Sergiu Hart, Ilan Kremer & Motty Perry

An evidence game is a strategic disclosure game in which an informed agent who has some pieces of verifiable evidence decides which ones to disclose to an uninformed principal who chooses a reward. The agent, regardless of his information, prefers the reward to be as high as possible. We compare the setup where the principal chooses the reward after the evidence is disclosed to the mechanism-design setup where he can commit in advance to a reward policy. The main result is that under natural conditions on the truth structure of the evidence, the two setups yield the same equilibrium outcome

Bhaskar Dutta & Rajiv Vohra

In the study of farsighted coalitional behavior, a central role is played by the von Neumann-Morgenstern (1944) stable set and its modification that incorporates farsightedness. Such a modification was first proposed by Harsanyi (1974) and has recently been re-formulated by Ray and Vohra (2015). The farsighted stable set is based on a notion of indirect dominance in which an outcome can be dominated by a chain of coalitional ‘moves’ in which each coalition that is involved in the sequence eventually stands to gain. However, it does not require that each coalition make a maximal move, i.e., one that is not Pareto dominated (for the members of the coalition in question) by another. Nor does it restrict coalitions to hold common expectations regarding the continuation path from every state. Consequently, when there are multiple continuation paths the farsighted stable set can yield unreasonable predictions. We resolve this difficulty by requiring all coalitions to have common rational expectations about the transition from one outcome to another. This leads to two related concepts: the rational expectations farsighted stable set (REFS) and the strong rational expectations farsighted stable set (SREFS). We apply these concepts to simple games and to pillage games to illustrate the consequences of imposing rational expectations for farsighted stability

Michael McMahon, Udara Peiris & Herakles Polemarchakis

Quantitative easing compromises the control of the central bank over the stochastic path of inflation.

Sebastian Fehrler & Niall Hughes

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decisionmaking. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concerns are predicted to affect behavior differently, and test the model’s key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model’s predictions are largely borne out - transparency negatively affects information aggregation at the deliberation and voting stages, leading to sharply different committee error rates than under secrecy. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information under transparency than theory predicts

Felix Kubler & Herakles Polemarchakis

The demand for assets as prices and initial wealth vary identifies beliefs and attitudes towards risk. We derive conditions that guarantee identification with no knowledge either of the cardinal utility index or of the distribution of future endowments or payoffs of assets; the argument applies even if the asset market is incomplete and demand is observed only locally.

Irfan Qureshi

I decompose deviations of the Federal funds rate from a Taylor type monetary policy rule into exogenous monetary policy shocks and a time-varying inflation target. I show that the role of exogenous shocks may be exaggerated in a fixed inflation target model, and a large fraction of business cycle fluctuations attributed to them may actually be due to changes in the inflation target. A time-varying inflation target explains approximately half of the volatility normally attributed to these deviations, and consequently more than a quarter of the fluctuations in the business cycle. This contributes approximately 39% additional inflation volatility during the Great Inflation. I show that shocks to the inflation target imply a lower sacrifice ratio compared to exogenous changes in the interest rate and therefore propose a gradual adjustment of the inflation target in order to achieve monetary policy objectives.

Victor Lavy and Edith Sand

In this paper, we estimate the effect of primary school teachers’ gender biases on boys’ and girls’ academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and sciences during high school. For identification, we rely on the random assignments of teachers and students to classes in primary schools. Our results suggest that teachers’ biases favoring boys have an asymmetric effect by gender—positive effect on boys’ achievements and negative effect on girls’. Such gender biases also impact students’ enrollment in advanced level math courses in high school—boys positively and girls negatively. These results suggest that teachers’ biased behavior at early stage of schooling have long run implications for occupational choices and earnings at adulthood, because enrollment in advanced courses in math and science in high school is a prerequisite for post-secondary schooling in engineering, computer science and so on. This impact is heterogeneous, being larger for children from families where the father is more educated than the mother and larger on girls from low socioeconomic background.

Alexandros Karlis, Giorgos Galanis, Spyridon Terovitis and Matthew Turner

This paper focuses on the use of interest rates as a tool for hedging against the default risk of heterogeneous hedge funds (HFs) in a leveraged market. We assume that the banks study the HFs survival statistics in order to compute default risk and hence the correct interest rate. The emergent non-trivial (heavy-tailed) statistics observed on the aggregate level, prevents the accurate estimation of risk in a leveraged market with heterogeneous agents. Moreover, we show that heterogeneity leads to the clustering of default events and constitutes thus a source of systemic risk.

Alexandros Karlis, Giorgos Galanis, Spyridon Terovitis and Matthew Turner

This paper provides a theoretical model which highlights the role of heterogeneity of information in the emergence of temporal aggregation (clustering) of defaults in a leveraged economy. We show that the degree of heterogeneity plays a critical role in the persistence of the correlation between defaults in time. Specifically, a high degree of heterogeneity leads to an autocorrelation of the time sequence of defaults characterised by a hyperbolic decay rate, such that the autocorrelation function is not summable (infinite memory) and defaults are clustered. Conversely, if the degree of heterogeneity is reduced the autocorrelation function decays exponentially fast, and thus, correlation between defaults is only transient (short memory). Our model is also able to reproduce stylized facts, such as clustered volatility and non-Normal returns. Our findings suggest that future regulations might be directed at improving publicly available information, reducing the relative heterogeneity

Lucio D’Aguanno

What are the welfare gains from being in a currency union? I explore this question in the context of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with monetary barriers to trade, local currency pricing and incomplete markets. The model generates a trade off between monetary independence and monetary union. On one hand, distinct national monetary authorities with separate currencies can address business cycles in a countryspecific way, which is not possible for a single central bank. On the other hand, short-run violations of the law of one price and long-run losses of international trade occur if different currencies are adopted, due to the inertia of prices in local currencies and to the presence of trade frictions. I quantify the welfare gap between these two international monetary arrangements in consumption equivalents over the lifetime of households, and decompose it into the contributions of di.erent frictions. I show that the welfare ordering of alternative currency systems depends crucially on the international correlation of macroeconomic shocks and on the strength of the monetary barriers affecting trade with separate currencies. I estimate the model on data from Italy, France, Germany and Spain using standard Bayesian tools, and I find that the trade off is resolved in favour of a currency union among these countries.

Christoph Koenig

What are the welfare gains from being in a currency union? I explore this question in the context of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with monetary barriers to trade, local currency pricing and incomplete markets. The model generates a trade off between monetary independence and monetary union. On one hand, distinct national monetary authorities with separate currencies can address business cycles in a countryspecific way, which is not possible for a single central bank. On the other hand, short-run violations of the law of one price and long-run losses of international trade occur if different currencies are adopted, due to the inertia of prices in local currencies and to the presence of trade frictions. I quantify the welfare gap between these two international monetary arrangements in consumption equivalents over the lifetime of households, and decompose it into the contributions of di.erent frictions. I show that the welfare ordering of alternative currency systems depends crucially on the international correlation of macroeconomic shocks and on the strength of the monetary barriers affecting trade with separate currencies. I estimate the model on data from Italy, France, Germany and Spain using standard Bayesian tools, and I find that the trade off is resolved in favour of a currency union among these countries.

Christoph Koenig

Election fraud is a pervasive feature of autocracies but often only serves lower-tier officials to cast signals of loyalty or competence to the central government in order to pursue their own interests. How much such personal interests matter for electoral fraud under autocracy has however not been studied so far. In this paper, I exploit a radical policy change in Russia which allowed the president to replace governors of the country’s 89 regions at his own will. As a result, federal elections after December 2004 were organised by two types of governors: one was handpicked by the president, the other one elected before the law change and re-appointed. Even though both types faced removal in case of bad results, the need to signal loyalty was much lower for the first type. In order to estimate the effect of handpicked governors on electoral fraud, I use a diff-in-diff framework over 7 federal elections between 2000 and 2012. For this time period, I use results from about 95,000 voting stations to construct a new indicator of suspicious votes for each region and election. I show that this indicator correlates strongly with incidents of reported fraud. My baseline estimates show that in territories with a handpicked governor the share of suspicious votes decreased on average by more than 10 percentage points and dropped even further if the region’s economy had done well over the past legislature. These findings suggest that governors have less need to use rigging as a signal once loyalty is assured unless faced with circumstances raising doubts about their competence.

Christoph Koenig

I study the effect of war participation on the rise of right-wing parties in Inter-war Germany. After the democratisation and surrender of Germany in 1918, 8m German soldiers of WWI were demobilised. I argue that defeat made veterans particularly sceptical about the new democratic state. Their return undermined support for democratic parties from the very beginning and facilitated the reversion to autocratic rule 15 years later. In order to quantify this effect, I construct the first disaggregated estimates of German WWI veterans since official army records were destroyed. I combine this data with a new panel of voting results from 1881 to 1933. Diff-in-Diff estimates show that war participation had a strong positive effect on support for the right-wing at the expense of socialist parties. A one standard deviation increase in veteran inflow shifted vote shares to the right by more than 2 percentage points. An IV strategy based on draft exemption rules substantiates my findings. The effect of veterans on voting is highly persistent and strongest in working class areas. Gains for the right-wing, however, are only observed after a period of Communist insurgencies. I provide suggestive evidence that veterans must have picked up especially anti- Communist sentiments after defeat, injected these into the working class and in this way eroded the future of the young democracy.

Natalie Chen and Luciana Juvenal

We explore whether the global financial crisis has had heterogeneous effects on traded goods differentiated by quality. Combining a dataset of Argentinean firm-level destination-specific wine exports with quality ratings, we show that higher quality exports grew faster before the crisis, but this trend reversed during the recession. Quantitatively, the effect is large: up to nine percentage points difference in trade performance can be explained by the quality composition of exports. This flight from quality was triggered by a fall in aggregate demand, was more acute when households could substitute imports by domestic alternatives, and was stronger for smaller firms’ exports.

Mark Harrison

This short paper reviews a new book about World War II. In most such books, what is new is not usually important, and what is important is not new. This one is an exception. How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, by Phillips Payson O'Brien, sets out a new perspective on the war. An established view is that World War II was decided on the Eastern front, where multi-million armies struggled for supremacy on land and millions died. According to O’Brien, this neglects the fact that the preponderance of the Allied productive effort was devoted to building ships and planes for an air-sea battle that was fought to a limited extent in the East and with much higher intensity across the Western and Pacific theatres. The Allies’ air-sea power framed the outcomes of the great land campaigns by preventing Germany and Japan from fully realizing their economic potentials for war. Finding much to be said for this reinterpretation, I reconsider the true significance of the Eastern front.

Mark Harrison

In Soviet Lithuania (and elsewhere) from the 1950s to the 1980s, the KGB applied a form of "zero-tolerance" policing, or profilaktika, to incipient threats to state security. Petty deviation from socio-political norms was regarded as a person's first step towards more serious state crimes, and as a bad example for others. As long as petty violators could be classed as confused or misled rather than motivated by anti-Soviet conviction, their mistakes would be corrected by a KGB warning or "preventive discussion." Successful prevention avoided the costly removal of the subject from society. This represented a complete contrast to the Stalin years, when prevention relied largely on eliminating the subject from society. Preventive discussions were widely practised in many different circumstances. KGB internal evaluations concluded that these discussions were extremely effective in preventing further violations. This was the front line of the Soviet police state; it was perhaps the largest programme for personally targeted behaviour modification anywhere in the world at that time outside the education sector. It was also a front line of the Cold War because the foreign adversary was seen as the most important source of misleading or confusing influence. My work in progress aims to understand the origins and operation of profilaktika, including how and to whom it was applied, how it worked on the individual subject, and its wider influence on the Soviet Union’s social and political order.

Sofoklis Goulas and Rigissa Megalokonomou

We study the effect of disclosing relative performance information (feedback) on students' performance in high-school and on subsequent university enrolment. We exploit a large scale natural experiment where students in some cohorts are provided with their national and school relative performance. Using unique primary collected data, we find an asymmetric response to the relative performance information: high achieving students improve their last-year performance by 0.15 standard deviations whereas the last-year performance of low achieving students drops by 0.3 standard deviations. The results are more pronounced for females indicating greater sensitivity to feedback. We also document the long term effect of feedback provision: high achieving students reduce their repetition rate of the national exams, enrol into 0.15 standard deviations more popular University Departments and their expected annual earnings increase by 0.17 standard deviations. Results are opposite for low achieving students. We find suggestive evidence that feedback encourages more students from low-income neighborhoods to enrol in university and to study in higher-quality programs indicating a potential decrease in income inequality.

Sharun Mukand and Dani Rodrik

We distinguish between three sets of rights – property rights, political rights, and civil rights and provide a taxonomy of political regimes. The distinctive nature of liberal democracy is that it protects civil rights (equality before the law for minorities) in addition to the other two. Democratic transitions are typically the product of a settlement between the elite (who care mostly about property rights) and the majority (who care mostly about political rights). Such settlements rarely produce liberal democracy, as the minority has neither the resources nor the numbers to make a contribution at the bargaining table. We develop a formal model to sharpen the contrast between electoral and liberal democracies and highlight circumstances under which liberal democracy can emerge. We discuss informally the difference between social mobilizations sparked by industrialization and decolonization. Since the latter revolve around identity cleavages rather than class cleavages, they are less conducive to liberal politics.

Nick Buttz, Rohan Churmz, Michael McMahon, Arpad Morotzz and Jochen Schanz

We test whether quantitative easing (QE), in addition to boosting aggregate demand and inflation via portfolio rebalancing channels, operated through a bank lending channel (BLC) in the UK. Using Bank of England data together with an instrumental variables approach, we find no evidence of a traditional BLC associated with QE. We show, in a simple framework, that the traditional BLC is diminished if the bank receives 'flighty' deposits (deposits that are likely to quickly leave the bank). We show that QE gave rise to such flighty deposits which may explain why we find no evidence of a BLC.

Benjamin Artz, Amanda H Goodall, and Andrew J Oswald

Nearly all workers have a supervisor or ‘boss’. Yet little is known about how bosses influence the quality of employees’ lives. This study is a cautious attempt to provide new formal evidence. First, it is shown that a boss’s technical competence is the single strongest predictor of a worker’s job satisfaction. Second, it is demonstrated in longitudinal data -- after controlling for fixed effects -- that even if a worker stays in the same job and workplace a rise in the competence of a supervisor is associated with an improvement in the worker’s well-being. Third, a variety of robustness checks, including tentative instrumental-variable results, are reported. These findings, which draw on US and British data, contribute to an emerging literature on the role of expert leaders in organizations. Finally, the paper discusses potential weaknesses of existing evidence and necessary future research.

Gus O'Donnell and Andrew J Oswald

Governments are becoming interested in the concept of human well-being and how truly to assess it. As an alternative to traditional economic measures, some nations have begun to collect information on citizens’ happiness, life satisfaction, and other psychological scores. Yet how could such data actually be used? This paper is a cautious attempt to contribute to thinking on that question. It suggests a possible weighting method to calculate first-order changes in society’s well-being, discusses some of the potential principles of democratic ‘well-being policy’, and (as an illustrative example) reports data on how sub-samples of citizens believe feelings might be weighted.

Miguel Almunia & David Lopez-Rodriguez

This paper analyzes the effects on tax compliance of monitoring the information trails generated by firms’ activities. We exploit quasi-experimental variation generated by a Large Taxpayers Unit (LTU) in Spain, which monitors firms with more than 6 million euros in reported revenue. Firms strategically bunch below this threshold in order to avoid stricter tax enforcement. This response is stronger in sectors where transactions leave more paper trail, implying that monitoring effort and the traceability of information reported by firms are complements. We calculate that there would be substantial welfare gains from extending stricter tax monitoring to smaller businesses.

Roberto Pancrazi, Hernan D. Seoane & Marija Vukotic

In this paper we examine the impact of bailout policies in small open economies that are subject to financial frictions. We extend standard endogenous default models in two ways. First, we augment the government’s choice set with a bailout option. In addition to the standard choice of defaulting or repaying the debt, a government can also choose to ask for a third-party bailout, which comes at a cost of an imposed borrowing limit. Second, we introduce financial frictions and a financial intermediation channel, which tie conditions on the private credit market to the conditions on the sovereign credit market. This link has been very strong in European countries during the recent sovereign crisis. We find that the existence of a bailout option reduces sovereign spreads and, through the described link, private credit rates as well. The implementation of a rescue program reduces output losses and increases welfare, measured in consumption equivalent terms. Moreover, bailout benefits emerge even when a government only has the option of asking for a bailout, but does not take advantage of it.

Roberto Pancrazi & Mario Pietrunti

In this paper we propose a novel explanation for the increase in households' leverage during the recent boom in U.S. housing prices. We use the U.S. housing market's boombust episode that led to the Great Recession as a case study, and we show that biased long-run expectations of both households and, especially, nancial intermediaries about future housing prices had a large impact on households' indebtedness. Specically, first we show that it is likely that financial intermediaries used forecasting models that ignored the long-run mean reversion of housing prices after a short-run momentum, thus leading to an overestimation of future households' housing wealth. We frame this finding in the theory of natural expectations, proposed by Fuster et al. (2010), to the housing market. Then, using a tractable model of collateralized credit market populated by households and banks, we find that: (1) mild variations in long-run forecasts of housing prices result in quantitatively considerable dierences in the amount of home equity extracted during a housing price boom; (2) the equilibrium levels of debt and interest rate are particularly sensitive to nancial intermediaries' naturalness; (3) home equity extraction data are better matched by models in which agents are fairly natural. 1068

Eric Mengus and Roberto Pancrazi

We show that the transition from an economy characterized by idiosyncratic income shocks and incomplete markets a la Aiyagari (1994) to markets where statecontingent assets are available but costly (in order to purchase a contingent asset, households have to pay a xed participation cost) leads to a large increase of wealth inequality. Using a standard calibration our model can match a Gini of 0.93 close to the level of wealth inequality observed in the US. In addition, under this level of participation costs, wealth inequality is particularly sensitive to income inequality.We label this phenomenon as the Inequality Accelerator. We demonstrate how costly access to contingent asset-markets generates these eects. The key insight stems from the non-monotonic relationship between wealth and desired degree of insurance, in an economy with participation costs. Poor borrowing constrained households remain uninsured, middle-class households are almost perfectly insured, while rich households decide to self-insure by purchasing risk-free assets. This feature of households' risk management has crucial eects in asset prices, wealth inequality, and social mobility.

Clement de Chaisemartin and Xavier D'Haultfoeuille

This paper gathers the supplementary material to de Chaisemartin & D'Haultfoeuille (2015). First, we show that two commonly used IV and OLS regressions with time and group fixed effects estimate weighted averages of Wald-DIDs. It then follows from Theorem 3.1 in de Chaisemartin & D'Haultfoeuille (2015) that these regressions estimate weighted sums of LATEs, with potentially many negative weights as we illustrate through two applications. We review all papers published in the American Economic Review between 2010 and 2012 and find that 10.1% of these papers estimate one or the other regression. Second, we consider estimators of the bounds on average and quantile treatment effects derived in Theorems 3.2 and 3.3 in de Chaisemartin & D'Haultfoeuille (2015) and we study their asymptotic behavior. Third, we revisit Gentzkow et al. (2011) and Field (2007) using our estimators. Finally, we present all the remaining proofs not included in the main paper.

Clement de Chaisemartin and Xavier D'Haultfoeuille

In many applications of the differences-in-differences (DID) method, the treatment increases more in the treatment group, but some units are also treated in the control group. In such fuzzy designs, a popular estimator of treatment effects is the DID of the outcome divided by the DID of the treatment, or OLS and 2SLS regressions with time and group fixed effects estimating weighted averages of this ratio across groups. We start by showing that when the treatment also increases in the control group, this ratio estimates a causal effect only if treatment effects are homogenous in the two groups. Even when the distribution of treatment is stable, it requires that the effect of time be the same on all counterfactual outcomes. As this assumption is not always applicable, we propose two alternative estimators. The first estimator relies on a generalization of common trends assumptions to fuzzy designs, while the second extends the changes-in-changes estimator of Athey & Imbens (2006). When the distribution of treatment changes in the control group, treatment effects are partially identified. Finally, we prove that our estimators are asymptotically normal and use them to revisit applied papers using fuzzy designs.

Chris Doyle, David Ronayne and Daniel Sgroi

The highly controversial e-cigarette industry has generated considerable policy debate and mixed regulatory responses worldwide. Surprisingly, an issue thathas been largely ignored is the categorisation of e-cigarettes as substitutes or (dynamic) complements for conventional smoking. We conduct an online survey ofUS participants finding that 37% of e-cigarette users view them primarily as complementary. We use this result along-side publicly available data to calibrate a cost-benefit analysis, estimating that complementarity reduces the potential cost-savings of e-cigarettes by as much as 57% (or $3.3-4.9bn p.a.) relative to case with zero complementarity.

Ben Lockwood and James Rockey

This paper studies how voter loss-aversion affects electoral competition in a Downsian setting. Assuming that the voters’ reference point is the status quo, we show that loss-aversion has a number of effects. First, for some values of the status quo, there is policy rigidity both parties choose platforms equal to the status quo, regardless of other parameters. Second, there is a moderation effect when there is policy rigidity, the equilibrium policy outcome is closer to the moderate voters’ ideal point than in the absence of loss-aversion. In a dynamic extension of the model, we consider how parties strategically manipulate the status quo to their advantage, and we find that this increases policy rigidity. Finally, we show that with loss-aversion, incumbents adjust less than challengers to changes in voter preferences. The underlying force is that the status quo works to the advantage of the incumbent. This prediction of asymmetric adjustment is new, and we test it using elections to US state legislatures. The results are as predicted: incumbent parties respond less to shocks in the preferences of the median voter.

Jordi Gali and Thijs van Rens

We document three changes in postwar US macroeconomic dynamics: (i) the procyclicality of labor productivity vanished, (ii) the relative volatility of employment rose, and (iii) the relative (and absolute) volatility of the real wage rose. We propose an explanation for all three changes that is based on a common source: the decline in labor market turnover, which reduced hiring frictions. We develop a simple model with hiring frictions, variable effort, and endogenous wage rigidities to illustrate the mechanisms underlying our explanation. We show that the decline
in turnover may also have contributed to the observed decline in output volatility.

Jordi Gali and Thijs van Rens

We document three changes in postwar US macroeconomic dynamics: (i) the procyclicality of labor productivity vanished, (ii) the relative volatility of employment rose, and (iii) the relative (and absolute) volatility of the real wage rose. We propose an explanation for all three changes that is based on a common source: the decline in labor market turnover, which reduced hiring frictions. We develop a simple model with hiring frictions, variable effort, and endogenous wage rigidities to illustrate the mechanisms underlying our explanation. We show that the decline
in turnover may also have contributed to the observed decline in output volatility

Peter Hammond

Catastrophic risk, rare events, and black swans are phenomena that require special attention in normative decision theory. Several papers by Chichilnisky integrate them into a single framework with nitely additive subjective probabilities.Some precursors include: (i) following Jones-Lee (1974), undened willingness to pay to avoid catastrophic risk; (ii) following Renyi (1955, 1956) and many successors, rare events whose probability is innitesimal. Also, when rationality is bounded, enlivened decision trees can represent a dynamic process involving successively unforeseen \true black swan" events. One conjectures that a dierent integrated framework could be developed to include these three phenomena while preserving countably additive probabilities.

Luc Behaghel, Clement de Chaisemartin and Marc Gurgand

Boarding schools substitute school to home, but little is known on the eects this substitution produces on students. We present results of an experiment in which seats in a boarding school for disadvantaged students were randomly allocated. Boarders enjoy better studying conditions than control students. However, they start outperforming control students in mathematics only two years after admission, and this effect mostly comes from strong students. After one year, levels of well-being are lower among boarders, but in their second year, students adjust: well-being catches-up. This suggests that substituting school to home is disruptive: only strong students benet from the boarding school, once they have managed to adapt to their new environment.

Choong Hyun Nam

Since the 1980s, labour demand has shifted toward more educated workers in the US. The most common explanation is that the productivity of skilled workers has risen relative to the unskilled, but it is not easy to explain why aggregate labour productivity was stagnant during the 1980s.This paper suggests an alternative story: introducing new goods involves a fixed labour input, which is biased toward white-collar workers. Hence the transition from Ford-style mass production towards more diversied one has shifted labour demand toward white-collar workers.

Niall Hughes and Sebastian Fehrler

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decisionmaking.We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concerns are predicted to affect behavior differently, and test the model’s key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model’s predictions are largely borne out - transparency negatively affects information aggregation at the deliberation and voting stages, leading to sharply different committee error rates than under secrecy. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information under transparency than theory predicts.

David Ronayne

The large and growing industry of price comparison websites (PCWs) or “web aggregators” is poised to benefit consumers by increasing competitive pricing pressure on firms by acquainting shoppers with more prices. However, these sites also charge firms for sales, which feeds back to raise prices. I find that introducing any number of PCWs to a market increases prices for all consumers, both those who use the sites, and those who do not. I then use my framework to identify ways in which a more competitive environment could be achieved

Niall Hughes

Conventional models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen - extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when when single district elections are used to fill a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters. An extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred by the median voter in a majority of districts, while the mere existence of a centrist party can lead to moderate outcomes even if the party itself wins few seats. Furthermore, I show that while standard single district elections always have misaligned voting i.e. some voters do not vote for their preferred choice, equilibria of the legislative election exist with no misaligned voting in any district. Finally, I show that when parties are impatient, a xed rule on how legislative bargaining occurs will lead to more coalition governments, while uncertainty will favour single party governments

Thanos Athanasopoulos

This paper investigates the relation between firms’ R&D incentives and their compatibility decisions regarding durable, imperfectly substitutable network goods in the presence of forward looking consumers. Non drastic product innovation is sequential and both an initially dominant firm and a smaller rival are potential inventors. For sufficiently innovative future products, our first key result is that the dominant firm invests more when there is compatibility and voluntarily decides to supply interoperability information. This happens as the probability that he is the only inventor increases, allowing him to enjoy a higher expected future profit that outweighs the current lost revenue. For economies whose initial market size is considerably large, the rival also demands compatibility but this is no longer true in industries with a relatively smaller number of existing consumers. For less innovative new versions, the dominant firm rejects compatibility and there is a cutoff in network externalities below which he invests more when there is incompatibility. Regarding welfare, we find that a laissez faire Competition Law with respect to the IPR holders is socially preferable.

Kazim Azam

This paper studies the effect of marginal distributions on a copula, in the case of mixed discrete-continuous random variables. The existing literature has proposed various methods to deal with mixed marginals: this paper is the first to quantify their effect in a unified Bayesian setting. Using order statistics based information for the marginals, as proposed by Ho (2007), we find that in small samples the bias and mean square error are at least half in size as compared to those of empirical or misspecified marginal distributions. The difference in the bias and mean square error enlarges with increasing sample size, especially for low count discrete variables. We employ the order statistics method on firm-level patents data, containing both discrete and continuous random variables, and consistently estimate their correlation.

Kazim Azam

Not only currencies are assets in investor's portfolio, central banks use them for implementing economic policies.This implies existence of some type of dependence pattern among the currencies. We investigate such patterns among daily Deutsche Mark (DM) (Euro later), UK Sterling (GBP) and the Japanese Yen (JPY) exchange rate, all considered against the US Dollar during various economic conditions. To overcome the short-comings of mis- specification, normality and linear dependence for such time series, a exible semi-parametric copula methodology is adopted where the marginals are non-parametric but the copula is parametrically specified. Dependence is estimated both as a constant and time-varying measure. During the Pre-Euro period, we find slightly more dependence when both DM (Euro)/USD and GBP/USD jointly appreciate as compared to joint depreciation, especially in the late 90s. Such results are reversed for GBP/USD and JPY/USD in the early 90s. Post-Euro, DM (Euro)/USD and GBP/USD exhibit stronger dependen e when they jointly appreciate, which could indicate preference for price-stability in EU zone. Whereas the dependence of JPY/USD with both DM (Euro)/USD and GBP/USD is stronger when they jointly depreciate, this could imply preference for export competitiveness among the countries. In the beginning of Recent-Crisis period, DM (EURO)/USD and GBP/USD show more dependence when they jointly depreciate, but later we see the similar tendency for these currencies to be related more when they jointly appreciate. Such measures of asymmetric dependence among the currencies provide vital insight into Central banks preferences and investors portfolio balancing.

Mike Pitt and Kazim Azam

This paper presents a method to specify a strictly stationary univariate time series model with particular emphasis on the marginal characteristics (fat tailedness, skewness etc.). It is the first time in time series models with specified marginal distribution, a non-parametric specification is used. Through a Copula distribution, the marginal aspect are separated and the information contained within the order statistics allow to efficiently model a discretely-varied time series. The estimation is done through Bayesian method. The method is invariant to any copula family and for any level of heterogeneity in the random variable. Using count times series of weekly rearm homicides in Cape Town, South Africa, we show our method eciently estimates the copula parameter representing the first-order Markov chain transition density.

Kostas Koufopoulos , Roman Kozhan, Giulio Trigilia

We consider a model of external financing under ex ante asymmetric information and profit manipulation (non veriability). Contrary to conventional wisdom, the optimal contract is not standard debt, and it is not monotonic. Instead, it resembles a contingent convertible (CoCo) bond. In particular: (i) if the profit manipulation and/or adverse selection are not severe, there exists a unique separating equilibrium in CoCos; (ii) in the intermediate region, if the distribution of earnings is unbounded above there exists a unique pooling equilibrium in CoCos, otherwise debt might be issued but it is never the unique equilibrium; (iii) nally, if profit manipulation is severe, there is no financing. These findings suggest that the standard monotonicity constraint exogenously imposed in the security design literature must be reconsidered. Crucially, profit manipulation is part of the optimal contract, and non-monotonic, convertible securities mitigate the asymmetric information problem. We discuss milestone payments in venture capital as an application.

Luigi Pascali

The 1870-1913 period marked the birth of the first era of trade globalization. How did this tremendous increase in trade affect economic development? This work isolates a causality channel by exploiting the fact that the steamship produced an asymmetric change in trade distances among countries. Before the invention of the steamship, trade routes depended on wind patterns. The introduction of the steamship in the shipping industry reduced shipping costs and time in a disproportionate manner across countries and trade routes. Using this source of variation and a completely novel set of data on shipping times, trade, and development that spans the great majority of the world between 1850 and 1900, I find that 1) the adoption of the steamship was the major reason for the first wave of trade globalization, 2) only a small number of countries that were characterized by more inclusive institutions benefited from globalization, and 3) globalization exerted a negative effect on both urbanization rates and economic deelopment in most other countries.

Lisa Flatley, Robert S MacKay , Michael Waterson

We characterise profit-maximising operating strategies, over some time horizon [0, T], for an energy store which is trading in an arbitrage market. Our theory allows for leakage, operating inefficiencies and general cost functions. In the special case where the operating cost of a store depends only on its instantaneous power ouput (or input), we present an algorithm to determine the optimal strategies. A key feature is that this algorithm is localised in time, in the sense that the action of the store at a time t 2 [0, T] only requires information about electricity prices over some subinterval of time [t, ] [t, T].

Luigi Grossi , Sven Heim and Michael Waterson

The German response to the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident was possibly the most significant change of policy towards nuclear power outside Japan, leading to a sudden and very significant shift in the underlying power generation structure in Germany. This provides a very useful natural experiment on the impact of increasing proportions of renewable compared to conventional fuel inputs into power production, helping us to see how changed proportions in future as a result of policy moves in favour of renewables are likely to impact. We find through quasi-experimental exploration of a modified demand-supply framework that despite the swift, unpredicted change, the main impact was a significant increase in prices, partly caused by more frequent situations with unilateral market power. The price impact was also most significant in off-peak hours leading to changed investment incentives. There were no appreciable quantity effects on the market, such as power outages, contrary to some views that the impacts w uld be significant. Furthermore, we find the sudden and unilateral phase-out decision by the German government has significantly affected electricity prices and thus competitiveness in neighbouring countries.

Dilip V. Jeste and Andrew J. Oswald

Objective: Although human aging is characterized by loss of fertility and progressive decline in physical abilities, later life is associated with better psychological health and well-being. Furthermore, there has been an unprecedented increase in average lifespan over the past century without corresponding extensions of fertile and healthy age spans. We propose a possible explanation for these paradoxical phenomena. Method: We reviewed the relevant literature on aging, well-being, and wisdom. Results: An increase in specific components of individual wisdom in later life may make up for the loss of fertility as well as declining physical health. However, current data on the relationship between aging and individual wisdom are not consistent, and do not explain increased longevity in the general population during the past century. We propose that greater societal wisdom (including compassion) may account for the notable increase in average lifespan over the last century. Data in older adults with serious mentaillnesses are limited, but suggest that many of them too experience improved psychosocial functioning, although their longevity has not yet increased, suggesting persistent stigma against mental illness and inadequate societal compassion.

Eugenio Proto and Aldo Rustichini

Cooperating behavior may be fostered by personality traits reflecting either favorable inclination to others or willingness to comply with norms and rules. We test the relative importance of these two factors in an experiment where subjects provide real mental effort in two treatments with identical task, differing only by whether others' payment is affected. If the first hypothesis is true, subjects reporting high agreeableness score should put more effort; if the second is true, reporting higher conscientiousness should predict more effort. We find experimental support for the second hypothesis but not for the first, as subjects reporting high Altruism do not behave consistently with this statement.

Robin Naylor and Christian Soegaard

We show that a firm's profits under Cournot oligopoly can be increasing in the number of firms in the industry if wages are determined by decentralised bargaining in unionised bilateral oligopoly. The intuition for the result is that increased product market competition following an increase in the number of firms is mirrored by increased labour market rivalry which induces (profit-enhancing) wage moderation. Whether the product or labour market effect dominates depends both on the extent of union bargaining power and on the nature of union preferences. An incumbent monopolist will have an incentive to accommodate entry if the labour market effect dominates. We also show that this incentive is stronger if the incumbent anticipates that, post entry, it will be able to act as a Stackelberg leader.

Thanos Athanasopoulos

This paper serves as a new contribution in understanding how firms’ decisions regarding compatibility relate to their incentives to invest into improving their durable, network goods in the presence of forward looking consumers. It is the first attempt to introduce a new framework in the literature by using a sequential game where the smaller firm can build on the dominant firm’s existing knowledge. Our first key result is that the market leader may indeed support compatibility with its rival and this happens when it anticipates a substantial quality improvement by the competitor allowing him to extract in the present market more of the higher total expected surplus that emerges when interoperability is present. On the other hand, the rival always supports compatibility because she can charge a higher price due to a larger network. Furthermore, we find that interoperability does not de-facto maximise social welfare and we identify no market failure when network effects are not particularly strong.

Federica Liberini

It is desirable to reduce the number of "artificial" merger and acquisitions (MA) designed to escape from high tax jurisdictions, without discouraging domestic firms from growing into highly productive multinational corporations. This paper studies the effect of corporate taxes on the headquarter's decision to expand its extensive margins through the acquisition of pre-existing firms. A model for the investment behaviour of heterogeneous firms is built, and Corporate taxes are introduced. The model shows that higher home statutory corporate tax rates make exports relatively more expensive, making firms more likely to serve foreign demand through cross-border acquisitions. The model's predictions are tested on a dynamic random parameter probit model estimated on firm-level data. The model's predictions are confirmed by the results from the empirical investigation. The data also support the hypothesis that there are sunk costs associated with becoming a multinational corporation, and that domestic firm that overcome these costs and acquire their first foreign subsidiary are more likely to complete further acquisitions. In addition, the inability to shift profit to foreign locations makes domestic firms more sensitive to home corporate taxes, as their capacity to capture investment opportunity is negatively affected by a reduction in net tax profit.

Huw Dixon, Jonathon S Seaton and Michael Waterson

This paper delivers a significantly different empirical perspective on micro pricing behaviour and its impact on macroeconomic processes than previous studies, largely resulting from the fact that our weekly price data for the three major British supermarkets spans a seven year period including the crisis years 2008-2010. We find that there is a large and significant change in the behaviour of prices from 2008 onwards: prices change more frequently and the average duration of price spells declines significantly. Several of our findings run strongly counter to established empirical regularities, in particular the high overall frequency of regular or reference price changes we uncover, the greater intensity of change in more turbulent times and the numerical dominance of price falls over rises. The pricing behaviour revealed also significantly challenges the implicit assumption that prices are tracking cost changes.

Rocco D'Este

This paper investigates the effect of stolen goods markets on crime. We focus on pawnshops, a business that have long been suspected of illicit trade. The analysis of a unique panel dataset of 2176 US counties from 1997 - 2010 uncovers an elasticity of pawnshops to theft crimes of 0.8 to 1.4. We then exploit the raise in gold price as a quasi - natural experiment, where the intensity of the treatment is given by the predetermined concentration of pawnshops in the county. A one standard deviation increase in pawnshops’ initial allocation raises the effect of gold price on burglaries by 0.05 to 0.10 standard deviation. No effect is ever detected on any other type of crime.

Nattavudh Powdthavee & Andrew J. Oswald

The causes of people’s political attitudes are largely unknown. We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing people before and after a lottery windfall, we show that winners tend to switch towards support for a right-wing political party and to become less egalitarian. The larger the win, the more people tilt to the right. This relationship is robust to (i) different ways of defining right-wing, (ii) a variety of estimation methods, and (iii) methods that condition on the person previously having voted left. It is strongest for males. Our findings are consistent with the view that voting is driven partly by human self-interest. Money apparently makes people more right-wing.

Richard Dorsett & Andrew J. Oswald

Many politicians believe they can intervene in the economy to improve people’s lives. But can they? In a social experiment carried out in the United Kingdom, extensive in-work support was randomly assigned among 16,000 disadvantaged people. We follow a sub-sample of 3,500 single parents for 5 ensuing years. The results reveal a remarkable, and troubling, finding. Long after eligibility had ceased, the treated individuals had substantially lower psychological well-being, worried more about money, and were increasingly prone to debt. Thus helping people apparently hurt them. We discuss a behavioral framework consistent with our findings and reflect on implications for policy.

Terence C. Chenga, Nattavudh Powdthavee & Andrew J. Oswald

There is a large amount of cross-sectional evidence for a midlife low in the life cycle of human happiness and well-being (a ‘U shape’). Yet no genuinely longitudinal inquiry has uncovered evidence for a U-shaped pattern. Thus some researchers believe the U is a statistical artefact. We re-examine this fundamental cross-disciplinary question. We suggest a new test. Drawing on four data sets, and only within-person changes in well-being, we document powerful support for a U-shape in unadjusted longitudinal data without the need for regression equations. The paper’s methodological contribution is to exploit the first-derivative properties of a well-being equation.

John Stovall

We model a decision maker who anticipates being aected by temptation but is also uncertain about what is normatively best. Our model is an extended version of Gul and Pesendorfer's (2001) where there are three time periods: in the ex-ante period the agent chooses a set of menus, in the interim period she chooses a menu from this set, and in the nal period she chooses from the menu. We posit axioms from the ex-ante perspective. Our main axiom on preference states that the agent prefers to have the option to commit in the interim period. Our representation is a generalization of Dekel et al.'s (2009) and identies the agent's multiple normative preferences and multiple temptations. We also characterize the uncertain normative preference analogue to the representation in Stovall (2010). Finally, we characterize the special case where normative preference is not uncertain. This special case allows us to uniquely identify therepresentations of Dekel et al. (2009) and Stovall (2010).

John Stovall

We impose the axiom Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives on division rules for the conflicting claims problem. With the addition of Consistency and Resource Monotonicity, this characterizes a family of rules which can be described in three different but intuitive ways. First, a rule is identified with a fixed monotone path in the space of awards, and for a given claims vector, the path of awards for that claims vector is simply the monotone path truncated by the claims vector. Second, a rule is identified with a set of parametric functions indexed by the claimants, and for a given claims problem, each claimant receives the value of his parametric function at a common parameter value, but truncated by his claim. Third, a rule is identified with an additively separable, strictly concave social welfare function, and for a given claims problem, the mount awarded is the maximizer of the social welfare function subject to the constraint of choosing a feasible award. This third way of describing the family of rule is similar to Lensberg's (1987) solution for bargaining problems applied to conflicting claims problems.

Chrysovalantis Vasilakis

Complex interactions between high-skilled migration and aggregate performance govern the dynamics of growth and inequality across nations. Due to lack of data, these interdependencies have not been extensively studied in the economics literature. This paper takes advantage of the availability of rich panel data on the mobility of talented football players, and the performances of national leagues and teams to quantify the effect of a "globalization" shock, the 1995 Bosman rule, on global efficiency and cross-country inequality in football. I built a micro-founded model endogenizing migration decisions, inequality and training; I estimated its structural parameters; and I used numerical simulations to compare actual data with a counterfactual no-Bosman trajectory. My analysis reveals that the Bosman shock (i) increased global efficiency in football, (ii) increased inequality across leagues, and (iii) decreased inequality across national teams. I quantify the effect of the Bosman rule on the football hierarchy f UEFA and FIFA. Countries from Africa, South (except Argentina and Brazil) and Central America have produced more talents and benefitted from brain-gain type effects. My results also show that this brain-gain mechanism is the major source of efficiency gains. However, it plays only a minor role in explaining the rising inequality  

Peter J. Hammond and Horst Zank

For choice with deterministic consequences, the standard rationality hypothesis is ordinality|i.e., maximization of a weak preference ordering. For choice under risk (resp. uncertainty), preferences are assumed to be represented by the objectively (resp. subjectively) expected value of a von Neumann{ Morgenstern utility function. For choice under risk, this implies a key independence axiom; under uncertainty, it implies some version of Savage's sure thing principle. This chapter investigates the extent to which ordinality, independence, and the sure thing principle can be derived from more fundamental axioms concerning behaviour in decision trees. Following Cubitt (1996), these principles include dynamic consistency, separability, and reduction of sequential choice, which can be derived in turn from one consequentialist hypothesis applied to continuation subtrees as well as entire decision trees. Examples of behavior violating these principles are also reviewed, as are possible explanations of why such violat ons are often observed in experiments.

Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria

This paper provides evidence on the importance of reputation, intended as beliefs buyers hold about seller’s reliability, in the context of the Kenyan rose export sector. A model of reputation and relational contracting is developed and tested. We show that 1) the value of the relationship increases with the age of the relationship; 2) during an exogenous negative supply shock sellers prioritize relationships consistently with the predictions of the model; and 3) reliability at the time of the shock positively correlates with future survival and relationship value. Models exclusively focussing on enforcement or insurance considerations cannot account for the evidence.

Pablo F. Beker and Emilio Espino

We evaluate whether the introduction of pessimistic homogeneous beliefs in the frictionless Lucas-Mehra-Prescott model and the Kehoe-Levine-Alvarez-Jermann model with endogenous borrowing constraints, helps explain the equity premium, the risk-free rate and the equity volatility puzzles as well as the short-term momentum and long-term reversal of excess returns. We calibrate the model to U.S. data as in Alvarez and Jermann [4] and we find that the data does not contradict the qualitative predictions of the models. When the preferences parameters are disciplined to match both the average annual risk-free rate and equity premium, the Lucas-Mehra- Prescott model gives a more quantitatively accurate explanation for short-term momentum than the Kehoe-Levine-Alvarez-Jermann model but the latter gives a more quantitatively accurate explanation for the equity volatility puzzle. Long-term reversal remains quantitatively unexplained in both models.

Michelle Sovinsky and Eric Helland

Every year thousands of firms are engaged in research joint ventures (RJV), where all knowledge gained through R&D is shared among members. Most of the empirical literature assumes members are non-cooperative in the product market. But many RJV members are rivals leaving open the possibility that firms may form RJVs to facilitate collusion. We examine this by exploiting variation in RJV formation generated by a policy change that affects the collusive benefits but not the research synergies associated with a RJV. We use data on RJVs formed between 1986 and 2001 together with firm-level information from Compustat to estimate a RJV participation equation. After correcting for the endogeneity of R&D and controlling for RJV characteristics and firm attributes, we find the decision to join is impacted by the policy change. We also find the magnitude is significant: the policy change resulted in an average drop in the probability of joining a RJV of 34% among telecommu- nications firms, 33% among computer and semiconductor manufacturers, and 27% among petroleum refining firms. Our results are consistent with research joint ventures serving a collusive function.

Luciana A Nicollier

Empirical evidence suggests that online reviews are an important source of consumers information and a relevant determinant of the firms revenues. Little is known, however, about how prices and reviews affect each other. This paper proposes a dynamic game to investigate this relationship. A long-lived monopoly faces a sequence of short-lived consumers whose only information about the value of an experience good is the one contained in the reviews completed by previous buyers. Neither the monopoly nor the consumers have private information about the value of the good. After buying the good, the consumers observe a quality realisation that is correlated with the actual value of the good and decide whether to complete reviews. The consumers complete reviews according to a social rule that maximises the present value of current and future consumers utility. It is shown that a necessary condition for the existence of reviews is that the rm cannot fully appropriate the surplus generated by this increased information Furthermore, the reviews induce a mean preserving spread on the posterior beliefs about the value of the good which, combined with the convexity with respect to the prior of the indirect utility and prot functions, implies that reviews are valuable for both the consumers and the firm. Hence, both parties are willing to face some cost in order to increase the information available in the market. The main result of the paper is that, from the firm's perspective, this cost takes the form of a discount in the price oered to current consumers.

Marco Francesconi, Christian Ghiglino and Motty Perry

We present a game theoretic model to explain why people form life long monogamous families. Three components are essential in our framework, paternal investment, fatherhood uncertainty, and, perhaps the most distinctive feature of all, the overlap of children of dif- ferent ages. When all three conditions are present, monogamy is the most ecient form of sexual organization in the sense that it yields greater survivorship than serial monogamy, group marriage, and polygyny. Monogamy is also the only configuration that fosters altruistic ties among siblings. Finally, our result sheds light to the understanding of why most religions center around the monogamous delity family.

Susanto Basu, Luigi Pascali and Fabio Schiantarelli

We show that the welfare of a country’s infinitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a first order, by total factor productivity (TFP) and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare di¤erences across countries. The result holds regardless of the type of production technology and the degree of product market competition. It applies to open economies as well, if TFP is constructed using domestic absorption, instead of gross domestic product, as the measure of output. Welfare relevant TFP needs to be constructed with prices and quantities as perceived by consumers, not firms. Thus, factor shares need to be calculated using after-tax wages and rental rates, and will typically sum to less than one. These results are used to calculate welfare gaps and growth rates in a sample of advanced countries with high-quality data on output, hours worked, and capital. We also present evidence for a broader sample that includes both advaned and developing countries.

Luigi Pascali

Are differences in local banking development long-lasting? Do they a¤ect long-term economic performance? I answer these questions by relying on an historical development that occurred in Italian cities during the 15th century. A sudden change in the Catholic doctrine had driven the Jews toward money lending. Cities that were hosting Jewish communities developed complex banking institutions for two reasons: first, the Jews were the only people in Italy who were allowed to lend for a profit and, second, the Franciscan reaction to Jewish usury led to the creation of charity lending institutions, the Monti di Pietà, that have survived until today and have become the basis of the Italian banking system. Using Jewish demography in 1500 as an instrument, I provide evidence of (1) an extraordinary persistence in the level of banking development across Italian cities (2) large effects of current local banking development on per-capita income. Additional firm-level analyses suggest that well-functioning local banks exert large effects on aggregate productivity by reallocating resources toward more efficient firms. I exploit the expulsion of the Jews from the Spanish territories in Italy in 1541 to argue that my results are not driven by omitted institutional, cultural and geographical characteristics. In particular, I show that, in Central Italy, the difference in current income between cities that hosted Jewish communities and cities that did not exists only in those regions that were not Spanish territories in the 16th century.

Rocco Macchiavello

Entrepreneurs must experiment to learn how good they are at a new activity. What happens when the experimentation is financed by a lender? Under common scenarios, i.e., when there is the opportunity to learn by "starting small" or when "no-compete" clauses cannot be enforced ex-post, we show that financing experimentation can become harder precisely when it is more profitable, i.e., for lower values of the known-arm and for more optimistic priors. Endogenous collateral requirements (like those frequently observed in micro-credit schemes) are shown to be part of the optimal contract.

Ilan Kremer, Yishay Mansour and Motty Perry

We study a novel mechanism design model in which agents each arrive sequentially and choose one action from a set of actions with unknown rewards. The information revealed by the principal affects the incentives of the agents to explore and generate new information. We characterize the optimal disclosure policy of a planner whose goal is to maximize social welfare. One interpretation of our result is the implementation of what is known as the "wisdom of the crowd". This topic has become increasingly relevant with the rapid spread of the Internet over the past decade.

Luc Tucker

Members of worldwide parliaments partake in debates, where they have the opportunity to hold governments to account by asking pre-submitted questions. The UK House of Commons uses a ballot system to determine which members are selected to ask a question from those who expressed an interest in doing so. This paper is the first in the literature to exploit this randomization to show that the asking of such questions increases a member’s chances of being reelected by their constituents. It is shown that while the ordering of parliamentary questions is determined at random, the practicalities of conducting debates introduce a potentially endogenous element to the determination of which questions receive oral answers (particularly the speed at which questions are answered). This paper uses a matched sampling approach to cope with such non-random cases, but also includes alternative results, to show that the findings are not reliant on the use of this technique.

Mehmet Gurdal, Joshua B. Miller & Aldo Rustichini

We provide experimental evidence that subjects blame others based on events they are not responsible for. In our experiment an agent chooses between a lottery and a safe asset; payment from the chosen option goes to a principal who then decides how much to allocate between the agent and a third party. We observe widespread blame: regardless of their choice, agents are blamed by principals for the outcome of the lottery, an event they are not responsible for. We provide an explanation of this apparently irrational behavior with a delegated-expertise principal-agent model, the subjects’ salient perturbation of the environment.

In democratic politics, voters delegate competing policy-making responsibilities to multiple elected agents: one agent is frequently tasked with initiating policies (the proposer) whilst the other is charged with scrutinizing and either passing or rejecting these policies (the veto player ). A fundamental distinction lies in whether both oces are subject to direct and separate election, or whether the voter instead may directly elect only one oce. Why should the voter benefit from a relatively coarse electoral instrument? When politicians' abilities are private information, actions taken by one agent provide information about both agents' types. A system in which their electoral fates are institutionally fused reduces the incentives of the veto player to build reputation through the specious rejection of the proposer's policy initiatives. This can improve the voter's welfare, relative to a system in which the survival of the veto player is institutionally separated from that of the proposer.

Clement de Chaisemartin

The instrumental variable method relies on a strong no-defiers condition, which requires that the instrument affect every subject's treatment decision in the same direction. This paper shows that no-defiers can be replaced by a weaker compliers- defiers condition, which requires that a subgroup of compliers have the same size and the same distribution of potential outcomes as defiers. This condition is necessary and sucient for IV to capture causal effects for the remaining part of compliers. In many applications, compliers-defiers is a very weak condition. For instance, in Angrist & Evans (1998), 94% of DGPs compatible with the data satisfy compliers-defiers, while 0% satisfy no-defiers.

Bishnupriya Gupta

Industrial investment in Colonial India was segregated by the export oriented industries, such as tea and jute that relied on British firms and the import substituting cotton textile industry that was dominated by Indian firms. The literature emphasizes discrimination against Indian capital. Instead informational factors played an important role. British entrepreneurs knew the export markets and the Indian entrepreneurs were familiar with the local markets. The divergent flows of entrepreneurship can be explained by the comparative advantage enjoyed by social groups in information and the role of social networks in determining entry and creating separate spheres of industrial investment.

Nicholas Crafts and Terence Mills

We report estimates of the fiscal multiplier for interwar Britain based on quarterly data, time-series econometrics, and ‘defense news’. We find that the government expenditure multiplier was in the range 0.3 to 0.8, much lower than previous estimates. The scope for a Keynesian solution to recession was less than is generally supposed. We find that rearmament gave a smaller boost to real GDP than previously claimed. Rearmament may, however, have had a larger impact than a temporary public works program of similar magnitude if private investment anticipated the need to add capacity to cope with future defense spending.

Pablo Beker and Angel Hernando-Veciana

We develop a model of bidding markets with financial constraints a la Che and Gale (1998b) in which two firms optimally choose their budgets. First, we provide an alternative explanation for the dispersion of markups and “money left on the table” across procurement auctions. Interestingly, this explanation does not hinge on significant private information but on differences, both endogenous and exogenous, in the availability of financial resources. Second, we explain why the empirical analysis of the size of markups may be biased downwards or upwards with a bias positively correlated with the availability of financial resources when the researcher assumes that the data are generated by the standard auction model. Third, we show that large concentration and persistent asymmetries in market shares together with occasional leadership reversals can arise as a consequence of the firms internal financial decisions even in the absence of exogenous shocks.

Roberto Pancrazi

In this paper I compute the welfare e¤ect of the Great Moderation, using a consumption based asset pricing model. The Great Moderation is modelled according to the data properties of consumption and dividend growth, which display a reduction of their innovation-volatility and increased persistence. The theoretical model (a long-run risk model), calibrated to match average asset pricing variables in the data, is able to capture the two features of the Great Moderation, and it predicts a welfare loss caused by the Great Moderation (-0.9 percent), due mainly to the utility cost of a late uncertainty resolution.

Mark Harrison

The Soviet dictatorship used secrecy to shield its processes from external scrutiny. A system of accounting for classified documentation assured the protection of secrets. The associated procedures resemble a turnover tax applied to government transactions. There is evidence of both compliance and evasion. The burden of secrecy was multiplied because the system was also secret and so had to account for itself. Unique documentation of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, is exploited to yield an estimate of the burden. Measured against available benchmarks, the burden looks surprisingly heavy.

Marina Halac and Pierre Yared

This paper studies the optimal level of discretion in policymaking. We consider a scal policy model where the government has time-inconsistent preferences with a present-bias towards public spending. The government chooses a scal rule to trade o its desire to commit to not overspend against its desire to have exibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. We analyze the optimal scal rule when the shocks are persistent. Unlike under i.i.d: shocks, we show that the ex-ante optimal rule is not sequentially optimal, as it provides dynamic incentives. The ex-ante optimal rule exhibits history dependence, with high shocks leading to an erosion of future fiscal discipline compared to low shocks, which lead to the reinstatement of discipline. The implied policy distortions oscillate over time given a sequence of high shocks, and can force the government to accumulate maximal debt and become immiserated in the long run.

Roberto Pancrazi and Marija Vukotic

In this paper, by using several statistical tools, we provide evidence of increased persistence of the U.S. total factor productivity. In a forward-looking model, agents’ optimal behavior depends on the autocorrelation structure of the exogenous shocks. Since many monetary models are driven by exogenous technology shocks, we study the implications of a change in technology persistence on monetary policy using a New Keynesian framework. First, we analytically derive the interaction between the TFP persistence, monetary policy parameters, and output gap and in‡ation. Second, we show that change in the TFP persistence a¤ects the optimal behavior of monetary policy.

John Stovall

We describe and characterize the family of asymmetric parametric division rules for the adjudication of conflicting claims on a divisible homogeneous good. As part of the characterization, we present two novel axioms which restrict how a division rule indirectly allocates between different versions of the same claimant. We also show that such division rules can alternately be represented as the maximization of an additively separable social welfare function.

James Choy

Many societies are divided into multiple smaller groups. The defining feature of these groups is that certain kinds of interaction are more likely to take place within a group than across groups. I build a model in which group divisions are enforced through a reputational penalty for interacting with members of different groups. Agents who interact with members of different groups find that they can support lower levels of cooperation in the future. The model explains why agents may be punished by the other members of their group for interacting with members of different groups and why agents are punished for interacting with members of some groups but not others. I test the empirical implication that there should be less cooperation among members of groups that make up a larger percentage of their communities. I discuss the origin and possible future of social division.

Inger Sommerfelt Ervik and Christian Soegaard

Conventional economic theory stipulates that output in Cournot competition is too low relative to that which is attained in perfect competition. We revisit this result in a General Cournot-competitive Equilibrium model with two industries that differ only in terms of productivity. We show that in general equilibrium, the more efficient industry produces too little and the less efficient industry produces too much compared to an optimal scenario with perfect competition.

Jennifer C Smith

Theories of wage rigidity often rely on a positive relationship between pay changes and utility, arising from concern for fairness or gift exchange. Supportive evidence has emerged from laboratory experiments, but the link has not yet been established with field data. This paper contributes a first step, using representative British data. Workers care about the level and the growth of earnings. Below-median wage increases lead to an insult effect except when similar workers have real wage reductions or firm production is falling. Nominal pay cuts appear insulting even when the firm is doing badly.

Peter J. Hammond

Harsanyi's original position treats personal identity, upon which each individual's utility depends, as risky. Pattanaik's critique is related to the problem of scaling \state-dependent" von Neumann{Morgenstern utility when determining subjective probabilities. But a unique social welfare functional, incorporating both level and unit interpersonal comparisons, emerges from contemplating an \extended" original position allowing the probability of becoming each person to be chosen. Moreover, the paper suggests the relevance of a \Harsanyi ethical type space", with types as both causes and objects of preference.

Christian Soegaard

Why are trade agreements regional? I address this question in a model of oligopoly featuring product variety. Tariffs have the effect of manipulating a country's terms of trade and shifting profits towards the domestic market at the expense of foreign trade partners. Countries endogenously form into regional trade agreements or global free trade in a framework where any agreement must be sustained by repeated interaction. A crucial parameter determining the degree of regionalism is product variety. I demonstrate that for a given trade cost and discount factor, increases in product variety leads to greater scope for global free trade relative to regional trade agreements.

Thanos Athanasopoulos

In this article I explore an incumbent monopolist’s incentives to upgrade in the future his durable network product in the presence of overlapping generations of customers and a potential entrant who may also sell a version of the same quality. When the incumbent has commitment power and entry cannot be deterred, he decides to withhold the upgrade when network effects are weak, as strategic complementarity between the competitors’ intertemporal pricing decisions allows him to charge sufficiently patient forward-looking consumers more in the present market. On the other hand, he commits to upgrade when network effects are strong, as there is strategic substitutability between firms ’prices. Regarding welfare, the frequency of new products is not socially optimal when the quality improvement is negligible and smaller than their adoption cost. I find that both potential or actual competition and the incumbent’s commitment power are sources of inefficiency.

Simone Tonin

This short paper shows in an example of strategic market game that the Cournot-Nash equilibrium converges to the Walras equilibrium, even in the case of an exchange economy with infinitely many commodities.

Gregory S. Crawford

The market for multi-channel video programming has undergone considerable change in the last 15 years. Direct-Broadcast Satellite service, spurred by 1999 legislation that leveled the playing field with cable television systems, has grown from 3% to 33% of the U.S. MVPD (cable, satellite, and telco video) market. Telephone operators have entered in some parts of the US and online video distributors are a growing source of television viewing. This chapter considers the merits of cable television regulation in light of these developments. It surveys the dismal empirical record on the effects of price regulation in cable and the more encouraging but incomplete evidence on the benefits of satellite and telco competition. It concludes with a consideration of four open issues in cable markets: horizontal concentration and vertical integration in the programming market, bundling by both cable systems and programmers, online video distribution, and temporary programming blackouts from failed carriage negotiatio s for both broadcast and cable programming. While the distribution market is clearly now more competitive, concerns in each of these areas remain.

Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann

The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with increasing income. The cross-section also shows a negative association between income and church attendance. But the association disappears in panel analyses, including firstdifferenced models of the 1886-1911 change, panel models with county and time fixed effects, and panel Granger-causality tests. The results cast doubt on causal interpretations of the religioneconomy nexus in Prussian secularization.

Sascha O. Becker and Hans K.Hvide

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and sustained effects of entrepreneurs at all levels of the performance distribution. Entrepreneurs strongly affect firm growth patterns of both very young firms and for firms that have begun to mature. We do not find significant differences between small and larger firms, family and non-family firms, nor between firms located in urban and rural areas,but we do find stronger effects for founders with high human capital. Overall, the results suggest that an often overlooked factor individual entrepreneurs plays a large role in affecting firm performance.

Dennis Leech & Robert Leech

The weighted voting system used by the International Monetary Fund creates problems of democratic legitimacy since each member's influence or voting power is not in general equal to its voting weight. Using voting power analysis to analyse both the Board of Governors and the Executive Board, we show that it tends to enhance the power of the United States at the expense of all other members. We investigate the constituency system as a form of representative democracy, idealizing it as a compound voting body, and find that it gives disproportionately large power to some smaller European countries, particularly Belgium and Netherlands. We also find that many countries are effectively disenfranchised. Separate analyses are done for 2006 and 2012, before and after recent reforms, which have been billed as being radical, enhancing the voice of the poor and emerging markets, but the effects are disappointingly small.

Adrian Masters and Abhinay Muthoo

This paper studies a dynamic model of a market such as a labour market in which firms post wages and search for workers but trade may occur at a negotiated wage procedure in markets characterized by match-specific heterogeneity. We study a model of a market in which, in each time period, agents on one side (e.g., sellers) choose whether or not to post a price before they encounter agents of the opposite type. After a pair of agents have encountered each other, their match-specific values from trading with each other are realized. If a price was not posted, then the terms of trade (and whether or not it occurs) are determined by bargaining. Otherwise, depending upon the agents’ match-specific trading values, trade occurs (if it does) either on the posted price or at a renegotiated price. We analyze the symmetric Markov subgame perfect equilibria of this market game, and address a variety of issues such as the impact of market frictions on the equilibrium proportion of trades that occur at a posted price rather than at a negotiated price.

Daniel Sgroi and Andrew J. Oswald

Many governments wish to assess the quality of their universities. A prominent example is the UK’s new Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In the REF, peer-review panels will be provided with information on publications and citations. This paper suggests a way in which panels could choose the weights to attach to these two indicators. The analysis draws in an intuitive way on the concept of Bayesian updating (where citations gradually reveal information about the initially imperfectly-observed importance of the research). Our study should not be interpreted as the argument that only mechanistic measures ought to be used in a REF.

Luca Gelsomini

We model strategic trading by a rent-seeking insider, who exchanges without being spotted, and propose a comprehensive theory of market non-anonymity. Several novel results are established. They depend on asset value proprieties, beliefs, inter-temporal choices, and investors characteristics. In equilibrium, under a regulation mandating public trade revelation, disclosures may shift prices. If they do, uninformed manipulations arise only in some instances. Specifically, insiders constrained on asset holdings earn more than they would without such a disclosure rule. Consequently, mandating disclosures is unnecessary, as informative trades will be revealed voluntarily. This result reveals a previously unexplored link to the literature on (uncertified/non-factual) announcements.

Andrew J. Oswald

Many environmentalists have not yet discovered and understood the value to them of a new research literature. That literature is the economics of happiness. It offers a potentially important tool for future policy debate. In particular, this literature offers a defensible way to calculate the costs and benefits of the true happiness value of ‘green’ variables – and to weigh those against the happiness value to people of extra income and consumption. Some of the latest research findings turn out to accord well with environmentalists’ intuitions: green variables seem to have large direct effects on human well-being; society would arguably be better to concentrate more on environmental aims and less on monetary or materialistic ones; greater consumption of things in Western society cannot be expected to make us much happier.

David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald & Sarah Stewart-Brown

Humans run on a fuel called food. Yet economists and other social scientists rarely study what people eat. We provide simple evidence consistent with the existence of a link between the consumption of fruit and vegetables and high well-being. In cross-sectional data, happiness and mental health rise in an approximately dose-response way with the number of daily portions of fruit and vegetables. The pattern is remarkably robust to adjustment for a large number of other demographic, social and economic variables. Well-being peaks at approximately 7 portions per day. We document this relationship in three data sets, covering approximately 80,000 randomly selected British individuals, and for seven measures of well-being (life satisfaction, WEMWBS mental well-being, GHQ mental disorders, self-reported health, happiness, nervousness, and feeling low). Reverse causality and problems of confounding remain possible. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our analysis, how government policy-makers might wish to react to it, and what kinds of further research -- especially randomized trials -- would be valuable.

Michael P. Clements

Survey respondents who make point predictions and histogram forecasts of macro-variables reveal both how uncertain they believe the future to be, ex ante, as well as their ex post performance. Macroeconomic forecasters tend to be overconfident at horizons of a year or more, but over-estimate the uncertainty surrounding their predictions at short horizons.

Francesca Busetto, Giulio Codognato and Sayantan Ghosal

In this paper, in an exchange economy with atoms and an atomless part, we analyze the Walras equilibrium allocations of the exchange economy with which relationship between the set of the Cournot-Nash equilibrium allocations of a strategic market game and the set of the it is associated. In an example, we show that, even when atoms are countably infinite, Cournot-Nash equilibria yield different allocations from the Walras equilibrium allocations of the underlying exchange economy. We partially replicate the exchange economy by increasing the number of atoms without affecting the atomless part while ensuring that the measure space of agents remains finite. We show that any sequence of Cournot-Nash equilibrium allocations of the strategic market game associated with the partially replicated exchange economies approximates a Walras equilibrium allocation of the original exchange economy.

Jonathan S Seaton and Michael Waterson

This paper delivers a significantly different empirical perspective on micro pricing behaviour and its impact on macroeconomic processes than previous studies. We examine a seven year period of pricing behaviour by the major British supermarkets encompassing the recession year 2008 and the partial recovery of 2009. Several of our findings run strongly counter to established empirical regularities, in particular the high overall frequency of regular or reference price changes we uncover, the greater intensity of change in more turbulent times and the numerical dominance of price falls over rises. The pricing behaviour revealed also significantly challenges the implicit assumption that prices are tracking cost changes.

Erez Yerushalmi

Many arid countries use an administrative water allocation mechanism. Quotas, price discrimination, and increasing block taris are set and enforced by prohibiting the resale of water. Critics of this mechanism argue that allocation is politicized, subjective and slow to respond, and therefore misallocates water compared to a market mechanism. However, an administrative mechanism also promotes social goals thatare not valued economically. In this paper, both positive and negative impacts of the administrative allocation are explored, using a general equilibrium model and with Israel as a case study. The model concludes that from 1995 to 2006, potable water misallocation in Israel was relatively small, on average of 5.5 percent of the potable water supply. The value of agricultural amenities is imputed at approximately 2.3 times agricultural output. At the margin, introducing a water market in Israel is not recommended, i.e., net-social welfare would fall.