Knowledge that Transforms

Voters often dismantle constitutional checks and balances on the executive. If such checks and balances limit presidential abuses of power and rents, why do voters support their removal? We argue that by reducing politician rents, checks and balances also make it cheaper to bribe or influence politicians through non-electoral means. In weakly institutionalized polities where such non-electoral influences, particularly by the better organized elite, are a major concern, voters may prefer a political system without checks and balances as a way of insulating politicians from these influences. When they do so, they are effectively accepting a certain amount of politician (presidential) rents in return for redistribution. We show that checks and balances are less likely to emerge when the elite is better organized and is more likely to be able to influence or bribe politicians, and when inequality and potential taxes are high (which makes redistribution more valuable to the majority). We also provide case study evidence from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela consistent with the model.

The evolution of the U.S. economy over the past 55 years is examined through the lens of a micro-founded model that allows for changes in the behaviour of the Federal Reserve and in the volatility of structural shocks. Agents are aware of the possibility of regime changes and their beliefs matter for the law of motion underlying the macroeconomy. Monetary policy is identified by repeated fluctuations between a Hawk and a Dove regime, with the latter prevailing in the 1970s and during the recent crisis. To explore the role of agents' beliefs I introduce a new class of counterfactual simulations: beliefs counterfactuals. If, in the 1970s, agents had anticipated the appointment of an extremely conservative Chairman, inflation would have been lower and the inflation-output trade-off more favourable. The large drop in inflation and output at the end of 2008 would have been mitigated if agents had expected the Federal Reserve to be exceptionally active in the near future.

How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple's expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these. We model households in terms of the utility functions of its members, a bargaining or social welfare function, and a consumption technology function. We demonstrate generic non-parametric identification of the model, and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call "indifference scales", as well as consumption economies of scale, the household's resource sharing rule or members' bargaining power, and other related concepts.

We study stochastic games with an infinite horizon and sequential moves played by an arbitrary number of players. We assume that social memory is finite--every player, except possibly one, is finitely lived and cannot observe events that are sufficiently far back in the past. This class of games includes games between a long-run player and a sequence of short-run players, and games with overlapping generations of players. An equilibrium is purifiable if some close-by behaviour is consistent with equilibrium when agents' payoffs in each period are perturbed additively and independently. We show that only Markov equilibria are purifiable when social memory is finite. Thus if a game has at most one long-run player, all purifiable equilibria are Markov.

We develop a model of endogenous productivity change to examine the impact of the investment in knowledge on the productivity of firms. Our dynamic investment model extends the tradition of the knowledge capital model of Griliches (1979) that has remained a cornerstone of the productivity literature. Rather than constructing a stock of knowledge capital from a firm's observed R&D expenditures, we consider productivity to be unobservable to the econometrician. Our approach accounts for uncertainty, non-linearity, and heterogeneity across firms in the link between R&D and productivity. We also derive a novel estimator for production functions in this setting. Using an unbalanced panel of more than 1800 Spanish manufacturing firms in nine industries during the 1990s, we provide evidence of non-linearities as well as economically significant uncertainties in the R&D process. R&D expenditures play a key role in determining the differences in productivity across firms and the evolution of firm-level productivity over time.

We construct a theory of persistent civil conflicts, where persistence is driven by the endogenous dynamics of inter-ethnic trust and trade. In times of peace, agents belonging to two groups are randomly matched to trade bilaterally. Trade hinges on trust and cooperation. The onset of conflict signals that the aggressor has a low propensity to cooperate, harming future trust and trade. Agents observe the history of conflicts and update their beliefs over time. The theory predicts that civil wars are persistent. Moreover, even accidental con.icts that do not reflect economic fundamentals erode trust, and can plunge a society into a vicious cycle of recurrent conflicts (a war trap). The incidence of conflict can be reduced by policies abating cultural barriers, fostering inter-ethnic trade and human capital, and shifting beliefs. Coercive peace policies such as peacekeeping forces or externally imposed regime changes have instead no persistent effects.

Are macro-economists mistaken in ignoring bargaining between spouses? This paper argues that models of intra-household allocation could be useful for understanding aggregate labor supply trends in the US since the 1970s. A simple calculation suggests that the standard model without bargaining predicts a 19% decline in married-male labor supply in response to the narrowing of the gender gap in wages since the 1970s. However married-men's paid labor remained stationary over the period from the mid 1970s to the recession of 2001. This paper develops and calibrates to US time-use survey data a model of marital bargaining in which time allocations are determined jointly with equilibrium marriage and divorce rates. The results suggest that bargaining effects raised married men's labor supply by about 2.1 weekly hours over the period, and reduced that of married women by 2.7 hours. Bargaining therefore has a relatively small impact on aggregate labor supply, but is critical for trends in female labor supply. Also, the narrowing of the gender wage gap is found to account for a weekly 1.5 hour increase in aggregate labor supply.

This paper analyzes the firm's choice between serving a foreign market through exports or through foreign affiliate sales in an environment characterized by country-specific shocks to the cost of production. Our model predicts that country pairs with less correlated output fluctuations trade more, relative to affiliate sales, while countries with more volatile fluctuations are served relatively more by exporters than by foreign affiliates selling abroad. Using detailed data on trade from Feenstra,

We introduce the financial economics of market microstructure to the financial econometrics of asset return volatility estimation. In particular, we derive the cross-correlation function between latent returns and market microstructure noise in several leading microstructure environments. We propose and illustrate several corresponding theory-inspired volatility estimators, which we apply to stock and oil prices. Our analysis and results are useful for assessing the validity of the frequently assumed independence of latent price and microstructure noise, for explaining observed cross-correlation patterns, for predicting as-yet undiscovered patterns, and most importantly, for promoting improved microstructure-based volatility empirics and improved empirical microstructure studies. Simultaneously and conversely, our analysis is far from the last word on the subject, as it is based on stylized benchmark models; it comes with a “call to action” for development and use of richer microstructure models in volatility estimation and beyond.

We show that in any game that is continuous at infinity, if a plan of action ai is played by a type ti in a Bayesian Nash equilibrium, then there are perturbations of ti for which ai is the only rationalizable plan and whose unique rationalizable belief regarding the play of the game is arbitrarily close to the equilibrium belief of ti. As an application to repeated games, we prove an unrefinable folk theorem: any individually rational and feasible payoff is the unique rationalizable payoff vector for some perturbed type profile. This is true even if perturbed types are restricted to believe that the repeated-game payoff structure and the discount factor are common knowledge.