Knowledge that Transforms

We compare asset prices in an overlapping generations model for incomplete and complete markets. Individuals within a generational cohort have heterogeneous beliefs about future states of the economy and thus would like to make bets against each other. In the incomplete-markets economy, agents cannot make such bets. Asset price volatility is very small. The situation changes dramatically when markets are completed through financial innovations as the set of available securities now allows agents with different beliefs to place bets against each other. Wealth shifts across agents and generations. Such changes in the wealth distribution lead to substantial asset price volatility.

In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita forced many children to relocate across the Southeast. While schools quickly enrolled evacuees, families in receiving schools worried about the impacts on incumbent students. We find no effect, on average, of the inflow of evacuees on achievement in Houston. In Louisiana we find little impact on average and we reject linear-in-means models. Moreover, we find that student achievement improves with high achieving peers and worsens with low achieving peers. Finally, an increase in the inflow of evacuees raised incumbent absenteeism and disciplinary problems in Houston's secondary schools.

We develop a novel computerized real effort task, based on moving sliders across a screen, to test experimentally whether agents are disappointment averse when they compete in a real effort sequential-move tournament. We predict that a disappointment averse agent, who is loss averse around her endogenous choice-acclimating expectations-based reference point, responds negatively to her rival's effort. We find significant evidence for this discouragement effect, and use the Method of Simulated Moments to estimate the strength of disappointment aversion on average and the heterogeneity in disappointment aversion across the population.

There is a wide variety in the capital account policies of emerging markets and developing economies. Some countries, such as Brazil, have recently experimented with prudential controls on capital inflows, whereas others, such as China, have continued to maintain tight controls. This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature explaining the motivations behind capital account policies, and whether there is a case for international coordination in this area.

The household's labor margin has a substantial effect on risk aversion, and hence asset prices, in dynamic equilibrium models even when utility is additively separable between consumption and labor. This paper derives simple, closed-form expressions for risk aversion that take into account the household's labor margin. Ignoring this margin can dramatically overstate the household's true aversion to risk. Risk premia on assets priced with the stochastic discount factor increase essentially linearly with risk aversion, so measuring risk aversion correctly is crucial for asset pricing in the model.

Using a large dataset on web browsing and purchasing behavior we test to what extent consumers are searching in accordance to various search models. We find that the benchmark model of sequential search with a known price distribution can be rejected based on recall patterns found in the data as well as the absence of dependence of search decisions on prices. Our findings suggest fixed sample size search provides a more accurate description of search behavior. We then utilize the fixed sample size search model to estimate demand elasticities of online bookstores in an environment where store preferences are heterogeneous.

We document a negative correlation, at business cycle frequencies, between the net job creation rate of large employers and the level of aggregate unemployment that is much stronger than for small employers. The differential growth rate of employment between initially large and small employers has an unconditional correlation of —0.5 with the unemployment rate, and varies by about 5 percent over the business cycle. We exploit several datasets from the United States, Denmark, and France, both repeated cross sections and job flows with employer longitudinal information, spanning the last four decades and several business cycles. We discuss implications for theories of factor demand.

We consider the efficient allocation of a single good with interdependent values in a quasilinear environment. We present an approach to modeling interdependent preferences distinguishing between “payoff types” and “belief types” and report a characterization of when the efficient allocation can be partially Bayesian implemented on a finite type space. The characterization can be used to unify a number of sufficient conditions for efficient partial implementation in this classical auction setting. We report how a canonical language for discussing interdependent types - developed in a more general setting by Bergemann, Morris and Takahashi (2011) - applies in this setting and note by example that this canonical language will not allow us to distinguish some types in the payoff type - belief type language.

From Fred Kahn's writings and experiences as a telecommunications regulator and commenter, we draw the following conclusions: prices must be informed by costs; costs are actual incremental costs; costs and prices are an outcome of a Schumpeterian competitive process, not the starting point; excluding incumbents from markets is fundamentally anticompetitive; and a regulatory transition to deregulation entails propensities to micromanage the process to generate preferred outcomes, visible competitors and expedient price reductions. And most important, where effective competition takes place among platforms characterized by sunk investment—land-line telephony, cable and wireless —traditional regulation is unnecessary and likely to be anticompetitive.

We use the Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators and the Federal Housing Finance Agency's House Price Indices to study the effects of the housing price bubble on local labor markets. We show that the 35 MSAs in the top decile of the house price boom were most severely impacted. Their stable job employment fell much more than the national average. Their real wage rates did not fall as fast as the national average. Accessions fell much faster than average while separations were constant. Job creations fell substantially while destructions rose slightly.