Sharing Rule Identification for General Collective Consumption Models

We propose a method to set identify bounds on the sharing rule for a general collective household consumption model. Unlike the effects of distribution factors, the level of the sharing rule cannot be uniquely identified without strong assumptions on preferences across households. Our new results show that, though not point identified without these assumptions, strong bounds on the sharing rule can be obtained. We get these bounds by applying revealed preference restrictions implied by the collective model to the household's continuous aggregate demand functions. We obtain informative bounds even if nothing is known about whether each good is public, private, or assignable within the household, though having such information tightens the bounds. We apply our method to US PSID data, obtaining narrow bounds that yield useful conclusions regarding the effects of income and wages on intrahousehold resource sharing, and on the prevalence of individual (as opposed to household level) poverty.     

房价上涨、家庭债务与城镇居民消费:贷款价值比的视角

家庭借贷是缓解居民支大于收、平缓消费的重要手段，而贷款价值比的约束迫使家庭的债务规模必须控制在一定的范围之内；与此同时，持续上涨的房价不断逼近贷款价值比约束，最终表现为消费的大幅度波动。基于家庭追踪调查（CFPS）微观数据，本文细致考察了房价上涨、家庭债务对城镇居民消费的影响。结果表明：（1）家庭债务对城镇居民消费的杠杆显著，即使将样本细分为有房家庭与无房家庭，杠杆效应依然显著；（2）持续上涨的房价将显著促进有房家庭的消费，且这正向作用将被贷款价值比放大；而上涨的房价将抑制无房家庭的消费。（3）无论是有房家庭还是无房家庭，贷款价值比对居民消费的作用存在明显的门槛效应，即只有当贷款价值比增大到一定水平时，其对居民消费的影响将由促进转为抑制。（4）房价上涨对城镇居民消费的作用在不同群体间差异明显，受教育程度高的城镇家庭，或者持有二套房以上的家庭，房价上涨对城镇居民消费的促进效应更强。     

住房价格波动对城镇居民消费的影响分析

将城镇居民家庭分为拥有至少两套住房的家庭(代表性家庭1)、只有一套住房的家庭(代表性家庭2)和没有住房的租房家庭(代表性家庭3)3类,微观经济模型分析表明:住房价格上涨会拉动代表性家庭1和代表性家庭2的消费增长;当代表性家庭3有购买住房意愿和计划时,住房价格上涨对其消费具有挤出效应;当代表性家庭3没有购买住房意愿和计划时,其消费随着住房价格的上升而增加;住房价格上涨影响居民消费的程度与家庭当前消费水平、住房价格、居住面积、消费习惯、对待风险的态度和利率等因素有关.利用中国家庭金融调查(CHFS)数据的实证分析表明:住房价格上涨对代表性家庭1、代表性家庭2和代表性家庭3这3类家庭的消费均具有促进作用;从影响程度来看,对无房城镇家庭的影响程度最大,对仅有一套住房城镇家庭的影响程度最小;从地域来看,房价上涨对东部地区城镇居民家庭消费的影响高于中西部地区.     

A Structural Evaluation of a Large‐Scale Quasi‐Experimental Microfinance Initiative

This paper uses a structural model to understand, predict, and evaluate the impact of an exogenous microcredit intervention program, the Thai Million Baht Village Fund program. We model household decisions in the face of borrowing constraints, income uncertainty, and high‐yield indivisible investment opportunities. After estimation of parameters using preprogram data, we evaluate the model's ability to predict and interpret the impact of the village fund intervention. Simulations from the model mirror the data in yielding a greater increase in consumption than credit, which is interpreted as evidence of credit constraints. A cost–benefit analysis using the model indicates that some households value the program much more than its per household cost, but overall the program costs 30 percent more than the sum of these benefits.     

Farms,Families, and Markets: New Evidence on Completeness of Markets in Agricultural Settings

The farm household model has played a central role in improving the understanding of small‐scale agricultural households and non‐farm enterprises. Under the assumptions that all current and future markets exist and that farmers treat all prices as given, the model simplifies households' simultaneous production and consumption decisions into a recursive form in which production can be treated as independent of preferences of household members. These assumptions, which are the foundation of a large literature in labor and development, have been tested and not rejected in several important studies including Benjamin (1992). Using multiple waves of longitudinal survey data from Central Java, Indonesia, this paper tests a key prediction of the recursive model: demand for farm labor is unrelated to the demographic composition of the farm household. The prediction is unambiguously rejected. The rejection cannot be explained by contamination due to unobserved heterogeneity that is fixed at the farm level, local area shocks, or farm‐specific shocks that affect changes in household composition and farm labor demand. We conclude that the recursive form of the farm household model is not consistent with the data. Developing empirically tractable models of farm households when markets are incomplete remains an important challenge.     

Consumption Commitments and Habit Formation

We analyze the implications of household‐level adjustment costs for the dynamics of aggregate consumption. We show that an economy in which agents have “consumption commitments” is approximately equivalent to a habit formation model in which the habit stock is a weighted average of past consumption if idiosyncratic risk is large relative to aggregate risk. Consumption commitments can thus explain the empirical regularity that consumption is excessively sensitive and excessively smooth, findings that are typically attributed to habit formation. Unlike habit formation and other theories, but consistent with empirical evidence, the consumption commitments model also predicts that excess sensitivity and smoothness vanish for large shocks. These results suggest that behavior previously attributed to habit formation may be better explained by adjustment costs. We develop additional testable predictions to further distinguish the commitment and habit models and show that the two models have different welfare implications.     

2 Untapped Potential in the Study of Negotiation and Gender Inequality in Organizations

Abstract

Negotiation is a process that creates, reinforces, and reduces gender inequality in organizations, yet the study of gender in negotiation has little connection to the study of gender in organizations. We review the literature on gender in job negotiations from psychology and organizational behavior, and propose ways in which this literature could speak more directly to gender inequality in organizations by incorporating insights from research on gender in intra‐household and collective bargaining. Taken together, these literatures illuminate how negotiations at the individual, household, and collective levels may contribute to the construction and deconstruction of gender inequality in organizations.     

Modelling multibrand consumption

In this article a model for the multibrand consumption of fast moving non-durable consumer goods is presented. The model is derived by the mixing of a multinomial distribution (representing the brand consumption probabilities of an individual household) with the continuous multivariate Beta (Dirichlet) distribution (which allows for differences between households). The core of the analysis involves the use of complete bivariate tables. The model is shown to provide an adequate representation of a set of consumption data and to satisfactorily estimate the various brand market shares.     

A Model of the Consumption Response to Fiscal Stimulus Payments

A wide body of empirical evidence finds that approximately 25 percent of fiscal stimulus payments (e.g., tax rebates) are spent on nondurable household consumption in the quarter that they are received. To interpret this fact, we develop a structural economic model where households can hold two assets: a low‐return liquid asset (e.g., cash, checking account) and a high‐return illiquid asset that carries a transaction cost (e.g., housing, retirement account). The optimal life‐cycle pattern of portfolio choice implies that many households in the model are “wealthy hand‐to‐mouth”: they hold little or no liquid wealth despite owning sizable quantities of illiquid assets. Therefore, they display large propensities to consume out of additional transitory income, and small propensities to consume out of news about future income. We document the existence of such households in data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. A version of the model parameterized to the 2001 tax rebate episode yields consumption responses to fiscal stimulus payments that are in line with the evidence, and an order of magnitude larger than in the standard “one‐asset” framework. The model's nonlinearities with respect to the rebate size and the prevailing aggregate economic conditions have implications for policy design.     

RISK SHARING WITH LIMITED COMMITMENT AND PREFERENCE HETEROGENEITY: STRUCTURAL ESTIMATION AND TESTING

In order to analyze the role of limited commitment and preference heterogeneity in explaining the consumption allocation, I propose a theoretical and empirical framework to estimate and evaluate a risk‐sharing model where insurance transfers have to be self‐enforcing and the coefficient of relative risk aversion may depend on observable household characteristics. I compare this model to benchmark models with full commitment and/or without preference heterogeneity using data from three Indian villages. I find that the limited commitment model with heterogeneous preferences outperforms the benchmark models in a statistical sense and in terms of (i) explaining the dynamic response of consumption to idiosyncratic income shocks, (ii) accounting for the variation of consumption unexplained by household and time effects, and (iii) capturing the variation of inequality across time and villages and predicting changes in inequality. I also use the estimated models to predict the effects of a counterfactual tax and transfer policy on the consumption allocation. The limited commitment model with preference heterogeneity predicts larger benefits to the poor than its homogeneous counterpart. (JEL: C52, D10, D52)     

INTERTEMPORAL CHOICE AND CONSUMPTION MOBILITY

The theory of intertemporal consumption choice makes sharp predictions about the evolution of the entire distribution of household consumption, not just about its conditional mean. In the paper, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We estimate the parameters that minimize the distance between the empirical and the theoretical transition matrix of the consumption distribution. The transition matrix generated by our estimates matches remarkably well the empirical matrix, both in the aggregate and in samples stratified by education. Our estimates strongly reject the consumption insurance model and suggest that households smooth income shocks to a lesser extent than implied by the permanent income hypothesis. (JEL: D52, D91, I30)     

Consumption Over the Life Cycle

This paper estimates a structural model of optimal life‐cycle consumption expenditures in the presence of realistic labor income uncertainty. We employ synthetic cohort techniques and Consumer Expenditure Survey data to construct average age‐profiles of consumption and income over the working lives of typical households across different education and occupation groups. The model fits the profiles quite well. In addition to providing reasonable estimates of the discount rate and risk aversion, we find that consumer behavior changes strikingly over the life cycle. Young consumers behave as buffer‐stock agents. Around age 40, the typical household starts accumulating liquid assets for retirement and its behavior mimics more closely that of a certainty equivalent consumer. Our methodology provides a natural decomposition of saving and wealth into its precautionary and life‐cycle components.     

Quantitative Risk Assessment of Listeria monocytogenes in French Cold-Smoked Salmon: I. Quantitative Exposure Assessment

A quantitative assessment of the exposure to Listeria monocytogenes from cold-smoked salmon (CSS) consumption in France is developed. The general framework is a second-order (or two-dimensional) Monte Carlo simulation, which characterizes the uncertainty and variability of the exposure estimate. The model takes into account the competitive bacterial growth between L. monocytogenes and the background competitive flora from the end of the production line to the consumer phase. An original algorithm is proposed to integrate this growth in conditions of varying temperature. As part of a more general project led by the French Food Safety Agency (Afssa), specific data were acquired and modeled for this quantitative exposure assessment model, particularly time-temperature profiles, prevalence data, and contamination-level data. The sensitivity analysis points out the main influence of the mean temperature in household refrigerators and the prevalence of contaminated CSS on the exposure level. The outputs of this model can be used as inputs for further risk assessment.     

华氏宏观经济模型的推广

本文对华罗庚教授的宏观经济模型进行了推广,在原来模型的基础上,增加了消费和投资,得到一种推广的模型,并对模型具有经济意义的解进行了研究,得到模型的均衡增长解。当消费和投资满足一定条件时,模型具有经济意义的解是唯一的。     

整体环境和个体关联对群体性事件产生与演化的影响

对群体性事件产生与演化规律的研究已经成为社会管理的重要主题,而发展迅速的计算社会学方法为深入研究这一问题提供了新的途径。在已有研究的基础上,通过考察群体性事件的部分案例,可以发现个体对政府的信任程度、个体利益诉求渠道和社会普遍情绪这些内生性因素构成了群体性事件发生的整体环境要素,这些内生性因素的存在和组合达到一定水平,就构成了群体性事件发生的重要条件,而在这些宏观条件下,个体之间通过社会网络产生的关联和相互作用对群体事件的产生与演化也有重要影响。通过基于社会网络的计算社会学模型的模拟检验,本文对群体性事件的产生与演化进行了计算分析,讨论了整体环境和个体关联的各要素的作用,获得了部分内生性因素在其他条件既定时引发群体性事件的临界值。研究工作为进一步研究群体性事件的演化与形成机制提供了必要的模型基础。     

A Quantitative Theory of Unsecured Consumer Credit with Risk of Default

We study, theoretically and quantitatively, the general equilibrium of an economy in which households smooth consumption by means of both a riskless asset and unsecured loans with the option to default. The default option resembles a bankruptcy filing under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Competitive financial intermediaries offer a menu of loan sizes and interest rates wherein each loan makes zero profits. We prove the existence of a steady‐state equilibrium and characterize the circumstances under which a household defaults on its loans. We show that our model accounts for the main statistics regarding bankruptcy and unsecured credit while matching key macroeconomic aggregates, and the earnings and wealth distributions. We use this model to address the implications of a recent policy change that introduces a form of “means testing” for households contemplating a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing. We find that this policy change yields large welfare gains.     

Individual learning as a driver of changes in community vulnerability under repeated hurricanes and changing climate

The risks from singular natural hazards such as a hurricane have been extensively investigated in the literature. However, little is understood about how individual and collective responses to repeated hazards change communities and impact their preparation for future events. Individual mitigation actions may drive how a community's resilience evolves under repeated hazards. In this paper, we investigate the effect that learning by homeowners can have on household mitigation decisions and on how this influences a region's vulnerability to natural hazards over time, using hurricanes along the east coast of the United States as our case study. To do this, we build an agent-based model (ABM) to simulate homeowners’ adaptation to repeated hurricanes and how this affects the vulnerability of the regional housing stock. Through a case study, we explore how different initial beliefs about the hurricane hazard and how the memory of recent hurricanes could change a community's vulnerability both under current and potential future hurricane scenarios under climate change. In some future hurricane environments, different initial beliefs can result in large differences in the region's long-term vulnerability to hurricanes. We find that when some homeowners mitigate soon after a hurricane—when their memory of the event is the strongest—it can help to substantially decrease the vulnerability of a community.     

Getting Together to Get Ahead: The Impact of Social Structure on Women's Networking

This paper examines the impact of socio‐structural variables (i.e. perceptions of permeability, stability and legitimacy of intergroup relations) on the extent to which professional women perceive a women's network as a collective strategy for status enhancement. A survey among network members (n=166) suggests that the extent to which women support and consider a network to benefit women as a collective is dependent on perceptions of whether individual mobility is possible (permeability of group boundaries) and beliefs that organizational conditions will improve for women in the future (stability of conditions for women). Specifically, the network is less likely to be perceived as a collective vehicle for change when individual advancement is possible (because intergroup boundaries are perceived as permeable) and status improvement in the future is unlikely. However, regardless of beliefs about the future, when female participants perceive that many barriers to individual advancement exist (due to the impermeability of intergroup boundaries), the network is considered in more collective terms presumably because the only way to challenge the status quo is through a collective effort. The practical implications for organizations that wish to or have established a women's network are discussed.     

Latent Separability: Grouping Goods without Weak Separability

This paper develops a new concept of separability with overlapping groups—latent separability. This is shown to provide a useful empirical and theoretical framework for investigating the grouping of goods and prices. It is a generalization of weak separability in which goods are allowed to enter more than one group and where the composition of groups is identified by the choice of group specific exclusive goods. Latent separability is shown to be equivalent to weak separability in latent rather than purchased goods and provides a relationship between separability and household production theory. For the popular class of linear, almost ideal and translog demand models and their generalizations, we provide a method for choosing the number of homothetic separable groups. A detailed method for exploring the composition of the separable groups is also presented. These methods are applied to a long time series of British individual household data on the consumption of twenty two nondurable and service goods.     

How Managers Talk about their Consumption of Popular Management Concepts: Identity,Rules and Situations

This paper analyses how top managers account for their consumption of popular management concepts. By ‘consumption’ we refer to managers acting as active users of popular management concepts within their organizations. After reviewing the relevant literature, we argue that the logic of appropriateness is a better theoretical perspective to view, understand and analyse managers' accounts of concept consumption than is the logic of consequence. We apply this perspective to extensive interviews we conducted with top managers in Germany. Based on the managers' own accounts of how they understand and apply popular management concepts, we identified four discourse categories: (1) learning from others' experiences, (2) controlling organizational change, (3) gaining external legitimacy and (4) collective sensemaking. We argue that these discourse categories all draw on the social norm of rationality central to managerial identity, while differing in socially defined rules about how rationality is realized in typical management situations. Our findings strongly encourage researchers, when investigating popular management concepts in the future, to take into account the situational nature of rationality that circumstantiates the consumption of concepts.