We analyse how progressive taxation and education subsidies affect schooling decisions when the returns to education are stochastic. We use the theory of real options to solve the problem of education choice in a dynamic stochastic model. We show that education attainment will be an increasing function of the risk associated with education. Furthermore, this result holds regardless of the degre...

The present paper accomplishes a major step towards a reconciliation of two conflicting approaches in mathematical finance: on the one hand, the mainstream approach based on the notion of no arbitrage (Black, Merton & Scholes); and on the other hand, the consideration of non-semimartingale price processes, the archetype of which being fractional Brownian motion (Mandelbrot). Imposing (arbitrari...

In a financial market with a continuous price process and proportional transaction costs we investigate the problem of utility maximization of terminal wealth. We give sufficient conditions for the existence of a shadow price process, i.e. a least favorable frictionless market leading to the same optimal strategy and utility as in the original market under transaction costs. The crucial ingredi...

For portfolio optimisation under proportional transaction costs, we provide a duality theory for general càdlàg price processes. In this setting, we prove the existence of a dual optimiser as well as a shadow price process in a generalised sense. This shadow price is defined via a “sandwiched” process consisting of a predictable and an optional strong supermartingale and pertains to all strateg...

In the article Russian and foreign experience of financial planning of budget expenditures is examined. Methodological and methodical approaches of financial planning expenses are examined, clarified, systematized and structured. Special attention is given to approaches to the valuation of government (municipal) services in order to improve the quality of budgeting by identifying the most neede...

This paper studies the dynamics of durable and nondurable consumption under two alternative assumptions about information updating by households – rational inattention and sticky expectations. We first show that the two types of sticky information diffusion can help generate strong excess smoothness in durables consumption. We then find that sticky expectations due to a fixed cost does a better...

We consider a group of mean-variance investors with mimicking desire such that each investor is willing to penalize deviations of his portfolio composition from compositions of other group members. Penalizing norm constraints are already applied for statistical improvement of Markowitz portfolio procedure in order to cope with estimation risk. We relate these penalties to individuals’ wish of s...

We show that incentive efficient allocations in economies with adverse selection and moral hazard can be determined as optimal solutions to a linear programming problem and we use duality theory to obtain a complete characterization of the optima. Our dual analysis identifies welfare effects associated with the incentives of the agents to truthfully reveal their private information. Because the...

We characterize the optimal dynamic price policy of a monopolist who faces “viscous” demand for its services. Demand is viscous if it adjusts relatively slowly to price changes. We show that with the optimal policy the monopolist stops short of achieving 100% market penetration, even when all of the consumers have the same long-run willingness to pay for the service. Furthermore, for certain pa...

Concern over the distributional effects of policies which induce changes in peer group structure, or ‘associational redistributions’ (Durlauf, 1996c), motivates a substantial body of theoretical and empirical research in economics, sociology, psychology, and education. A growing collection of econometric methods for characterizing the effects of such policies are now available. This chapter sur...