Knowledge that Transforms

We argue that positive co-movements between land prices and business investment are a driving force behind the broad impact of land-price dynamics on the macroeconomy. We develop an economic mechanism that captures the co-movements by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: We introduce land as a collateral asset in firms' credit constraints, and we identify a shock that drives most of the observed fluctuations in land prices. Our estimates imply that these two features combine to generate an empirically important mechanism that amplifies and propagates macroeconomic fluctuations through the joint dynamics of land prices and business investment.

This article predicts how radio station formats would change if, as was recently proposed, music stations were made to pay fees for musical performance rights. It does so by estimating and solving, using parametric approximations to firms' value functions, a dynamic model that captures important features of the industry such as vertical and horizontal product differentiation, demographic variation in programming tastes, and multi-station ownership. The estimated model predicts that high fees would cause the number of music stations to fall significantly and quite quickly. For example, a fee equal to 10% of revenues would cause a 4.6% drop in the number of music stations within 2 1/2 years, and a 9.4% drop in the long run. The size of the change is limited, however, by the fact that many listeners, particularly in demographics that are valued by advertisers, have strong preferences for music programming. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

We consider a standard social choice environment with linear utilities and independent, one-dimensional, private types. We prove that for any Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism there exists an equivalent dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanism that delivers the same interim expected utilities for all agents and the same ex ante expected social surplus. The short proof is based on an extension of an elegant result due to Gutmann, Kemperman, Reeds, and Shepp (1991). We also show that the equivalence between Bayesian and dominant strategy implementation generally breaks down when the main assumptions underlying the social choice model are relaxed or when the equivalence concept is strengthened to apply to interim expected allocations.

We study European banks' demand for short-term funds (liquidity) during the summer 2007 subprime market crisis. We use bidding data from the European Central Bank's auctions for one-week loans, their main channel of monetary policy implementation. Our analysis provides a high-frequency, disaggregated perspective on the 2007 crisis, which was previously studied through comparisons of collateralized and uncollateralized interbank money market rates which do not capture the heterogeneous impact of the crisis on individual banks. Through a model of bidding, we show that banks' bids reflect their cost of obtaining short-term funds elsewhere (e.g., in the interbank market) as well as a strategic response to other bidders. The strategic response is empirically important: while a naïve interpretation of the raw bidding data may suggest that virtually all banks suffered an increase in the cost of short-term funding, we find that, for about one third of the banks, the change in bidding behavior was simply a strategic response. We also find considerable heterogeneity in the short-term funding costs among banks: for over one third of the bidders, funding costs increased by more than 20 basis points, and funding costs vary widely with respect to the country-of-origin. The funding costs we estimate using bidding data are also predictive of market- and accounting-based measures of bank performance, reinforcing the usefulness of “revealed preference” information contained in bids.

This comment corrects two results in the 2006 Econometrica paper by Amador, Werning, and Angeletos (AWA), that features a model in which individuals face a trade-off between flexibility and commitment. First, in contrast to Proposition 1 in AWA, we show that money-burning can be part of the ex ante optimal contract when there are two states. Second, in contrast to Proposition 2 in AWA, we show that money-burning can be imposed at the top (in the highest liquidity shock state), even when there is a continuum of states. We provide corrected versions of the above results. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Nonseparable panel models are important in a variety of economic settings, including discrete choice. This paper gives identification and estimation results for nonseparable models under time-homogeneity conditions that are like “time is randomly assigned” or “time is an instrument.” Partial-identification results for average and quantile effects are given for discrete regressors, under static or dynamic conditions, in fully nonparametric and in semiparametric models, with time effects. It is shown that the usual, linear, fixed-effects estimator is not a consistent estimator of the identified average effect, and a consistent estimator is given. A simple estimator of identified quantile treatment effects is given, providing a solution to the important problem of estimating quantile treatment effects from panel data. Bounds for overall effects in static and dynamic models are given. The dynamic bounds provide a partial-identification solution to the important problem of estimating the effect of state dependence in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. The impact of T, the number of time periods, is shown by deriving shrinkage rates for the identified set as T grows. We also consider semiparametric, discrete-choice models and find that semiparametric panel bounds can be much tighter than nonparametric bounds. Computationally convenient methods for semiparametric models are presented. We propose a novel inference method that applies in panel data and other settings and show that it produces uniformly valid confidence regions in large samples. We give empirical illustrations.

We consider a general representation of the delegation problem, with and without money burning, and provide sufficient and necessary conditions under which an interval allocation is optimal. We also apply our results to the theory of trade agreements among privately informed governments. For both perfect and monopolistic competition settings, we provide conditions under which tariff caps are optimal. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

We analyze games of incomplete information and offer equilibrium predictions that are valid for, and in this sense robust to, all possible private information structures that the agents may have. The set of outcomes that can arise in equilibrium for some information structure is equal to the set of Bayes correlated equilibria. We completely characterize the set of Bayes correlated equilibria in a class of games with quadratic payoffs and normally distributed uncertainty in terms of restrictions on the first and second moments of the equilibrium action–state distribution. We derive exact bounds on how prior knowledge about the private information refines the set of equilibrium predictions. We consider information sharing among firms under demand uncertainty and find new optimal information policies via the Bayes correlated equilibria. We also reverse the perspective and investigate the identification problem under concerns for robustness to private information. The presence of private information leads to set rather than point identification of the structural parameters of the game.

Belief disagreements have been suggested as a major contributing factor to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. This paper theoretically evaluates this hypothesis. I assume that optimists have limited wealth and take on leverage so as to take positions in line with their beliefs. To have a significant effect on asset prices, they need to borrow from traders with pessimistic beliefs using loans collateralized by the asset itself. Since pessimists do not value the collateral as much as optimists do, they are reluctant to lend, which provides an endogenous constraint on optimists' ability to borrow and to influence asset prices. I demonstrate that the tightness of this constraint depends on the nature of belief disagreements. Optimism concerning the probability of downside states has no or little effect on asset prices because these types of optimism are disciplined by this constraint. Instead, optimism concerning the relative probability of upside states could have significant effects on asset prices. This asymmetric disciplining effect is robust to allowing for short selling because pessimists that borrow the asset face a similar endogenous constraint. These results emphasize that what investors disagree about matters for asset prices, to a greater extent than the level of disagreements. When richer contracts are available, relatively complex contracts that resemble some of the recent financial innovations in the mortgage market endogenously emerge to facilitate betting.

This paper considers random coefficients binary choice models. The main goal is to estimate the density of the random coefficients nonparametrically. This is an ill-posed inverse problem characterized by an integral transform. A new density estimator for the random coefficients is developed, utilizing Fourier–Laplace series on spheres. This approach offers a clear insight on the identification problem. More importantly, it leads to a closed form estimator formula that yields a simple plug-in procedure requiring no numerical optimization. The new estimator, therefore, is easy to implement in empirical applications, while being flexible about the treatment of unobserved heterogeneity. Extensions including treatments of nonrandom coefficients and models with endogeneity are discussed.