Working papers results

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.

A common explanation for African current underdevelopment is the extractive character of institutions established during the colonial period. Yet, since colonial extraction is hard to quantify, its precise mecha- nisms and magnitude are still unclear. In this paper, I tackle these issues by focusing on colonial trade in French Africa. By using new data on export prices, I show that the colonizers used trade monopsonies and coercive labor institutions to reduce prices to African agricultural producers way below world market prices. As a consequence, during the colonial period, extractive institutions cut African gains from trade by at least one-half.

Motivated by dynamic asset pricing, we extend the dual pairs'theory of Dieudonne'(1942) and Mackey (1945) to pairs of modules over a Dedekind complete f-algebra with multiplicative unit. The main tools are:

a Hahn-Banach Theorem for modules of this kind;

a topology on the f-algebra that has the special feature of coinciding with the norm topology when the algebra is a Banach algebra and with the strong order topology of Filipovic, Kupper, and Vogelpoth (2009), when the algebra of all random variables on a probability space is considered.

As a leading example, we study in some detail the duality of conditional Lp-spaces.

How can laboratory experiments help us understand banking crises, including the usefulness of various policy responses? After giving a concise introduction to the field of experimental economics more generally, I attempt to provide answers. I discuss methodological issues and survey relevant work that has been done.

Because journals favor clear stories researchers' may gain by engaging in scientific misconduct, ranging from shady practices like running more sessions hoping for significance to outright data fabrication. To set researchers' incentives straight, we propose sealed-envelope submissions, where editors' and referees' evaluations are based only on the interest of the research question and on the proposed empirical method.

We introduce imperfect information in stock prices determination. Agents receive a noisy signal about the structural shock driving future dividend variations. Equilibrium stock prices include a transitory 'noise bubble' which can be responsible for boom andbust episodes unrelated to economic fundamentals. We propose a non-standard VAR procedure to estimate impulse response functions to noise shock and the bubble component of stock prices. Noise explains a large fraction of US stock prices. The dot-com bubble is explained by noise. The 2007 stock price boom is not a bubble, whereas the following stock market crisis is due to negative noise shocks.

We investigate the role of 'noise' shocks as a source of business cycle fluctuations. To do so we set up a simple model of imperfect information and derive restrictions for identifying the noise shock in a VAR model. The novelty of our approach is that identification is reached by means of dynamic rotations of the reduced form residuals. We find that noise shocks generate hump-shaped responses of GDP, consumption and investment and account for quite a sizable fraction of their prediction error variance at business cycle horizons.