Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines strategic trade policy under asymmetric information with publicly observable contracts. We analyse both the cases of unilateral and bilateral intervention. We find that the requirement of incentive compatibility undermines the strategic precommitment effect when public funds are costly, even with no restrictions on the form of the policies. Second, when firms sell substitute goods, the introduction of a rival interventionist government may reduce the cost of informational rents to each government. Third, it turns out that under bilateral intervention there exists a continuum of symmetric equilibria with levels of output and corresponding levels of welfare in the exporting countries which can be ranked. The requirement of ex post participation constraints for the firm limits the set of subsidies which can be offered to the firm. In particular, under bilateral intervention, the equilibrium levels of output which are implemented under adverse selection are below their values under ex ante uncertainty, i.e., below the equilibrium levels of output which are achieved when firms sign their contracts before the realization of their costs.

We present a new methodology for studying the problem of intra-firm bargaining, based on the notion that contracts cannot commit the firm and its agents to wages and employment. We develop and analyse a general non-cooperative multilateral bargaining framework between the firm and its employees and consider outcomes which are immune to renegotiations by any party. Equilibrium firm profits are characterizable as both a weighted average of a neo-classical (non-bargaining) firm's profits and a generalization of Shapley value for a corresponding cooperative game. Furthermore, the resulting payoffs induce economically significant distortions in the firm's input and organizational-design decisions.

We study cooperative behaviour in communities where the flow of information regarding past conduct is limited or missing. Players are initially randomly matched with no knowledge of each other's past actions; they endogenously decide whether or not to continue the repeated relationship. There is incomplete information regarding player types: a subset of the population is myopic, while the remainder have discount factors that permit cooperation, in principle. We define social equilibrium in such communities. Such equilibria are characterized by an initial testing phase, followed by cooperation if the test is successful. It is precisely the presence of myopic types that permit cooperation, by raising barriers to entry into new relationships. We examine the implications of increased patience, which takes two forms: an increase in the number of non-myopic types, and an increase in the discount factor of non-myopic types. These two notions turn out to have strikingly different implications for the degree of cooperation that can be sustained.

A model of market making by firms with heterogeneous consumers, suppliers and price-setting intermediaries is examined. Consumers and suppliers engage in time-consuming search for the best price and discount future returns. There exists a unique symmetric equilibrium pricing strategy. In equilibrium, there are non-degenerate distributions of ask and bid prices that straddle the Walrasian price. As the discount rate goes to zero, the ranges of the bid and ask prices, and the total output approach the Walrasian equilibrium values. As the discount rate becomes large, the ask and bid prices approach the monopoly pricing policies. An increase in the discount rate leads to an increase in the equilibrium number of active firms, profit per firm, the mean spread between ask and bid prices, and the variance of ask and bid prices, while lowering the number of active consumers and suppliers. The model is extended to examine the steady-state market equilibrium with continual entry and exit of consumers and suppliers.

This paper compares the performance of a decentralized market with that of a dealership market when traders have differential information. Trade occurs as a result of equilibrium actions in a Bayesian game, where uncertainty is captured by a finite state space and information is represented by partitions on this space. In the benchmark case of trade with common knowledge of endowments, the two mechanisms deliver virtually identical outcomes. However, with differential information, the dealership market has strictly higher trading volume, and yields an efficient post-trade allocation in most states. In contrast, the decentralized market suffers from suboptimal trading volume. The reason for this poor performance is the vulnerability of the decentralized market to higher-order uncertainty concerning the fundamentals of the market. Traders may know that mutually beneficial trade is feasible, and perhaps know that they know, and yet a failure of common knowledge that this is so precludes efficient trade. The dealership market is robust to this type of uncertainty.

This paper examines how interaction between endogenous human capital accumulation and technological change affects relative wages and economic growth. Private incentives to invest in human capital finance the employment of skilled labour in the education sector, while non-rival technology is a by-product of the education process. The absorption of new technologies into production is skill intensive, creates skill-biased labour demand, and increases the relative wage of skilled to unskilled labour. In contrast to recent models of endogenous growth, higher rates of technological change and growth may be accompanied by a higher relative wage but lower relative supply of skilled labour. Thus the model provides a theoretical foundation for the empirically observed relation between technological change and relative demand, supply and wages of skilled labour.

We study the competition between two political parties for seats in a legislature. The parties have fixed positions on some issues, but vary their positions on others in order to attract votes and campaign contributions. In this context, we examine whether special interest groups are governed by an electoral motive or an influence in their campaign giving, and how their contributions affect the equilibrium platforms. We show that each party is induced to behave as if it were maximizing a weighted sum of the aggregate welfares of informed voters and members of special interest groups. The party that is expected to win a majority of seats caters more to the special interests.

Many unit root tests have distorted sizes when the root of the error process is close to the unit circle. This paper analyses the properties of the Phillips-Perron tests and some of their variants in the problematic parameter space. We use local asymptotic analyses to explain why the Phillips-Perron tests suffer from severe size distortions regardless of the choice of the spectral density estimator but that the modified statistics show dramatic improvements in size when used in conjunction with a particular formulation an autoregressive spectral density estimator. We explain why kernel based spectral density estimators aggravate the size problem in the Phillips-Perron tests and yield no size improvement to the modified statistics. The local asymptotic power of the modified statistics are also evaluated. These modified statistics are recommended as being useful in empirical work since they are free of the size problems which have plagued many unit root tests, and they retain respectable power.

This paper introduces a new index number, the Trade Restrictiveness Index, which measures the restrictiveness of a system of trade protection. The index is a general equilibrium application of the distance function and answers the question: “What uniform set of trade restrictions is equivalent (in welfare terms) to the initial protective structure?” The index is applicable to both tariffs and quotas and permits international and intertemporal comparisons. The index is operational and we provide two empirical examples to illustrate its applicability and to show its superiority to commonly used measures.

For some game-theoretic solution concepts, such as dominant strategies, Nash equilibrium, and undominated strategies, only dictatorial social choice functions are implementable on a full domain of preferences with at least three alternatives. For other solution concepts, such as the iterative removal of weakly dominated strategies, undominated Nash equilibrium, and maximin, it is possible to implement non-dictatorial social choice functions. Which aspects of solution concepts accounts for these differences? We answer this question by providing a characterization of solution concepts which lead to impossibility results.