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Articles 1 - 30 of 78
Full-Text Articles in Economics
Human Capital Development And Parental Investment In India, Orazio P. Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Emily Nix
Human Capital Development And Parental Investment In India, Orazio P. Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Emily Nix
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We estimate production functions for cognition and health for children aged 1-12 in India, where over 70 million children aged 0-5 are at risk of developmental deficits. The inputs into the production functions include parental background, prior child cognition and health, and child investments. We use income and local prices to control for the endogeneity of investments. We find that cognition is sensitive to investments throughout the age range we consider, while health is mainly affected by early investments. We also find that inputs are complementary, and crucially that health is very important in determining cognition. Our paper contributes in …
Human Capital Development And Parental Investment In India, Orazio P. Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Emily Nix
Human Capital Development And Parental Investment In India, Orazio P. Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Emily Nix
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We estimate production functions for cognition and health for children aged 1-12 in India, based on the Young Lives Survey. India has over 70 million children aged 0-5 who are at risk of developmental deficits. The inputs into the production functions include parental background, prior child cognition and health, and child investments, which are taken as endogenous. Estimation is based on a nonlinear factor model, based on multiple measurements for both inputs and child outcomes. Our results show an important effect of early health on child cognitive development, which then becomes persistent. Parental investments affect cognitive development at all ages, …
Human Capital Development And Parental Investment In India, Orazio P. Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Emily Nix
Human Capital Development And Parental Investment In India, Orazio P. Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Emily Nix
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
In this paper we estimate production functions for cognition and health throughout four stages of childhood from 5-15 years of age using two cohorts of children drawn from the Young Lives Survey for India. The inputs into the production function include parental background, prior child cognition and health and child investments. We allow investments to be endogenous and they depend on local prices and household income, as well as on the exogenous determinants of cognition and health. We find that investments are very important determinants of child cognition and of health at an earlier age. We also find that inputs …
Premuneration Values And Investments In Matching Markets, George J. Mailath, Andrew Postlewaite, Larry Samuelson
Premuneration Values And Investments In Matching Markets, George J. Mailath, Andrew Postlewaite, Larry Samuelson
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We analyze a model in which agents make investments and then match into pairs to create a surplus. The agents can make transfers to reallocate their pretransfer ownership claims on the surplus. Mailath, Postlewaite and Samuelson (2013) showed that when investments are unobservable, equilibrium investments are generally inefficient. In this paper we work with a more structured model that is sufficiently tractable to analyze the nature of the investment inefficiencies. We provide conditions under which investment is inefficiently high or low and conditions under which changes in the pretransfer ownership claims on the surplus will be Pareto improving, as well …
Long Term Effects Of Experience During Youth: Evidence From Consumptions In China, K. Sudhir, Ishani Tewari
Long Term Effects Of Experience During Youth: Evidence From Consumptions In China, K. Sudhir, Ishani Tewari
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We test for the long-term effects of experience during youth on consumption in nontraditional taste-forming categories. A unique dataset that tracks individuals over twenty years from 1992-2011, residing in nine Chinese provinces that vary widely in both income levels and rate of economic growth, helps us identify cohort and intra-cohort “prosperity-inyouth” (PIY) effects on consumption. We first demonstrate that non-traditional category consumption increases strongly among cohorts that entered adulthood during China’s boom years. We then show evidence of the intra-cohort PIY effect, controlling for individual level experience by leveraging the heterogeneity in the timing and rate of growth in prosperity …
Optimal Product Variety In Radio Markets, Steven T. Berry, Alon Eizenberg, Joel Waldfogel
Optimal Product Variety In Radio Markets, Steven T. Berry, Alon Eizenberg, Joel Waldfogel
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
A vast theoretical literature shows that inefficient market structures may arise in free entry equilibria. Previous empirical work demonstrated that excessive entry may obtain in local radio markets. Our paper extends that literature by relaxing the assumption that stations are symmetric, allowing instead for endogenous station differentiation along both (observed) horizontal and (unobserved) vertical dimensions. We find that, in most broadcasting formats, a social planner who takes into account the welfare of market participants (stations and advertisers) would eliminate 50%–60% of the stations observed in equilibrium. In 80%–94.9% of markets that have high quality stations in the observed equilibrium, welfare …
Long Term Effects Of “Prosperity In Youth” On Consumption: Evidence From China, K. Sudhir, Ishani Tewari
Long Term Effects Of “Prosperity In Youth” On Consumption: Evidence From China, K. Sudhir, Ishani Tewari
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We test for the long-term impact of experiencing “prosperity in youth” (PIY) on non-traditional category consumption. Using unique twenty-year panel data of individuals from nine Chinese provinces with varying levels of per-capita GDP and rates of per-capita GDP growth, we find robust evidence for the PIY effect. We find both a direct effect of one’s own prosperity and an indirect effect of the prosperity of one’s province during youth on long-term consumption. In particular, the indirect PIY effect is driven more strongly by individuals with low incomes during youth — suggesting that norms and aspirations created by the consumption of …
Are We Approaching An Economic Singularity? Information Technology And The Future Of Economic Growth, William D. Nordhaus
Are We Approaching An Economic Singularity? Information Technology And The Future Of Economic Growth, William D. Nordhaus
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
What are the prospects for long-run economic growth?, the present study looks at a more recently launched hypothesis, which I label Singularity . The idea here is that rapid growth in computation and artificial intelligence will cross some boundary or Singularity after which economic growth will accelerate sharply as an ever-accelerating pace of improvements cascade through the economy. The paper develops a growth model that features Singularity and presents several tests of whether we are rapidly approaching Singularity. The key question for Singularity is the substitutability between information and conventional inputs. The tests suggest that the Singularity is not near.
Modeling Uncertainty In Climate Change: A Multi‐Model Comparison, Kenneth Gillingham, William D. Nordhaus, David Anthoff, Geoffrey Blanford, Valentina Bosetti, Peter Christensen, Haewon Mcjeon
Modeling Uncertainty In Climate Change: A Multi‐Model Comparison, Kenneth Gillingham, William D. Nordhaus, David Anthoff, Geoffrey Blanford, Valentina Bosetti, Peter Christensen, Haewon Mcjeon
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
The economics of climate change involves a vast array of uncertainties, complicating both the analysis and development of climate policy. This study presents the results of the first comprehensive study of uncertainty in climate change using multiple integrated assessment models. The study looks at model and parametric uncertainties for population, total factor productivity, and climate sensitivity. It estimates the pdfs of key output variables, including CO 2 concentrations, temperature, damages, and the social cost of carbon (SCC). One key finding is that parametric uncertainty is more important than uncertainty in model structure. Our resulting pdfs also provide insights on tail …
First Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications For Bidding And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
First Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications For Bidding And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We explore the impact of private information in sealed-bid first-price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning-bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information and equilibrium attaining this minimum leave bidders indifferent between their equilibrium bids and all higher bids. Our results provide lower bounds for bids and revenue with asymmetric distributions over values. We also report further characterizations of revenue and bidder surplus including upper bounds on revenue. Our work has implications for the identification of value distributions from data on winning bids and …
Efficient Estimation Of Multivariate Semi-Nonparametric Garch Filtered Copula Models, Xiaohong Chen, Zhuo Huang, Yanping Yi
Efficient Estimation Of Multivariate Semi-Nonparametric Garch Filtered Copula Models, Xiaohong Chen, Zhuo Huang, Yanping Yi
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper considers estimation of semi-nonparametric GARCH filtered copula models in which the individual time series are modelled by semi-nonparametric GARCH and the joint distributions of the multivariate standardized innovations are characterized by parametric copulas with nonparametric marginal distributions. The models extend those of Chen and Fan (2006) to allow for semi-nonparametric conditional means and volatilities, which are estimated via the method of sieves such as splines. The fitted residuals are then used to estimate the copula parameters and the marginal densities of the standardized innovations jointly via the sieve maximum likelihood (SML). We show that, even using nonparametrically filtered …
Information And Market Power, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris
Information And Market Power, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We consider demand function competition with a finite number of agents and private information. We analyze how the structure of the private information shapes the market power of each agent and the price volatility. We show that any degree of market power can arise in the unique equilibrium under an information structure that is arbitrarily close to complete information. In particular, regardless of the number of agents and the correlation of payoff shocks, market power may be arbitrarily close to zero (so we obtain the competitive outcome) or arbitrarily large (so there is no trade in equilibrium). By contrast, price …
First Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications For Bidding And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
First Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications For Bidding And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We explore the impact of private information in sealed bid first price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information and equilibrium attaining this minimum leave bidders uncertain whether they will win or lose and indifferent between their equilibrium bids and all higher bids. Our results provide lower bounds for bids and revenue with asymmetric distributions over values. We report further analytic and computational characterizations of revenue and bidder surplus including upper bounds on revenue. Our work has …
First Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications For Bidding And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
First Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications For Bidding And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We explore the impact of private information in sealed-bid first-price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning-bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information and equilibrium attaining this minimum leave bidders indifferent between their equilibrium bids and all higher bids. Our results provide lower bounds for bids and revenue with asymmetric distributions over values. We report further analytic and computational characterizations of revenue and bidder surplus including upper bounds on revenue. Our work has implications for the identification of value distributions from data on winning …
Team Production, Endogenous Learning About Abilities And Career Concerns, Evangelia Chalioti
Team Production, Endogenous Learning About Abilities And Career Concerns, Evangelia Chalioti
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper studies career concerns in teams where the support a worker receives depends on fellow team members’ effort and ability. In this setting, by exerting effort and providing support, a worker can influence her own and her teammates’ performances in order to bias the learning process in her favor. To manipulate the market’s assessments, we argue that in equilibrium, a worker has incentives to help or even sabotage her colleagues in order to signal that she is of higher ability. In a multiperiod stationary framework, we show that the stationary level of work effort is above and help effort …
Introduction To Jet Symposium Issue On ‘Dynamic Contracts And Mechanism Design, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Pavan
Introduction To Jet Symposium Issue On ‘Dynamic Contracts And Mechanism Design, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Pavan
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
The Introduction to the Symposium Issue on “Dynamic Contract and Mechanism Design” of the Journal of Economic Theory provides an overview of the dynamic mechanism design literature. We then introduce the papers that are contained in the Symposium issue and finally conclude by discussing avenues for future research. Several of the papers contained in the Symposium issue were presented at the Economic Theory Workshop of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University in June 2013.
First Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications For Bidding And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
First Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications For Bidding And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper explores the consequences of information in sealed bid first price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over valuations, we characterize the set of possible outcomes that can arise in a Bayesian equilibrium for some information structure. In particular, we characterize maximum and minimum revenue across all information structures when bidders may not know their own values, and maximum revenue when they do know their values. Revenue is maximized when buyers know who has the highest valuation, but the highest valuation buyer has partial information about others’ values. Revenue is minimized when buyers are uncertain …
Identification In Differentiated Products Markets, Steven T. Berry, Philip A. Haile
Identification In Differentiated Products Markets, Steven T. Berry, Philip A. Haile
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Empirical models of demand for — and, often, supply of — differentiated products are widely used in practice, typically employing parametric functional forms and distributions of consumer heterogeneity. We review some recent work studying identification in a broad class of such models. This work shows that parametric functional forms and distributional assumptions are not essential for identification. Rather, identification relies primarily on the standard requirement that instruments be available for the endogenous variables — here, typically, prices and quantities. We discuss the kinds of instruments needed for identification and how the reliance on instruments can be reduced by nonparametric functional …
Information And Market Power, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris
Information And Market Power, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We analyze demand function competition with a finite number of agents and private information. We show that the nature of the private information determines the market power of the agents and thus price and volume of equilibrium trade. We establish our results by providing a characterization of the set of all joint distributions over demands and payoff states that can arise in equilibrium under any information structure. In demand function competition, the agents condition their demand on the endogenous information contained in the price. We compare the set of feasible outcomes under demand function to the feasible outcomes under Cournot …
Identification Of Nonparametric Simultaneous Equations Models With A Residual Index Structure, Steven T. Berry, Philip A. Haile
Identification Of Nonparametric Simultaneous Equations Models With A Residual Index Structure, Steven T. Berry, Philip A. Haile
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We present new identification results for a class of nonseparable nonparametric simultaneous equations models introduced by Matzkin (2008). These models combine traditional exclusion restrictions with a requirement that each structural error enter through a “residual index.” Our identification results are constructive and encompass a range of special cases with varying demands on the exogenous variation provided by instruments and the shape of the joint density of the structural errors. The most important of these results demonstrate identification even when instruments have limited variation. A genericity result demonstrates a formal sense in which the associated density conditions may be viewed as …
Inference In Near Singular Regression, Peter C.B. Phillips
Inference In Near Singular Regression, Peter C.B. Phillips
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper considers stationary regression models with near-collinear regressors. Limit theory is developed for regression estimates and test statistics in cases where the signal matrix is nearly singular in finite samples and is asymptotically degenerate. Examples include models that involve evaporating trends in the regressors that arise in conditions such as growth convergence. Structural equation models are also considered and limit theory is derived for the corresponding instrumental variable estimator, Wald test statistic, and overidentification test when the regressors are endogenous.
Identification Of Nonparametric Simultaneous Equations Models With A Residual Index Structure, Steven T. Berry, Philip A. Haile
Identification Of Nonparametric Simultaneous Equations Models With A Residual Index Structure, Steven T. Berry, Philip A. Haile
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We present new results on the identifiability of a class of nonseparable nonparametric simultaneous equations models introduced by Matzkin (2008). These models combine exclusion restrictions with a requirement that each structural error enter through a “residual index.” Our identification results encompass a variety of special cases allowing tradeoffs between the exogenous variation required of instruments and restrictions on the joint density of structural errors. Among these special cases are results avoiding any density restriction and results allowing instruments with arbitrarily small support.
Inference Based On Many Conditional Moment Inequalities, Donald W.K. Andrews, Xiaoxia Shi
Inference Based On Many Conditional Moment Inequalities, Donald W.K. Andrews, Xiaoxia Shi
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
In this paper, we construct confidence sets for models defined by many conditional moment inequalities/equalities. The conditional moment restrictions in the models can be finite, countably infinite, or uncountably infinite. To deal with the complication brought about by the vast number of moment restrictions, we exploit the manageability (Pollard (1990)) of the class of moment functions. We verify the manageability condition in five examples from the recent partial identification literature. The proposed confidence sets are shown to have correct asymptotic size in a uniform sense and to exclude parameter values outside the identified set with probability approaching one. Monte Carlo …
Information Limits Of Aggregate Data, Ray C. Fair
Information Limits Of Aggregate Data, Ray C. Fair
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper uses a small model in the Cowles Commission (CC) tradition to examine the limits of aggregate data. It argues that more can be learned about the macroeconomy following the CC approach than the reduced form and VAR approaches allow, but less than the DSGE approach tries to do.
Sieve Semiparametric Two-Step Gmm Under Weak Dependence, Xiaohong Chen, Zhipeng Liao
Sieve Semiparametric Two-Step Gmm Under Weak Dependence, Xiaohong Chen, Zhipeng Liao
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper considers semiparametric two-step GMM estimation and inference with weakly dependent data, where unknown nuisance functions are estimated via sieve extremum estimation in the first step. We show that although the asymptotic variance of the second-step GMM estimator may not have a closed form expression, it can be well approximated by sieve variances that have simple closed form expressions. We present consistent or robust variance estimation, Wald tests and Hansen’s (1982) over-identification tests for the second step GMM that properly reflect the first-step estimated functions and the weak dependence of the data. Our sieve semiparametric two-step GMM inference procedures …
Payoff Equivalence Of Efficient Mechanisms In Large Matching Markets, Yeon-Koo Che, Olivier Tercieux
Payoff Equivalence Of Efficient Mechanisms In Large Matching Markets, Yeon-Koo Che, Olivier Tercieux
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study Pareto efficient mechanisms in matching markets when the number of agents is large and individual preferences are randomly drawn from a class of distributions, allowing for both common and idiosyncratic shocks. We show that, as the market grows large, all Pareto efficient mechanisms — including top trading cycles, serial dictatorship, and their randomized variants — are uniformly asymptotically payoff equivalent “up to the renaming of agents,” yielding the utilitarian upper bound in the limit. This result implies that, when the conditions of our model are met, policy makers need not discriminate among Pareto efficient mechanisms based on the …
Efficiency And Stability In Large Matching Markets, Yeon-Koo Che, Olivier Tercieux
Efficiency And Stability In Large Matching Markets, Yeon-Koo Che, Olivier Tercieux
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study efficient and stable mechanisms in matching markets when the number of agents is large and individuals’ preferences and priorities are drawn randomly. When agents’ preferences are uncorrelated, then both efficiency and stability can be achieved in an asymptotic sense via standard mechanisms such as deferred acceptance and top trading cycles. When agents’ preferences are correlated over objects, however, these mechanisms are either inefficient or unstable even in an asymptotic sense. We propose a variant of deferred acceptance that is asymptotically efficient, asymptotically stable and asymptotically incentive compatible. This new mechanism performs well in a counterfactual calibration based on …
An Analysis Of Top Trading Cycles In Two-Sided Matching Markets, Yeon-Koo Che, Olivier Tercieux
An Analysis Of Top Trading Cycles In Two-Sided Matching Markets, Yeon-Koo Che, Olivier Tercieux
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study top trading cycles in a two-sided matching environment (Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (2003)) under the assumption that individuals’ preferences and objects’ priorities are drawn iid uniformly. The distributions of agents’ preferences and objects’ priorities remaining after a given round of TTC depend nontrivially on the exact history of the algorithm up to that round (and so need not be uniform iid ). Despite the nontrivial history-dependence of evolving economies, we show that the number of individuals/objects assigned at each round follows a simple Markov chain and we explicitly derive the transition probabilities
Inference Based On Many Conditional Moment Inequalities, Donald W.K. Andrews, Xiaoxia Shi
Inference Based On Many Conditional Moment Inequalities, Donald W.K. Andrews, Xiaoxia Shi
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
In this paper, we construct confidence sets for models defined by many conditional moment inequalities/equalities. The conditional moment restrictions in the models can be finite, countably in finite, or uncountably in finite. To deal with the complication brought about by the vast number of moment restrictions, we exploit the manageability (Pollard (1990)) of the class of moment functions. We verify the manageability condition in five examples from the recent partial identification literature. The proposed confidence sets are shown to have correct asymptotic size in a uniform sense and to exclude parameter values outside the identified set with probability approaching one. …
Investment Horizons And Price Indeterminacy In Financial Markets, Shinichi Hirota, Juergen Huber, Thomas Stöckl, Shyam Sunder
Investment Horizons And Price Indeterminacy In Financial Markets, Shinichi Hirota, Juergen Huber, Thomas Stöckl, Shyam Sunder
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We examine how different investment horizons, and consequently the number of hands through which a security passes during its life, affect prices in a laboratory market populated by overlapping generations of investors. We find that (i) price deviations are larger in markets populated only by short-horizon investors compared to markets with long-horizon investors; (ii) for a given maturity of security, price deviations increase as investment horizons shrink (and frequency of transfers increases); and (iii) short investment horizons create upward pressure on prices when liquidity is high and downward pressure when liquidity is low.