Data is nonrival: a person’s location history, medical records, and driving data can be used by many firms simultaneously. Nonrivalry leads to increasing returns. As a result, there may be social gains to data being used broadly across firms, even in the presence of privacy considerations. Fearing creative destruction, firms may choose to hoard their data, leading to the inefficient use of nonrival data. Giving data property rights to consumers can generate allocations that are close to optimal. Consumers balance their concerns for privacy against the economic gains that come from selling data broadly. (JEL C80, D11, D21, D83, E22, K11, O34)

[Using data on repurchase agreements by primary securities dealers, we show that three classes of securities (Treasury securities, securities issued by government-sponsored agencies, and mortgage-backed securities) can be formally ranked in terms of their collateral values in the general collateral (GC) market. We then show that GC repurchase agreement (repo) spreads across asset classes display jumps and significant temporal variation, especially at times of predictable liquidity needs, consistent with the "safe haven" properties of Treasury securities: These jumps are driven almost entirely by the behavior of the GC repo rates of Treasury securities. Estimating the "collateral rents" earned by owners of these securities, we find such rents to be sizable for Treasury securities and nearly zero for agency and mortgage-backed securities. Finally, we link collateral values to asset prices in a simple no-arbitrage framework and show that variations in collateral values explain a significant fraction of changes in short-term yield spreads but not those of longer-term spreads.Our results point to securities' role as collateral as a promising direction of research to improve understanding of the pricing of money market securities and their spreads.]

The least productive agents in an economy can be vital in generating growth by spurring technology diffusion. We develop an analytically tractable model in which growth is created as a positive externality from risk taking by firms at the bottom of the productivity distribution imitating more productive firms. Heterogeneous firms choose to produce or pay a cost and search within the economy to upgrade their technology. Sustained growth comes from the feedback between the endogenously determined distribution of productivity, as evolved from past search decisions, and an optimal, forward-looking search policy. The growth rate depends on characteristics of the productivity distribution, with a thicker-tailed distribution leading to more growth.

Using data on repurchase agreements by primary securities dealers, we show that three classes of securities (Treasury securities, securities issued by government-sponsored agencies, and mortgage-backed securities) can be formally ranked in terms of their collateral values in the general collateral (GC) market. We then show that GC repurchase agreement (repo) spreads across asset classes display jumps and significant temporal variation, especially at times of predictable liquidity needs, consistent with the "safe haven" properties of Treasury securities: These jumps are driven almost entirely by the behavior of the GC repo rates of Treasury securities. Estimating the "collateral rents" earned by owners of these securities, we find such rents to be sizable for Treasury securities and nearly zero for agency and mortgage-backed securities. Finally, we link collateral values to asset prices in a simple no-arbitrage framework and show that variations in collateral values explain a significant fraction of changes in short-term yield spreads but not those of longer-term spreads. Our results point to securities' role as collateral as a promising direction of research to improve understanding of the pricing of money market securities and their spreads. The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can adopt new technologies already in use by other firms in their home country. We characterize the growth rate using a summary statistic of the profit distribution: the mean-min ratio. Opening to trade increases the profit spread through increased export opportunities and foreign competition, induces more rapid technology adoption, and generates faster growth. Quantitatively, these forces produce large welfare gains from trade by increasing an inefficiently low rate of technology adoption and economic growth. (JEL D21, D24, F14, F43, O33)

We study how endogenous innovation and technology diffusion interact to determine the shape of the productivity distribution and generate aggregate growth. We model firms that choose to innovate, adopt technology, or produce with their existing technology. Costly adoption creates a spread between the best and worst technologies concurrently used to produce similar goods. The balance of adoption and innovation determines the shape of the distribution; innovation stretches the distribution, while adoption compresses it. On the balanced growth path, the aggregate growth rate equals the maximum growth rate of innovators. While innovation drives long‐run growth, changes in the adoption environment can influence growth by affecting innovation incentives, either directly, through licensing of excludable technologies, or indirectly, via the option value of adoption.

Older wealth holders spend down assets much more slowly than predicted by classic life-cycle models. This paper introduces health-dependent utility into a model with incomplete markets in which preferences for bequests, expenditures when in need of long-term care, and ordinary consumption combine with health and longevity uncertainty to explain saving behavior. To sharply identify motives, it develops strategic survey questions (SSQs) that elicit stated preferences. The model is estimated using these SSQs and wealth data from the Vanguard Research Initiative. The desire to self-insure against long-term-care risk explains a substantial fraction of the wealth holding of many older Americans.