Who Are the Microenterprise Owners? Evidence from Sri Lanka on Tokman v. de Soto

Is the vast army of the self-employed in low income countries a source of employment generation? We use data from surveys in Sri Lanka to compare the characteristics of own account workers (non-employers) with wage workers and with owners of larger firms. We use a rich set of measures of background, ability, and attitudes, including lottery experiments measuring risk attitudes. Consistent with the ILO’s views of the self employed (represented by Tokman), we find that 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the own account workers have characteristics which are more like wage workers than larger firm owners. This suggests the majority of the own account workers are unlikely to become employers. Using a two and a half year panel of enterprises, we show that the minority of own account workers who are more like larger firm owners are more likely to expand by adding paid employees. The analysis suggests that finance is not the sole constraint to growth of microenterprises, and provides an explanation for the low rates of growth of enterprises supported by microlending.entrepreneurship, self-employment, De Soto

Simultaneous Signaling in Elimination Contests

This paper analyzes the signaling effect of bidding in a two-round elimination contest. Before the final round, bids in the preliminary round are revealed and act as signals of the contestants' private valuations. Depending on his valuation, a contestant may have an incentive to bluff or sandbag in the preliminary round in order to gain an advantage in the final round. I analyze this signaling effect and characterize the equilibrium in this game. Compared to the benchmark model, in which private valuations are revealed automatically before the final round and thus no signaling of bids takes place, I find that strong contestants bluff and weak contestants sandbag. In a separating equilibrium, bids in the preliminary round fully reveal the contestants' private valuations. However, this signaling effect makes the equilibrium bidding strategy in the preliminary round steeper for high valuations and flatter for low valuations compared to the benchmark model.all-pay auction, elimination contests, incomplete, lottery, signaling

The Spinnaker Vol. 10 No. 3

Student newspaper for the UNF communit

Lucas on Involuntary Unemployment

The aim of this paper is to examine critically Lucas’ arguments against Keynes’s General Theory and in particular against Keynes’s concept of involuntary unemployment. It comprises two main parts. In the first, I question Lucas’s claim that Keynes betrayed the equilibrium discipline by freeing himself from the postulates of optimising behaviour and market clearing. In the second, I discuss Lucas’ three arguments against the involuntary unemployment concept - first, that there is no rationale for drawing a distinction between two sorts of unemployment, second that every economic outcome features voluntarity and involuntarity jointly and, third, that alternatives to unemployment are always present.Keynes; Lucas; Involuntary Unemployment

State Lotteries and the New American Dream

This paper analyzes state lotteries in the economic and cultural context of the late twentieth century. As access to traditional meritocratic advancement declined, many Americans perceived lotteries as new means of attaining increasingly elusive upward mobility. Their turn to lotteries was facilitated by grassroots coalitions as well as lottery advertisers who claimed lotteries as effective means of making money. The relationship of lotteries and social mobility reveals the full implications of lottery playing in the United States and the reasons this form of gambling has assumed new importance as providing access to the American Dream

Block Recursive Equilibria for Stochastic Models of Search on the Job

In this paper, we develop a general stochastic model of directed search on the job. Analogous to models of random search on the job, the state of the economy in our model includes the infinite-dimensional distribution of workers across different employment states (unemployment, and employment at different wages). Unlike the models of random search on the job, our model admits an equilibrium in which agents' value and policy functions do not depend on the distribution of workers. We refer to this type of equilibrium as a Block Recursive Equilibrium (BRE). Therefore, while solving the equilibrium of a random search model in a stochastic environment is a difficult task both analytically and computationally, solving the Block Recursive Equilibrium of our model is as easy as solving a representative agent model. We prove existence of a BRE under various specifications of workers' preferences and contractual environments, including dynamic contracts and fixed-wage contracts.Directed Search; On the Job Search; Heterogeneity; Aggregate Fluctuations