Econometrica最新文献

{"title":"Setbacks, Shutdowns, and Overruns","authors":"Felix Zhiyu Feng,&nbsp;Curtis R. Taylor,&nbsp;Mark M. Westerfield,&nbsp;Feifan Zhang","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21548","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21548","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We investigate optimal project management in a setting plagued by an indefinite number of setbacks that are discovered en route to project completion. The contractor can cover up delays in progress due to shirking either by making false claims of setbacks or by postponing the reports of real ones. The sponsor optimally induces work and honest reporting via a soft deadline and a reward for completion that specifies a bonus for early delivery. Late-stage setbacks trigger randomization between minimally feasible project extension and (inefficient) cancellation. Because extensions may be granted repeatedly, arbitrarily large overruns in schedule and budget are possible after which the project may still be canceled.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"815-847"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bias-Aware Inference in Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Designs","authors":"Claudia Noack,&nbsp;Christoph Rothe","doi":"10.3982/ECTA19466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19466","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We propose new confidence sets (CSs) for the regression discontinuity parameter in fuzzy designs. Our CSs are based on local linear regression, and are bias-aware, in the sense that they take possible bias explicitly into account. Their construction shares similarities with that of Anderson–Rubin CSs in exactly identified instrumental variable models, and thereby avoids issues with “delta method” approximations that underlie most commonly used existing inference methods for fuzzy regression discontinuity analysis. Our CSs are asymptotically equivalent to existing procedures in canonical settings with strong identification and a continuous running variable. However, they are also valid under a wide range of other empirically relevant conditions, such as setups with discrete running variables, donut designs, and weak identification.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"687-711"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA19466","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Endogenous Information and Simplifying Insurance Choice","authors":"Zach Y. Brown,&nbsp;Jihye Jeon","doi":"10.3982/ECTA18555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18555","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In markets with complicated products, individuals may choose how much time and effort to spend understanding and comparing alternatives. Focusing on insurance choice, we find evidence consistent with individuals acquiring more information when there are larger consequences from making an uninformed choice. Building on the rational inattention literature, we develop and estimate a parsimonious demand model in which individuals choose how much to research difficult-to-observe characteristics. We use our estimates to evaluate policies that simplify choice. Reducing the number of plans can raise welfare through improved choice as well as savings in information costs. Capping out-of-pocket costs generates larger welfare gains than standard models. The empirical model can be applied to other settings to examine the regulation of complex products.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"881-911"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Demand Curve for Disaster Recovery Loans","authors":"Benjamin Collier,&nbsp;Cameron Ellis","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20417","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \t\t\t<p>We estimate and trace a credit demand curve for households that recently experienced damage to their homes from a natural disaster. Our administrative data include over one million applicants to a federal recovery loan program for households. We estimate extensive-margin demand over a large range of interest rates. Our identification strategy exploits 24 natural experiments, leveraging exogenous, time-based variation in the program's offered interest rate. Interest rates meaningfully affect consumer demand throughout the distribution of rates. On average, a 1 percentage point increase in the interest rate reduces loan take-up by 26%. We find a large impact of applicants' credit quality on demand and evidence of monthly payment targeting. Using our estimated demand curve and information on program costs, we find that the program generates an average social surplus of $2900 per borrower.</p>\u0000 \t\t</div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"713-748"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20417","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Walras–Bowley Lecture: Market Power and Wage Inequality","authors":"Shubhdeep Deb,&nbsp;Jan Eeckhout,&nbsp;Aseem Patel,&nbsp;Lawrence Warren","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21157","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We propose a theory of how market power affects wage inequality. We ask how goods and labor market power jointly determine the level of wages, the skill premium, and wage inequality. We then use detailed microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau between 1997 and 2016 to estimate the parameters of labor supply, technology, and the market structure. We find that a less competitive market structure lowers the average wage of high-skilled workers by 11.3%, and of low-skilled workers by 12.2%, contributes 8.1% to the rise in the skill premium, and accounts for 54.8% of the increase in between-establishment wage variance.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"603-636"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA21157","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Implementation via Information Design in Binary-Action Supermodular Games","authors":"Stephen Morris,&nbsp;Daisuke Oyama,&nbsp;Satoru Takahashi","doi":"10.3982/ECTA19149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19149","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>What outcomes can be implemented by the choice of an information structure in binary-action supermodular games? An outcome is partially implementable if it satisfies obedience (Bergemann and Morris (2016)). We characterize when an outcome is <i>smallest equilibrium implementable</i> (induced by the smallest equilibrium). Smallest equilibrium implementation requires a stronger <i>sequential obedience</i> condition: there is a stochastic ordering of players under which players are prepared to switch to the high action even if they think only those before them will switch. We then characterize the optimal outcome induced by an information designer who prefers the high action to be played, but anticipates that the worst (hence smallest) equilibrium will be played. In a potential game, under convexity assumptions on the potential and the designer's objective, it is optimal to choose an outcome where actions are perfectly coordinated (all players choose the same action), with the high action profile played on the largest event where that action profile maximizes the average potential.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"775-813"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA19149","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Comment on: “Walras–Bowley Lecture: Market Power and Wage Inequality” by Shubhdeep Deb, Jan Eeckhout, Aseem Patel, and Lawrence Warren","authors":"John Van Reenen","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22248","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>A burgeoning literature in labor economics is focused on modeling employer labor market power, generally finding nontrivial estimates of monopsony power. A smaller literature also simultaneously incorporates product market power. Deb, Eeckhout, Patel, and Warren (2024) is an example of applying an oligopoly-oligopsony model to the U.S. labor market, arguing for important effects on wage levels and inequality from rising market power. I support combining IO and labor as a fruitful way of studying wages and business dynamism, but argue for looking more broadly at (i) <i>differential</i> degrees of employer power in labor and product markets; (ii) investigating the <i>dynamic</i> sources of markups (e.g., through innovation), and (iii) considering wage <i>bargaining</i> models, not just wage posting models, which have some starkly different implications for wage setting.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"643-646"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA22248","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Comment on: “Walras–Bowley Lecture: Market Power and Wage Inequality” by Shubhdeep Deb, Jan Eeckhout, Aseem Patel, and Lawrence Warren","authors":"Giovanni L. Violante","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22163","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;&lt;span&gt;One of the most exciting new trends&lt;/span&gt; in macroeconomics is the development of general equilibrium models with oligopolistic product markets in which a discrete number of firms interact strategically and exploit their market power to set an endogenous wedge between price and marginal cost. This literature is largely motivated by a novel set of empirical findings establishing that market concentration has increased and/or price markups have risen at the aggregate level. Heightened market power has already proved to be helpful in explaining a number of major macroeconomic trends in the United States, such as the decline in the labor share (Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson, and Van Reenen (&lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;)), the fall in business dynamism and innovation rate (&lt;span&gt;Akcigit and Ates&lt;/span&gt; (&lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;)), the investment slowdown (&lt;span&gt;Gutiérrez and Philippon&lt;/span&gt; (&lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;)), and the deteriorating net foreign asset position (&lt;span&gt;Atkeson, Heathcote, and Perri&lt;/span&gt; (&lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;)).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jan Eeckhout is a coauthor of one of the earliest and most influential papers on this topic (&lt;span&gt;De Loecker, Eeckhout, and Unger&lt;/span&gt; (&lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;)), and a leader of this literature. In this Walras–Bowley lecture, Eeckhout and coauthors (DEPW, thereafter) ask whether stronger product market power can also quantitatively account for three salient shifts in the U.S. wage structure over the last two decades: growing skill premium, stagnant average wages, and the between-firm component explaining most of the rise in wage inequality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For this purpose, DEPW develop a structural model in the spirit of &lt;span&gt;Atkeson and Burstein&lt;/span&gt; (&lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;) and &lt;span&gt;Berger, Herkenhoff, and Mongey&lt;/span&gt; (&lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;), two other seminal contributions in this literature. This approach has been especially successful because it obtains a rich market structure with endogenous markups that nests perfect competition, monopolistic competition, and monopoly, while retaining analytical tractability thanks to the within- and between-sector CES aggregators, and the continuum of sectors assumption implying that no individual firm can affect the aggregate price and wage indexes. The specific contribution of DEPW is to simultaneously apply this elegant framework to both product and labor markets, while also allowing for heterogeneity in the degree of skill-biased technical change (SBTC, thereafter) at the establishment level. As a result, the model incorporates three potential sources of changes in the wage structure: shifts in technology, rising monopsony power, and rising monopoly power.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The impact of skill-biased technical change on the wage structure is well understood. Market power affects the wage structure via two channels. First, individual firms have monopsony power in both the skilled and unskilled labor markets, that is, they face an upward sloping labor supply curve (e.g., because of frictions in labor mobility or id","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"637-641"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA22163","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Identification and Estimation in Many-to-One Two-Sided Matching Without Transfers","authors":"YingHua He,&nbsp;Shruti Sinha,&nbsp;Xiaoting Sun","doi":"10.3982/ECTA19636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19636","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>In a setting of many-to-one two-sided matching with nontransferable utilities, for example, college admissions, we study conditions under which preferences of both sides are identified with data on one single market. Regardless of whether the market is centralized or decentralized, assuming that the observed matching is stable, we show nonparametric identification of preferences of both sides under certain exclusion restrictions. To take our results to the data, we use Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate different estimators, including the ones that are directly constructed from the identification. We find that a parametric Bayesian approach with a Gibbs sampler works well in realistically sized problems. Finally, we illustrate our methodology in decentralized admissions to public and private schools in Chile and conduct a counterfactual analysis of an affirmative action policy.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"749-774"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA19636","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Frontmatter of Econometrica Vol. 92 Iss. 3","authors":"","doi":"10.3982/ECTA923FM","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA923FM","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"i-ii"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}