Knowledge that Transforms

This paper analyses the effect immigration has on the wages of native workers. Unlike most previous work, we estimate wage effects along the distribution of native wages. We derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre-allocating immigrants to particular skill groups. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival. As for the effects on native wages, we find a pattern of effects whereby immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution. This pattern mirrors the evidence on the location of immigrants in the wage distribution. We suggest that possible explanations for the overall slightly positive effect on native wages, besides standard immigration surplus arguments, could involve deviations of immigrant remuneration from contribution to production either because of initial mismatch or immigrant downgrading.

We use variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer–employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. We find that firms operating in less financially developed markets offer lower entry wages but faster wage growth than firms in more financially developed markets. This helps firms finance their operations by implicitly raising funds from workers. We control for local market fixed effects and only exploit time variation in the degree of local financial development induced by an exogenous liberalization, so that the effect we find is unlikely to reflect unobserved local factors that systematically affect wage–tenure profiles. We estimate that the amount of credit generated by implicit lending within the firm is economically important and can be as large as 30 percent of the bank lending. Consistent with credit market imperfections opening up trade opportunities within the firm, we find that the internal rate of return of implicit loans lies between the rate at which workers savings are remunerated in the market and the rate that firms pay on their loans from banks.

We consider a dynamic Mirrlees economy in a life-cycle context and study the optimal insurance arrangement. Individual productivity evolves as a Markov process and is private information. We use a first-order approach in discrete and continuous time and obtain novel theoretical and numerical results. Our main contribution is a formula describing the dynamics for the labour-income tax rate. When productivity is an AR(1) our formula resembles an AR(1) with a trend where: (i) the auto-regressive coefficient equals that of productivity; (ii) the trend term equals the covariance productivity with consumption growth divided by the Frisch elasticity of labour; and (iii) the innovations in the tax rate are the negative of consumption growth. The last property implies a form of short-run regressivity. Our simulations illustrate these results and deliver some novel insights. The average labour tax rises from 0% to 37% over 40 years, whereas the average tax on savings falls from 12% to 0% at retirement. We compare the second best solution to simple history-independent tax systems, calibrated to mimic these average tax rates. We find that age-dependent taxes capture a sizable fraction of the welfare gains. In this way, our theoretical results provide insights into simple tax systems.

This article analyses contract cancellation and product return policies in markets in which sellers advise customers about the suitability of their offering. When customers are fully rational, it is optimal for sellers to offer the right to cancel or return on favourable terms. A generous return policy makes the seller's “cheap talk” at the point of sale credible. This observation provides a possible explanation for the excess refund puzzle and also has implications for the management of customer reviews. When customers are credulous, instead, sellers have an incentive to set unfavourable terms to exploit the inflated beliefs they induce in their customers. The imposition of a minimum statutory standard improves welfare and consumer surplus when customers are credulous. In contrast, competition policy reduces contractual inefficiencies with rational customers, but it is not effective with credulous customers.

We propose exact simulation-based procedures for: (i) testing mean-variance efficiency when the zero-beta rate is unknown, and (ii) building confidence intervals for the zero-beta rate. On observing that this parameter may be weakly identified, we propose LR-type statistics as well as heteroskedascity and autocorrelation corrected (HAC) Wald-type procedures, which are robust to weak identification and allow for non-Gaussian distributions including parametric GARCH structures. In particular, we propose confidence sets for the zero-beta rate based on "inverting" exact tests for this parameter; these sets provide a multivariate extension of Fieller's technique for inference on ratios. The exact distribution of LR-type statistics for testing efficiency is studied under both the null and the alternative hypotheses. The relevant nuisance parameter structure is established and finite-sample bound procedures are proposed, which extend and improve available Gaussianspecific bounds. Furthermore, we study the invariance to portfolio repacking property for tests and confidence sets proposed. The statistical properties of available and proposed methods are analyzed via aMonte Carlo study. Empirical results on NYSE returns show that exact confidence sets are very different from the asymptotic ones, and allowing for non-Gaussian distributions affects inference results. Simulation and empirical results suggest that LR-type statistics - with p-values corrected using the Maximized Monte Carlo test method - are generally preferable to their Wald-HAC counterparts from the viewpoints of size control and power.

We solve a multi-period model of strategic trading with long-lived information in multiple assets with correlated innovations in fundamental values. Market makers in each asset can only condition their pricing functions on trading in each asset. Using daily non-public data from the New York Stock Exchange, we test the model's predictions on the conditional and unconditional lead–lag relations of institutional order flow and returns within portfolios. We find support for the model prediction of positive autocorrelations in portfolio returns as well as the predictions for how informed order flow positively predicts future returns and future informed order flow. We show that these relations strengthen for portfolios formed from assets within the same industry, which likely have higher correlation of fundamental values. Furthermore, we discuss issues that arise when testing implications of strategic models with imperfect proxies for the underlying strategic behaviour.

This article presents a model of information manipulation and political regime change. There is a regime that can be overthrown but only if enough citizens participate in an uprising. Citizens are imperfectly informed about the regime's ability to resist an uprising and the regime can engage in propaganda that, taken at face-value, makes the regime seem stronger than it truly is. This coordination game with endogenous information manipulation has a unique equilibrium and the article gives a complete analytic characterization of the equilibrium's comparative statics. Holding fixed the number of signals available to citizens, if the per-unit signal precision is sufficiently high then the regime is harder to overthrow. In contrast, if the number of signals increases, so that both total signal precision and the regime's costs of manipulation rise together, then the regime is easier to overthrow unless there are strong economies of scale in information control.

I study elections between citizen-candidates who cannot make binding policy commitments before taking office, but who are accountable to voters due to the possibility of re-election. In each period a representative voter chooses among heterogeneous candidates with known policy preferences. The elected candidate chooses the policy to implement, and how much rent-seeking to engage in, when in office. As the voter decides both which candidate to elect and, subsequently, whether the candidate is retained, this framework integrates elements of electoral competition and electoral accountability. I show that, in the best stationary equilibrium, when utility functions are concave over policy, non-median candidates are elected over candidates with policy preferences more closely aligned with the voter. In this equilibrium, there are two candidates who are elected at some history, and the policies these candidates implement in office do not converge. This divergence incentivizes candidates to engage in less rent-seeking, increasing voter welfare.

This paper analyzes participation and information aggregation in a common-value election with continuous private signals. In equilibrium, some citizens ignore their private information and abstain from voting, in deference to those with higher-quality signals. Even as the number of highly-informed peers grows large, however, citizens with only moderate expertise continue voting, so that voter participation remains at realistic levels (e.g. 50 % or 60%, for simple examples). The precise level of voter turnout, along with the margin of victory, are determined by the distribution of expertise. Improving a voter’s information makes her more willing to vote, consistent with a growing body of empirical evidence, but makes her peers more willing to abstain, providing a new explanation for various empirical patterns of voting. Equilibrium participation is optimal, even though the marginal voter may have very little (e.g. below-average) expertise, and even though non-voters’information is not utilized.

We develop a numerical procedure that facilitates efficient likelihood evaluation in applications involving non-linear and non-Gaussian state-space models. The procedure employs continuous approximations of filtering densities, and delivers unconditionally optimal global approximations of targeted integrands to achieve likelihood approximation. Optimized approximations of targeted integrands are constructed via efficient importance sampling. Resulting likelihood approximations are continuous functions of model parameters, greatly enhancing parameter estimation. We illustrate our procedure in applications to dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models.