According to basic economics, if demand exceeds supply, prices will rise, thus decreasing demand or increasing supply until demand and supply are in equilibrium; thus if prices do their job, rationing will not exist. However, credit rationing does exist. This paper demonstrates that even in equilibrium, credit rationing will exist in a loan market. Credit rationing is defined as occurring either (a) among loan applicants who appear identical, and some do and do not receive loans, even though the rejected applicants would pay higher interest rates; or (b) there are groups who, with a given credit supply, cannot obtain loans at any rate, even though with larger credit supply they would. A model is developed to provide the first theoretical justification for true credit rationing. The amount of the loan and the amount of collateral demanded affect the behavior and distribution of borrowers. Consequently, faced with increased credit demand, it may not be profitable to raise interest rates or collateral; instead banks deny loans to borrowers who are observationally indistinguishable from those receiving loans. It is not argued that credit rationing always occurs, but that it occurs under plausible assumptions about lender and borrower behavior. In the model, interest rates serve as screening devices for evaluating risk. Interest rates change the behavior (serve as incentive mechanism) for the borrower, increasing the relative attractiveness of riskier projects; banks ration credit, rather than increase rates when there is excess demand. Banks are shown not to increase collateral as a means of allocating credit; although collateral may have incentivizing effects, it may have adverse selection effects. Equity, nonlinear payment schedules, and contingency contracts may be introduced and yet there still may be rationing. The law of supply and demand is thus a result generated by specific assumptions and is model specific; credit rationing does exist. (TNM)

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Credit Rationing in Markets with Imperfect Information.

This paper discusses the discounted utility (DU) model: its historical development, underlying assumptions, and "anomalies" - the empirical regularities that are inconsistent with its theoretical predictions. We then summarize the alternate theoretical formulations that have been advanced to address these anomalies. We also review three decades of empirical research on intertemporal choice, and discuss reasons for the spectacular variation in implicit discount rates across studies. Throughout the paper, we stress the importance of distinguishing time preference, per se, from many other considerations that also influence intertemporal choices.

/pdf/time-discounting-and-time-preference-a-critical-review-47don96ek5.pdf

Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review

Involuntary unemployment appears to be a persistent feature of many modem labor markets. The presence of such unemployment raises the question of why wages do not fall to clear labor markets. In this paper we show how the information structure of employer-employee relationships, in particular the inability of employers to costlessly observe workers' on-the-job effort, can explain involuntary unemployment' as an equilibrium phenomenon. Indeed, we show that imperfect monitoring necessitates unemployment in equilibrium. The intuition behind our result is simple. Under the conventional competitive paradigm, in which all workers receive the market wage and there is no unemployment, the worst that can happen to a worker who shirks on the job is that he is fired. Since he can immediately be rehired, however, he pays no penalty for his misdemeanor. With imperfect monitoring and full employment, therefore, workers will choose to shirk. To induce its workers not to shirk, the firm attempts to pay more than the "going wage"; then, if a worker is caught shirking and is fired, he will pay a penalty. If it pays one firm to raise its wage, however, it will pay all firms to raise their wages. When they all raise their wages, the incentive not to shirk again disappears. But as all firms raise their wages, their demand for labor decreases, and unemployment results. With unemployment, even if all firms pay the same wages, a worker has an incentive not to shirk. For, if he is fired, an individual will not immediately obtain another job. The equilibrium unemployment rate must be sufficiently large that it pays workers to work rather than to take the risk of being caught shirking. The idea that the threat of firing a worker is a method of discipline is not novel. Guillermo Calvo (1981) studied a static model which involves equilibrium unemployment.2 No previous studies have treated general market equilibrium with dynamics, however, or studied the welfare properties of such unemployment equilibria. One key contribution of this paper is that the punishment associated with being fired is endogenous, as it depends on the equilibrium rate of unemployment. Our analysis thus goes beyond studies of information and incentives within organizations (such as Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, 1972, and the more recent and growing literature on worker-firm relations as a principal-agent problem) to inquire about the equilibrium conditions in markets with these informational features. The paper closest in spirit to ours is Steven Salop (1979) in which firms reduce turnover costs when they raise wages; here the savings from higher wages are on monitoring costs (or, at the same level of monitoring, from increased output due to increased effort). As in the Salop paper, the unemployment in this paper is definitely involuntary, and not of the standard search theory type (Peter Diamond, 1981, for example). Workers have perfect information about all job opportunities in our model, and unemployed workers strictly prefer to work at wages less than the prevailing market wage (rather than to remain unemployed); there are no vacancies. *Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Department of Economics, respectively, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540. We thank Peter Diamond, Gene Grossman, Ed Lazear, Steve Salop, and Mike Veall for helpful comments. Financial support from the National Science Foundation is appreciated. 'By involuntary unemployment we mean a situation where an unemployed worker is willing to work for less than the wage received by an equally skilled employed worker, yet no job offers are forthcoming. 2In his 1979 paper, Calvo surveyed a variety of models of unemployment, including his hierarchical firm model (also with Stanislaw Wellisz, 1979). There are a number of important differences between that work and this paper, including the specification of the monitoring technology.

Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market: Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device

Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics sciences in 2002, December 8, Stockholm, Sweden. This article is the edited version of his Nobel Prize lecture. The author comes back to the problems he has studied with the late Amos Tversky and to debates conducting for several decades already. The statement is based on worked out together with Shane Federik the quirkiness of human judgment. Language: ru

Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics

As GDP is a measure of market capacity and not economic well-being, this report has been commissioned to more accurately understand the social progress indicators of any given state. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely used measure of economic activity. There are international standards for its calculation, and much thought has gone into its statistical and conceptual bases. But GDP mainly measures market production, though it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions. One reason why money measures of economic performance and living standards have come to play such an important role in our societies is that the monetary valuation of goods and services makes it easy to add up quantities of a very different nature. When we know the prices of apple juice and DVD players, we can add up their values and make statements about production and consumption in a single figure. But market prices are more than an accounting device. Economic theory tells us that when markets are functioning properly, the ratio of one market price to another is reflective of the relative appreciation of the two products by those who purchase them. Moreover, GDP captures all final goods in the economy, whether they are consumed by households, firms or government. Valuing them with their prices would thus seem to be a good way of capturing, in a single number, how well-off society is at a particular moment. Furthermore, keeping prices unchanged while observing how quantities of goods and services that enter GDP move over time would seem like a reasonable way of making a statement about how society’s living standards are evolving in real terms. As it turns out, things are more complicated. First, prices may not exist for some goods and services (if for instance government provides free health insurance or if households are engaged in child care), raising the question of how these services should be valued. Second, even where there are market prices, they may deviate from society’s underlying valuation. In particular, when the consumption or production of particular products affects society as a whole, the price that individuals pay for those products will differ from their value to society at large. Environmental damage caused by production or consumption activities that is not reflected in market prices is a well-known example.

https://andrewoswald.com/docs/stiglitz20report_commission20final20200920sept.pdf

Report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress

Without market outcomes for comparison, internal consistency tests, particularly adding-up tests, are needed for credibility. When tested, contingent valuation has failed. Proponents find surveys tested poorly done. To the authors' knowledge, no survey has passed these tests. The 'embedding effect' is the similarity of willingness-to-pay responses that theory suggests (and sometimes requires) be different. This problem has long been recognized but not solved. The authors conclude that current methods are not suitable for damage assessment or benefit-cost analysis. They believe the problems come from an absence of preferences, not a flaw in survey methodology, making improvement unlikely.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.8.4.45

Contingent Valuation: Is Some Number Better than No Number?

Equilibrium is analyzed for a simple barter model with identical risk-neutral agents where trade is coordinated by a stochastic matching process. It is shown that there are multiple steady-state rational expectations equilibria, with all non-corner solution equilibria inefficient. This implies that an economy with this type of trade friction does not have a unique natural rate of unemployment.

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Aggregate Demand Management in Search Equilibrium

A model of price adjustment

Theories of optimal production in a planned economy have usually assumed that the tax system can allow the government to achieve any desired redistribution of property.' On the other hand, some recent discussions of public investment criteria have tended to ignore taxation as a complementary method of controlling the economy.2 Although lump sum transfers of the kind required for full optimality3 are not feasible today, commodity and income taxes can certainly be used to increase welfare.4 We shall therefore examine the maximization of social welfare using both taxes and public production as control variables. In doing so, we intend to bring together the theories of taxation, public investment, and welfare economics. There are two main results of the study: the demonstration of the desirability of aggregate production efficiency in a wide variety of circumstances provided that taxes are set at the optimal level; and an examination of that optimal tax structure. It is widely known that aggregate production efficiency is desired as one part of achieving a Pareto optimum. It is also widely known that when the desired Pareto optimum cannot be achieved, aggregate production efficiency may not be desirable. Our conclusion differs from these results in that production efficiency is desirable although a full Pareto optimum is not achieved. In the optimum position, the presence of commodity taxes implies that marginal rates of substitution are not equal to marginal rates of transformation. Furthermore, the absence of lump sum taxes implies that the income distribution is not the best that can be conceived. Yet, the presence of optimal commodity taxes will be shown to imply the desirability of aggregate production efficiency. This result is similar to that derived by Marcel Boiteux, although he considered an economy where lump sum redistributions of income were possible. Boiteux also examined the optimal tax structure that was necessary for this result. The optimal tax structure for the case of a single consumer (or equivalently with lump sum redistribution) has also been examined by Frank * The authors are at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nuffield College, Oxford, respectively. During some of the work, Diamond was at Churchill College, Cambridge and Nuffield College, Oxford and Mirrlees was at M.I.T. Earlier versions of this paper were given at Econometric Society winter meetings at Washington and Blaricum, 1967, at the University Social Science Council Conference, Kampala, Uganda, December 1968, and to the Game Theory and Mathematical Economics Seminar, Hebrew University, Jerusalem'i. The authors wish to thank M.A.H. Dempster, D. K. Foley, P. A. Samuelson, K. Shell, and participants in these seminars for helpful discussions on this subject, and referees for valuable comments. Diamond was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant GS 1585. The authors bear sole responsibility for opinions and errors. 1 For a discussion of this literature, see Abram Bergson.

Optimal Taxation and Public Production I: Production Eficiency

set out the problem of using taxation and government production to maximize a social welfare function. We derived the first-order conditions, and considered the argument for efficiency in aggregate production. Here in Part II we consider the structure of optimal taxes in more detail. Part I contained five sections, and Part II begins at Section VI. In the sixth and seventh sections we consider commodity taxation in one- and many-consumer economies. In the eighth section we consider other kinds of taxes; and in the ninth, public consumption. In the tenth section we consider a rigorous treatment of the problem, giving a sufficient condition for the validity of the first-order conditions. To begin, we shall restate the notation and basic problem. Notation

Peter A. Diamond

Papers

Contingent Valuation: Is Some Number Better than No Number?

Aggregate Demand Management in Search Equilibrium

A model of price adjustment

Optimal Taxation and Public Production I: Production Eficiency

Optimal Taxation and Public Production II: Tax Rules