Working papers results

We find that Epstein (2010)'s Ellsberg-style thought experiments pose, contrary to his claims, no paradox or difficulty for the smooth ambiguity model of decision making under uncertainty developed by Klibanoff, Marinacci and Mukerji (2005). Not only are the thought experiments naturally handled by the smooth ambiguity model, but our reanalysis shows that they highlight some of its strengths compared to models such as the maxmin expected utility model (Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989)). In particular, these examples pose no challenge to the model's foundations, interpretation of the model as affording a separation of ambiguity and ambiguity attitude or the potential for calibrating ambiguity attitude in the model.

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During a fiscal stimulus, does it matter, for the size of the government spending multiplier, which category of agents bears the brunt of the current and/or future adjustment in taxes? In an economy with heterogeneous agents and imperfect financial markets, the answer depends on whether or not New Keynesian features, such are price rigidity, are present. If prices are flexible, the tax-financing rule is either neutral or quasi-neutral. If prices are sticky, who bears the brunt of the adjustment, whether financially constrained borrowers as opposed to unconstrained savers, does matter. The differential effect on the multiplier, however, depends crucially on (i) the degree of persistence of the fiscal expansion, and (ii) on whether the expansion is balanced-budget as opposed to debt-financed.

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With perfect credit markets, any (lump-sum) tax redistribution is neutral. We study the eects of a tax redistribution in an economy with heterogenous agents and borrowing constraints. Under flexible prices, a tax redistribution that favors 'the poor' (i.e., the credit constrained) is neutral, or, possibly, even mildly contractionary. When nominal prices are sticky, that result is overturned: a tax redistribution from the savers to the constrained borrowers is expansionary on output. Key to the non-neutrality result is the agents' heterogenous sensitivity to movements in the credit premium.

The aim of this paper is to show how the richer frequency and variety of fiscal policy shocks available in an international sample can be analyzed recognizing the heterogeneity that exists across different countries. The main conclusion of our empirical analysis is that the question "what is the fiscal policy multiplier" is an ill-posed one. There is no unconditional fiscal policy multiplier. The effect of fiscal policy on output is different depending on the different debt dynamics, the different degree of openness and the different fiscal reaction functions in different countries. There are many fiscal multipliers and an average fiscal multiplier is of very little use to describe the effect of exogenous shifts in fiscal policy on output.

In this paper we propose a model to forecast future mortality that includes information on the limits to life and on progress in medicine. We apply the model to forecasting future mortality and survival rates for the males population in England andWales. Our proposal ex- tends the benchmark stochastic mortality model along two dimensions. First, we try and deal explicitly with tail risk in the cross-sectional estimation. by including information about the 'limit to life' in the sample used to construct factors for the cross-sectional dimension of mortality rates. Second, we propose to substitute the usual stochastic trend model adopted for the time series of risk factors with a predictive framework based on available evidence on medical progress and causes of death. The model projects very little variability for limits to life over the next ten years and predicts that in 2020 the probability that an individual age 65 will survive until 85 is 20% with an upper bound of 23% and a lower bound of 17%.

We examine a model of limited communication in which the seller is selling a single good to two potential buyers. Limited communication is modeled as follows: in each of the finite number of periods the seller asks one of the two buyers a binary question. After the final answer, the allocation and the transfers are executed. The model sheds light on the communication protocols that arise in welfare maximizing mechanisms. Among other things, we show that when the total number of questions is bounded the welfare optimal mechanism requires the seller to start with questioning one of the buyers and conclude with a single last question to the other buyer.

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We study the distributional effects of globalization within a model of heterogeneous agents where both managerial talent and knowledge of the local economic environment are required in order to become a successful entrepreneur. Agents willing to set up a firm abroad incur a learning cost that depends on how different the foreign and domestic entrepreneurial environments are. In this context, we show that globalization fosters FDI and raises wages, output and productivity. However, not everybody wins. The steady state relationship between globalization and income is U-shaped: high- and low-income agents are better off in a globalized world, while middle-income agents (domestic entrepreneurs) are worse off. Thus, consistently with recent empirical evidence, the model predicts globalization to increase inequality at the top of the income distribution while decreasing it at the bottom.

We provide evidence that incumbent and entrant rms' access to business group deep pockets affects entry patterns in product markets. Relying on a unique French data set on business groups, our paper shows that entry in manufacturing industries is negatively related to the cash hoarded by incumbent-affiliated groups, and positively related to entrant groups' cash. In line with theoretical predictions, we nd that the impact on entry of group cash holdings is more important in environments where financial constraints are pronounced and in more financially dependent sectors. The cash holdings of incumbent and entrant groups also affect the survival rate of entrants in the 3 to 5 year post-entry window. Overall, our findings suggest that internal capital markets operate within corporate groups and affect the product market behavior of affiliated firms by mitigating financial constraints.

Part of a long-run project to put together a systematic database of prices and wages for the American continents, this paper takes a first look at standards of living in a series of North American and Latin American cities. From secondary sources we collected price data that –with diverse degrees of quality– covers various years between colonization and independence and, following the methodology now familiar in the literature, we built estimations of price indexes for Boston, Philadelphia, and the Chesapeake Bay region in North America and Bogot, Mexico, and Potos in Latin America exploring alternative assumptions on the characteristics of the reference basket. We use these indexes to deflate the (relatively more scarce) figures on wages, and compare the results with each other, and with the now widely known series for various European and Asian cities. We find that real wages were higher in North America than in Latin America from the very early colonial period: four times the World Bank Poverty Line (WBPL) in North America while only two times the WBPL in Latin America. These wages place the North American colonies among the most advanced countries in the world alongside Northwestern European countries and the Latin American colonies among the least developed countries at a similar level to Southern European and Asian countries. These wage differences existed from the early colonial period because wages in the American colonies were determined by wages in the respective metropoles and by the Malthusian population dynamics of indigenous peoples. Settlers would not migrate unless they could maintain their standard of living, so wages in the colonies were set in the metropole. Political institutions, forced labour regimes, economic geography, disease environments and culture shaped the size of the economy of each colony but did not affect income levels.

This paper examines the incomes of individuals who have joined self-help groups in poor neighborhoods of Nairobi. Self-help groups are often advocated as a way of facilitating income pooling. We ...nd that incomes are indeed more correlated among individuals in the same group than among individuals who belong to dierent groups. Using an original methodology, we test whether this correlation is due to self-selection of similar individuals into the same groups. We ...nd that this correlation is not driven by positive assortative matching. If anything, selection works in the opposite direction: incomes from group activities would be more correlated if individuals were matched at random. These ...ndings are consistent with the idea that self-help groups play a mutual assistance role.