MARKET DISTORTIONS AND GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Albornoz, Facundo; Esteban, Joan; Vanin, Paolo
• 署名单位: University of Birmingham; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); CSIC - Institut d'Analisi Economica (IAE); University of Bologna
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1111/jeea.12052
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 200-222
• 关键词: actually pro-transparency; social value; cheap-talk; public information; shin 2002; COMMUNICATION; POLICY; credibility; DISCRETION; morris

摘要

In this paper, we investigate how government transparency depends on economic distortions. We first consider an abstract class of economies in which a benevolent policy maker is privately informed about the exogenous state of the economy and contemplates whether to release this information. Our key result is that distortions limit communication: even if transparency is exante Pareto superior to opaqueness, it cannot constitute an equilibrium when distortions are sufficiently high. We next confirm this broad insight in two applied contexts, in which monopoly power and income taxes are the specific sources of distortions.