Knowledge that Transforms

Aggregate and sectoral comovement are central features of business cycles, so the ability to generate comovement is a natural litmus test for macroeconomic models. But it is a test that most models fail. We propose a unified model that generates aggregate and sectoral comovement in response to contemporaneous and news shocks about fundamentals. The fundamentals that we consider are aggregate and sectoral total factor productivity shocks as well as investment-specific technical change. The model has three key elements: variable capital utilization, adjustment costs to investment, and preferences that allow us to parameterize the strength of short-run wealth effects on the labor supply. (JEL E13, E20, E32)

There is economic pressure to postpone the retirement age, but employers are still reluctant to employ older workers. We investigate the comparative behavior of juniors and seniors in experiments conducted both onsite with the employees of two large firms and in a conventional laboratory environment with students and retirees. We show that seniors are no more risk averse than juniors and are typically more cooperative; both juniors and working seniors respond strongly to competition. The implication is that it may be beneficial to define additional incentives near the end of the career to motivate and retain older workers. (JEL C90, J14, J26, M12, M51)

Executive Summary 1. Survey responses are always subject to measurement error. In general surveys (and especially longitudinal surveys), there are severe constraints on the time that can be spent eliciting a less noisy response for any target variable. In this paper we consider when it may be better to consider multiple noisy measures of the target measure rather than improving the reliability of a single measure. 2. The Kotlarski result states that if the measurement errors in two measures of the same target variable are mutually independent and independent of the true value then we can recover the entire distribution of the quantity of interest, up to location. 3. We consider designing surveys to deliver measurement error with desirable properties. This shifts the emphasis from reliability (the signal to noise ratio for any given measure) to the joint properties of the multiple measures. 4. To illustrate our ideas, we consider a concrete example: the measurement of consumption inequality. A small simulation study suggests that the approach we propose has promise. The next step in this research agenda is experiments in survey data collection.

This paper experimentally examines image motivation—the desire to be liked and well regarded by others—as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial behavior due to crowding out of image motivation. Using the unique property of image motivation—its dependency on visibility—we show that image is indeed an important part of the motivation to behave prosocially, and that extrinsic incentives crowd out image motivation. Therefore, monetary incentives are more likely to be counterproductive for public prosocial activities than for private ones. (JEL D64, L31, Z13)

We examine the impacts of increased US gasoline taxes in a model that links the markets for new, used, and scrapped vehicles and recognizes the considerable heterogeneity among households and cars. Household choice parameters derive from an estimation procedure that integrates individual choices for car ownership and miles traveled. We find that each cent-per-gallon increase in the price of gasoline reduces the equilibrium gasoline consumption by about 0.2 percent. Taking account of revenue recycling, the impact of a 25-cent gasoline tax increase on the average household is about $30 per year (2001 dollars). Distributional impacts depend importantly on how additional revenues from the tax increase are recycled. (JEL D12, H22, H25, L62, L71)

This manuscript is a “work of the United States Government ” within the meaning of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101. As such, the manuscript is not entitled to copyright protection, 17 U.S.C. § 105. Accordingly, the manuscript is in the public domain as a matter of law.

This paper presents a model of business cycles driven by shocks to consumer expectations regarding aggregate productivity. Agents are hit by heterogeneous productivity shocks, they observe their own productivity and a noisy public signal regarding aggregate productivity. The public signal gives rise to “noise shocks,” which have the features of aggregate demand shocks: they increase output, employment, and inflation in the short run and have no effects in the long run. Numerical examples suggest that the model can generate sizable amounts of noise-driven volatility. (JEL D83, D84, E21, E23, E32)

Bayesian Learning and the Pricing of New Information: Evidence from Prediction Markets by David S. Lee and Enrico Moretti. Published in volume 99, issue 2, pages 330-36 of American Economic Review, May 2009

We study the departure time decisions of commuters traversing a traffic network with the goal of arriving at a common destination at a specified time. There are costs associated with arriving either too early or too late, and with delays experienced at bottlenecks. Our main hypothesis, based on the Nash equilibrium distribution of departure times, implies that, for certain parameter values, expanding the capacity of an upstream bottleneck can increase the total travel costs in the network. We report the results of a large-group laboratory experiment, which are strongly supportive of this counterintuitive hypothesis, and we discuss the implications. (JEL D85, R41)

In settings ranging from office suite software to online auctions, casual empiricism suggests a strong tendency for markets where platforms compete to tip to a single dominant player. But which platform will prevail? One might hope that the better platform will be selected. Theory, however, offers no such comfort. Standard models suggest that tipping to any platform—even an inferior one—comprises an equilibrium. Paul A. David (1985) suggests that getting stuck in a bad equilibrium is not merely a theoretical possibility, but a good description of what happened in the typewriter keyboard market. He argues that the QWERTY arrangement prevailed (and continues to prevail) despite its inferiority to the DVORAK arrangement. The essence of David’s argument is that, by virtue of its head start in the market, users expected QWERTY to prevail and these expectations were selffulfilling. As a consequence, the superior platform, DVORAK, was never adopted. The idea that self-fulfilling expectations can lead an inferior platform to triumph in the face of better alternatives has now become standard in the economics literature and features prominently in many textbooks (see, for instance, Luis M. B. Cabral, 2000). Yet, despite the long passage of time since David’s piece was first published, the datedness of the examples illustrating this idea is striking. Most textbooks, including Cabral’s, are content to focus on QWERTY as well as the competition between Betamax and VHS some thirty years ago. We thank Dylan Minor and Xingtian Zhu for excellent research assistance. We gratefully