Knowledge that Transforms

We examine the impact of a positive and policy-driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood. We focus on the introduction of the Food Stamp Program, which was rolled out across counties between 1961 and 1975. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to assemble unique data linking family background and county of residence in early childhood to adult health and economic outcomes. Our findings indicate access to food stamps in childhood leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of metabolic syndrome and, for women, an increase in economic self-sufficiency.

This paper uses the Household Finance and Consumption Survey to construct new estimates of top wealth shares in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Finland and The Netherlands. It provides a methodology to address simultaneously non-response and underreporting in wealth surveys.

This paper examines the impact of the Federal Reserve's founding on seasonal pressures and contagion risk in the interbank system. Deposit flows among classes of banks were highly seasonal before 1914; amplitude and timing varied regionally. Panics interrupted normal flows as banks throughout the country sought funds from the central money markets simultaneously. Seasonal pressures and contagion risk in the system were lower by the 1920s, when the Fed provided seasonal liquidity and reserves. Panics returned in the 1930s, due in part to shocks from nonmember banks and because the Fed's decentralized structure hampered a vigorous response to national crises.

An increase in a married woman's attachment to the labor market affected her family's ability to smooth unexpected income shocks. Between 1970 and 1990, the sharp rise in labor market attachment provided an increasingly important channel for smoothing shocks to spousal income. As the participation rate stabilized, this contribution to smoothing evened out. In the Great Recession, both spouses received negative income shocks, and access to transfer income became the main insurance mechanism. Volatility of consumption followed volatility of family income trends but at a lower magnitude. Families' ability to weather income shocks didn't change during the 1970-2010 period.

Increasingly, economists are drawing on concepts from outside economics--such as “norms,” “esteem,” and “identity”--to model agents' social natures. A key reason for studying such social motivation is to shed light on the conditions that facilitate--or deter--collective action. It has been widely observed, for instance, that groups are more able to engage in collective action when they have a common, group identity. This paper gives one explanation for such a link. The paper develops a new concept, “we thinking”; and it also provides a deeper understanding of the concepts of norms, identity, and esteem.

To what extent can an incumbent manufacturer use discount contracts to foreclose efficient entry? We show that off-list-price rebates that do not commit buyers to unconditional transfers—like the rebates in EU Commission v. Michelin II, for instance—cannot be anticompetitive. This is true even in the presence of cost uncertainty, scale economies, or intense downstream competition, all three market settings where exclusion has been shown to emerge with exclusive dealing contracts. The difference stems from the fact that, unlike exclusive dealing provisions, rebates do not contractually commit retailers to exclusivity when signing the contract.

We model an online display advertising environment in which “performance” advertisers can measure the value of individual impressions, whereas “brand” advertisers cannot. If advertiser values for ad opportunities are positively correlated, second-price auctions for impressions can be inefficient and expose brand advertisers to adverse selection. Bayesian-optimal auctions have other drawbacks: they are complex, introduce incentives for false-name bidding, and do not resolve adverse selection. We introduce “modified second bid” auctions as the unique auctions that overcome these disadvantages. When advertiser match values are drawn independently from heavy-tailed distributions, a modified second bid auction captures at least 94.8 percent of the first-best expected value. In that setting and similar ones, the benefits of switching from an ordinary second-price auction to the modified second bid auction may be large, and the cost of defending against shill bidding and adverse selection may be low.

From 1980 to 2000, the rise in the US college/high school graduate wage gap coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. This paper estimates a structural spatial equilibrium model to determine causes and welfare consequences of this increased skill sorting. While local labor demand changes fundamentally caused the increased skill sorting, it was further fueled by endogenous increases in amenities within higher skill cities. Changes in cities' wages, rents, and endogenous amenities increased inequality between high school and college graduates by more than suggested by the increase in the college wage gap alone.

We study decentralized mechanisms for allocating firms into search pools. The pools are created in response to noisy preference signals provided by consumers, who then browse the pools via costly random sequential search. Surplus-maximizing search pools are implementable in symmetric Nash equilibrium. Full extraction of the maximal surplus is implementable if and only if the distribution of consumer types satisfies a set of simple inequalities, which involve the relative fractions of consumers who like different products and the Bhattacharyya coefficient of similarity between their conditional signal distributions. The optimal mechanism can be simulated by a keyword auction with broad matching.

This comment assesses the claim of The Rise and Fall of American Growth that for coming decades, growth in US TFP will continue the disappointing pace of the last decade. While predicting future technological advance is difficult, there are indications that Gordon may actually be too optimistic on future TFP growth. The share of output from manufacturing, which still generates the majority of R&D expenditures, and has historically more rapid TFP growth, will continue to fall. There are substantial obstacles to rapid TFP advance in much of the rest of the economy: construction, transport, health care and other services.