Knowledge that Transforms

The paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations. A member's current incentives are affected by his past behaviour and, because his track record is observed only with noise, by the group's past behaviour as well. The paper thus studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature. It shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone, and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt. Last, the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality.

This paper studies the interdependence between and the determinants of life-cycle marital status and labour force participation decisions of women. A dynamic utility maximization model is presented and estimated using longitudinal data on women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The MLE method employed involves solving a dynamic programming problem. Further, a minimum distance estimator is proposed which allows for the incorporation of wage data in a computationally simple way. The estimates are used to predict changes in the life-cycle patterns of employment, marriage and divorce due to differences in education, race, the female's earnings and her (potential) husband's earnings. The estimation results indicate that the utility gains to marriage are decreasing in the female's wage rate and increasing in her (potential) husband's earnings, while the opposite is found for gains to working. Ignoring the endogeneity of marital status decisions is shown to lead to an underestimation of own and husband's wage effects on female labour supply. Copyright 1996 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

This paper presents a model where income distribution and redistributive fiscal policy interact to affect the budget deficit and the pattern of net borrowing of a country. According to the standard representative agent paradigm, a small open economy should smooth consumption by borrowing from (lending to) the rest of the world when its income increases (declines) over time. The simple model of this paper delivers exactly the same predictions in the absence of income dispersion. When income distribution is not degenerate, however, the same model gives rise to a surprising wealth of results. In particular, poor economies with high inequality may exhibit completely counter-intuitive patterns of fiscal policy and external borrowing. The country's production path declines over time, because the more mobile agents leave the country to escape taxation; yet, the country might end up having a budget deficit and borrowing from abroad, thereby reinforcing rather than smoothing the asymmetry in consumption between the two periods. An important feature of this outcome is that it is backed by both the poor and the rich, who gain from the fiscal system at the expense of the middle class.

This paper studies the problem of optimal security design by a privately informed entrepreneur. In the context of a simple parametric model, it is shown that the entrepreneur does not find it profitable to float an asset that affords her an informational advantage. The reason is that, with rational, uninformed outside investors, the entrepreneur faces adverse selection in the security market, which prevents her from exploiting her position as an insider. This is true whether or not she has market power in trading the asset.

Two parties have different goals. Voters, but not parties, are uncertain about the functioning of the economy, in this case the costs of producing a public good. The parties each propose a policy, an election is held and the policy of the winning party is implemented. Voters and parties care about the level of the public good and costs. Two kinds of sequential equilibria exist; revealing, where voters learn the true costs and the implemented policy adjusts to costs, and non-revealing. If parties' preferences are polarized only non-revealing equilibria fulfill a refinement criterion like the intuitive criterion. If they are alike only revealing equilibria fulfill this criterion. Thus less political polarization improves information revelation.

When the profitability of investment depends on the general level of economic activity, entrepreneurs have an incentive to delay investments during a recession. Endogenous delay thus prolongs the recovery from a recession and heightens the effect of the boom. This paper describes a dynamic model that exhibits both delay and cycles and develops methods for analysing the role of delay in propogating business cycles. A number of interesting characteristics of the cycle are revealed. First, the effect of delay is asymmetric: it lengthens the recovery but not the downturn. Second, delay can increase the amplitude and typically reduces the frequency of the cycle. Third, it can reduce the average level of activity, but it achieves this effect by prolonging the recession rather than by reducing the amplitude of the cycle. The welfare effects of delay are ambiguous, however.

This paper examines the competition between money and credit in a search model with divisible commodities. It is shown that fiat money can be valuable even though it yields a lower rate of return than the coexisting credit. The competition between money and credit increases efficiency. The monetary equilibrium with credit Pareto dominates the monetary equilibrium without credit whenever the two coexist. When a credit is repaid with money, the competition also bounds the purchasing power of money from below by that of credit and so eliminates the weak inefficient monetary equilibrium found in previous search models. With numerical examples, three different monetary equilibria are ranked and the properties of the interest rate are examined.

Linear models with error components are widely used to analyse panel data. Some applications of these models require knowledge of the probability densities of the error components. Existing methods handle this requirement by assuming that the densities belong to known parametric families of distributions (typically the normal distribution). This paper shows how to carry out nonparametric estimation of the densities of the error components, thereby avoiding the assumption that the densities belong to known parametric families. The nonparametric estimators are applied to an earnings model using data from the Current Population Survey. The model's transitory error component is not normally distributed. Use of the nonparametric density estimators yields estimates of the probability that individuals with low earnings will become high earners in the future that are much lower than the estimates obtained under the assumption of normally distributed error components.