Knowledge that Transforms

We present a tractable general equilibrium model with multiple sectors in which firms offer workers incentive contracts and simultaneously raise capital in stock markets. Workers optimally invest in the stock market and at the same time hedge labour income risk. Firms rationally take agents' portfolio decisions into account. In equilibrium, the cost of capital of each sector is endogenous. The distortion induced by moral hazard generates counterintuitive effects on the real economy. For example, the value of labour market participation may be higher under moral hazard than under first best, further a positive productivity shock may decrease welfare in the moral hazard economy. In addition, our model generates predictions on the effects of moral hazard on asset markets. For example, in the presence of moral hazard, the capital asset pricing model fails because firms, by choosing optimal incentive contracts, transfer risk both through wages and through the stock market. This leads to several cross-sectional asset pricing “anomalies”, such as size and value effects. As we characterize optimal contracts, we can also present empirical predictions relating workers' compensation, firm productivity, firm size, and financial market abnormal returns.

Our paper examines the impact of heterogeneous trading technologies for households on asset prices and the distribution of wealth. We distinguish between passive traders who hold fixed portfolios of stocks and bonds, and active traders who adjust their portfolios to changes in expected returns. To solve the model, we derive an optimal consumption sharing rule that does not depend on the trading technology, and we derive an aggregation result for state prices. This allows us to solve for equilibrium prices and allocations without having to search for market clearing prices in each asset market separately. We show that the fraction of total wealth held by active traders, not the fraction held by all participants, is critical for asset prices because only these traders respond to variation in state prices and hence absorb the residual aggregate risk created by non-participants. We calibrate the heterogeneity in trading technologies to match the equity premium and the risk-free rate. The calibrated model reproduces the skewness and kurtosis of the wealth distribution in the data. In contrast to existing asset pricing models with heterogeneous agents, our model matches the high volatility of returns and the low volatility of the risk-free rate.

Whether campaign advertising influences election outcomes is an open question; a paradox given the amount spent on campaigning in general and TV advertising in particular. We argue that such “absence of documentation” is due to the focus of the empirical literature on the United States, in which the allocation of campaign spending and advertising is decentralized. We explore a quasinatural experiment that enables us to mitigate the omitted variables and reverse causality problems caused by decentralized allocation. In Brazil, gubernatorial elections work in a two-round system. In the first round, candidates’ TV time shares are determined by their coalitions’ share of seats in the National Parliament. In the second round, TV time is split equally between the first-round winner and runner-up. Using differences between rounds as a source of variation, we find a large causal effect of TV advertising on election outcomes.

We evaluate the effects of a fundamental lever of constitutional design: the duration of public office terms. We present a simple model grounded in interviews with legislators and highlight three forces shaping incentives to exert legislative effort. We exploit two natural experiments in the Argentine Congress (where term lengths were assigned randomly) to ascertain which forces are empirically dominant. Results for separate measures as well as an aggregate index of legislative effort show that longer terms increase effort. Shorter terms appear to discourage effort not due to campaign distractions but due to an investment payback logic: when effort yields returns over multiple periods, longer terms yield a higher chance of capturing those returns. A broader implication is that job stability may promote effort despite making individuals less accountable.

How can we know in advance whether simplifying assumptions about beliefs will make a difference in the conclusions of game-theoretic models? We define critical types to be types whose rationalizable correspondence is sensitive to assumptions about arbitrarily high-order beliefs. We show that a type is critical if and only if it exhibits common belief in some non-trivial event. We use this characterization to show that all types in commonly used type spaces are critical. On the other hand, we show that regular types (types that are not critical) are generic, although perhaps inconvenient to use in applications.

We study dynamic incentives and behaviour in markets with costly discovery of past transactions. In our model, a sequence of short-lived customers interact over time with a single long-lived firm that privately knows its type (good or opportunistic). Customers must pay to observe the firm's past behaviour. We characterize the equilibrium structure that features accumulation, consumption, and restoration of reputation. The opportunistic firm deliberately builds its reputation up to a point where the maximum periods of information acquired by customers do not reveal past opportunistic behaviour and exploits the customers who most trust the firm.

Preemption games are widely used to model economic problems such as patent races. We introduce private information into these games and allow for this information to stochastically change over time. This reflects, e.g. how R&D competitors improve their innovations over time and keep these innovations secret before patenting them. The analysis initially appears intractable because of the complexity of the equilibrium updating of beliefs on opponents' information. However, we demonstrate the existence of a class of equilibria and calculate these equilibria in closed form. We find that the expected durations in these equilibria are longer than when players' information is public but, in some cases, shorter than in the collusive outcome. Hence, R&D secrecy slows down innovation disclosure.

In many procurement auctions, the bidders' unobserved costs depend both on a common shock and on idiosyncratic private information. Assuming a multiplicative structure, I derive sufficient conditions under which the model is identified and propose a non-parametric estimation procedure that results in uniformly consistent estimators of the cost components' distributions. The estimation procedure is applied to data from Michigan highway procurement auctions. Private information is estimated to account for 34% of the variation in bidders' costs. It is shown that accounting for unobserved auction heterogeneity has important implications for the evaluation of the distribution of rents, efficiency, and optimal auction design.

The paper studies the effects and the determinants of interregional redistribution in a model of residential and political choice. We find that paradoxical consequences of interjurisdictional transfers arise if people are mobile: while self-sufficient regions are necessarily identical with respect to policies and average incomes in our model, interregional redistribution always leads to the divergence of regional policies and per capita incomes. Thus, interregional redistribution prevents inter regional equality. At the same time, however, transfers may allow for more inter personal equality among the inhabitants of each region. The voting population may therefore in a decision over the fiscal constitution deliberately implement such a transfer scheme to foster regional divergence. Empirical evidence from panel data from OECD countries and Canadian provinces is consistent with the theory.

We study the effects of globalization on risk sharing and welfare. Like the previous literature, we assume that governments cannot commit to enforce the repayment of debts owed by their citizens. Unlike the previous literature, we assume that governments cannot discriminate between domestic and foreign creditors when enforcing debt payments. This creates novel interactions between domestic and international trade in assets. (i) Increases in domestic trade raise the benefits of enforcement and facilitate international trade. In fact, in our set-up, countries can obtain international risk sharing even in the absence of default penalties. (ii) Increases in foreign trade raise the costs of enforcement and hamper domestic trade. As a result, globalization may worsen domestic risk sharing and lower welfare. We show how these effects depend on various characteristics of tradable goods and explore the roles of borrowing limits, debt renegotiations, and trade policy.