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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Political Economy
Grading Standards And Education Quality, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton
Grading Standards And Education Quality, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton
Raphael Boleslavsky
We consider a game in which schools compete to place graduates by investing in education quality and by choosing grading policies. In equilibrium, schools strategically adopt grading policies that do not perfectly reveal graduate ability to evaluators (including employers and graduate schools). We compare equilibrium outcomes when schools grade strategically to equilibrium outcomes when evaluators perfectly observe graduate ability. With strategic grading, grades are less informative, and evaluators rely less on grades and more on a school's quality when assessing graduates. Consequently, under strategic grading, schools have greater incentive to invest in quality, and this can improve evaluator welfare.
Progressive Screening: Long Term Contracting With A Privately Known Stochastic Process, Raphael Boleslavsky, Maher Said
Progressive Screening: Long Term Contracting With A Privately Known Stochastic Process, Raphael Boleslavsky, Maher Said
Raphael Boleslavsky
We examine a model of long-term contracting in which the buyer is privately informed about the stochastic process by which her value for a good evolves. In addition, the realized values are also private information. We characterize a class of environments in which the profit-maximizing long-term contract offered by a monopolist takes an especially simple structure: we derive sufficient conditions on primitives under which the optimal contract consists of a menu of deterministic sequences of static contracts. Within each sequence, higher realized values lead to greater quantity provision; however, an increasing proportion of buyer types are excluded over time, eventually …
Selloffs, Bailouts, And Feedback: Can Asset Markets Inform Policy?, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly, Curtis R. Taylor
Selloffs, Bailouts, And Feedback: Can Asset Markets Inform Policy?, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly, Curtis R. Taylor
Raphael Boleslavsky
We present a model in which a policymaker observes trade in a financial asset before deciding whether to intervene in the economy, for example by offering a bailout or monetary stimulus. Because an intervention erodes the value of private information, informed investors are reluctant to take short positions and selloffs are, therefore, less likely and less informative. The policymaker faces a tradeoff between eliciting information from the asset market and using the information so obtained. In general she can elicit more information if she commits to intervene only infrequently. She thus may benefit from imperfections in the intervention process or …
Does The Individual Mandate Force Individuals To Buy Insurance?, Raphael Boleslavsky, Sergio J. Campos
Does The Individual Mandate Force Individuals To Buy Insurance?, Raphael Boleslavsky, Sergio J. Campos
Raphael Boleslavsky
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act contains provisions which penalize individuals for failing to purchase health insurance. These provisions are commonly known as the "individual mandate." Both critics and supporters believe that the individual mandate forces individuals to buy health insurance, but supporters argue that this coercion is necessary. This term, the Supreme Court will address the constitutionality of the mandate, and this legal issue has sparked debate about the government's power to force individuals to purchase a private good. In this Essay we question the consensus that the individual mandate forces individuals to pay for health insurance. Using …
Information And Extremism In Elections, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton
Information And Extremism In Elections, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton
Raphael Boleslavsky
We show that informative political campaigns can increase political extremism and decrease voter welfare. We present a model of elections in which candidate ideology is strategically selected prior to a campaign which reveals information about candidate quality. Documented means by which campaigns can harm voters are not present in our model; special interest groups, fundraising, and biased or private information are not part of the analysis. Even under these optimistic assumptions, we establish that informative campaigns have negative consequences. We discuss implications regarding media coverage, the number of debates, and campaign finance reform.
Evolving Influence: Resolving Extreme Conflicts Of Interest In Advisory Relationships, Raphael Boleslavsky, Tracy Lewis
Evolving Influence: Resolving Extreme Conflicts Of Interest In Advisory Relationships, Raphael Boleslavsky, Tracy Lewis
Raphael Boleslavsky
An advocate for a special interest provides advice to an uninformed planner for her to consider in making a sequence of decisions. Although the advocate may have valuable information for the planner, it is also known that the advocate is interested only in advancing his cause and will distort his advice in order to influence the planner's decision. Each time she repeats the problem, however, the planner learns about the accuracy of the advocate's recommendation, mitigating some of the advocate's incentive to act in a self-serving manner. We propose a theory to explain why planners do sometimes rely on information …
Dynamic Regulation Design Without Payments: The Importance Of Timing, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly
Dynamic Regulation Design Without Payments: The Importance Of Timing, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly
Raphael Boleslavsky
We consider a two period model of optimal regulation of a firm subject to marginal compliance cost shocks. The regulator faces an asymmetric information problem: the firm knows current compliance costs, but the regulator does not. Both the regulator and the firm are uncertain about future costs. In our basic framework, the regulator may not offer payments to the firm; we show that the regulator can vary the strength of regulation over time to induce the firm to reveal its costs and increase welfare. In the optimal mechanism, the regulator offers stronger (weaker) regulation in the first period and weaker …
Flying Passports Of Convenience, Karl T. Muth
Flying Passports Of Convenience, Karl T. Muth
Karl T Muth
This paper proposes an economic alternative to the legal construct of citizenship that currently dominates international law.
The Negotiated Guilty Plea: A Framework For Analysis, Richard Adelstein
The Negotiated Guilty Plea: A Framework For Analysis, Richard Adelstein
Richard Adelstein
My dissertation of 1975, published by Garland Publishing in their series Outstanding Dissertations in Economics, 1984