Econometrica最新文献

{"title":"Stationary Social Learning in a Changing Environment","authors":"Raphaël Levy,&nbsp;Marcin Pęski,&nbsp;Nicolas Vieille","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20475","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We consider social learning in a changing world. With changing states, societies can be responsive only if agents regularly act upon fresh information, which significantly limits the value of observational learning. When the state is close to persistent, a consensus whereby most agents choose the same action typically emerges. However, the consensus action is not perfectly correlated with the state, because societies exhibit inertia following state changes. When signals are precise enough, learning is incomplete, even if agents draw large samples of past actions, as actions then become too correlated within samples, thereby reducing informativeness and welfare.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 6","pages":"1939-1966"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142685353","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":"Sparse Network Asymptotics for Logistic Regression Under Possible Misspecification","authors":"Bryan S. Graham","doi":"10.3982/ECTA19051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19051","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>Consider a bipartite network where <i>N</i> consumers choose to buy or not to buy <i>M</i> different products. This paper considers the properties of the logit fit of the <i>N</i> × <i>M</i> array of “<i>i</i>-buys-<i>j</i>” purchase decisions, <span></span><math></math>, onto a vector of known functions of consumer and product attributes under asymptotic sequences where (i) both <i>N</i> and <i>M</i> grow large, (ii) the average number of products purchased per consumer is finite in the limit, (iii) there exists dependence across elements in the same row or same column of <b>Y</b> (i.e., dyadic dependence), and (iv) the true conditional probability of making a purchase may, or may not, take the assumed logit form. Condition (ii) implies that the limiting network of purchases is <i>sparse</i>: only a vanishing fraction of all possible purchases are actually made. Under sparse network asymptotics, I show that the parameter indexing the logit approximation solves a particular Kullback–Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC) minimization problem (defined with respect to a certain Poisson population). This finding provides a simple characterization of the logit pseudo-true parameter under general misspecification (analogous to a (mean squared error (MSE) minimizing) linear predictor approximation of a general conditional expectation function (CEF)). With respect to sampling theory, sparseness implies that the first and last terms in an extended Hoeffding-type variance decomposition of the score of the logit pseudo composite log-likelihood are of equal order. In contrast, under dense network asymptotics, the last term is asymptotically negligible. Asymptotic normality of the logistic regression coefficients is shown using a martingale central limit theorem (CLT) for triangular arrays. Unlike in the dense case, the normality result derived here also holds under degeneracy of the network graphon. Relatedly, when there “happens to be” no dyadic dependence in the data set in hand, it specializes to recently derived results on the behavior of logistic regression with rare events and i.i.d. data. Simulation results suggest that sparse network asymptotics better approximate the finite network distribution of the logit estimator. A short empirical illustration, and additional calibrated Monte Carlo experiments, further illustrate the main theoretical ideas.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 6","pages":"1837-1868"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA19051","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142692097","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":"Ambiguous Contracts","authors":"Paul Dütting,&nbsp;Michal Feldman,&nbsp;Daniel Peretz,&nbsp;Larry Samuelson","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22687","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an ambiguous contract, and this gain can be arbitrarily high. We characterize the structure of optimal ambiguous contracts, showing that ambiguity drives optimal contracts toward simplicity. We also provide a characterization of ambiguity-proof classes of contracts, where the principal cannot gain by infusing ambiguity. Finally, we show that when the agent can engage in mixed actions, the advantages of ambiguous contracts disappear.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 6","pages":"1967-1992"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA22687","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142692032","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":"Social Media and Collective Action in China","authors":"Bei Qin,&nbsp;David Strömberg,&nbsp;Yanhui Wu","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20146","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>This paper studies how social media affects the dynamics of protests and strikes in China during 2009–2017. Based on 13.2 billion microblog posts, we use tweets and retweets to measure social media communication across cities and exploit its rapid expansion for identification. We find that, despite strict government censorship, Chinese social media has a sizeable effect on the geographical spread of protests and strikes. Furthermore, social media communication considerably expands the scope of protests by spreading events across different causes (e.g., from anticorruption protests to environmental protests) and dramatically increases the probability of far-reaching protest waves with simultaneous events occurring in many cities. These effects arise even though Chinese social media barely circulates content that explicitly helps organize protests.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 6","pages":"1993-2026"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20146","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142685354","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":"Lifestyle Behaviors and Wealth-Health Gaps in Germany","authors":"Lukas Mahler,&nbsp;Minchul Yum","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20603","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We document significant gaps in wealth across health status over the life cycle in Germany—a country with a universal healthcare system and negligible out-of-pocket medical expenses. To investigate the underlying sources of these wealth-health gaps, we build a heterogeneous-agent life-cycle model in which health and wealth evolve endogenously. In the model, agents exert efforts to lead a healthy lifestyle, which helps maintain good health status in the future. Effort choices, or lifestyle behaviors, are subject to adjustment costs to capture their habitual nature in the data. We find that our estimated model generates the great majority of the empirical wealth gaps by health and quantify the role of earnings and savings channels through which health affects these gaps. We show that variations in individual health efforts account for around a quarter of the model-generated wealth gaps by health, illustrating their role as an amplification mechanism behind the gaps.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 5","pages":"1697-1733"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20603","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328518","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":"Propagation and Amplification of Local Productivity Spillovers","authors":"Xavier Giroud,&nbsp;Simone Lenzu,&nbsp;Quinn Maingi,&nbsp;Holger Mueller","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The gains from agglomeration economies are believed to be highly localized. Using confidential Census plant-level data, we show that large industrial plant openings raise the productivity not only of local plants but also of distant plants hundreds of miles away, which belong to large multi-plant, multi-region firms that are exposed to the local productivity spillover through one of their plants. This “global” productivity spillover does not decay with distance and is stronger if plants are in industries that share knowledge with each other. To quantify the significance of firms' plant-level networks for the propagation and amplification of local productivity shocks, we estimate a quantitative spatial model in which plants of multi-region firms are linked through shared knowledge. Counterfactual exercises show that while large industrial plant openings have a greater local impact in less developed regions, the aggregate gains are greatest when the plants locate in well-developed regions, which are connected to other regions through firms' plant-level (knowledge-sharing) networks.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 5","pages":"1589-1619"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328533","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":"Contractual Chains","authors":"Joel Watson","doi":"10.3982/ECTA19797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19797","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>This paper develops a model of private bilateral contracting, in which an exogenous network determines the pairs of players who can communicate and contract with each other. After contracting, the players interact in an underlying game with globally verifiable productive actions and externally enforced transfers. The paper investigates whether such decentralized contracting can internalize externalities that arise due to parties being unable to contract directly with others whose productive actions affect their payoffs. The contract-formation protocol, called the “contracting institution,” is treated as a design element. The main result is positive: There is a contracting institution that supports efficient equilibria for any underlying game and connected network. A critical property is that the institution allows for sequential contract formation or revision. The equilibrium construction features <i>assurance contracts</i> and <i>cancellation penalties</i>.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 5","pages":"1735-1774"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA19797","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328520","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":"Robust Real Rate Rules","authors":"Tom D. Holden","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21069","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>Central banks wish to avoid self-fulfilling fluctuations. Interest rate rules with a unit response to real rates achieve this under the weakest possible assumptions about the behavior of households and firms. They are robust to household heterogeneity, hand-to-mouth consumers, non-rational household or firm expectations, active fiscal policy, and to any form of intertemporal or nominal-real links. They are easy to employ in practice, using inflation-protected bonds to infer real rates. With a time-varying short-term inflation target, they can implement an arbitrary inflation path, including optimal policy. This provides a way to translate policy makers' desired path for inflation into one for nominal rates. U.S. Federal Reserve behavior is remarkably close to that predicted by a real rate rule, given the desired inflation path of U.S. monetary policy makers. Real rate rules work thanks to the key role played by the Fisher equation in monetary transmission.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 5","pages":"1521-1551"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA21069","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328537","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. 5","authors":"","doi":"10.3982/ECTA925FM","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA925FM","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 5","pages":"i-ii"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328516","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":"On the Structure of Informationally Robust Optimal Mechanisms","authors":"Benjamin Brooks,&nbsp;Songzi Du","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20240","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We study the design of optimal mechanisms when the designer is uncertain both about the form of information held by the agents and also about which equilibrium will be played. The <i>guarantee</i> of a mechanism is its worst performance across all information structures and equilibria. The <i>potential</i> of an information structure is its best performance across all mechanisms and equilibria. We formulate a pair of linear programs, one of which is a lower bound on the maximum guarantee across all mechanisms, and the other of which is an upper bound on the minimum potential across all information structures. In applications to public expenditure, bilateral trade, and optimal auctions, we use the bounding programs to characterize guarantee-maximizing mechanisms and potential-minimizing information structures and show that the max guarantee is equal to the min potential.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 5","pages":"1391-1438"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20240","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328517","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}