1.Approximate Random Allocation Mechanisms
2.Human Capital Development and Parental Investment in India
3.Endogenous Agency Problems and the Dynamics of Rents
4.The Political Economy of Debt and Entitlements
5.Policy Inertia, Election Uncertainty, and Incumbency Disadvantage of Political Parties
6. Firm Response to Competitive Shocks: Evidence from China’s Minimum Wage Policy
7.Mergers, Innovation, and Entry-Exit Dynamics: Consolidation of the Hard Disk Drive Industry, 1996–2016
8.Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being
9.Crime is Terribly Revealing: Information Technology and Police Productivity
10.U.S. Monetary Policy and the Global Financial Cycle
11.Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank
12.Externalities and Benefit Design in Health Insurance
13.The Union Threat
14.Random Inspections and Periodic Reviews: Optimal Dynamic Monitoring
Approximate Random Allocation Mechanisms
Mohammad Akbarpour, Afshin Nikzad
We generalize the scope of random allocation mechanisms, in which the mechanism first identifies a feasible 「expected allocation」 and then implements it by randomizing over nearby feasible integer allocations. The previous literature has shown that the cases in which this is possible are sharply limited. We show that if some of the feasibility constraints can be treated as goals rather than hard constraints, then, subject to weak conditions that we identify, any expected allocation that satisfies all the constraints and goals can be implemented by randomizing among nearby integer allocations that satisfy all the hard constraints exactly and the goals approximately. By defining ex post utilities as goals, we are able to improve the ex post properties of several classic assignment mechanisms, such as the random serial dictatorship. We use the same approach to prove the existence of ϵϵ-competitive equilibrium in large markets with indivisible items and feasibility constraints.
Human Capital Development and Parental Investment in India
Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Emily Nix
We estimate production functions for cognition and health for children aged 1–12 in India, based on the Young Lives Survey. India has over 70 million children aged 0–5 who are at risk of developmental deficits. The inputs into the production functions include parental background, prior child cognition and health, and child investments, which are taken as endogenous. Estimation is based on a nonlinear factor model, based on multiple measurements for both inputs and child outcomes. Our results show an important effect of early health on child cognitive development, which then becomes persistent. Parental investments affect cognitive development at all ages, but more so for younger children. Investments also have an impact on health at early ages only.
Endogenous Agency Problems and the Dynamics of Rents
While potentially more productive, more complex tasks generate larger agency rents. Agents therefore prefer to acquire complex skills, to earn large rents. In our overlapping generations model, their ability to do so is kept in check by competition with predecessors. Old agents, however, are imperfect substitutes for young ones, because the latter are easier to incentivize, thanks to longer horizons. This reduces competition between generations, enabling young managers to go for larger complexity than their predecessors. Consequently, equilibrium complexity and rents gradually increase beyond what is optimal for the principal and for society.
The Political Economy of Debt and Entitlements
Laurent Bouton, Alessandro Lizzeri, Nicola Persico
This article presents a dynamic political-economic model of total government obligations. Its focus is on the interplay between debt and entitlements. In our model, both are tools by which temporarily powerful groups can extract resources from groups that will be powerful in the future: debt transfers resources across periods; entitlements directly target the future allocation of resources. We prove the following results. First, the presence of endogenous entitlements dampens the incentives of politically powerful groups to accumulate debt, but it leads to an increase in total government obligations. Second, fiscal rules can have perverse effects: if entitlements are unconstrained, and there are capital market frictions, debt limits lead to an increase in total government obligations and to worse outcomes for all groups. Analogous results hold for entitlement limits. Third, our model sheds some lights on the influence of capital market frictions on the incentives of governments to adopt fiscal rules, and implement entitlement programs. Finally, we identify preference polarization as a possible explanation for the joint growth of debt and entitlements.
Policy Inertia, Election Uncertainty, and Incumbency Disadvantage of Political Parties
Satyajit Chatterjee, Burcu Eyigungor
We document that postwar U.S. elections show a strong pattern of 「incumbency disadvantage」: if a party has held the presidency of the country or the governorship of a state for some time, that party tends to lose popularity in the subsequent election. We show that this fact can be explained by a combination of policy inertia and unpredictability in election outcomes. A quantitative analysis shows that the observed magnitude of incumbency disadvantage can arise in several different models of policy inertia. Normative and positive implications of policy inertia leading to incumbency disadvantage are explored.
Firm Response to Competitive Shocks: Evidence from China’s Minimum Wage Policy
Harald Hau, Yi Huang, Gewei Wang
The large regional variation in minimum wage levels during the period 2002–8 in China implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from labour to capital, reduce employment growth and accelerate total factor productivity growth—particularly among the less productive firms under private Chinese or foreign ownership, but not among state-owned enterprises. The heterogeneous firm response to labour cost shocks can be explained by differences in management practices and suggests that management quality and competitive pressure are complementary.
Mergers, Innovation, and Entry-Exit Dynamics: Consolidation of the Hard Disk Drive Industry, 1996–2016
Mitsuru Igami, Kosuke Uetake
How far should an industry be allowed to consolidate when competition and innovation are endogenous? We develop a stochastically alternating-move game of dynamic oligopoly and estimate it using data from the hard disk drive industry, in which a dozen global players consolidated into only three in the last 20 years. We find plateau-shaped equilibrium relationships between competition and innovation, with heterogeneity across time and productivity. Our counterfactual simulations suggest the current rule-of-thumb policy, which stops mergers when three or fewer firms exist, strikes approximately the right balance between pro-competitive effects and value-destruction side effects in this dynamic welfare trade-off.
Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being
Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling, David Cesarini
We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being 5–22 years after a major lottery event and analysed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to matched controls, large-prize winners experience sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persist for over a decade and show no evidence of dissipating over time. The estimated treatment effects on happiness and mental health are significantly smaller. Follow-up analyses of domain-specific aspects of life satisfaction implicate financial life satisfaction as an important mediator for the long-run increase in overall life satisfaction.
Crime is Terribly Revealing: Information Technology and Police Productivity
An increasing number of police departments use information technology (IT) to optimize patrolling strategies, yet little is known about its effectiveness in preventing crime. Based on quasi-random access to 「predictive policing,」 this study shows that IT improves police productivity as measured by crime clearance rates. Thanks to detailed information on individual incidents and offender-level identifiers it also shows that criminals strategies are predictable. Moreover, the introduction of predictive policing coincides with a large negative trend-discontinuity in crime rates. The benefit–cost ratio of this IT innovation appears to be large.
U.S. Monetary Policy and the Global Financial Cycle
Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Hélène Rey
U.S. monetary policy shocks induce comovements in the international financial variables that characterize the 「Global Financial Cycle.」 A single global factor that explains an important share of the variation of risky asset prices around the world decreases significantly after a U.S. monetary tightening. Monetary contractions in the US lead to significant deleveraging of global financial intermediaries, a decline in the provision of domestic credit globally, strong retrenchments of international credit flows, and tightening of foreign financial conditions. Countries with floating exchange rate regimes are subject to similar financial spillovers.
Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank
Richard Murphy, Felix Weinhardt
This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement distributions across primary school classes to estimate the impact of class rank. We find large effects on test scores, confidence, and subject choice during secondary school, even though these students have a new set of peers and teachers who are unaware of the students』 prior ranking in primary school. The effects are especially pronounced for boys, contributing to an observed gender gap in the number of Maths courses chosen at the end of secondary school. Using a basic model of student effort allocation across subjects, we distinguish between learning and non-cognitive skills mechanisms, finding support for the latter.
Externalities and Benefit Design in Health Insurance
Amanda Starc, Robert J Town
Insurance benefit design has important implications for consumer welfare. In this article, we model insurer behaviour in the Medicare prescription drug coverage market and show that strategic private insurer incentives impose a fiscal externality on the traditional Medicare program. We document that plans covering medical expenses have more generous drug coverage than plans that are only responsible for prescription drug spending, which translates into higher drug utilization by enrolees. The effect is driven by drugs that reduce medical expenditure and treat chronic conditions. Our equilibrium model of benefit design endogenizes plan characteristics and accounts for asymmetric information; the model estimates confirm that differential incentives to internalize medical care offsets can explain disparities across plans. Counterfactuals show that strategic insurer incentives are as important as asymmetric information in determining benefit design.
Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel
This article develops a search theory of labour unions in which the possibility of unionization distorts the behaviour of non-union firms. In the model, unions arise endogenously through a majority election within firms. As union wages are set through a collective bargaining process, unionization compresses wages and lowers profits. To prevent unionization, non-union firms over-hire high-skill workers— who vote against the union— and under-hire low-skill workers— who vote in its favour. As a consequence of this distortion in hiring, firms that are threatened by unionization hire fewer workers, produce less and pay a more concentrated distribution of wages. In the calibrated economy, the threat of unionization has a significant negative impact on aggregate output, but it also reduces wage inequality.
Random Inspections and Periodic Reviews: Optimal Dynamic Monitoring
Felipe Varas, Iván Marinovic, Andrzej Skrzypacz
We study the design of monitoring in dynamic settings with moral hazard. An agent (e.g. a firm) benefits from reputation for quality, and a principal (e.g. a regulator) can learn the agent’s quality via costly inspections. Monitoring plays two roles: an incentive role, because outcomes of inspections affect agent’s reputation, and an informational role because the principal directly values the information. We characterize the optimal monitoring policy inducing full effort. When information is the principal’s main concern, optimal monitoring is deterministic with periodic reviews. When incentive provision is the main concern, optimal monitoring is random with a constant hazard rate.
編輯 鄧欣雨
來源《RES》
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%。2019年，入選智庫頭條號指數（前50名），成為第一象限28家智庫之一。
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