Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112568
Yusuke Yamaguchi , Takuro Yamashita
{"title":"Robust predictions and hard information in the market for lemons","authors":"Yusuke Yamaguchi , Takuro Yamashita","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112568","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112568","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The literature on informationally robust predictions has focused mostly on <em>soft</em> information. In a stylized adverse selection model, we show that hard information enables trade, even when the unique equilibrium outcome without it is no-trade.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 112568"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145011095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112588
Segun Thompson Bolarinwa, Munacinga Simatele
{"title":"Informality and development: Revisiting the nonlinear dynamics with threshold evidence","authors":"Segun Thompson Bolarinwa, Munacinga Simatele","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112588","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112588","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper investigates the nonlinear and threshold-based impact of informality on economic development across 150 countries from 1990 to 2020. Drawing on dualistic and institutional economic theories, it employs a Dynamic Panel Threshold Model (DPTM) to endogenously identify levels of informality beyond which the effect of informality on development shifts. Our findings reveal significant threshold effects. The analysis reveals that informality can support development in low-income and institutionally weak contexts but becomes detrimental in more advanced economies. Region-specific thresholds are estimated: informality remains growth-enhancing below ∼20 % globally and ∼37–40 % in African economies but has adverse effects in high-income countries even at low levels. Institutional quality and financial development also influence the nature of these dynamics. These findings challenge one-size-fits-all formalisation policies, suggesting that tailored, more context-specific interventions are likely to be more fruitful.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 112588"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145046917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-02DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112586
François Cochard , Emmanuel Peterlé , Jean-Christian Tisserand
{"title":"Do donation ceilings increase contributions? Evidence from an experimental study","authors":"François Cochard , Emmanuel Peterlé , Jean-Christian Tisserand","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112586","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112586","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study how setting a maximum limit on donations affects how much people give to charity. In a laboratory experiment with 210 participants, we compare three conditions: a neutral baseline, a suggested donation amount, and a capped maximum donation. We find that imposing a donation ceiling significantly increases both the likelihood and the amount of giving compared to the baseline. Moreover, ceilings perform at least as well as suggestions in our experimental setting.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 112586"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144989562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-02DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112570
Ziyi Chai , Doudou Gong , Genjiu Xu , Bas Dietzenbacher
{"title":"The concede-and-divide rule for liability problems","authors":"Ziyi Chai , Doudou Gong , Genjiu Xu , Bas Dietzenbacher","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112570","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112570","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Liability problems model the issue of allocating the asset value of an insolvent firm among the creditors and the firm itself. We introduce the concede-and-divide rule for liability problems with at most three agents, i.e. one firm and at most two creditors. Following a game-theoretic approach, we show that all solutions for liability games that satisfy symmetry and translation covariance induce the concede-and-divide rule, in particular the Shapley value and the nucleolus. Moreover, we provide axiomatic characterizations of the concede-and-divide rule using the minimal rights first property. We extend the analysis to liability problems with more agents but an almost solvent firm, i.e. reducing an arbitrary individual liability to zero would make the firm solvent.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 112570"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144989564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-02DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112584
Elisa Belfiori , Manuel Macera
{"title":"Demographic changes and social discounting","authors":"Elisa Belfiori , Manuel Macera","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112584","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112584","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper studies social discounting in the context of demographic transitions. We show how changes in population growth and age structure affect the social discount rate, giving rise to a <em>demographic premium</em>: the spread between the discount rate during a transition and that in a stationary environment. The premium is sizable and robust across a range of plausible assumptions about how consumption growth responds to demographic change. It is also larger for less developed and low-income countries, suggesting that long-term policy decisions requiring international cooperation are especially prone to tension and disagreement.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 112584"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145027363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112573
Yeongwoong Do
{"title":"Effects of monetary policy on the wealth inequality","authors":"Yeongwoong Do","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112573","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112573","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the effect of monetary policy on wealth inequality in the United States using quarterly data from the Distributional Financial Accounts. I construct a Gini coefficient across five wealth groups and analyze its response to high-frequency-identified monetary shocks. Results suggest contractionary policy modestly reduces wealth inequality via lower equity values, but this effect is statistically insignificant and offset by reallocation toward interest-bearing assets. Real assets, such as housing, play a limited role in shaping these distributional dynamics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"255 ","pages":"Article 112573"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144921557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112577
Mike Vo
{"title":"When to degrade a product: The utility-to-cost ratio rule","authors":"Mike Vo","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112577","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112577","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper analyzes product degradation as a screening tool under asymmetric information, emphasizing cost-efficiency over traditional concerns about information rents. Using the virtual surplus framework, we derive a sharp, distribution-free condition for profitable versioning: a degraded product should be introduced if and only if its utility-to-cost ratio exceeds that of the full-featured version. We then examine settings with multiple low-end options and identify two sufficient conditions for optimal design. The firm prefers the more degraded product when it offers a superior cost-efficiency of utility reduction, and the less degraded one when it offers a better cost-efficiency of utility delivery.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"255 ","pages":"Article 112577"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144921558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112580
Cheng Sun
{"title":"Managing the advertising intensity: The role of the marginal disutility from advertising","authors":"Cheng Sun","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112580","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112580","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using a monopolistic framework, this study finds higher dispersion induces an inverted U-shaped advertising intensity in the Freemium model, but an increasing one in the ad-funded model—with the interaction between the advertising and premium markets playing a crucial role.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"255 ","pages":"Article 112580"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144921559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112571
Yasuhiro Doi , Kensuke Suzuki
{"title":"Foreign–native wage gap and tasks: Evidence from the Japanese labor market","authors":"Yasuhiro Doi , Kensuke Suzuki","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112571","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112571","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the foreign–native wage gap in the Japanese labor market, examining the role of tasks. By leveraging government micro-level data and the Japanese version of O*NET, we construct task scores <em>à la</em> Acemoglu and Autor (2011) at a detailed occupational level. We then estimate the foreign–native wage gap in the spirit of Mincer (1974). Unconditionally, foreign workers earn 27% less than native workers; 82% of this gap is explained by observable characteristics. Tasks account for roughly one-third of the remaining unexplained gap, suggesting that foreign workers are assigned to lower-wage tasks, typically manual and routine tasks.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"255 ","pages":"Article 112571"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144921556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economics LettersPub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112578
Mansi Nair, Sandip Sarkar
{"title":"New measures of fair and unfair inequality: A Gini decomposition-based approach","authors":"Mansi Nair, Sandip Sarkar","doi":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112578","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112578","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The paper introduces a new decomposition of the Gini coefficient, emphasizing the income disparities that emerge due to better circumstantial situations and higher efforts. We illustrate our methodology with Indian data, highlighting the advantages of using our method compared to the existing ones.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11468,"journal":{"name":"Economics Letters","volume":"255 ","pages":"Article 112578"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144921561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}