Working papers results

Openness per se requires optimal monetary policy to deviate from the canonical closed-economy principle of domestic price stability, even if domestic prices are the only ones to be sticky. I review this argument using a simple partial equilibrium analysis in an economy that trades in ...nal consumption goods. I then extend the standard open economy New Keynesian model to include imported inputs of production. Production openness strengthens even further the incentive for the policymaker to deviate from strict domestic price stability. With both consumption and production openness variations in the world price of food and in the world price of imported oil act as exogenous cost-push factors.

In an economy with financial imperfections, Ricardian equivalence holds when prices are flexible and the steady-state distribution of consumption is uniform, or labor is inelastic. With different steady-state consumption levels, Ricardian equivalence fails, but tax cuts, somewhat paradoxically, are contractionary; the presentvalue multiplier on consumption is, however, zero. With sticky prices, Ricardian equivalence always fails. A Robin-Hood, revenue-neutral redistribution to borrowers is expansionary on aggregate activity. A uniform cut in taxes financed with public debt has a positive present-value multiplier on consumption, stemming from intertemporal substitution by the savers, who hold the public debt.

We extend the Fundamental Theorem of Finance and the Pricing Rule Representation Theorem of Cox and Ross (see Ross [35] and [37] and Cox and Ross [9]) to the case in which market frictions are aken into account but the Put-Call Parity is still assumed to hold. In turn, we obtain a representation of the pricing rule as a discounted expectation with respect to a nonadditive risk neutral probability. As a further contribution, in so doing we endogenize the state space structure and the contingent claim representation usually assumed to represent assets and markets.

This paper considers the optimal mechanism design problem of an expected revenue maximizing principal who wants to sell a single unit of a good to an agent who is ambiguity averse in the sense of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989). We show that the optimal static mechanism is an ambiguous mechanism. An ambiguous mechanism specifies a message space and a set of outcome functions. After showing that (a version of) the Revelation Principle holds in our environment, we give an exact characterization of the (smallest) optimal ambiguous mechanism. If the type set is composed of N (finite) types, then the (smallest) optimal ambiguous mechanism contains N - 1 outcome functions. We show that the share of the surplus that the designer can extract from the agent increases as the type set becomes larger and the probability of each single type decreases. In the limiting case where the agent's type is drawn from a non-atomic distribution on an interval, the optimal ambiguous mechanism extracts all the rent from the agent.

Over the last millennium, the clan and the city have been the locus of cooperation in China and Europe respectively. This paper examines - analytically, historically,and empirically - the cultural, social, and institutional co-evolution that led to this bifurcation. We highlight that groups with which individuals identify are basic units of cooperation. Such groups impact institutional development because intra-group moral commitment reduces enforcement cost implying a comparative advantage in pursuing collective actions. Moral groups perpetuate due to positive feedbacks between morality, institutions, and the implied pattern of cooperation.

We develop a theory of corporate boards and their role in forcing CEO turnover. We consider a firm with an incumbent CEO of uncertain management ability and a board consisting of a number of directors whose role is to evaluate the CEO and fire her if a better replacement can be found. Each board member receives an independent private signal about the CEO's ability, after which board members vote on firing the CEO (or not). If the CEO is fired, the board hires a new CEO from the pool of candidates available. The true ability of the rm's CEO is revealed in the long run; the firm's long-run share price is determined by this ability. Each board member owns some equity in the firm, and thus prefers to fire a CEO of poor ability. However, if a board member votes to fire the incumbent CEO but the number of other board members also voting to fire her is not enough to successfully oust her, the CEO can impose significant costs of dissent on him. In this setting, we show that the board faces a coordination problem, leading it to retain an incompetent CEO even when a majority of board members receive private signals indicating that she is of poor quality. We solve for the optimal board size, and show that it depends on various board and rm characteristics: one size does not fit all firms. We develop extensions to our basic model to analyze the optimal composition of the board between firm insiders and outsiders and the effect of board members observing imprecise public signals in addition to their private signals on board decision-making. Finally, we develop a dynamic extension to our basic model to analyze why many boards do not fire CEOs even when they preside over a signi cant, publicly observable, reduction in shareholder wealth over a long period of time. We use this dynamic model to distinguish between the characteristics of such boards from those that fire bad CEOs proactively, before significant shareholder wealth reductions take place.

We investigate the role of government-provided loans on market outcomes. First, we show that government-provided financing can lead to asset bubbles when enough households have adaptive expectations and determine the minimum share of households with adaptive expectation that is sufficient for bubbles to arise. Second, we show that in addition to causing bubbles government-provided loans can generate a propagation mechanism behind them. Third, we show that bubbles can be avoided if financing is provided over a sufficiently large number of periods rather than all at once, even when households have adaptive expectations.

I examine the role of third-party debt collectors in consumer credit markets. Using law enforcement as an instrument for the number of debt collectors, I find that higher density of debt collectors increases the supply of unsecured credit. The estimated elasticity of the average credit card balance with respect to the number of debt collectors per capita is 0.49, the elasticity of the average balance on non-credit card unsecured loans with respect to the number of debt collectors per capita is 1.32. I also find evidence that creditors substitute unsecured credit for secured credit when the number of debt collectors increases. Higher density of debt collectors improves recoveries, which enables lenders to extend morecredit. Finally, creditors charge higher interest rates and lend to a larger pool of borrowers when the density of debt collectors increases, presumably because better collections enable them to extend credit to riskier applicants.

In this paper, we show that secondary buyouts (SBOs) do not generate a signifi...cant improvement in the operating performance of target companies. We collect deal-level infor mation on 2,911 buyouts between 1998 and 2008 and gather detailed firm-level financial and accounting information on 163 companies targeted by two consecutive leveraged acquisitions in the period 1998-2008. We show that ...first-round buyers generate a large and signi...cant ab normal improvement in operating performance and efficiency. In contrast, SBO investors do not show statistically signi...cant evidence of incremental contribution to the performance oftarget companies whereas they increasing leverage and squeeze-out. Returns to PE investors are signifi...cantly lower in secondary transactions and are mostly determined by large dividend payments. Market-wide SBO activity is signifi...cantly determined by favorable debt market conditions and PE reputation. Additionally, large and high-value deals are more likely to be exited through an SBO. We test a possible collusive motive for this class of deals, fo...nding some support for this conjecture.

We use response time (RT) and behavioral data from two different but related games to test the hypothesis that individuals use introspection when confronted with a new strategic situation. Our results confirm that the need to reflect about the possible behavior of the other player (interactive thought) has an important role in the mental processes present in strategic interactions. We also find that players with longer response times have distributions of behavior that are more dispersed than for faster players. This suggests that the longest RTs across games correspond to thought dedicated to the resolution of moral dilemmas and not to guessing the likely behavior of other players in order to maximize own payoff.