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作者:Guembel, Alexander; Sussman, Oren
作者单位:University of Oxford; Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics
摘要:We develop a theory of sovereign borrowing where default penalties are not implementable. We show that when debt is held by both domestic and foreign agents, the median voter might have an interest in serving it. Our theory has important practical implications regarding (a) the role of financial intermediaries in sovereign lending, (b) the effect of capital flows on price volatility including the possible overvaluation of debt to the point that the median voter is priced out of the market, and...
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作者:Altissimo, Filippo; Mele, Antonio
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要:This paper introduces a new class of parameter estimators for dynamic models, called simulated non-parametric estimators (SNEs). The SNE minimizes appropriate distances between non-parametric conditional (or joint) densities estimated from sample data and non-parametric conditional (or joint) densities estimated from data simulated out of the model of interest. Sample data and model-simulated data are smoothed with the same kernel, which considerably simplifies bandwidth selection for the purp...
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作者:Dal Bo, Ernesto; Dal Bo, Pedro; Snyder, Jason
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research; Brown University; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要:Political dynasties have long been present in democracies, raising concerns that inequality in the distribution of political power may reflect imperfections in democratic representation. However, the persistence of political elites may simply reflect differences in ability or political vocation across families and not their entrenchment in power. We show that dynastic prevalence in the Congress of the U.S. is high compared to that in other occupations and that political dynasties do not merely...
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作者:Bergemann, Dirk; Morris, Stephen
作者单位:Yale University; Princeton University
摘要:A social choice function is robustly implementable if there is a mechanism under which the process of iteratively eliminating strictly dominated messages lead to outcomes that agree with the social choice function for all beliefs at every type profile. In an interdependent-value environment with single-crossing preferences, we identify a contraction property on the preferences which together with strict ex post incentive compatibility is sufficient to guarantee robust implementation in the dir...
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作者:Epifani, Paolo; Gancia, Gino
作者单位:Bocconi University
摘要:This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size of governments, both theoretically and empirically. We argue that openness can increase the size of governments through two channels: (1) a terms-of-trade externality, whereby trade lowers the domestic cost of taxation, and (2) the demand for insurance, whereby trade raises risk and public transfers. We provide a unified framework for studying and testing these two mechanisms. Our main theoretical prediction is that t...
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作者:Hellwig, Christian; Veldkamp, Laura
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; New York University
摘要:We explore how optimal information choices change the predictions of strategic models. When a large number of agents play a game with strategic complementarity, information choices exhibit complementarity as well: if an agent wants to do what others do, they want to know what others know. This makes heterogeneous beliefs difficult to sustain and may generate multiple equilibria. In models with substitutability, agents prefer to differentiate their information choices. We use these theoretical ...
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作者:Oprea, Ryan; Friedman, Daniel; Anderson, Steven T.
作者单位:United States Department of the Interior; United States Geological Survey
摘要:Human subjects decide when to sink a fixed cost C to seize an irreversible investment opportunity whose value V is governed by Brownian motion. The optimal policy is to invest when V first crosses a threshold V* = (1 + w*)C, where the wait option premium w* depends on drift, volatility, and expiration hazard parameters. Subjects in the Low w* treatment on average invest at values quite close to optimum. Subjects in the two Medium and the High w* treatments invested at values below optimum, but...
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作者:Galor, Oded; Moav, Omer; Vollrath, Dietrich
作者单位:Brown University; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; University of London; Royal Holloway University London; University of Houston System; University of Houston
摘要:This paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of landownership adversely affected the emergence of human-capital promoting institutions (e.g. public schooling), and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, contributing to the emergence of the great divergence in income per capita across countries. The prediction of the theory regarding the adverse effect of the concentration of landownership on education expenditure is established ...
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作者:Dionne, Georges; St-Amour, Pascal; Vencatachellum, Desire
作者单位:University of Lausanne
摘要:Information asymmetry is a necessary prerequisite for testing adverse selection. This paper applies this sequence of tests to Mauritian slave auctions. The theory of dynamic auctions with private and common values suggests that when an informed participant is known to be active, uninformed bidders will be more aggressive and the selling price will be higher. We conjecture that observable family links between buyer and seller entailed superior information and find a strong price premium when a ...
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作者:Kartik, Navin
作者单位:Columbia University; University of California System; University of California San Diego
摘要:I study a model of strategic communication between an uninformed Receiver and an informed but upwardly biased Sender. The Sender bears a cost of lying, or more broadly, of misrepresenting his private information. The main results show that inflated language naturally arises in this environment, where the Sender (almost) always claims to be of a higher type than he would with complete information. Regardless of the intensity of lying cost, there is incomplete separation, with some pooling on th...