1.Willingness to Pay for Clean Air: Evidence from Air Purifier Markets in China
2.When Fair Isn’t Fair: Understanding Choice Reversals Involving Social Preferences
3.Subsidy Design in Privately Provided Social Insurance: Lessons from Medicare Part D
4.Cutthroat Capitalism versus Cuddly Socialism: Are Americans More Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking than Scandinavians?
5.Games of Love and Hate
6.The Use of Regression Statistics to Analyze Imperfect Pricing Policies
7.Stochastic Dominance under Independent Noise
8.Information Aversion
9.Turning Up the Heat: The Discouraging Effect of Competition in Contests
10.Cooperation and Community Responsibility
Willingness to Pay for Clean Air: Evidence from Air Purifier Markets in China
Koichiro Ito and Shuang Zhang
We develop a framework to estimate willingness to pay for clean air from defensive investments on differentiated products. Applying this framework to scanner data on air purifier sales in China, we find that a household is willing to pay $1.34 annually to remove 1 μg/m3 of air pollution (PM10) and $32.7 annually to eliminate the pollution induced by the Huai River heating policy. Substantial heterogeneity is explained by income and exposure to information on air pollution. Using these estimates, we evaluate various environmental policies and quantify the value of recent air quality improvements since China declared a war on pollution in 2014.
When Fair Isn’t Fair: Understanding Choice Reversals Involving Social Preferences
James Andreoni, Deniz Aydin, Blake Barton, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Jeffrey Naecker
In settings with uncertainty, tension exists between ex ante and ex post notions of fairness. Subjects in an experiment most commonly select the ex ante fair alternative ex ante and switch to the ex post fair alternative ex post. One potential explanation embraces consequentialism and construes reversals as time inconsistent. Another abandons consequentialism in favor of deontological (rule-based) ethics and thereby avoids the implication that revisions imply inconsistency. We test these explanations by examining contingent planning and the demand for commitment. Our findings suggest that the most common attitude toward fairness involves a time-consistent preference for applying a naive deontological heuristic.
Subsidy Design in Privately Provided Social Insurance: Lessons from Medicare Part D
Francesco Decarolis, Maria Polyakova, and Stephen P. Ryan
The efficiency of publicly subsidized, privately provisioned social insurance programs depends on the interaction between strategic insurers and the subsidy mechanism. We study this interaction in the context of Medicare’s prescription drug coverage program. We find that the observed mechanism is successful in keeping 「raise-the-subsidy」 incentives relatively low, acts much like a flat voucher, and obtains a level of welfare close to that for the optimal voucher. Across a range of counterfactuals, we find that more efficient subsidy mechanisms share three features: they retain the marginal elasticity of demand, limit the exercise of market power, and preserve the link between prices and marginal costs.
Cutthroat Capitalism versus Cuddly Socialism: Are Americans More Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking than Scandinavians?
Ingvild Almås, Alexander W. Cappelen, and Bertil Tungodden
There are striking differences in inequality and redistribution between the United States and Scandinavia. To study whether there are corresponding differences in social preferences, we conducted a large-scale international social preference experiment where Americans and Norwegians make distributive choices in identical environments. Combining the infrastructure of an international online labor market and that of a leading international data collection agency, we show that Americans and Norwegians differ significantly in fairness views, but not in the importance assigned to efficiency. We also provide causal evidence suggesting that fairness considerations are more fundamental for inequality acceptance than efficiency considerations.
Debraj Ray and Rajiv Vohra
A strategic situation with payoff-based externalities is one in which a player’s payoff depends on her own action and others』 payoffs. We place restrictions on the resulting interdependent utility system that generate a standard normal form, referred to as a 「game of love and hate.」 Our central theorem states that every equilibrium of a game of love and hate is Pareto optimal. While externalities are restricted to flow only through payoffs, there are no other constraints: they could be positive or negative or of varying sign. We examine the philosophical implications of the restrictions that underlie this theorem.
The Use of Regression Statistics to Analyze Imperfect Pricing Policies
Mark R. Jacobsen, Christopher R. Knittel, James M. Sallee, and Arthur A. van Benthem
Corrective taxes can solve many market failures, but actual policies frequently deviate from the theoretical ideal because of administrative or political constraints. We present a method to quantify the efficiency costs of constraints on externality-correcting policies or, more generally, the costs of imperfect pricing, using simple regression statistics. Under certain conditions, the R2 and the sum of squared residuals from a regression of true externalities on policy variables measure relative welfare gains from policies. We illustrate via four empirical applications: random mismeasurement of externalities, imperfect electricity pricing, heterogeneity in the longevity of energy-consuming durable goods, and imperfect spatial policy differentiation.
Stochastic Dominance under Independent Noise
Luciano Pomatto, Philipp Strack, and Omer Tamuz
Stochastic dominance is a crucial tool for the analysis of choice under risk. It is typically analyzed as a property of two gambles that are taken in isolation. We study how additional independent sources of risk (e.g., uninsurable labor risk, house price risk) can affect the ordering of gambles. We show that, perhaps surprisingly, background risk can be strong enough to render lotteries that are ranked by their expectation ranked in terms of first-order stochastic dominance. We extend our results to second-order stochastic dominance and show how they lead to a novel and elementary axiomatization of mean-variance preferences.
Marianne Andries and Valentin Haddad
Information aversion—a preference-based fear of news flows—has rich implications for decisions involving information and risk-taking. It can explain key empirical patterns on how households pay attention to savings, namely, that investors observe their portfolios infrequently, particularly when stock prices are low or volatile. Receiving state-dependent alerts following sharp market downturns, such as during the financial crisis of 2008, improves welfare. Information-averse investors display an ostrich behavior: overhearing negative news prompts more inattention. Their fear of frequent news encourages them to hold undiversified portfolios.
Turning Up the Heat: The Discouraging Effect of Competition in Contests
Dawei Fang, Thomas Noe, and Philipp Strack
We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often criticized as evidence of laxity or cronyism, muting competition (e.g., adopting softer grading curves or less high-powered promotion systems) can both reduce inequality and increase output. Holding promotion contests at the division level rather than the firm level can boost employees』 effort. Our results are also consistent with personnel policies that feature egalitarian pay systems and dismissal of worst-performing employees.
Cooperation and Community Responsibility
I consider markets in which participants have very little information: for instance, agents are anonymous, cannot verify each other’s identities, or have little information about each other’s past transactions. I ask whether it is possible to prevent opportunistic behavior in such settings in the absence of contractual enforcement. I model such markets as repeated anonymous-random-matching games and show that cooperation is sustainable if players are sufficiently patient and can announce their name (though unverifiable) before every transaction. Cooperation is achieved by 「community responsibility」: if a player deviates, her entire community is held responsible and punished by the victim. Sustaining cooperation involves partial authentication of identities by checking players』 knowledge about past transactions.
編輯 張孝茹
來源《JPE》
監製 安然
「大金融」概念，在學理上源於黃達教授所倡導的宏微觀金融理論相結合的基本思路，在理念上源於金融和實體經濟作為一個不可分割的有機整體的系統思維。中國人民銀行副行長陳雨露在《大金融論綱》中系統論證了「大金融」命題的基本內涵和方法論思想，為全面構建有利於促進長期經濟增長和增強國家競爭力的「大金融」體系框架奠定了理論和實證基礎。
本公眾號由中國人民大學國際貨幣研究所（IMI）負責維護及推送，圍繞大金融理念，專注傳播優秀學術研究成果，加強大金融學術研究交流。
中國人民大學國際貨幣研究所（IMI）成立於2009年12月20日，是專注於貨幣金融理論、政策與戰略研究的非營利性學術研究機構和新型專業智庫。研究所聘請了來自國內外科研院所、政府部門或金融機構的90餘位著名專家學者擔任顧問委員、學術委員和國際委員，80餘位中青年專家擔任研究員。
研究所長期聚焦國際金融、貨幣銀行、宏觀經濟、金融監管、金融科技、地方金融等領域，定期舉辦國際貨幣論壇、貨幣金融（青年）圓桌會議、大金融思想沙龍、麥金農大講壇、陶湘國際金融講堂、IMF經濟展望報告發布會、金融科技公開課等高層次系列論壇或講座，形成了《人民幣國際化報告》《天府金融指數報告》《金融機構國際化報告》《宏觀經濟月度分析報告》等一大批具有重要理論和政策影響力的學術成果。
2018年，研究所榮獲中國人民大學優秀院屬研究機構獎，在182家參評機構中排名第一；在《智庫大數據報告（2018）》中獲評A等級，在參評的1065個中國智庫中排名前5%。
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