Documentos de Trabajo publicados en 2001

• Lista de documentos de trabajo.
• Documentos de trabajo de otros años: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998,1999 ,2000 ,2002 en adelante

Actividades del ICAE

Nota: Pulsando sobre el título se accede al resumen del trabajo. Pulsando sobre el autor se puede enviar un mensaje de correo electrónico.

"Optimal Growth Under Endogenous Depreciation, Capital Utilization And Maintenance Costs". Omar Licandro, Luis A. Puch and Ramón Ruiz-Tamarit.

This paper analyzes the equilibrium dynamics of an optimal growth model that incorporates endogenous depreciation, variable capital utilization, and expenditures on the maintenance of physical capital. Maintenance acts as a substitute for investment, since it reduces the depreciation of capital. Investment is subject to adjustment costs,and capital is not fully utilized, the degree of capital utilization affecting the activity of maintaining. We establish a set of sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a steady state equilibrium. Also, we define a "delta golden rule" consistent with the proposed economic enviroment and we analyze the dynamic efficiency of this economy. Finally, the steady state is found locally saddle-path stable. these results provide a framework for the analysis of compartive dynamics in general equilibrium with these features.

"Electronic Commerce, Consumer Search and Retailing Cost Reduction." Cristina Mazón y Pedro Pereira

This paper explains four things in a unified way. First, how e-commerce can generate price equilibria, where physical shops either compete with virtual shops for consumers with Internet access, or alternatively, sell only to consumers with no Internet access. Second, how these price equilibria might involve price dispersion on-line. Third, why prices may be higher on-line. Fourth, why established firms can, but need not, be more reluctant than newly created firms to adopt e-commerce. for this purpose we develop a model where e-commerce reduces consumers´ search costs, involves trade-off for consumers, and reduces retailing costs.

"The Effect of Public Infrastructure on Private Activity: Evidence From The Spanish Regions." M.J. Delgado Rodríguez e Inmaculada Álvarez Ayuso

This paper considers the measurement of infrastructure capital in the Spanish economy and investigates the technical relation among the inputs,which offers information about the way infrastructure enters in the production process. Using a translog production function we present panel estimate for the 17 Spanish regions for the period 1980-1995. The results indicate that productive infrastructure encourages private investment and can therefore be considered to be essential for economic growth.

"Cheating for The Common Good in a Macroeconomic Policy Game. " Francisco Álvarez González y Christophe Deissenberg

This paper presents a simple repeated-game model of interaction between an optimizing government and the private sector, represented by a continium of heterogenous atomistic agents. At the beginning of each repetition, the government makes a non-binding announcement about its future action. The (private) agents do not know whether or not the government will act as announced. Each agent i either plays with probability p_i as if it trusted the announcement, or plays with probability 1-p_i as a Stackelberg leader. After observing the agents actions, the government takes an action. The p _i´s area updated as a function of the payoffs. We show that, although the government´s announcements are never respected, acting as if they were true leads to an outcome that simultaneously improves the situation of the government and of those players that trust it, compared to the standard equilibrium solutions. 

"Growth and Welfare: Distorting or Non-Distorting Taxes." Gustavo A. Marrero

In an infinitely-lived framework, taxing capital income may be growth and welfare enhancing when it allows for correcting distorting externalities in the competitive equilibrium allocation. This is the case when public capital is subject to congestion by private capital or total income(Turnovsky and Fisher(1998)) or when government spending exerts an external effect on physical capital (Corsetti and Roubini(1996)). However, none of these features are incorporated into simple one-sector endogenous growth models with public capital. We find that in a simple one-sector growth model with productive and unproductive public expenses, and under certain realistic fiscal policy constraints, raising revenues through factors income taxes might be prefered to raising revenues through lump-sum taxes.

"Dinamic Laffer Curves." Alfonso Novales and Jesús Ruiz

In an endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation, we discuss the possibility of welfare improving changes on the fiscal policy stance in some actual economies. First, we characterize the extent to which the initial fall in revenues produced by a permanent tax cut can be compensated by an increase in the tax base, due to a dynamic Laffer curve effect, showing that there is, in fact, a non-trivial margin for substituting debt for taxes on labor and capital income. Second, we show that the largest feasible reduction in labor income tax rates may easily produce a higher welfare gain than the largest feasible reduction in capital income tax rates. Two qualifications: a) feasible tax cuts exist only for a relatively high elasticity of intertemporal substitution of consumption, and b) the preference for the largest feasible tax cuT on labor income rather than that on capital income reverses for a low appreciation for leisure, relative to consumption, in the preferences of the representative agent.

"Time To-Build, Growth and Welfare." Esther Fernández y Jesús Ruiz

In AK endogenous growth setup with a time-to-build investment technology, the steady-state growth rate and the level of welfare are shown not to be independent on the time distribution of the financing of an investment project. We emphasize that welfare effects in the AK model are of opposite sign to those arising in an exogenous growth model when both theorical economies share the same long-run growth rate and the same steady state real interest rate.

"Indeterminación y Función de Utilidad no Separable en consumo Público y Ocio." Jesús Ruiz y Esther Fernández

En este trabajo se muestra que,en un modelo de crecimiento sencillo, donde el consumo público es un argumento de la función de utilidad, y en el que la tecnología de producción exhibe rendimientos constantes a escala en la producción, el equilibrio competitivo puede estar indeterminado. Se produce indeterminación de equilibrios para valores creíbles de la elasticidad de sustitución intertemporal del consumo. Además, puede ocurrir que las curvas de oferta y demanda de trabajo tengan las pendientes habituales. Para obtener estos resultados es imprescindible suponer preferencias en las que el consumo público y el ocio son no separables.

"Coordinating Short-And Long-Run Public Investment Rules." Gustavo A. Marrero

The coordination between short- and long-run policies has been extensively studied in the Monetary Policy literature. However, little work has been done regarding the coordination between long- and short-run fiscal policy measures. In this paper, given a long-run target for the public investment/output ratio, the government follows a particular rule that makes the public investment/output ratio to react along the transition aaccording to the current state of the economy. this public investment rule is more flexible than those commonly considered in the literature(Barro (1990), Turnovsky (1996,2000)), where the public investment/output ratio is usually assumed to be constant over time. In comparison with the Barro-Turnovsky rule, and under alterative taxing scenarios, important welfare improvements are found when coordinating the short- and the long-run policies.

"Structural Breaks and Interest Rates Forecast: A Sequential Approach." José Luis Fernández-Serrano María Dolores Robles-Fernández

The analysis of the future behavior of economic variables can be biased if structural breaks are not considered. When these structural breaks are present, the in -sample fit of a model gives us a poor guide to ex-ante forecast performance. This problem is shared by univariate and multivariate analysis and can be extremely important when cointegration relations hips area analysed. The main goal of this paper consists in analysing the impact of structural breaks on forecast accuracy evaluation. We are concerned in forecasting several interest rates from the Spanish interbank money market. In order to carry out the analysis, we perform two forescasting exercises: (1) without structural breaks and (2) when structural breaks are explicitly considered. We use new sequential methods in order to estimate change- points in an endogenous way. After which, we compare the out-of-sample forecast ability of these models. Our results may indicate scarce gains when the structural break is included in the models.

"Costly Capital Reallocation and Energy Use." Antonio Díaz, Luis A. Puch y María D. Guilló.

In time series data, energy use does not change much with energy price changes. However, energy use is responsive to international differences in energy prices in cross-section data across countries. In this paper we condier a model of energy use in which production takes place at individual plants and capital can be used either to directly produce output or to reduce the energy required to run the plant. We assume that reallocating capital from one use to another is costly. this turns out to be crucial flor the quantitative properties of the model to be in conformity with the low short-run and high long-run elasticities of energy use seen in data. Furthermore, our model displays variation in capacity utilization that are in line with those observed during the period of major oil price increases.

Actividades del ICAE

Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico