Strategic complementarity games have found applications in many fields, including macroeconomics, development, and labor economics.' They provide a useful framework within which to address questions like: What generates the disparity across regions and countries? Why are there booms and recessions? and What causes gender and race discrimination in the labor market? In short, they help us think about the diversity and variations across space, time, and groups. The literature on complementarity games has emphasized coordination failures as the key notion to understand these questions. This paper argues that such emphasis is misplaced; the key to understand the diversity is symmetrybreaking. The notion of coordination failures is not only irrelevant, but also misleading when thinking about the diversity.
American Economic Review200292(3), 571-589open access
This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. We find a sizeable negative effect of public spending—and in particular of its wage component— on profits and on business investment. This result is consistent with different theoretical models in which government employment creates wage pressure for the private sector. Various types of taxes also have negative effects on profits, but, interestingly, the effects of government spending on investment are larger than those of taxes. Our results can explain the so-called “non-Keynesian” (i.e., expansionary) effects of fiscal adjustments.
American Economic Review200292(4), 999-1012open access
Specially collected data on adults in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are used to provide evidence on the longer-term effects of Head Start, an early intervention program for poor preschool-age children. Whites who attended Head Start are, relative to their siblings who did not, significantly more likely to complete high school, attend college, and possibly have higher earnings in their early twenties. African-Americans who participated in Head Start are less likely to have been booked or charged with a crime. There is some evidence of positive spillovers from older Head Start children to their younger siblings.
Prosperity and depression are relative concepts. Today both France and Japan are depressed relative to the United States; equivalently, the United States is prosperous relative to these countries. I say these countries are depressed relative to the United States because their output per working-age person is 30 percent less than the U.S. level. An interesting and important policy question is: Why are these countries depressed? The answers for these two countries turn out to be very different. The United States is prosperous relative to France because the U.S. intratemporal tax wedge that distorts the trade-off between consumption and leisure is much smaller than the French wedge. I will show that, if France modified its intratemporal tax wedge so that its value was the same as the U.S. value, French welfare in consumption equivalents would increase by 19 percent. Consumption would have to increase by 19 percent now and in all future periods to achieve as large a welfare gain as that resulting from this tax reform. The United States is prosperous relative to Japan because production efficiency is higher in the United States. In the United States, total factor productivity is approximately 20 percent higher than in Japan. If Japan suddenly became as efficient in production as the United States, its welfare gain in consumption equivalents would be 39 percent. Equally interesting and important are big changes over time in relative output (per working-age person) across countries. Why are New Zealand’s and Switzerland’s economies depressed by over 30 percent relative to their 1970 trend-corrected levels? Both of these countries have small populations, but depressions are not restricted to small countries. Japan, with its 125 million people, is now depressed by 20 percent relative to its 1991 trend-corrected level. On the prosperity side, why are Ireland and South Korea so prosperous now relative to their 1970 trend-corrected levels? This lecture is concerned primarily with big international differences among relatively rich industrial countries and changes in these differences over time. The countries that receive primary attention all have market economies and healthy, well-educated populations. In the countries considered, the variations in aggregate output per working-age person are large, and reasonably good measures of the factor inputs are available. This permits, in many cases, the identification of the change in policy or the difference in policy that gave rise to prosperity or depression. This is in contrast to business-cycle theory, which provides little guidance to policy except for the important policy implication that a stabilization effort will have either no effect or a perverse effect. The output variations studied and analyzed in this lecture are big: an order of magnitude larger than the much-studied business-cycle fluctuations. The variations studied, however, are an order of magnitude smaller than the muchstudied differences between the richest and poorest countries. Surprisingly, only recently have depressions been systematically studied from the perspective of growth theory, which is the theory used * University of Minnesota and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. I thank my colleagues at the University of Minnesota and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis for helpful discussions and comments. In particular, I thank Tim Kehoe, Ellen McGrattan, and Nancy Stokey for their help. I also thank Martin Weale and Franck Portier for providing some British and French tax information used in this lecture. Thanks also go to Sami Alpanda and James MacGee for research assistance and helpful discussions. This lecture draws heavily on collaborative research with Fumio Hayashi. I thank the Economic and Social Research Institute, Cabinet Office, Government of Japan and the U.S. National Science Foundation for financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System.
American Economic Review200292(5), 1521-1534open access
What are the welfare effects of enhanced dissemination of public information through the media and disclosures by market participants with high public visibility? We examine the impact of public information in a setting where agents take actions appropriate to the underlying fundamentals, but they also have a coordination motive arising from a strategic complementarity in their actions. When the agents have no socially valuable private information, greater provision of public information always increases welfare. However, when agents also have access to independent sources of information, the welfare effect of increased public disclosures is ambiguous.
We develop a model linking maximum damage awards available to plaintiffs in wrongful termination lawsuits, workers' propensity to sue as a function of experience, and returns to experience. Using Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data on protected-worker discrimination complaints and labor-market data from the Current Population Survey, we examine how returns to experience among protected workers changed around the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. We show that employers' reactions to employment protections may induce redistributive effects. Furthermore, these effects operate not merely across groups of differing protected status, but also within groups of identical protected status.
Charitable Giving, Income, and Taxes: An Analysis of Panel Data by Gerald E. Auten, Holger Sieg and Charles T. Clotfelter. Published in volume 92, issue 1, pages 371-382 of American Economic Review, March 2002
A menu of paired lottery choices is structured so that the crossover point to the high-risk lottery can be used to infer the degree of risk aversion. With “normal” laboratory payoffs of several dollars, most subjects are risk averse and few are risk loving. Scaling up all payoffs by factors of twenty, fifty, and ninety makes little difference when the high payoffs are hypothetical. In contrast, subjects become sharply more risk averse when the high payoffs are actually paid in cash. A hybrid “power/expo” utility function with increasing relative and decreasing absolute risk aversion nicely replicates the data patterns over this range of payoffs from several dollars to several hundred dollars. Although risk aversion is a fundamental element in standard theories of lottery choice, asset valuation, contracts, and insurance (e.g. Daniel Bernoulli, 1738; John Pratt, 1964; Kenneth Arrow, 1965), experimental research has provided little guidance as to how risk aversion should be modeled. To date, there have been several approaches used to assess the importance and nature of risk aversion. Using lottery choice data from a field experiment, Hans Binswanger (1980) concluded that most farmers exhibit a significant amount of risk aversion that tends to increase as payoffs are increased. Alternatively, risk aversion can be inferred from bidding and pricing tasks. In auctions, overbidding relative to Nash predictions has been attributed to risk aversion by some and to noisy decision-making by others, since the payoff consequences of such overbidding tend to be small (Glenn Harrison, 1989). Vernon Smith and James Walker (1993) assess the effects of noise and decision cost by dramatically scaling up auction payoffs. They find little support for the noise hypothesis, reporting that there is an insignificant increase in overbidding in private value auctions as payoffs are scaled up by factors of 5, 10, and 20. Another way to infer risk aversion is to elicit buying and/or selling prices for simple lotteries. Steven Kachelmeier and Mohamed Shehata (1992) report a significant increase in risk aversion (or, more precisely, a decrease in risk seeking behavior) as the prize value is increased. However, they also obtain dramatically different results depending on whether the choice task involves buying or selling, since subjects tend to put a high selling price on something they “own” and a lower buying price on something they do not, which implies This is analogous to the well-known “willingness to pay/willingness to accept bias.” Asking for a high selling price 1 implies a preference for the risk inherent in the lottery, and offering a low purchase price implies an aversion to the risk in the lottery. Thus the way that the pricing task is framed can alter the implied risk attitudes in a dramatic manner. The issue is whether seemingly inconsistent estimates are due to a problem with the way risk aversion is conceptualized, or to a behavioral bias that is activated by the experimental design. We chose to avoid this possible complication by framing the decisions in terms of choices, not purchases and sales. 3 risk seeking behavior in one case and risk aversion in the other. Independent of the method used to elicit 1 a measure of risk aversion, there is widespread belief (with some theoretical support discussed below) that the degree of risk aversion needed to explain behavior in low-payoff settings would imply absurd levels of risk aversion in high-payoff settings. The upshot of this is that risk aversion effects are controversial and often ignored in the analysis of laboratory data. This general approach has not caused much concern because most theorists are used to bypassing risk aversion issues by assuming that the payoffs for a game are already measured as utilities. The nature of risk aversion (to what extent it exists, and how it depends on the size of the stake) is ultimately an empirical issue, and additional laboratory experiments can produce useful evidence that complements field observations by providing careful controls of probabilities and payoffs. However, even many of those economists who admit that risk aversion may be important have asserted that decision makers should be approximately risk neutral for the low-payoff decisions (involving several dollars) that are typically encountered in the laboratory. The implication, that low laboratory incentives may be somewhat unrealistic and therefore not useful in measuring attitudes toward “real-world” risks, is echoed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1979), who suggest an alternative: Experimental studies typically involve contrived gambles for small stakes, and a large number of repetitions of very similar problems. These features of laboratory gambling complicate the interpretation of the results and restrict their generality. By default, the method of hypothetical choices emerges as the simplest procedure by which a large number of theoretical questions can be investigated. The use of the method relies of the assumption that people often know how they would behave in actual situations of choice, and on the further assumption that the subjects have no special reason to disguise their true preferences. (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979, p. 265) In this paper, we directly address these issues by presenting subjects with simple choice tasks that
The economic analysis of property rights proceeds in two steps. The first distinguishes rival from nonrival goods. The second contrasts the welfare effects of property rights for these two types of goods. For rival goods, strong property rights lead to efficient outcomes. For nonrival goods, property rights involve the trade-off formalized by William Nordhaus (1969): Weak property rights lead to under-provision. Strong property rights create monopoly distortions. Recent discussions of copyright protection for recorded music have obscured the underlying economic issues. Interested firms deny that music-sharing will reduce the incentives for firms to release new recordings. Artists and recording companies never acknowledge the efficiency costs of prices that far exceed marginal cost. It is left to economists with no stake in the outcome to clarify these issues. (Full disclosure: I have not consulted for anyone in the Napster case.) The stakes in the battle over the music business are small enough to get lost in rounding