Gaia Garino

Speculative Bubbles in U.K. House Prices: Some New Evidence

In this article, we test the view, widely held among both academics and practitioners, that speculative bubbles have characterized the time series behavior of U.K. house prices in recent times. We motivate our empirical analysis using a stylized overlapping-generations model which generates a housing demand function of the form assumed by a large literature, illustrating how rational bubbles may arise as a solution to the house price determination equation. Employing two recently developed econometric techniques specifically designed to test for rational bubbles, we then provide empirical evidence for the existence of bubbles in U.K. house prices over the sample period 1983–2002.

Efficiency wages and union–firm bargaining

Abstract This paper combines the efficiency wage and union–firm bargaining approaches to wage determination to produce a unified model that leads to higher wages, confirming an original insight of Summers (Am. Econom. Rev. 78 (1988) 383). Increases in monopoly power on the goods market also have a stronger impact on wages when there are efficiency wage effects, but the proportional effect of bargaining and market power on the wage is independent of the proportional effect of efficiency wages. We also find that efficiency wage effects alter the form of the labour demand curve to make it backward bending.

Household Debt and Attitudes Toward Risk

We explore the relationship between attitudes toward risk and the level of debt at the household level for a sample of households drawn from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) over the period 1984 to 2007. Using a sequence of questions from the 1996 PSID, we analyze the implications of interpersonal differences in attitudes toward risk for the accumulation of unsecured debt, secured debt, and total debt at the household level. Our empirical findings suggest that attitudes toward risk are an important determinant of the level of debt acquired at the household level with risk aversion being inversely related to the level of debt accumulated by households.

Costly State Verification with Varying Risk Preferences and Liability

In the scenario of loan contracts with costly state verification, we examine how the properties of the set of states, different risk preferences of debtors and varying liability of lenders affect the structure of optimal repayments. In particular, we show that with risk-averse debtors, a general set of states, a constant observation cost and both unlimited and limited lender liability, the debtor is strictly better off revealing the true state of nature when his realized revenue is low, which implies that optimal debtor consumption has a downward jump around the single switch from observed to unobserved states. If the debtor can destroy revenue or if the debtor is risk neutral, this non-monotonicity of consumption disappears. Moreover, given the loan size, there is more monitoring under debtor-risk aversion than risk neutrality. We present simulations showing that a contract with unlimited lender liability and debtor-risk aversion has a higher expected observation cost but a lower variance of consumption than a contract with limited lender liability. Finally, we discuss the problems of commitment to verification and contract renegotiation in this framework. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2006.

Privatisation or Competition

Market competition is essential for any economy to be efficient. In order to develop competition in a transition economy, it is conventionally thought that privatisation should take place first. This wisdom has been challenged by the Chinese reform experience of the last two decades, which modified the incentive structure of state enterprises and created markets and market competition in the absence of large scale privatisation. Chinas experience, however, raises the question of whether its chosen type of reform is sufficient to promote competition in a market dominated by public firms. To answer this, we need to know what kind of markets were created – regional markets closed to trade or unified markets with easy access – and whether or not improved incentives for state firms have led to competition. This paper investigates these questions on the basis of a survey of both theory and empirical evidence; and finds that the Chinese reform policies did succeed in stimulating competition among state firms.