Working papers results

Severe economic downturns, characterized by deleverage, are typically preceeded by phenomena of debt overhang. This evidence suggests that large recessions may not be the result of large shocks, but, rather, of the interaction between typical shocks and the current state of the economy. We study the transmission of deleverage shocks in a stochastic economy with heterogeneous agents and occasionally binding collateral constraints, where debt evolves endogenously. Our key finding is that the impact effect of a deleverage shock on aggregate output is a non-linear, S-shaped, function of the accumulated level of debt. At low levels of debt, deleverage is almost neutral, whereas its negative impact is largely magnified when debt reaches a critical threshold, i.e., when financial fragility is sufficiently high. At this threshold, the constraint on borrowing becomes endogenously binding. However, when the level of debt is already high before the shock hits, the borrowers are constrained both ex-ante and ex-post. In this case, the effect on output of a deleverage shock is the highest, but, at the margin, roughly insensitive to the level of debt. This non-linearity is much more pronounced for deleverage shocks than for productivity shocks. Our results cast doubts on the accuracy of gauging the effects of financial disturbances in linearized, certainty-equivalence environments.

We study the patterns of political selection in majoritarian versus proportional systems. Political parties face a trade-off in choosing the mix of high and low quality candidates: high quality candidates are valuable to the voters, and thus help to win the elections, but they crowd out the parties' most preferred loyal candidates. In majoritarian elections, the share of high quality politicians depends on the distribution of competitive versus safe (single-member) districts. Under proportional representation, politicians' selection depends on the share of swing voters in the entire electorate. We show that, as the share of competitive districts increases, the majoritarian system begins to dominate the proportional system in selecting high quality politicians. However, when the share of competitive districts becomes large enough, a non-linearity arises: the marginal (positive) effect of adding high quality politicians on the probability of winning the election is reduced, and proportional systems dominate even highly competitive majoritarian.

We consider real pre-Hilbert modules H on Archimedean f-algebras A with unit e. We provide conditions on A and H such that a Riesz representation theorem for bounded/continuous A-linear operators holds.

Does welfare improve when …firms are better informed about the state of the economy and can better coordinate their decisions? We address this question in an elementary business-cycle model that highlights how the dispersion of information can be the source of both nominal and real rigidity. Within this context we develop a taxonomy for how the social value of information depends on the two rigidities, on the sources of the business cycle, and on the conduct of monetary policy.

We analyze the effort allocation choices of incumbent politicians when voters are uncertain about politician preferences. There is a pervasive incentive to "posture" by overproviding effort to pursue divisive policies, even if all voters would strictly prefer to have a consensus policy implemented. As such, the desire of politicians to convince voters that their preferences are aligned with the majority of the electorate can lead them to choose strictly pareto dominated effort allocations. Transparency over the politicians' effort choices can either mitigate or re-enforce the distortions depending on the strength of politicians' office motivation and the capacity for the holder of the office in question to effect change. When re-election concerns are paramount transparency about effort choices can be bad for both incentivizing politicians to exert effort on socially efficient tasks and for allowing voters to select congruent politicians. We take our theoretical results to the data with an empirical analysis o f how U.S. Congressmen allocate time across issues. Consistent with the theory, we find evidence of political posturing due to elections (among U.S. Senators) and due to higher transparency (among U.S. House Members).

This paper applies mechanism design to the study of international conflict resolution. Standard mechanisms in which an arbitrator can enforce her decisions are usually not feasible because disputants are sovereign entities. Nevertheless, we find that this limitation is inconsequential. Despite only being capable of making unenforceable recommendations, mediators can be equally effective as arbitrators. By using recommendation strategies that do not reveal that one player is weak to a strong opponent, a mediator can effectively circumvent the unenforceability constraint. This is because these strategies make the strong player agree to recommendations that yield the same payoff as arbitration in expectation. This result relies on the capability of mediators to collect confidential information from the disputants, before making their recommendations. Simple protocols of unmediated communication cannot achieve the same level of ex ante welfare, as they preclude confidentiality.

Existant studies of conflict, negotiation and international relations do not take into account that the institutions used to resolve disputes shape the incentives for entering disputes in the first place. Because engagement in a costly and destructive war is the 'punishment' for entering a dispute, institutions that reduce the chances that a dispute lead to open conflict may make more disputes emerge and incentivize militarization. We provide a simple model in which the support for unmediated peace talks, while effective in improving the chance of peace for a given distribution of military strength, ultimately leads to the emergence of more disputes and to higher conflict outbreak. Happily, we find that not all conflict resolution institutions suffer from these, apparently paradoxical, but actually quite intuitive drawbacks. We identify a form of third-party intervention inspired by the celebrated work by Myerson, and show that it can broker peace in emerged disputes effectively and also avoid perverse militarization incentives.

Frustration, anger, and blame have important consequences for economic and social behavior, concerning for example monopoly pricing, contracting, bargaining, violence, and politics. Drawing on insights from psychology, we develop a formal approach to exploring how frustration and anger, via blame and aggression, shape interaction and outcomes in strategic settings.

We develop, and experimentally test, models of informal agreements. Agents are assumed to be honest but suffer costs of overcoming temptations. We extend two classical bargaining solutions -split-the-difference and deal-me-out -to this informal agreement setting. For each solution there are two natural ways to do this, leaving us with 2x2 models to explore. In the experiment, a temptations-constrained version of deal-me-out emerges as the clear winner.

Understanding the dynamics of the leverage ratio is at the heart of the empirical research about firms' capital structure, as they can be very different under alternative theoretical models. The pillars of almost all empirical applications are the maintained assumptions of poolability and stationarity, which are motivated by the need of model's simplicity and treatability, rather than being based on an empirical ground. In this paper we provide robust evidence of non-stationarity for a significantly large share of US firms' debt ratios and of strong heterogeneity in the speeds at which firms adjust towards their targets. These results stimulate new directions of the empirical research on debt ratio dynamics by relying more on the concept of heterogeneous degree of leverage persistence.