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作者：Han, Jin Soo; Houde, Jean-Francois; Van Benthem, Arthur A.; Abito, Jose Miguel
作者单位：University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Pennsylvania
摘要：We revisit one of the results in Cicala (2015) and show that the previously estimated large and significant effects of US electricity restructuring on fuel procurement are not robust to the presence of outliers. Using methodologies from the robust statistics literature, we estimate the effect to be less than one-half of the previous estimate and not statistically different from zero. The robust methodology also identifies as outliers the plants owned by a single company whose coal contracts we...
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作者：Halac, Marina; Lipnowski, Elliot; Rappoport, Daniel
作者单位：Yale University; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Columbia University; University of Chicago
摘要：A principal incentivizes a team of agents to work by privately offering them bonuses contingent on team success. We study the principal's optimal incentive scheme that implements work as a unique equilibrium. This scheme leverages rank uncertainty to address strategic uncertainty. Each agent is informed only of a ranking distribution and his own bonus, the latter making work dominant provided that higher-rank agents work. If agents are symmetric, their bonuses are identical. Thus, discriminati...
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作者：Kartik, Navin; Kleiner, Andreas; Van Weelden, Richard
作者单位：Columbia University; Arizona State University; Arizona State University-Tempe; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh
摘要：A proposer requires a veto player's approval to change a status quo. Proposer is uncertain about Vetoer's preferences. We show that Vetoer is typically given a non-singleton menu, or delegation set, of options to pick from. The optimal set balances the extent of compromise with the risk of a veto. We identify conditions for certain delegation sets to emerge, including full delegation: Vetoer can choose any action between the status quo and Proposer's ideal action. By contrast to expertise-base...
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作者：Banerjee, Abhijit; Breza, Emily; Chandrasekhar, Arun G.; Mobius, Markus
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University; Stanford University; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; Microsoft
摘要：The DeGroot model has emerged as a credible alternative to the standard Bayesian model for studying learning on networks, offering a natural way to model naive learning in a complex setting. One unattractive aspect of this model is the assumption that the process starts with every node in the network having a signal. We study a natural extension of the DeGroot model that can deal with sparse initial signals. We show that an agent's social influence in this generalized DeGroot model is essentia...
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作者：Weaver, Jeffrey
作者单位：University of Southern California
摘要：Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt hiring in a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months of salary, but contrary to conventional wisdom, their observable quality is comparable to counterfactual merit-based hires. Exploiting variation across jobs, I show that the consequences of corrupt allocations depend on the correlation between wealth and quality among applicants: ser...
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作者：Martin, Alberto; Moral-Benito, Enrique; Schmitz, Tom
作者单位：Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI); Barcelona School of Economics; Banco de Espana; Bocconi University; Bocconi University
摘要：How does a housing boom affect credit to non-housing firms? Using bank, firm, and loan-level microdata, we show that the Spanish housing boom reduced non-housing credit growth during its first years, but stimulated it later on. These patterns can be rationalized by financial constraints for banks. Constrained banks initially accommodated higher housing credit demand by reducing non-housing credit. Eventually, however, the housing boom increased bank net worth and expanded credit supply. A quan...
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作者：Gerard, Francois; Lagos, Lorenzo; Severnini, Edson; Card, David
作者单位：University of London; Queen Mary University London; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Brown University; Carnegie Mellon University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：We measure the effects of firm policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. Non-Whites are less likely to be hired by high-wage firms, explaining about 20 percent of the racial wage gap for both genders. Firm-specific pay premiums for non-Whites are also compressed relative to Whites, contributing another 5 percent for that gap. A counterfactual analysis reveals that about two-thirds of the underrepresentation of non-Whites at higher-wage firms is explained by race-neutral skill-based sorting...
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作者：Heiss, Florian; McFadden, Daniel; Winter, Joachim; Wuppermann, Amelie; Zhou, Bo
作者单位：Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of Southern California; University of Munich; Martin Luther University Halle Wittenberg
摘要：Consumers' health plan choices are highly persistent even though optimal plans change over time. This paper separates two sources of inertia, inattention to plan choice and switching costs. We develop a panel data model with separate attention and choice stages, linked by heterogeneity in acuity, i.e., the ability and willingness to make diligent choices. Using data from Medicare Part D, we find that inattention is an important source of inertia but switching costs also play a role, particular...
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作者：Van den Bremer, Ton S.; Van der Ploeg, Frederick
作者单位：Delft University of Technology; University of Oxford; University of Oxford; University of Amsterdam
摘要：The social cost of carbon is the expected present value of damages from emitting one ton of carbon today. We use perturbation theory to derive an approximate tractable expression for this cost adjusted for climatic and economic risk. We allow for different aversion to risk and intertemporal fluctuations, skewness and dynamics in the risk distributions of climate sensitivity and the damage ratio, and correlated shocks. We identify prudence, insurance, and exposure effects, reproduce earlier ana...
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作者：Fanning, Jack
作者单位：Brown University
摘要：Can an uninformed mediator improve outcomes in a dynamic reputational bargaining model? I show that a simple communication protocol used by professional mediators, of announcing an agreement only if both parties privately accept its terms, can increase the payoffs of rational bargainers, but only if communication is noisy: the mediator must sometimes fail to suggest a deal even when both bargainers accept it.
