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作者：Loh, Isaac; Phelan, Gregory
作者单位：Northwestern University; Williams College
摘要：We provide a model of boundedly rational, multidimensional learning and characterize when beliefs will converge to the truth. Agents maintain beliefs as marginal probabilities instead of joint probabilities, and agents' information is of lower dimension than the model. As a result, for some observations, agents may face an identification problem affecting the role of data in inference. Beliefs converge to the truth when these observations are rare, but beliefs diverge when observations present...
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作者：Nevo, Aviv; Wong, Arlene
作者单位：University of Pennsylvania; National Bureau of Economic Research; Princeton University
摘要：We document a change in household shopping behavior during the Great Recession. Households purchased more on sale, larger sizes, and generic products and increased coupon usage and shopping at discount stores. We estimate a decline in returns to shopping during the recession. Therefore, the increase in shopping behavior implies a significant decrease in households' opportunity cost of time. Using the estimated cost of time and time use data, we estimate a high elasticity of substitution betwee...
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作者：Aruoba, S. Boragan; Drazen, Allan; Vlaicu, Razvan
作者单位：University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; National Bureau of Economic Research; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Inter-American Development Bank
摘要：This article proposes a structural approach to measuring the effects of electoral accountability. We estimate a political agency model with imperfect information in order to identify and quantify discipline and selection effects, using data on U.S. governors. We find that the possibility of reelection provides a significant incentive for incumbents to exert effort, that is, a disciplining effect. We also find a positive but weaker selection effect. According to our model, the widely used two-t...
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作者：Bignon, Vincent; Breton, Regis; Breu, Mariana Rojas
作者单位：European Central Bank; Bank of France; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Universite PSL; Universite Paris-Dauphine
摘要：We build a symmetric two-country monetary model with credit to study the interplay between currency integration and credit markets integration. The currency arrangement affects credit availability through default incentives. We capture credit markets integration by the extra cost incurred to obtain credit for cross-border transactions and, with the euro area context in mind, label as banking union a situation where this cost is low. For high levels of the cross-border credit cost, currency int...
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作者：Kumar, Pradeep; Zhang, Hongsong
作者单位：University of Exeter; University of Hong Kong
摘要：We investigate the roles played by unexpected demand shocks, besides productivity, on firms' capital investment and exit decisions. We propose a practical approach to recover unexpected firm-level demand shocks using inventory data. The recognition of demand shocks and inventory also improves the productivity estimation. The empirical results indicate that although productivity and demand shocks are both significant factors determining firm behavior, the former is more dominant for investment ...
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作者：Ma, Lala
作者单位：University of Kentucky
摘要：Incomplete information in property value hedonic models can bias estimates of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP). Using brownfield remediation as an application, this article recovers hedonic values from a dynamic neighborhood choice framework that allows households to learn about brownfield contamination in a Bayesian fashion before choosing where to live. I find that ignoring learning yields nontrivial biases to the MWTP estimate. This has important implications for hedonic valuation if agen...
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作者：Monge-Naranjo, Alexander
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - St. Louis; Washington University (WUSTL)
摘要：Inflows of foreign knowledge are key for developing countries to catch up with the world technology frontier. I construct a model to analyze the entry decisions of foreign firms and the incentives of domestic firms to invest in their own know-how, given the exposure to foreign ideas and competition. The model embeds two diffusion mechanisms typically considered separately in the literature: externalities and markets. I find that openness allows developing countries to fully catch up only when ...
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作者：Gilles, Robert P.
作者单位：Queens University Belfast
摘要：I consider a general equilibrium model of a competitive market economy in which production is conducted through an endogenous social division of labor. I represent economic decision makers as consumer-producers, who consume as well as produce commodities. In this approach, the emergence of a nontrivial social division of labor is guided by Increasing Returns to Specialization (IRSpec) in production. Under IRSpec, I show existence of competitive equilibria, the two fundamental theorems of welfa...
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作者：Silva, Francisco
作者单位：Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
摘要：I consider a scenario where a social planner suspects that a crime has been committed. There are many suspects and at most one of them is guilty. I characterize the optimal mechanism for the social planner under different assumptions with respect to her commitment power. I find that the optimal mechanism is a confession inducing mechanism: Before an investigation, each agent can confess to being guilty in exchange for a reduced punishment. I find that these mechanisms do better than the tradit...
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作者：Letina, Igor; Schmutzler, Armin
作者单位：University of Bern; University of Zurich
摘要：This article analyzes the design of innovation contests when the quality of an innovation depends on the research approach, but the best approach is unknown. Inducing a variety of research approaches generates an option value. We show that suitable contests can induce such variety. The buyer-optimal contest is a bonus tournament, where suppliers can choose only between a low bid and a high bid. This contest implements the socially optimal variety for a suitable parameter range. Finally, we com...
