Knowledge that Transforms

Previous work has established that recessions involve a “cleansing” effect, so that in downturns, only high productivity jobs remain. But empirical evidence suggests job quality is procyclical: jobs created in recessions are likely to be low-paying and temporary. This paper modifies previous models by adding on-the-job search, which leads to an additional “sullying” effect. Calibration of the model suggests this offsetting sullying effect is likely to be much larger than the cleansing effect, and can account for the procyclical match quality we observe in the data.

We study repeated sequential games where players may not move simultaneously in stage games. We introduce the concept of effective minimax for sequential games and establish a Folk theorem for repeated sequential games. The Folk theorem asserts that any feasible payoff vector where every player receives more than his effective minimax value in a sequential stage game can be supported by a subgame perfect equilibrium in the corresponding repeated sequential game when players are sufficiently patient. The results of this paper generalize those of Wen (1994), and of Fudenberg and Maskin (1986). The model of repeated sequential games and the concept of effective minimax provide an alternative view to the Anti-Folk theorem of Lagunoff and Matsui (1997) for asynchronously repeated pure coordination games. Copyright 2002, Wiley-Blackwell.

In this paper we investigate the implementation problem arising when some of the players are “faulty” in the sense that they fail to act optimally. The planner and the non-faulty players only know that there can be at most k faulty players in the population. However, they know neither the identity of the faulty players, their exact number nor how faulty players behave. We define a solution concept which requires a player to optimally respond to the non-faulty players regardless of the identity and actions of the faulty players. We introduce a notion of fault tolerant implementation, which unlike standard notions of full implementation, also requires robustness to deviations from the equilibrium. The main result of this paper establishes that under symmetric information any choice rule that satisfies two properties—k-monotonicity and no veto power—can be implemented by a strategic game form if there are at least three players and the number of faulty players is less than 1\2n−1. As an application of our result we present examples of simple mechanisms that implement the constrained Walrasian function and a choice rule for the efficient allocation of an indivisible good.

Ideas are difficult to sell when buyers cannot assess an idea's value before it is revealed and sellers cannot protect a revealed idea. These problems exist in a variety of intellectual property sales ranging from pure ideas to poorly protected inventions and reflect the nonverifiability of key elements of an intellectual property sale. An expropriable partial disclosure can be used as a signal, allowing the seller to obtain payment based on the value of the remaining (undisclosed) know-how. We examine contracting after the disclosure and find that seller wealth is pivotal in supporting a partial disclosure equilibrium and in determining the payoff size.

This paper examines the role of the information contained in stock prices in the regulation of privatized firms. Stock prices contain noisy but unbiased information about firm's future prospects that regulators can use to decide on some regulatory policies. The main argument developed is that the observation of stock price movements reduces the incentives of regulators to develop their own monitoring technologies and can allow them to commit to relatively lighthanded regulations. This protects firm's investments in cost reduction activities and can increase ex ante welfare.

The paper examines the consequences of the economic integration of factor markets in a model with two countries that redistribute income among their residents. The social benefits in each country are financed by a source based tax on capital which is democratically chosen by its inhabitants. If either capital or labour is internationally mobile, the countries engage in fiscal competition and the partial integration of capital or labour markets is detrimental to the countries' redistributive ability. A move from partial to full integration, however, may alleviate rather than intensify fiscal competition, particularly, if the two countries face sufficiently similar economic and political conditions. In such a situation, for example, tax competition for mobile capital is softened as the labour market becomes more integrated and even vanishes if both factors are fully mobile. As a result, there is more redistribution in equilibrium and a majority of the population in each country is strictly better off.

. Mean dynamics describe the convergence to self-confirming equilibria of selfreferential systems under discounted least squares learning. Escape dynamics recurrently propel away from a self-confirming equilibrium. In a model with a unique self-confirming equilibrium, the escape dynamics make the government discover too strong a version of the natural rate hypothesis. The escape route dynamics cause recurrent outcomes close to the Ramsey (commitment) inflation rate in a model with an adaptive government. Key Words: Self-confirming equilibrium, mean dynamics, escape route, large deviation, natural rate of unemployment, adaptation, experimentation trap. `If an unlikely event occurs, it is very likely to occur in the most likely way.' Michael Harrison 1. INTRODUCTION Building on work by Sims (1988) and Chung (1990), Sargent (1999) showed how a government adaptively fitting an approximating Phillips curve model recurrently sets inflation near the optimal time-inconsistent ouctome, althoug...

The central puzzle in international business cycles is that fluctuations in real exchange rates are volatile and persistent. We quantify the popular story for real exchange rate fluctuations: they are generated by monetary shocks interacting with sticky goods prices. If prices are held fixed for at least one year, risk aversion is high, and preferences are separable in leisure, then real exchange rates generated by the model are as volatile as in the data and quite persistent, but less so than in the data. The main discrepancy between the model and the data, the consumption—real exchange rate anomaly, is that the model generates a high correlation between real exchange rates and the ratio of consumption across countries, while the data show no clear pattern between these variables.

This paper considers a class of two-player dynamic games in which each player controls a one-dimensional action variable, interpreted as a level of cooperation. The dynamics are due to an irreversibility constraint: neither player can ever reduce his cooperation level. Payoffs are decreasing in one's own action, increasing in one's opponent's action. We characterize efficient symmetric equilibrium action paths; actions rise gradually over time and converge, when payoffs are smooth, to a level strictly below the one-shot efficient level, no matter how little discounting takes place. The analysis is extended to incorporate sequential moves and asymmetric equilibria. Copyright 2002, Wiley-Blackwell.

I explore the idea that people care about the justifiability of their decisions in the context of two-person extensive games. Each player justifies his strategy s with a belief b of the opponent's strategy which is consistent with the play path and maximally plausible (according to some exogenous criterion). We say that s is justifiable if against the ex post criticism that some other strategy s′ outperforms s against b, the player can argue that playing s′ would have exposed him to similar criticism in the opposite direction. Under a simplicity-based plausibility criterion, this concept implies systematic departures from maximizing behaviour in familiar games.