a new wave of experimental research offering additional exciting insights into the nature of preferences and into the relative performance of competing theories of fairness. The purpose of this paper is to review these recent developments, to point out open questions, and to suggest avenues for future research.

This paper studies the entry decision of a multinational enterprise into a foreign market. Two alternative entry modes for a foreign direct investment are considered: Greenfield investment versus acquisition. In contrast to existing approaches, the acquisition price and the profits under both entry modes are endogenously determined. Interestingly, we find that the optimal entry mode decision is a ected by the competition intensity in the market in a non-monotonic way. When markets are very much or very little competitive, greenfield investment is the optimal entry mode, while for intermediate values it is acquisition.

In this paper we use several well-being measures that combine average income with a measure of inequality to undertake international and intertemporal well-being comparisons in transition countries. Our well-being measures drastically change the impression of levels and changes in well-being from a traditional reliance on income measures. They also significantly affect the ranking of countries, when compared to rankings based on real incomes. Due to low inequality and moderate income levels, socialist countries enjoyed relatively high levels of economic well-being. In the transition process, rising inequality and falling incomes have led to a dramatic decline in well-being in many transition countries, and a corresponding worsening in rank when compared to other countries. There is great variance in the income and inequality performance of transition countries. We find a close correlation between income losses and inequality increases suggesting the ability of appropriate policies to reduce the income losses and reduce rising inequality. While the political dimension of transformation remains largely successful, our indicators suggest that most transition countries have yet to reach the level of economic well-being enjoyed in the late 1980s.

The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction with the actual pricing behavior of industrial sectors in the Ukraine in 1997. Based on pricing data of 165 barter deals we find no systematic difference in the pricing behavior in barter across sectors. What appears to matter for the pricing behavior is whether the sector is on the selling or buying end of the barter transaction. We offer an alternative explanation which sees this pricing behavior as a mechanism to deal with the absence of trust and financial discipline in the economy.

In most OECD countries, unemployment benefits are tied to individual previous labor earnings. We study the progressivity of this indexation with regard to its effects on employment, output and wages in four equilibrinin models of the labor market keeping the level of unemployment benefits fixed. In the two cases of competitive labor markets and decentralized wage bargaining, employment and output increase, while wages decrease with the degree of indexation. In the model with search unemployment and Nash wage bargaining, all wages, employment and output increase, while die indexation of employirient benefits to previous carnings has no effect in the case of efficiency wages. In addition, our results suggest that a more progressive mdexation of unemployment benefits to labor earnings is wellare enhancing.

We introduce intergenerational transfers into a general equilihrium life-cycle model in order to explain observed levels of wealth heterogeneity. In our overlapping generations model, heterogenous agents face uncertain lifetime and leave both accidental and voluntary bequests to their cinldren. Furthermore, agents face stochastic employment opportunities. The model is calibrated with regard to the characteristics of the US economy. Our resuits indicate that hequests onl account for a sniall proportion of ohserved wealth heterogeneitv. The introduction of an inheritance tax increases both welfare are measured by the average value of the newborn and equality of the wealth distribution. Preliminary versions of this paper have been presented at conference on 'Intergenerational transfers, taxes and the distribution of wealth´ in Uppsala 1999 and the Econoinetric Societv European Meetirig in Santiago dc Compostela 1999. We would like to thank Michael Kaganovieli. John Laitner, James Smith, Frank Stafford, and Carl Cristian von Weizsäcker for comments on earlier versions of the paper. All remaining errors are ours.

This paper combines the recent garne theoretic approach of endogenous timing of entry to herding models with a rnacroeconornic model of investrnent cycles. The integrated description embodies the qualitative resuits of the rnyopic herding model in a medium run investment objective of smooth ing the capital stock adjustment process. lt features a completely disaggregated structure and bears the potential to synchronize individual cyclic investing be haviors. This synchronization via nonlinear feedback from the aggregate ac tivity can serve as an explanation of the inexistent cancelling of heterogeneous sectoral quasi-cycles. The model others an explanatory base for the constitu tion of the observed strong cyclicality of the aggregate investment series by a multitude of different periodicities and phases on the individual level. Finally, based on recent ndings of the herding literature, the stabilization potential of third parties' information revelation is conjectured.

During the last decade, there has been a significant bias towards bond financing on emerging markets, with private investors relying on a bail-out of bonds by the international community. The bias has been a main cause for recent excessive fragility of international capital markets. The paper shows how collective action clauses in bonds contracts help to involve the private sector in risk sharing. It argues that such clauses, as a market based instrument, will raise spreads for emerging market debt and so help to correct a market failure towards excessive bond finance. Recent pressure by the IMF to involve the private sector is facing a conflict between the principle to honour existing contracts and the principle of equal treatment of bondholders.

In this paper we survey the common explanations of barter in transition economies and expose them to detailed survey data on 165 barter deals in Ukraine in 1997. The evidence does not support the notion that soft budget constraints, lack of restructuring, or that the virtual economy are the driving forces behind barter. Further, tax avoidance is only weakly associated with the incidence of barter in Ukraine. We then explore an alternative explanation of barter as a mechanism to address transitional challenges where capital markets and economic institutions are poorly developed. First, barter helps to maintain production by creating a deal-specific collateral which softens the liquidity squeeze in the economy when credit enforcement is prohibitively costly. Second, barter helps to maintain production by preventing firms to be exploited by their input suppliers when suppliers' bargaining position is very strong due to high costs of switching suppliers. Thus, in the absence of trust and functioning capital markets barter is a self-enforcing response to imperfect input and financial markets in the former Soviet Union. The paper concludes by discussing potential long-term costs of barter arrangements, and by suggesting particular pitfalls of expansionary monetary policy in barter economies such as Ukraine and Russia.

The paper analyzes the incentive for the ECB to establish reputation by pursuing a restrictive policy right at the start of its operation. The bank is modelled as risk averse with respect to deviations of both inflation and output from her target. The public, being imperfectly informed about the bank’s preferences uses observed inflation as (imperfect) signal for the unknown preferences. Under linear learning rules - which are commonly used in the literature - a gradual build up of reputation is the optimal response. The paper shows that such a linear learning rule is not consistent with efficient signaling. It is shown that in a game with efficient signaling, a cold turkey approach - allowing for deflation - is optimal for a strong bank - accepting high current output losses at the beginning in order to demonstrate its toughness.

A derivative asset is a security whose payoff is entirely determined by the prices of one or more underlying securities. Call and put options on stocks are simple examples. Since 1973, when Black and Scholes published their path-breaking option price formula, a rapidly growing literature has dealt with the valuation of derivatives for various models of the underlying price processes. Some researchers have studied the converse problem. They seek to infer properties of the underlying asset price from given prices of derivatives. The properties of the underlying price which are relevant for valuation purposes can be summarised in what are referred to as Arrow-Debreu state prices. These are the prices of elementary securities that pay one unit if the realisation of the underlying price path belongs to some specified set, and nothing otherwise. Breeden and Litzenberger showed in 1978 that a subset of these state prices can indeed be inferred from a sufficiently large collection of option prices. In a similar spirit, the present paper investigates the restrictions which a pricing formula for a derivative asset imposes on the underlying price processes. The valuation formulae considered satisfy a partial differential equation which is common in the literature on derivatives. It is shown that such formulae uniquely determine the full set of state prices. In contrast to Breeden and Litzenberger's work, the approach chosen does not rely on the particular payoff profiles of standard options, but allows for arbitrary derivative assets. In the last part of the paper, the general result is used to analyse two types of valuation formulae for options on pure discount bonds. The analysis yields a characterisation of the interest rate behaviour implicit in the valuation formulae and highlights the shortcomings of either type of formula

This note, published in 1995, assesses the problems that might be entailed by the introduction of the European monetary union. It is argued that wage pressure will not be diminished by forming the union, and the stagflation problem that lies at the root of the rising trend in unemployment will persist. As exchange rates cannot serve to compensate different wage developments in the monetary union, imbalances will result, and subsidization less competitive member states will be necessary. An indexation of wage settlements is proposed that, similar to exchange rates, permits to compensate divergent developments in wage rates across member states while maintaining the monetary union.

This paper develops a theory of stagflation, based on turnover-efficiency-wage theory. In these theories, wages are forward-looking, i.e., set to keep incumbents with the firm. The employed workers apply for better jobs and compete with unemployed applicants. An employed applicant is, however, preferred to an unemployed applicant, or the long-term unemployed, who, with their outdated skills, form an essentially non-competing group. Consider now the case that the monetary authority succeeds in stabilizing the price level permanently. Start from efficiency-wage unemployment equilibrium. The skills of the unemployed will, after a while, become outdated. This reduces the „effective” rate of unemployment and causes the labor market to tighten. Turnover increases, and the former equilibrium is destroyed. The individual firm will raise wages in order to reduce turnover costs. Costs increase, causing prices to also increase. The monetary authority reacts with restrictive policies, and unemployment increases. This leads to a new turnover-efficiency-wage equilibrium, and the process continues. The argument implies that wage inflation emerges after a while at all employment levels. This paper concludes by discussing some of the consequent policy implications.