Suchergebnisse

Preface -- Memories in color -- Alpha -- A family of three -- Baoshan -- Academic demise and renascence -- The three musketeers -- The healing -- Vive Les cultural differences! -- The loan -- Inches from Hollywood glamour -- The girl I wanted to marry -- Chinese opera in New York -- Confucius Sez -- The uplifting hand -- Two sides of the lectern -- Separate ways -- Dutch treat -- Fundamental methods of mathematical economics -- Class of 1943 reunions -- The latecomers -- Kiddish words and deeds -- Castles in my life -- Art on the walls -- The "Christmas-card uncle" -- Viewing a floral show on a trotting horse -- Travel tidbits -- An oddball student -- Commencement exercises -- The itinerant professor -- The Holland semester -- Chopin, Marie Antoinette, oriental painting, and frogs' legs -- Nobel-prize winners -- Retiring so early? -- On the dance floor -- Golden anniversary -- Opus 1 -- Suddenly 80! -- Count Alphonso -- Spices of life -- Donald Trump's brother -- An omniscient herbal doctor -- Diamond anniversary -- The treasures of cedar crest -- A fortuitous playwright -- The kitchen and I -- A life foretold.

In an earlier paper, I presented an analysis of the intermediate-run effects of instalment credit control, that is, the effects prevailing after the new credit terms have fully replaced the old ones. Although brief reference was made there to the effects of control in the short run, that is, in the time periods immediately following the change in credit terms, yet several interesting questions regarding the short run had to be ignored because of the scope of that paper. One may ask, for example: Does the down-payment effect tend to grow or diminish in strength from one period to the next during the transition from old credit terms to new ones? What about the maturity effect? Do these effects change with time, if at all, at a steady rate? In one direction only, or with reversals)? And how will different types of consumer reaction to new credit terms, as reflected in the amount of credit purchases, modify the down-payment and maturity effects, especially when there is perversity? These questions are important because for purposes of credit control policy, the short-run effects are in many cases more relevant than the intermediate-run effects. The present paper seeks to answer these questions.As the questions themselves suggest, the following discussion will be principally concerned with the delineation of the time paths of effects of credit term changes. In this sense, then, the paper pertains to the realm of "dynamics," in contrast to the comparative-statics orientation of the earlier article. As in the earlier paper, I shall assume (a) a constant rate of growth of credit purchases before control, (b) uniform down-payment and maturity terms on all credit purchases, (c) straight-line amortization of all instalment debts, and (d) the absence of secondary effects. But instead of assuming that new credit terms will always result in a new (fixed) rate of growth of instalment purchases, I shall also consider several other types of consumer reaction. Finally, to make the analysis more general, the concept "marginal propensity to cut outlays for down payments" will be introduced, to supplement the "marginal propensity to cut outlays for instalments" used in the other paper.