Knowledge that Transforms

A reasonable model of the labour market over the business cycle should predict, among other things, that (a) in very low states of product demand there may be too little employment from an efficiency perspective, but as the state improves employment will increase until ultimately it is efficiently deployed, and (b) in low states of demand, a worker's welfare level will be "low" and as the state of the world improves so will the worker's welfare, except, possibly, at high levels of demand where the worker's utility may start to fall. Surprisingly, there does not exist a labour contract based model that is consistent with predictions (a) and (b). In fact, the standard results in the literature are if leisure is a normal good then there will be too much employment in essentially all states of the world and the welfare of the worker declines as the state of the world improves. In this paper a labour contracting model is constructed that is consistent with the above mentioned predictions. Two necessary ingredients in the model are the possibility of financial distress in low demand states and "partial provability" in contracting. Financial distress can be viewed as frustrating renegotiation and, thus, inefficient outcomes are possible in equilibrium. Partial provability—the ability of an informed player to make verifiable claims or statements to an uninformed player—eliminates certain kinds of inefficient outcomes. In particular, it eliminates the possibility that, in equilibrium, there is too much employment. This last result is interesting in itself because it is commonly believed that normality of leisure necessarily implies that labour contracting models will generate employment levels that are too high from an efficiency perspective.

The authors investigate an infinite horizon bargaining problem in which a firm and a worker bargain over two dimensions: quality and wage. The worker has private information about his type. Only the uninformed firm makes an offer and it can offer a menu of quality-age contracts instead of a single one. They show that for all discount factors, the unique sequential equilibrium outcome is separating without delay; the firm separates the types of worker with a menu of contracts in the first period. The authors result shows that in multidimensional bargaining, the 'Coase Conjecture' holds in the sense that the game ends in the first period. But it fails in the sense that the uninformed party can preserve the entire bargaining power. Copyright 1998 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

Journal Article A Note on "Strategic Trade Policy Design with Asymmetric Information and Public Contracts" Get access Giovanni Maggi Giovanni Maggi Princeton University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 65, Issue 3, July 1998, Pages 623–625, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-937X.00060 Published: 01 July 1998 Article history Received: 01 April 1997 Accepted: 01 October 1997 Published: 01 July 1998

This paper develops the method of matching as an econometric evaluation estimator. A rigorous distribution theory for kernel-based matching is presented. The method of matching is extended to more general conditions than the ones assumed in the statistical literature on the topic. We focus on the method of propensity score matching and show that it is not necessarily better, in the sense of reducing the variance of the resulting estimator, to use the propensity score method even if propensity score is known. We extend the statistical literature on the propensity score by considering the case when it is estimated both parametrically and nonparametrically. We examine the benefits of separability and exclusion restrictions in improving the efficiency of the estimator. Our methods also apply to the econometric selection bias estimator.

This paper analyses a security market with transaction costs and a sequential trading structure. Transaction costs may prevent many traders from revealing their private information if they trade in a sequential fashion. Due to the information aggregation failure, hidden information gets accumulated in the market which may be revealed by a small trigger, yielding a high volatility in the absence of an accompanying event. The paper first characterizes the optimal trading strategy of the agent which constitute the unique equilibrium. Further properties of the price sequence are obtained using the concepts of informational cascade and informational avalanche. The results are applied to the explanation of market crashes. In particular, the dynamics of market crashes are illustrated as evolving through the following four phases: (1) boom; (2) euphoria; (3) trigger; and (4) panic; where the euphoria corresponds to the informational cascade and the panic corresponds to the informational avalanche.

This paper develops and implements a semiparametric estimator for investigating, with panel data, the importance of human capital and time nonseparable preferences to females when aggregate shocks are present. It provides a set of conditions for making statistical inferences about agents' expectations of their correlated future choices, from a short panel. Under the assumption that observed allocations are Pareto optimal, a dynamic model of female labour supply and participation is estimated, in which experience on the job raises future wages, and time spent off the job in the past directly affects current utility (or, indirectly through productivity in the nonmarket sector).

Speculators buy an asset hoping to sell it later to investors with higher private valuations. If agents are uncertain about the distribution of private valuations and about the beliefs of others about this distribution, a beauty contest with an infinite hierarchy of beliefs arises. Under Harsanyi's assumption of a common prior the infinite beliefs hierarchy is readily solved using Bayes' law. This paper shows that common knowledge of the “beliefs formation rule,” mapping the private valuation of each agent into his first-order belief, also simplifies the beliefs hierarchy while allowing for disagreement among agents. We analyse the resulting speculation in a stylized asset market. Several statistics, computed only from readily observable quote, return and volume data, are evaluated in terms of their power to discriminate between genuine disagreement and the Harsanyian case. Only statistics that relate volume and volatility, or volume and changes in best offers, have the necessary discriminatory power.