Search results for " adjustment costs"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Interventions with Sticky Social Norms: A Critique
2021
Abstract We study the consequences of policy interventions when social norms are endogenous but costly to change. In our environment, a group faces a negative externality that it partially mitigates through incentives in the form of punishments. In this setting, policy interventions can have unexpected consequences. The most striking is that when the cost of bargaining is high, introducing a Pigouvian tax can increase output—yet in doing so increase welfare. An observer who saw that an increase in a Pigouvian tax raised output might wrongly conclude that this harmed welfare and that a larger tax increase would also raise output. This counter-intuitive impact on output is demonstrated theore…
The Bayesian estimation of private investment in Finland
2009
Abstract This paper estimates an investment equation for private investment using Bayesian estimation techniques. In the paper we derive the optimal capital accumulation behavior in the model economy from the households’ optimization problem of utility. The equation is derived as in Smets and Wouters (2003). The model contains costly adjustment of investment and random shocks to adjustment cost function. The driving variable of investment is Tobin Q variable. The empirical proxy for Tobin Q in this paper is the ratio of OMX Helsinki Cap Index to the price index of the physical capital. The investment series is the seasonally adjusted private investment in quarterly national accounts. The AR…
Failing to Provide Public Goods: Why the Afghan Army Did Not Fight
2022
The theory of public goods is mainly about the difficulty in paying for them. Our question here is this: Why might public goods not be provided, even if funding is available? We use the Afghan Army as our case study. We explore this issue using a simple model of a public good that can be provided through collective action and peer pressure, by modeling the self-organization of a group (the Afghan Army) as a mechanism design problem. We consider two kinds of transfer subsidies from an external entity such as the U.S. government. One is a Pigouvian subsidy that simply pays the salaries, rewarding individuals who provide effort. The second is an output/resource multiplier (the provision of mil…