Knowledge that Transforms

In the presence of aggregate demand spillovers, an imperfectly competitive form's profit is positively related to aggregate income, which in turn rises with profits of all firms in the economy. This pecuniary externality makes a dollar of a firm's profit raise aggregate income by more than a dollar since other firms' profits also rise, and in this way gives rise to a "multiplier." Since such multipliers are ignored by firms making investment decisions, privately optimal investment decisions under uncertainty will not in general be socially optimal. Under reasonable conditions, investment is too low.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, U.S. Treasury bonds and notes appeared to have negative nominal yields as they approached maturity. But negative nominal interest rates are impossible in a world in which one can always hold cash. The resolution to this puzzle is that Treasury securities, in addition to making coupon payments, gave the owner the right to buy a new security on a future date. This paper describes the institutional environment that led to the apparent negative nominal interest rates; develops a method for valuing the "exchange privilege"; and computes accurate measures of the yield to the coupon-bearing component of these composite bond/options. Copyright 1988 by University of Chicago Press.

A market composed of pairwise trading under incomplete information is modeled in order to analyze how resources are allocated among competing uses when information about trade gains is incomplete. Contrary to the results from studying a single such trade, sufficient homogeneity across potential trades guarantees that efficiency obtains. This is analogous to simple first-price auctions with homogeneous bidders, where bidders have a common bid function and, as a result, the high bidder also places the highest value on the auctioned object. With enough symmetry, the decentralized bilateral trades in the present model occur as if they were made in a first-price auction that occurs through time. The robustness of the efficiency result to heterogeneities among agents and to nontrivial search intensity decisions is then considered.