Knowledge that Transforms

The winner-take-all nature of all-pay auctions makes the outcome sensitive to decision errors, which we introduce with a logit formulation. The equilibrium bid distribution is a fixed point: the belief distributions that determine expected payoffs equal the choice distributions determined by expected payoffs. We prove existence, uniqueness, and symmetry properties. In contrast to the Nash equilibrium, the comparative statics of the logit equilibrium are intuitive: rent dissipation increases with the number of players and the bid cost. Overdissipation of rents is impossible under full rationality but is observed in laboratory experiments. Our model predicts this property.

We estimate a model of demand for quality‐related attributes of child care: group size, staff/child ratio, and provider training. The model is estimated jointly with equations for mode, expenditure on and hours of care, and the mother's labor supply. The results show that a lower price of child care in a particular mode leads to substitution toward that mode and an increase in the use of paid child care. A decrease in the price of care causes an increase in hours of care demanded and a decrease in the demand for qualityrelated attributes. Income effects on demand for quality are small.

Studies of horse race betting have empirically established a long shot anomaly; that is, low‐probabiliy, high‐variance bets (long shots) provide low mean returns and high‐probability, lowvariance bets provide relatively high mean returns. Because bettors willingly accept low‐return, high‐variance bets, researchers conclude that bettors are risk lovers. In this study, we show that the data are at least as consistent with risk aversion as they are with risk loving when one explicitly considers the skewness of bet returns. Because the variance and skewness of bet returns are highly correlated, bettors may appear to prefer variance when it is skewness that they crave.

This paper is motivated by empirical observations on the comovements of currency velocity, inflation, and the relative size of the credit services sector. We document these comovements and incorporate into a monetary growth model a credit services sector that provides services that help people economize on money. Our model makes two new contributions. First, we show that direct evidence on the appropriately defined credit service sector for the United States is consistent with the welfare cost measured using an estimated money demand schedule. Second, we provide estimates of the welfare cost of inflation that have some new features.

Household scale economics are plausibly attributed to shared household public goods that make larger households better off at the same level of per capita resources. larger households should therefore have higher per capita consumption of private goods, such as food, provided that they do not substitute too much toward the effectively cheaper public goods. The evidence shows exactly the opposite. Data from rich and poor countries indicate that, at constant per capita total expenditure, the per capita demand for food decreases with household size and that it does so most in the poorest countries, where substitution should be the least.

Women are fecund for a shorter period of their lives than men. This paper investigates how differential fecundity interacts with marriage, labor, and financial markets to affect gender roles. The main findings of the paper are as follows: (i) Fecund women are relatively scarce. Men will behave differently than women in response to this scarcity. In the most fundamental way, demand and supply conditions in the marriage market affect gender roles. (ii) Differential fecundity does not have any market‐invariant gender effect. Gender roles depend on the way in which marriage, labor, and financial markets interact. (iii) Gender differences in the labor market can occur without corresponding differences in labor market opportunities, productivities in child rearing, or social norms. (iv) With uncertainty in human capital accumulation and no insurance against this uncertainty, the model's predictions are consistent with observed gender roles.

This paper examines the extent to which households offset pension wealth with reductions in other wealth. Systematic econometric biases imply that the estimated offsets in previous empirical studies are smaller than the true offset and may even have the wrong sign. New empirical estimates that do not correct for the biases generate little offset between pensions and other wealth. Estimates that correct for the biases show substantially more offset (a smaller impact of pensions on overall saving) than in most previous studies. The estimates also indicate that the effects of pensions on wealth vary significantly across households.