Econometrica最新文献

We develop a tractable small-open-economy framework to characterize the constrained efficient use of the monetary policy rate, foreign exchange (FX) intervention, capital controls, and domestic macroprudential measures. The model features dominant currency pricing, positive premia on local currency debt arising from financiers' portfolio constraints, and occasionally-binding external and domestic borrowing constraints. We characterize the conditions under which the traditional prescription—relying solely on the policy rate and exchange rate flexibility—remains sufficient, even in the presence of externalities. By contrast, to manage noise trader flows into and out of the local currency debt market, FX intervention and in some cases capital inflow taxes should be used instead of the traditional prescription. Moreover, if a country faces a mix of local currency premia and external borrowing constraints, we establish that certain regulations to limit FX mismatch may alleviate the external borrowing constraint but exacerbate the local currency premia. Finally, we show that capital controls may dominate domestic macroprudential measures in cases when external shocks trigger stress in domestic housing markets.

In low-income communities in both rich and poor countries, redistributive transfers within kin and social networks are frequent. Such arrangements may distort labor supply—acting as a “social tax” that dampens the incentive to work. We document that across countries, from the United States to Côte d'Ivoire, low-income groups report strong pressure to share earned income with others; in addition, social groups that undertake more interpersonal transfers work fewer hours. Using a field experiment, we enable piece-rate factory workers in Côte d'Ivoire to shield income using blocked savings accounts over 9 months. Workers may only deposit earnings increases, relative to baseline, mitigating income effects on labor supply. Offering Private accounts raises work attendance by 6.5% and earnings by 9.4%. These treatment effects are concentrated among workers who report higher redistributive pressure at baseline. To obtain further suggestive evidence on mechanisms, in a supplementary experiment, we vary whether blocked accounts are private or known to the worker's network. When accounts are private, take-up is substantively higher (60% vs. 14%), with a resultant 8.8% higher earnings. Outgoing transfers do not decline, indicating no loss in redistribution. The welfare benefits of informal redistribution may come at a cost, depressing labor supply and productivity.

Consumer surplus, the area between the demand curve and the price, plays a key role in many models of trade and growth. Quantifying it typically requires estimating and extrapolating demand curves. This paper provides an alternative approach to measuring consumer surplus by focusing on firms as consumers of inputs. We show that the elasticity of a downstream firm's marginal cost to supplier additions and separations measures the downstream firm's consumer surplus relative to its input costs. Using Belgian data and instrumenting for changes in supplier access, we find that for every 1% of suppliers gained or lost, the marginal cost of downstream firms falls or rises by roughly 0.3%. Our estimates are directly informative about the strength of love-of-variety effects and the gains from movements along quality ladders. We use our microeconomic estimates of consumer surplus to assess the macroeconomic importance of supplier additions and separations in a growth accounting framework. We find that supplier churn plausibly accounts for about half of aggregate productivity growth.

This paper shows that product design shapes search frictions and that intermediaries leverage this channel to increase their rents in the context of the U.S. municipal bond market. The majority of bonds are designed via negotiation between a local government and its underwriter. They are then traded in a decentralized market, where the underwriter often also acts as an intermediary. Exploiting variations in state regulations that limit government officials' conflicts of interest, we provide evidence that the underwriter benefits from designing and trading complex bonds, which induces an increase in search frictions. Interestingly, a simpler bond may not necessarily benefit the government, as bond complexity affords flexibility in debt repayment. Motivated by these findings, we build and estimate a model of bond origination and trading to quantify the welfare implications of a policy mandating bond standardization.

We study reputation formation where a long-run player repeatedly observes private signals and takes actions. Short-run players observe the long-run player's past actions but not her past signals. The long-run player can thus develop a reputation for playing a distribution over actions, but not necessarily for playing a particular mapping from signals to actions. Nonetheless, we show that the long-run player can secure her Stackelberg payoff if distinct commitment types are statistically distinguishable and the Stackelberg strategy is confound-defeating. This property holds if and only if the Stackelberg strategy is the unique solution to an optimal transport problem. If the long-run player's payoff is supermodular in one-dimensional signals and actions, she secures the Stackelberg payoff if and only if the Stackelberg strategy is monotone. Applications include deterrence, delegation, signaling, and persuasion. Our results extend to the case where distinct commitment types may be indistinguishable, but the Stackelberg type is salient under the prior.

I study whether platform competition in app-based transportation generates waste and whether consolidating competing networks would improve efficiency. I build a spatial model of a ride-hailing market where competing platforms set prices strategically and estimate it using detailed data from two major platforms in New York City. Comparing the status quo to simulated counterfactuals, I find that: (i) platform market power and the fragmentation of users across networks cause a $176 million annual loss in social welfare and waste 21% of driver-generated traffic; (ii) a platform merger would trade off gains from pooling all users into a single network against harms from greater market power, reducing traffic by 8% but lowering consumer surplus by $77 million per year due to a 4% price hike; and (iii) interoperability regulations would bring these gains without undermining competition, reducing wasteful traffic by 6% while raising consumer surplus by $63 million per year.

Transparency versus opacity is an important dimension of college admission policy. Colleges may gain useful information from a holistic review of applicants' materials, but in doing so may contribute to uncertainty that discourages potential applicants with poor information. This paper investigates the impacts of admissions transparency in the context of Texas' Top Ten Percent Plan, using survey and administrative data from Texas and a model of college applications, admissions, enrollment, grades, and persistence. I estimate that two thirds of the plan's 9.1 point impact on top-decile students' probability of attending a flagship university was due to information rather than mechanical effects. Students induced to enroll are more likely to come from low-income high schools, and academically outperform the students that they displace. These effects would be larger if complemented by financial-aid information, and are driven by transparency, not misalignment between the rules used for automatic and discretionary admissions.