1.Declining Search Frictions, Unemployment, and Growth
2.What Goes Up May Not Come Down: Asymmetric Incidence of Value-Added Taxes
3.Ex Ante Returns and Occupational Choice
4.Commitment versus Flexibility with Costly Verification
5.Welfare Analysis with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences
6.A/B Testing with Fat Tails
7.Erratum: Fatter Attraction: Anthropometric and Socioeconomic Matching on the Marriage Market
Declining Search Frictions, Unemployment, and Growth
Paolo Martellini and Guido Menzio
Abstract
For a search-theoretic model of the labor market, we seek conditions for the existence of a balanced growth path (BGP), where unemployment, vacancy, and worker’s transitions rates remain constant in the face of improvements in the production and search technologies. A BGP exists iff firm-worker matches are inspection goods and the quality of a match is drawn from a Pareto distribution. Declining search frictions contribute to growth with an intensity determined by the tail coefficient of the Pareto distribution. We develop a strategy to measure the rate of decline of search frictions and their contribution to growth.
What Goes Up May Not Come Down: Asymmetric Incidence of Value-Added Taxes
Youssef Benzarti, Dorian Carloni, Jarkko Harju, and Tuomas Kosonen
This paper provides evidence that prices respond significantly more strongly to increases than to decreases in value-added taxes (VATs). First, using two plausibly exogenous VAT changes, we show that prices respond twice as much to VAT increases as to VAT decreases. Second, we show that this asymmetry results in higher equilibrium profits and markups. Third, we find that firms operating with low profit margins are particularly likely to respond asymmetrically to VAT changes. Fourth, these asymmetric price effects persist several years after VAT changes take place. Fifth, using all VAT changes in the European Union from 1996 to 2015, we find similar levels of asymmetry.
Ex Ante Returns and Occupational Choice
Authors
Peter Arcidiacono, V. Joseph Hotz, Arnaud Maurel, and Teresa Romano
Using data from Duke University undergraduates, we make three main contributions to the literature. First, we show that data on earnings beliefs and probabilities of choosing particular occupations are highly informative of future earnings and occupations. Second, we show how beliefs data can be used to recover ex ante treatment effects and their relationship with individual choices. We find large differences in expected earnings across occupations and provide evidence of sorting on expected gains. Finally, nonpecuniary factors play an important role, with a sizable share of individuals willing to give up substantial amounts of earnings by not choosing their highest-paying occupation.
Commitment versus Flexibility with Costly Verification
Marina Halac and Pierre Yared
A principal faces an agent who is better informed but biased toward higher actions. She can verify the agent’s information and specify his permissible actions. We show that if the verification cost is small enough, a threshold with an escape clause (TEC) is optimal: the agent either chooses an action below a threshold or requests verification and the efficient action above the threshold. For higher costs, however, the principal may require verification only for intermediate actions, dividing the delegation set. TEC is always optimal if the principal cannot commit to inefficient allocations following the verification decision and result.
Welfare Analysis with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences
How much should society be willing to pay for reducing inequality? The standard approach to this normative question relates inequality aversion to risk aversion by treating inequality as an outcome of a lottery. However, in the presence of heterogeneous risk preferences, it is unclear whose preferences should be used for evaluating this lottery. This paper derives a social welfare function as a limit of an iterative procedure, in which each iteration constructs a lottery based on the certainty equivalents from the previous iteration. The limit of this procedure can be interpreted as the equally distributed equivalent of the initial allocation.
A/B Testing with Fat Tails
Eduardo M. Azevedo, Alex Deng, José Luis Montiel Olea, Justin Rao, and E. Glen Weyl
We propose a new framework for optimal experimentation, which we term the 「A/B testing problem.」 Our model departs from the existing literature by allowing for fat tails. Our key insight is that the optimal strategy depends on whether most gains accrue from typical innovations or from rare, unpredictable large successes. If the tails of the unobserved distribution of innovation quality are not too fat, the standard approach of using a few high-powered 「big」 experiments is optimal. However, if the distribution is very fat tailed, a 「lean」 strategy of trying more ideas, each with possibly smaller sample sizes, is preferred. Our theoretical results, along with an empirical analysis of Microsoft Bing’s EXP platform, suggest that simple changes to business practices could increase innovation productivity.
Erratum: Fatter Attraction: Anthropometric and Socioeconomic Matching on the Marriage Market
Pierre-André Chiappori, Sonia Oreffice, and Climent Quintana-Domeque
Alfred Galichon pointed out to us an error in our paper 「Fatter Attraction: Anthropometric and Socioeconomic Matching on the Marriage Market」 (Chiappori, Oreffice, and Quintana-Domeque 2012). The properties derived in the theory section (sec. III) are not sufficient to validate the empirical strategy developed in the following section; the latter requires more specific assumptions.
編輯 陳婷
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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