Econometrica最新文献

{"title":"Corrigendum: Financial Frictions and the Wealth Distribution","authors":"Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Samuel Hurtado, Galo Nuño","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22259","url":null,"abstract":"<p><span>Part of the focus</span> of our paper “Financial Frictions and the Wealth Distribution” was the discussion of the presence of two stochastic steady states (SSSs): a high-leverage (HL-SSS) and a low-leverage one (LL-SSS).</p><p>We have found that if the number of points in the grid of aggregate debt <i>B</i> increases, the HL-SSS disappears for a range of calibrations close to the baseline parameterization. We have not found any evidence regarding the presence of the HL-SSS for other parameterizations. Furthermore, the degree of state dependency on households' impulse response functions (IRFs) is smaller. We must emphasize that this is a purely numerical issue: the neural network algorithm that we propose is correct and the code that we posted online is bug-free. Unfortunately, we did not select enough grid points for <i>B</i> (a numerical hyperparameter that controls the accuracy of the results) to yield stable numerical results. Nonetheless, what we see as the two main contributions of our paper, namely, the introduction of a new neural network algorithm to solve heterogeneous agent models with aggregate shocks and the nonlinear estimation of continuous-time models, remain unchanged.</p><p>Furthermore, the model of financial frictions with heterogeneity is still quite nonlinear, since:</p><p>Figure 1 shows, in the phase diagram, the impact of increasing the number of grid points in the dimension of aggregate debt <i>B</i>. The top left panel replicates Figure 5 in our original paper, where we used four grid points and a forward scheme. In the top right panel, we switch from a forward scheme to an upwind scheme to ensure the stability of our procedure (otherwise, it is numerically difficult to get the algorithm to converge with more than four grid points). In both top panels, we see two SSSs: the HL-SSS and the LL-SSS. In particular, the right top panel shows that switching to an upwind scheme is not central to our argument.</p><p>In the left bottom panel, we increase the number of grid points to eight (now with the upwind scheme). We can see now that the HL-SSS disappears, and only the LL-SSS remains. The bottom right panel checks the case with 16 grid points for completeness. We have tried alternative calibrations around the baseline one, and this result seems to hold for eight and 16 grid points.</p><p>Notice how the PLM for debt displays a nonlinear shape, with a change in concavity happening in the region between the LL-SSS and the DSS. Consequently, despite only crossing once at the LL-SSS, the PLMs for constant equity and debt run almost parallel and very close, as in the version with three crosses in our paper. This explains why the ergodic distribution will occupy a similar region of the state space.</p><p>To illustrate this point, Figure 2 displays the ergodic distribution generated with 16 grid points. It covers a region similar to the one plotted in Figure 9 in the paper. The main difference is that, instead of peaking around","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1491-1496"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA22259","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740468","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":"Contract Labor and Establishment Growth in India","authors":"Marianne Bertrand,&nbsp;Chang-Tai Hsieh,&nbsp;Nick Tsivanidis","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20046","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>India's Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) requires large manufacturing plants to pay substantial costs if they wish to shrink their workforce. Since the early 2000s, these large plants have dramatically increased their use of contract workers who are not subject to these regulatory constraints. Between 2000 and 2015, the contract labor share in non-managerial employment nearly doubled at establishments with more than 100 workers (from 21 to 40 percentage points), while it only increased from 14 to 17 percentage points at establishments with less than 50 workers. Over the same period, the thickness of the right tail of the establishment size distribution in formal Indian manufacturing plants increased, the average product of labor at large plants declined, the job creation rate for large plants increased, and the probability that large plants introduced new products rose. We argue that these changes were caused by the increased adoption of contract labor. In a model of establishment growth subject to firing costs, we show that easing access to contract labor increased TFP in Indian manufacturing by 7.3% since the early 2000s, occurring all through a one-time reduction in misallocation between large and small plants with negligible change in the long-run growth rate.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1411-1448"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20046","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740414","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":"Dynamic Concern for Misspecification","authors":"Giacomo Lanzani","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22139","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I consider an agent who posits a set of probabilistic models for the payoff-relevant outcomes. The agent has a prior over this set but fears the actual model is omitted and hedges against this possibility. The concern for misspecification is endogenous: If a model explains the previous observations well, the concern attenuates. I show that different static preferences under uncertainty (subjective expected utility, maxmin, robust control) arise in the long run, depending on how quickly the agent becomes unsatisfied with unexplained evidence. The misspecification concern's endogeneity naturally induces behavior cycles, and I characterize the limit action frequency. I apply the model to monetary policy cycles and choices in the face of complex tax schedules.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1333-1370"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740150","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 Comment on: “Monotone Comparative Statics”","authors":"Rabah Amir,&nbsp;David Rietzke","doi":"10.3982/ECTA23292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA23292","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>Milgrom and Shannon (1994) provide necessary and sufficient conditions on parameterized optimization problems for their solution sets to be globally monotone in the parameter. We establish that their conditions may be significantly relaxed when focusing on discrete, binary comparisons between solution sets. Such binary comparisons are ubiquitous in economics and may involve comparing the same decision maker across two distinct regimes or two distinct decision makers with related objectives (e.g., a monopolist firm versus a social planner). While the single-crossing property remains prominent in the theory, quasisupermodularity of the objective functions of interest is not needed. Our approach relies upon a novel method of embedding a new optimization problem with a quasisupermodular objective function “between” the two original problems of interest. In smooth problems, sufficient conditions for our new assumptions may be verified by elementary differential comparisons, making them well suited for applied work. We illustrate the relevance of this novel approach with several economic applications.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1481-1490"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA23292","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740467","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":"Private Information and Price Regulation in the US Credit Card Market","authors":"Scott T. Nelson","doi":"10.3982/ECTA18063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18063","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>The 2009 CARD Act limited credit card lenders' ability to raise borrowers' interest rates on the basis of new information. Pricing became less responsive to public and private signals of borrowers' risk and demand characteristics, and price dispersion fell by one-third. I estimate the efficiency and distributional effects of this shift toward more pooled pricing. Prices fell for high-risk and price-inelastic consumers, but prices rose elsewhere in the market and newly exceeded willingness to pay for over 30% of the safest subprime borrowers. On net, average traded prices fell and consumer surplus rose at all credit scores. Higher consumer surplus was partly driven by a fall in lender profits, and partly by the Act's insurance value to borrowers who could retain favorable pricing after adverse changes to their default risk. The relatively high level of pre-CARD-Act markups was crucial for realizing these surplus gains.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1371-1410"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA18063","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740313","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":"Producing Health: Measuring Value Added of Nursing Homes","authors":"Liran Einav,&nbsp;Amy Finkelstein,&nbsp;Neale Mahoney","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We develop a stylized model that allows us to estimate a value-added measure for nursing homes (“SNFs”) which accounts for patient selection both into and out of a SNF. We use the model, together with detailed data on the physical and mental health of about 6 million Medicare SNF patients between 2011 and 2016, to estimate the value added for about 14,000 distinct SNFs. We document substantial heterogeneity in value added. Nationwide, compared to a 10th percentile SNF, a 90th percentile SNF is able to discharge a patient at the same health level almost a week sooner, or one quarter of the median length of stay. Heterogeneity in value added within a market is almost as large as it is nationwide. Our results point to the potential for substantial gains through policies that encourage reallocation of patients to higher-quality SNFs within their market.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1225-1264"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740329","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":"Fiduciary Duty and the Market for Financial Advice","authors":"Vivek Bhattacharya,&nbsp;Gastón Illanes,&nbsp;Manisha Padi","doi":"10.3982/ECTA18492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18492","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>Fiduciary duty aims to solve principal-agent problems, and the United States is in the middle of a protracted debate surrounding the merits of extending it to all financial advisers. Leveraging a transaction-level data set of deferred annuities and state-level variation in common law fiduciary duty, we find that it raises risk-adjusted returns by 25 bp and leads to a 16% decline in the entry of affected firms. Through the lens of a model of entry and advice provision, we show that this effect can be due to both an increase in fixed costs and an increase in the cost of providing low-quality advice. We show how to disentangle these channels and find that both are empirically relevant. Counterfactual simulations show that further increases in the stringency of fiduciary duty monotonically improve advice quality.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1449-1480"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA18492","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740466","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":"Submission of Manuscripts to the Econometric Society Monograph Series","authors":"","doi":"10.3982/ECTA934SUM","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA934SUM","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740470","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":"Fisher–Schultz Lecture: Generic Machine Learning Inference on Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments, With an Application to Immunization in India","authors":"Victor Chernozhukov,&nbsp;Mert Demirer,&nbsp;Esther Duflo,&nbsp;Iván Fernández-Val","doi":"10.3982/ECTA19303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19303","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We propose strategies to estimate and make inference on key features of heterogeneous effects in randomized experiments. These key features include <i>best linear predictors of the effects</i> using machine learning proxies, <i>average effects sorted by impact groups</i>, and <i>average characteristics of most and least impacted units</i>. The approach is valid in high-dimensional settings, where the effects are proxied (but not necessarily consistently estimated) by predictive and causal machine learning methods. We post-process these proxies into estimates of the key features. Our approach is generic; it can be used in conjunction with penalized methods, neural networks, random forests, boosted trees, and ensemble methods, both predictive and causal. Estimation and inference are based on repeated data splitting to avoid overfitting and achieve validity. We use quantile aggregation of the results across many potential splits, in particular taking medians of <i>p</i>-values and medians and other quantiles of confidence intervals. We show that quantile aggregation lowers estimation risks over a single split procedure, and establish its principal inferential properties. Finally, our analysis reveals ways to build provably better machine learning proxies through causal learning: we can use the objective functions that we develop to construct the best linear predictors of the effects, to obtain better machine learning proxies in the initial step. We illustrate the use of both inferential tools and causal learners with a randomized field experiment that evaluates a combination of nudges to stimulate demand for immunization in India.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1121-1164"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA19303","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740314","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: “Fisher–Schultz Lecture: Generic Machine Learning Inference on Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments, With an Application to Immunization in India” by Victor Chernozhukov, Mert Demirer, Esther Duflo, and Iván Fernández-Val","authors":"Kosuke Imai,&nbsp;Michael Lingzhi Li","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22261","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We examine the split-sample robust inference (SSRI) methodology introduced by Chernozhukov, Demirer, Duflo, and Fernandez-Val for quantifying uncertainty in heterogeneous treatment effect estimates produced by machine learning (ML) models. Although SSRI properly accounts for the additional variability due to sample splitting, its computational cost becomes prohibitive with complex ML models. We propose an alternative approach based on randomization inference (RI) that preserves the broad applicability of SSRI while eliminating the need for repeated sample splitting. Leveraging cross-fitting and design-based inference, the RI procedure yields valid confidence intervals with substantially reduced computational burden. Simulation studies demonstrate that the RI method preserves the statistical efficiency of SSRI while scaling to much larger applications and more complex settings.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1165-1170"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740315","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}