International Economic Review最新文献

We explore the consequences of higher-order risk in a standard incomplete-markets life-cycle model. We calibrate the model using a canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk, extended to feature cyclical shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis. We estimate this income process for U.S. household data, and find shocks to be highly leptokurtic, with countercyclical variance and procyclical skewness of persistent shocks. In the model, first, higher-order risk has sizable welfare implications; second, it matters quantitatively for the welfare costs of cyclical idiosyncratic risk; third, it has nontrivial implications for self-insurance against shocks.

We argue that the rate of capital depreciation is a determinant of competition. We show that the rate of capital depreciation has a robust positive relationship with market power in U.S. data. Then, we develop a general equilibrium model of industry competition where industries vary in their rate of capital depreciation. In equilibrium, optimal savings decisions imply that rapid depreciation is related to higher costs of capital, so that industries with rapid depreciation display less competition than industries with slow depreciation. Depending on parameters, the calibrated model can account for much of the observed dispersion in markups across U.S. industries.

What can organizations do to minimize wasteful year-end spending? I introduce a two-period model to derive optimal budget roll-over and audit rules. A principal tasks an agent with using a budget to fulfill the organization's spending needs, which are private information of the agent. The agent can misuse funds for private benefit. The optimal rules allow the agent to roll-over a share of the unused funds, but not necessarily the full share, and in most cases to audit only sufficiently large spending. The optimal audit rule can change once fund roll-over is allowed. Strategically underfunding the agent can be optimal.

We use household-level data to analyze how the introduction of interest-only (IO) mortgages in Denmark affected consumption expenditure and borrowing. Using an ex ante measure of exposure to the IO mortgage reform motivated by mortgage-payment and leverage constraints, we show households more likely to use an IO mortgage to relax their mortgage-payment constraint increased consumption following the reform. This increase in consumption is financed by borrowing at the time of refinancing and by borrowers with lower prereform leverage and higher needs for liquidity. We find even larger postreform consumption growth for the leverage-constrained homeowners through house-price growth stimulated by the reform.

We study dynamic choice under risk through the lens of salience theory. We derive predictions on salient thinkers' gambling decisions and strategy choices. We test our model experimentally and find support for all of our predictions. We also detect a strong correlation between static and dynamic choices, suggesting that salience theory can coherently explain risky choice in both static and dynamic contexts. Our results help to understand when people sell assets, stop gambling, enter the job market, or retire.

When selling a home, through the choice of the list price, sellers make a trade-off between achieving a quick sale at a low price or waiting for higher bids. This list-price setting decision is governed by a discount rate. Using data on housing sales in the Netherlands, we derive gross discount rates under bilateral bargaining and bidding wars. The estimated discount rates are 25%–35%, which are considerably higher than long-run housing market discount rates and may result from the seller's unfamiliarity with the selling process. The rates are higher for sellers that already moved and have a low education.

In the Varian (1980; American Economic Review 70(4) (1980), 651–59) model of price competition, a change from simultaneous to sequential price setting dramatically changes equilibrium strategies, and in the unique symmetric, equilibrium prices are pushed up to the monopoly price. There also exists an asymmetric equilibrium with lower average prices. Our main contribution is to test these predictions in the laboratory. Our data strongly support the qualitative model predictions. However, a fraction of players set low prices in accordance with the asymmetric equilibrium, which is puzzling. We show that the puzzle to a large extent can be resolved by introducing competitive preferences in the model.

Consumers acquire information through their own search efforts or through word-of-mouth communication within their social network. Information diffusion leads to free-riding and less active search. Free-riding consumers also create important positive externalities, however, as they are more likely to compare prices, imposing competitive pressure on firms. We show how market prices depend on network characteristics and search cost. For example, if search cost becomes small, price dispersion disappears, while prices converge to the monopoly level, with expected prices decreasing for small search cost. Prices are lower in societies with more connections, while price dispersion remains even in fully connected societies.

Coal-fired power plants minimize costs subject to output and emission constraints. We model the plants' choice of coal quality and emission abatement to minimize costs under these constraints, allowing for heterogeneous unobserved generation productivity and abatement efficiency. We derive and estimate the plants' cost functions to recover the production technologies. Our data set is a balanced panel of 76 U.S. coal-fired power plants from 1995 to 2005, when the emission permit trading system was viable. We find a dramatic growth in abatement efficiency, a major goal of the Acid Rain Program. By contrast, the growth in generation productivity is positive but small.