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作者:Moreno, Diego; Wooders, John
作者单位:University of Arizona; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
摘要:In markets with adverse selection, only low-quality units trade in the competitive equilibrium when the average quality of the good held by sellers is low. We show that under decentralized trade, however, both high-and low-quality units trade, although with delay. Moreover, when frictions are small, the surplus realized is greater than the (static) competitive surplus. Thus, decentralized trade mitigates the lemons problem. Remarkably, payoffs are competitive as frictions vanish, even though b...
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作者:Gall, Thomas
作者单位:University of Bonn
摘要:This article analyzes the effects of intrafirm bargaining on the formation of firms in an economy with imperfect capital markets and contracting constraints. In equilibrium, wealth inequality induces a heterogeneous distribution of firm sizes, allowing for firms both too small and too large in terms of technical efficiency. The findings connect well to empirical facts such as the missing middle of firm-size distributions in developing countries. The model can encompass a nonmonotonic relations...
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作者:Linnemann, Ludger; Schabert, Andreas
作者单位:Dortmund University of Technology
摘要:We study the consequences of nonneutrality of government debt for macroeconomic stabilization policy in a sticky-price model. Ricardian equivalence fails because debt has a negative impact on its rate of return and on private savings, which is induced by assuming transaction services of bonds. Under aggressive monetary policy regimes, macroeconomic fluctuations tend to be stabilized if nominal budget deficits are low. A smooth debt path limits inflation expectations, such that inflation varian...
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作者:Desmet, Klaus; Parente, Stephen L.
作者单位:University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要:This article proposes a novel mechanism whereby larger markets increase competition and facilitate process innovation. Larger markets, in the sense of more people or more open trade, support a larger variety of goods, resulting in a more crowded product space. This raises the price elasticity of demand and lowers markups. Firms, therefore, become larger to break even. This facilitates process innovation, as larger firms can amortize R&D costs over more goods. We demonstrate this mechanism in a...
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作者:Levine, David K.; Weinschelbaum, Federico; Zurita, Felipe
作者单位:Washington University (WUSTL); Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
摘要:When a firm is forced to pay abnormally high wages, hiring transfers rents. This effectively endows the employer with the ability to grant favors, and he may wish to do so even at some cost to efficient production. We refer to this as the brother-in-law effect. This article analyzes its consequences. When the brother-in-law effect is due to unionization, decisions regarding both the number and type of workers employed could be inefficient; overemployment could obtain even relative to the workf...
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作者:Santos-Pinto, Luis
作者单位:University of Lausanne
摘要:This article analyzes the implications of worker overestimation of productivity for firms in which incentives take the form of tournaments. Each worker overestimates his productivity but is aware of the bias in his opponent's self-assessment. The manager of the firm, on the other hand, correctly assesses workers' productivities and self-beliefs when setting tournament prizes. The article shows that, under a variety of circumstances, firms can benefit from worker positive self-image. The articl...
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作者:van der Ploeg, Frederick
作者单位:University of Oxford; University of Amsterdam
摘要:I analyze a power struggle where competing factions have private financial assets and deplete a common stock of natural resources with no private property rights. I obtain a feedback Nash equilibrium to the dynamic common-pool problem and obtain political variants of the Hotelling depletion rule and the Hartwick saving rule. Resource prices and depletion occur too fast, so substitution away from resources to capital occurs too fast and the saving rate is too high. The power struggle boosts out...