Hidden Insurance in a Moral Hazard Economy We consider an economy where individuals privately choose effort and trade competitively priced securities that pay off with effort-determined probability. We show that if insurance against a negative shock is sufficiently incomplete, then standard functional form restrictions ensure that individual objective functions are optimized by an effort and in...

We consider inflation and debt dynamics under a global interest rate rule when private agents forecast using adaptive learning. Given the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a second, low-inflation steady state. Under learning the economy can slip below this low-inflation steady state and be driven to an even lower inflation floor s...

We investigate experimentally the economic effects of wage taxation to finance unemployment benefits for a closed economy and an international economy. The main findings are the following. (i) There is clear evidence of a vicious circle in the dynamic interaction between the wage tax and unemployment. (ii) In the short run employment is boosted by budget deficits. However, subsequent tax rate a...

An economy is presented where trade is beneficial but not assumed. If trade is to occur, it must arise endogenously as either barter or mediated trade. The role decision costs play in the development of trade is explicitly recognized. The theoretical model is examined in an experimental setting by imbedding it in a computer trading game. The data obtained from the experiments are used to examin...

A benchmark result in the political economy of taxation is that majority voting over a linear income tax schedule will result in an inefficiently high tax rate whenever the median voter has a below average income. The present paper examines the role of tax avoidance for this welfare assessment. We find that the inefficiency in the voting equilibrium is the lower, the higher the average level of...

This paper reviews the Chilean experience of growth, with particular focus on the rapid growth that began in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from the crisis of 1982. This process slowed down in the late nineties. This paper also reviews the evidence on growth and decomposes the rate of growth and the level of output into its components. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses that exp...

This paper provides a theoretical model of an open economy credit channel including currency mismatch and financial fragility where exporting firms have access to international credit but non-exporting firms do not. The impact of the crisis is predicted to be dramatically different for exporters/non-exporters. We examine firms’ access to external finance in four Asian economies after 1997 using...

Using detailed stockholding for a comprehensive sample of Chinese mutual funds from 2004 to 2009, we investigate the economy of scale and liquidity on the relation between fund size and performance. We find that there exists an inverted U-shape relation between fund size and performance accounting for various performance benchmarks. Both economy of scale and liquidity exist and play an importan...

In a finite time horizon, incomplete market, continuous-time setting with dividends and investor incomes governed by arithmetic Brownian motions, we derive closed-form solutions for the equilibrium risk-free rate and stock price for an economy with finitely many heterogeneous CARA investors and unspanned income risk. In equilibrium, the Sharpe ratio is the same as in an otherwise identical comp...

In the last decade, there are strong indications of an expansion in shadow economic activities in the Netherlands Antilles, which is caused by the high tax burden and high unemployment. This paper attempts to measure the size of the shadow economy of the Netherlands Antilles using two distinct estimation methods: the direct and indirect approach. Both methods produced similar results, showing t...