Publications

With SACMEQ and PASEC there are now two large data bases available on student achievement, socio-economic background and school and teacher characteristics in both anglophone and francophone sub-Saharan Africa. A joint analysis of PASEC and SACMEQ in a common education production function framework allows us to estimate the impact of educational inputs on student achievement in 21 sub-Saharan African countries and to compare our results with those of earlier empirical studies for education systems in Africa and other world regions. In our analysis we focus on school equipment, teacher quality and class organisation. The issue of teacher and student incentives cannot be adequately addressed with the given data. Our results are based on a traditional retrospective analysis of student achievement in PASEC and SACMEQ countries. In contrast to the ‘nothing works’ result from most industrialized countries’ studies we find robust positive correlations of achievement test scores and the possession of textbooks and negative correlations with teaching in shifts. The most striking result is the weak or even absent correlation of achievement test scores and teacher education and professional training. However, some differences between francophone and anglophone education systems can be observed in this context if differences in the sampling methodology are duly taken into account.

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This paper considers victim heterogeneity in harm levels in a bilateral-care model, where harm is private information. In practice, resources are expended on the verification of damages suffered. We establish a sufficient condition for the possibility to accurately deduce the harm level from the observable care choice without spending on verification. For cases in which this condition does not hold, this paper sets out a simple screening mechanism that induces victims to reveal their type truthfully and induces optimal care in equilibrium without verification costs.

We construct a two-country North South Product-cycle model of trade with endogenous growth and trade barriers. We remove the scale effects on growth by incorporating rent protection activities by Northern incumbents. We examine the effects of two forms of globalization an expansion of the relative size of the South and unilateral trade liberalization by either country. We find that the location of rent protection institutions and the sectoral trade structure determine whether or not globalization raises steady-state economic growth. We demonstrate that for accelerating worldwide economic growth, contrary to conventional wisdom, unilateral Northern trade liberalization is preferable to bilateral trade liberalization.

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dc.contributor.author: Eberle, Franz; Brüggenbrock, Christel

This paper analyzes optimal foreign aid policy in a neoclassical growth framework with a conflict of interest between the donor and the recipient government. Aid conditionality is modeled as a limited enforceable dynamic contract. We define the contract to be self-enforcing if, at any point in time, the conditions imposed on aid funds are supportable by the threat of a permanent aid cutoff from then onward. Quantitative results show that optimal self-enforcing conditional aid strongly stimulates the developing economy and substantially increases welfare. However, aid effectiveness comes at a high cost: to ensure enforceability, less benevolent political regimes receive permanently larger aid funds in return for a less intense conditionality.

In this paper we present a two-period model where a left-wing and a right-wing political party are solely interested in the policies they pursue. We assume that voters display reciprocal behavior. By contrast, political parties are not motivated by reciprocity. We show that reciprocity may have dramatic consequences for models of voting behavior. The incentive to be kind to the median voter may ensure that a position closer to the median voter's position is adopted even if political parties are not directly interested in being elected and cannot commit to a political stance during an election campaign. Moreover, reciprocity increases incumbency advantages.

We document widespread violations of stochastic dominance by one-month S&P 500 index call options market over 1986-2006. These violations imply that a trader can improve her expected utility by engaging in a zero-net-cost trade. We allow the market to be incomplete and also imperfect by introducing transaction costs and bid-ask spreads. Even though pre-crash option prices conform to the Black-Scholes-Merton model reasonably well, they are incorrectly priced if the distribution of the index return is estimated from time-series data even with a variety of statistical adjustments. Even though there are fewer violations by OTM calls than by ITM calls, there are still substantial violations by OTM calls, contradicting the inference drawn from the observed implied volatility smile that the problem primarily lies with the left-hand tail of the index return distribution. Most of the violations by post-crash options are not due to the smile being too steep: options are underpriced over 1988-1995 and overpriced over 1997-2006. The decrease in violations over the post-crash period 1988-1995 is followed by a substantial increase in violations over 1997-2006. These results do not support the hypothesis that the options market is becoming more rational over time. Current draft: November 10, 2006 JEL classification: G13 Keywords: Derivative pricing; volatility smile, incomplete markets, transaction costs; index options; stochastic dominance bounds We thank workshop participants at the German Finance Society Meetings 2004, the Bachelier 2004 Congress, the EFA 2005 Meetings, the Frontiers of Finance conference 2006, the Alberta/Calgary 2006 conference, the Universities of Chicago, Iowa, Southern California, Maryland, Texas-Austin, Torino, Utah and Concordia, Laval, New York, Princeton and St. Gallen Universities and, in particular, Yacine Ait-Sahalia, David Bates, Duke Bristow, Larry Harris, Steve Heston, Jim Hodder, Mark Loewenstein, Matthew Richardson, Jeffrey Russell, Hersh Shefrin and Greg Willard for their insightful comments and constructive criticism. We also thank Michal Czerwonko for excellent research assistance. We remain responsible for errors and omissions. Constantinides acknowledges financial support from the Center for Research in Security Prices of the University of Chicago and Perrakis from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. E-mail addresses: gmc@ChicagoGSB.edu, Jens.Jackwerth@uni-konstanz.de, SPerrakis@jmsb.concordia.ca.

Different information provision in experimental markets can drastically change subjects' behavior. Considering the repeated Bertrand duopoly game of Dufwenberg and Gneezy (2000), we find that population feedback about the prices in other markets outside a subjects' own current market causes group dynamics that prevent prices from convergence to Nash equilibrium. Limited information comprising only the decisions of a subject's own opponent, in contrast, leads to competitive behavior. When we extend the number of periods from 10 to 25 in the full information treatment we observe a very robust cyclical up and down movement of prices. We can explain tacit coordination in our experiment with an extended learning direction model and leadership by example.