minimum effort coordination games stochastic potential and logit equilibrium abstract this paper revisits the minimum effort coordination game with a continuum of pareto ranked nash equilibria noise is introduced via a logit probabilistic choice function the resulting logit equilibrium distribution of decisions is unique and maximizes a stochastic potential function in the limit as the noise vanishes the distribution converges to an outcome that is analogous to the risk dominant outcome for 2 2 games in accordance with experimental evidence logit equilibrium efforts decrease with increases in effort costs and the number of players even though these parameters do not affect the nash equilibria journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c92

macroeconomic implications of production bunching factor demand linkages abstract existing empirical evidence suggests that output is more variable than consumption so that production smoothing is not apparently present in this paper we investigate some macroeconomic implications of the proposition that the empirical evidence reflects the presence of some firms in the economy that produce with nonconvex technologies overall when activities are sufficiently complementary and inventory holding is sufficiently costly nonconvexities at the firm level can generate a pattern of output and sales such that the variance of output exceeds that of sales at an aggregate level in this way nonconvexities at the individual firm level may have macroeconomic consequences

occupational choice and the process of development this paper models economic development as a process of institutional transformation by focusing on the interplay between agents occupational decisions and the distribution of wealth because of capital market imperfections poor agents choose working for a wage over self employment and wealthy agents become entrepreneurs who monitor workers only with sufficient inequality however will there be employment contracts otherwise there is either subsistence or self employment thus in static equilibrium the occupational structure depends on distribution since the latter is itself endogenous we demonstrate the robustness of this result by extending the model dynamically and studying examples in which initial wealth distributions have long run effects in one case the economy develops either widespread cottage industry self employment or factory production employment contracts depending on the initial distribution in the other example it develops into prosperity or stagnation

wind insurance and mitigation in the coastal zone this paper presents the only study analyzing the decision to purchase wind coverage for individuals whose standard homeowner s policy excludes wind and one of very few analyses of the decision to undertake wind mitigation measures because these two decisions are closely related a simultaneous mixed process approach is used that allows for correlated disturbances across probit insurance and tobit mitigation equations results indicate a positive correlation between errors of the insurance and mitigation models conditioning on covariates households that hold wind insurance tend to engage in greater levels of wind mitigation

the impact of perceived background risk on behavioral health evidence from hurricane katrina i explore the hypothesis that hurricane katrina in 2005 raised perceived background risks which had spillover effects on behavioral health outcomes of mental health substance use and health insurance i explore this hypothesis using behavioral risk factor surveillance system data for 2002 2007 i use a difference in difference model to estimate the effect that hurricane katrina had in the non damaged storm surge region in 90 day intervals leading up to and after the hurricane compared to areas impervious to hurricanes within non damaged counties at risk of any storm surge i find causal evidence that katrina increased poor mental health days by 8 8 for three months after katrina and increased smoking by 10 over nine months which translates to 39 0 million extra days of poor mental health and 1 1 million extra smokers results suggest that perceived background risk increases may have important spillover effects on health for people far from the actual disaster and highlight a hidden cost of the government s failures in managing hurricane katrina

financial intermediation variability and the development process abstract in this paper we build a model of financial intermediation that explains the pattern of gdp variability in an economy during the development process we find evidence that per capita output is more volatile in middle income economies than in both low and high income economies we show that if the model economy is in the early or in the mature stages of development there is a unique equilibrium however in the middle stages of development multiple equilibria exist moreover we find that in economies with imperfect credit markets per capita output volatility tends to be higher than in economies with perfect or non existent credit markets

limited rationality and strategic interaction the impact of the strategic environment on nominal inertia much evidence suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational forward looking decisions this raises the question as to when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate results we examine this question in the context of a long standing and important economic problem the adjustment of nominal prices after an anticipated monetary shock our experiments suggest that two types of bounded rationality money illusion and anchoring are important behavioral forces behind nominal inertia however depending on the strategic environment bounded rationality has vastly different effects on aggregate price adjustment if agents actions are strategic substitutes adjustment to the new equilibrium is extremely quick whereas under strategic complementarity adjustment is both very slow and associated with relatively large real effects this adjustment difference is driven by price expectations which are very flexible and forward looking under substitutability but adaptive and sticky under complementarity moreover subjects expectations are also considerably more rational under substitutability

public versus private investment in human capital endogenous growth and income inequality in this paper we present an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents in which human capital investment through formal schooling is the engine of growth we use simple functional forms for preferences technologies and income distribution to highlight the distinction between economies with public education and those with private education we find that income inequality declines more quickly under public education on the other hand private education yields greater per capita incomes unless the initial income inequality is sufficiently high we also find that societies will choose public education if a majority of agents have incomes below average

transparency of information and coordination in economies with investment complementarities how do public and private information affect equilibrium allocations and social welfare in economies with investment complementarities and what is the optimal transparency in the information conveyed for example by economic statistics policy announcements or news in the media we first consider an environment where the complementarities are weak so that the equilibrium is unique no matter the structure of information an increase in the precision of public information may have the perverse effect of increasing aggregate volatility nevertheless as long as there is no value to lotteries welfare unambiguously increases with an increase in either the relative or the absolute precision of public information hence full transparency is optimal this is because more transparency facilitates more effective coordination which is valuable from a social perspective on the other hand when complementarities are strong enough that multiple equilibria are possible more transparency permits the market to coordinate more effectively on either the bad or the good equilibrium in this case constructive ambiguity becomes optimal if there is a high risk that more transparency will lead to coordination failures this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

income shocks and gender gaps in education evidence from uganda abstract this paper uses exogenous variation in rainfall across districts in uganda to estimate the causal effects of household income shocks on children s enrollment and academic performance conditional on gender i find negative deviations in rainfall from the long term mean to have negative and highly significant effects on female enrollment in primary schools and the effect grows stronger for older girls i find no effect of rainfall variation on the enrollment of boys and young girls moreover i find that when schooling is free of charge and both marginal boys and girls are enrolled a negative income shock has an adverse effect on the test scores of female students while boys are not affected the results imply that households respond to income shocks by varying the amount of schooling and resources provided to girls while boys are to a large extent sheltered a finding consistent with a model where parents values of child labor differ across sexes

what drives households to buy flood insurance new evidence from georgia abstract benefiting from access to detailed data on the federally run national flood insurance program for the entire state of georgia usa we analyze residential flood insurance purchasing behavior in that state over more than three decades 1978 2010 the demand for flood insurance on an extensive margin based on take up rates is found to be relatively price inelastic aligned with the behavioral economics literature recent flood events temporarily increase purchases but this effect fades after 3 years we also find that the proportion of developed area in floodplains has a significant positive impact on insurance take up rates contrary to what is often assumed we do not find evidence that insurance purchase and mitigation efforts are substitutes educated individuals individuals over the age of 45 and african americans are all else equal more likely to purchase flood insurance

the connection between public transfers and private interfamily transfers abstract this paper investigates the anti poverty effectiveness of public transfers taking private transfer responses into account widespread altruistically motivated private transfers would neutralize the distributional impact of public transfers but exchange motivated transfers can reinforce the effects of public transfers on the distribution of economic well being the common technique for gauging anti poverty effectiveness subtracting public transfers from other income and measuring the poverty rate counterfactual yields results that are close to a more complex procedure that takes private transfer responses into account and some of the empirical findings suggest an exchange rather than altruistic motive for private transfers indicating that the effects of public transfers can be magnified by private behavior this is an exact reversal of the prediction that public transfers merely supplant private ones

intergenerational transfers and liquidity constraints a growing body of evidence indicates that liquidity constraints could affect a substantial proportion of u s consumers but little is known about why these constraints might exist an important but little explored issue is the relationship between inter vivos intergenerational transfers and liquidity constraints these transfers can ease borrowing constraints empirical transfer patterns match those predicted from a model in which transfers are allocated to liquidity constrained consumers in particular the distinction between current and permanent incomes of potential recipients is a key aspect of private transfer behavior the findings have important implications for our understanding of consumer behavior

delay and cycles when the profitability of investment depends on the general level of economic activity entrepreneurs have an incentive to delay investments during a recession endogenous delay thus prolongs the recovery from a recession and heightens the effect of the boom this paper describes a dynamic model that exhibits both delay and cycles and develops methods for analysing the role of delay in propogating business cycles a number of interesting characteristics of the cycle are revealed first the effect of delay is asymmetric it lengthens the recovery but not the downturn second delay can increase the amplitude and typically reduces the frequency of the cycle third it can reduce the average level of activity but it achieves this effect by prolonging the recession rather than by reducing the amplitude of the cycle the welfare effects of delay are ambiguous however

educational policy and the economics of the family this paper analyzes the implications of alternative ways to model decision making by families for educational policy we show that many of the policy implications associated with credit constraints cannot be distinguished from the implications of models of the family that differ from the conventional barro becker model we then argue that it is the combination of credit constraints and non conventional preferences that provides a robust basis for government intervention to promote educational investment

a non unitary discount rate model we develop a simple macroeconomic model in which agents discount their utility from consumption and the utility from leisure at different rates under this setting time inconsistency emerges for the preferences of agents moreover the time inconsistency problem generates two types of inefficiencies intratemporal and intertemporal we examine the welfare effects of savings subsidy and consumption tax the effects of taxation in our model are quite different from those in the standard model if the discount rate for consumption is higher lower than that for leisure today s self cares less more about the consumption of the future selves than the leisure of the future selves depressing stimulating the consumption of future selves improves the utility of today s self hence a positive negative consumption tax rate improves the utility level of all selves

endogenous land use and the ricardian valuation of climate change the ricardian technique uses cross sectional variation in the capitalized value of climate in land to infer the agricultural costs or benefits of dynamic climate change while a practical approach for predicting the consequences of global warming with readily available data it may yield biased results when land use decisions depend on the climate attributes being valued and when land has unobserved attributes that differ with the use to which it is put this paper illustrates the conditions under which such a bias will occur describes an empirical model that corrects for it and estimates that model with agricultural census data from brazil the approach moreover allows constraints on adjustment to be explicitly incorporated into the ricardian framework relaxing one of that technique s most conspicuous assumptions

measuring environmental effects on property values without hedonic regressions abstract the effect of environmental nuisances on property values has been frequently studied using hedonic regressions yet that method has extensive data and estimation requirements the technique developed in this paper uses repeat sales on houses to substantially reduce these requirements the technique adjusts for depreciation between sales and allows for nonzero error covariance terms when a house has been sold more than twice the effect of highway noise on property values is studied using this method and the results are statistically equivalent to the results of an extensive hedonic study for the same area

seasonal solow residuals and christmas a case for labor hoarding and increasing returns in aggregate unadjusted data measured solow residuals exhibit large seasonal variations total factor productivity grows rapidly in the fourth quarter at an annual rate of 16 percent and regresses sharply in the first quarter at an annual rate of 24 percent how much of the total seasonal variation in the measured solow residual can be explained by christmas the answer to this question is surprising with increasing returns and time varying labor effort christmas is sufficient to explain the seasonal variation in the solow residual consumption average productivity and output in all four quarters our analysis of seasonally unadjusted data uncovers important roles for labor hoarding and increasing returns that are difficult to identify in adjusted data prescott 1986 has argued that the variability of solow s residual is a reasonable estimate of the variability of exogenous technology shocks when solow s residual is measured using seasonally unadjusted data for the postwar u s economy it exhibits large seasonal variations growing rapidly in the fourth quarter at an annual rate of 16 percent and falling sharply in the first quarter at an annual rate of 24 percent this paper starts from the premise that it is implausible to attribute seasonal variation of this magnitude to changes in the state of technology we present a model in which all seasonal fluctuations arise from a single demand shift christmas this demand shift together with misspecification of the traditional production function leads to large seasonal variation in the solow residual we consider two candidates for misspecification labor hoarding and external increasing returns to scale even when technological growth is aseasonal either candidate in isolation can induce spurious seasonality in the solow residual our general equilibrium analysis indicates that 1 the economy s seasonal patterns in all four quarters may be a response simply to a fourth quarter consumption demand shift and 2 a combination of labor hoarding and external increasing returns is important for replicating these patterns in aggregate quantity variables for the postwar u s economy since our analysis identifies important roles for labor hoarding and increasing returns these results have implications for nonseasonal macroeconomic models indeed our analysis im

risk self protection and ex ante economic value abstract we develop three propositions about the ex ante value of reduced risk if there is a continuous outcome distribution and if self protection influences outcome probability and severity then 1 unobservable utility terms cannot be eliminated from the ex ante value expressions 2 knowledge of the convexity or the nonconvexity of dose response functions is insufficient to sign changes in these expressions and 3 self protection expenditures need not be a lower bound measure of these expressions therefore many restrictions applied in recent empirical work on the economic value of risk changes are not immediately transferable to settings where endogenous risks prevail

students today teachers tomorrow identifying constraints on the provision of education with an estimated 115 million children not attending primary school in the developing world increasing access to education is critical resource constraints limit the effectiveness of demand based subsidies this paper focuses on the importance of a supply side factor the availability of low cost teachers and the resulting ability of the market to offer affordable education the authors first show that private schools are three times more likely to emerge in villages with government girls secondary schools gss identification is obtained by using official school construction guidelines as an instrument for the presence of gss in contrast there is little or no relationship between the presence of a private school and girls primary or boys primary and secondary government schools in support of a supply channel the authors then show that for villages that received a gss there are over twice as many educated women and that private school teachers wages are 27 percent lower in these villages in an environment with poor female education and low mobility gss substantially increase the local supply of skilled women lowering wages locally and allowing the market to offer affordable education these findings highlight the prominent role of women as teachers in facilitating educational access and resonate with similar historical evidence from developed economies the students of today are the teachers of tomorrow

financial crises and coordination failure a comment abstract the three papers of this session link financial crises explicitly or implicitly to coordination failure in bryant journal of banking and finance 2002 the possibility of coordination failure is due to complementarity in the productive technology in chui et al journal of banking and finance 2002 foreign lenders to a small country fail to coordinate on the optimal strategy rolling over short term loans finally amable et al journal of banking and finance 2002 implicitly introduce coordination failure through a production function with external increasing returns to scale this sort of thick markets externality can be viewed as a reduced form that stands for coordination problems in a non walrasian economy

intergenerational transfers within the family in this paper we present a stylized model of private transfers within the family under alternative assumptions as to the nature of relations between parents and children we then analyze the effectiveness of public education and social security to achieve efficiency when needed

an evolutionary interpretation of van huyck battalio and beil s experimental results on coordination this paper proposes an adaptive interpretation of the results of some recent experiments with repeated tacit coordination games these experiments revealed several behavioral regularities including a systematic discrimination between strict nash equilibria in certain games that appear to be driven by strategic uncertainty and are not explained by traditional equilibrium refinements the observed patterns of discrimination correspond closely to predictions based on maynard smith s notion of evolutionary stability an adaptive model in the spirit of the evolutionary dynamics but recognizing the important differences between learning in human populations and evolution promises to yield a unified explanation of the results journal of economic literature classification numbers 020 026

a quantal response equilibrium model of order statistic games abstract this paper applies mckelvey and palfrey s games econ behav 10 1995 6 notion of quantal response equilibrium to a class of order statistic coordination games closely related to those studied by van huyck et al am econ rev 80 1990 234 quart j econ 106 1991 885 and van huyck et al evidence on learning in coordination games manuscript texas a m university 1996 and those recently analyzed by anderson et al games econ behav 34 2001 177 with quadratic effort costs the limiting qre as the noise goes to zero in their games is the most efficient equilibrium this result contrasts with anderson et al s conclusion for order statistic games with linear effort costs and allows a fuller assessment of the qre s success in describing the limiting outcomes in van huyck et al s experiments

the family as an incomplete annuities market families can self insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings they may simply reflect risk sharing behavior of completely selfish family members although family annuity markets are incomplete even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities given adverse selection and transaction costs family risk pooling may be preferred to public market annuities in the absence of public annuities these risk sharing arrangements provide powerful incentives for marriage and family formation

dynamic complementarities a quantitative analysis abstract this paper considers the importance of dynamic complementarities as an endogenous source of propagation in a dynamic stochastic economy dynamic complementarities link the stocks of human and organizational capital which are influenced by past levels of economic activity to current levels of productivity we supplement an otherwise standard dynamic business cycle model with both contemporaneous and dynamic complementarities the model is calibrated using estimates of these effects from both micro and aggregate data our quantitative analysis identifies empirically relevant dynamic complementarities as a source of propagation for both technology and taste shocks

james tobin an appreciation of his contribution to economics jim tobin who died on march 11 2002 at the age of 84 was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation tobin s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive so much part of our professional acquis that many younger economists often are not even aware that it is his ideas they are elaborating testing criticising refuting or re inventing in this appreciation i consider tobin s scholarly contributions made over a period of more than 50 years tobin received the 1981 nobel memorial prize for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions employment production and prices i consider his contributions to mean variance portfolio demand and asset pricing theory especially the portfolio separation theorem pitfalls in financial model building portfolio balance and flow of funds models and the credit channel the life cycle model and social security econometric methodology including the tobit estimator and his pioneering work using both time series and cross sectional data to estimate food demand functions economic growth tobin s q the tobin tax the monetary and fiscal policy effectiveness debate first with milton friedman and then with the new classical macroeconomics and real business cycle schools and tobin s approach to methodological questions including microfoundations and aggregation

fiat exchange in finite economies the state of the art of rendering fiat money valuable is either to impose a boundary condition or to make the boundary condition unimportant through an infinite sequence of markets so as to circumvent backward induction we show fiat exchange may nevertheless arise in finite economies if agents have incomplete information about their relative position in the trade cycle or when the barter and autarky equilibria of the one shot trading round support a monetary equilibrium with repeated trades

concatenate coordination and mutual coordination abstract we tell of the evolving meaning of the term coordination as used by economists the paper is based on systematic electronic searches on coord etc of major works and leading journals the term coordination first emerged in professional economics around 1880 to describe the directed productive concatenation of factors or activities within a firm also transportation economists used the term to describe the concatenation of routes and trips of a transportation system these usages represent what we term concatenate coordination the next major development came in the 1930s from several lse economists hayek plant hutt and coase who extended that concept beyond the eye of any actual coordinator that is they wrote of the concatenate coordination of a system of polycentric or spontaneous activities these various applications of concatenate coordination prevailed until the next major development namely thomas schelling and game models here coordination referred to a mutual meshing of actions game theorists developed crisp ideas of coordination games like battle of the sexes coordination equilibria convention and path dependence this coordination was not a refashioning but rather a distinct concept one we distinguish as mutual coordination as game models became more familiar to economists it was mutual coordination that economists increasingly had in mind when they spoke of coordination economists switched so to speak to a new semantic equilibrium now mutual coordination overshadows the older notion of concatenate coordination the two senses of coordination are conceptually distinct and correspond neatly to the two dictionary definitions of the verb to coordinate both are crucial to economics we suggest that distinguishing between the two senses can help to clarify coordination talk also compared to talk of efficiency and optimality concatenate coordination allows for a richer more humanistic and more openly aesthetic discussion of social affairs the narrative is backed up by excel worksheets that report on systematic content searches of the writings of economics using the worldwide web and using jstor of quarterly journal of economics economic journal journal of political economy american economic review and economica

economic growth with intergenerational altruism in this paper we study the properties of equilibria in an aggregative growth model with intergenerational altruism in this model each generation is active for a single period at the beginning of this period it receives an endowment of a single homogeneous good which is the output from a bequest investment made by the previous generation it divides the endowment between consumption and investment the return from this investment constitutes the endowment of the next generation each generation derives utility from its own consumption and that of its immediate successor however since altruism is limited in the sense that no generation cares about later successors the interests of distinct agents come into conflict models of this type have been used to analyze a number of issues concerning intergenerational altruism one line of research pursued by arrow 1973 and dasgupta 1974a elucidates the implications of rawls principle of just savings others beginning with phelps and pollak 1968 have addressed the question of how an altruistic growth economy might actually evolve over time topics of subsequent investigation have included the efficiency and optimality of equilibrium programs and the implications of intergenerational altruism for the distribution of wealth unfortunately the positive features of equilibrium programs have received little attention from previous authors aside from a few comments by kohlberg 1976 virtually nothing is known about the asymptotic behaviour of capital stocks in these models in particular will the long run capital stock which arises from intergenerational conflict be higher or lower than the turnpike associated with the solution to the optimal planning problem on a priori grounds the answer is not clear agents who take only a limited interest in the future will tend to bequeath less than those who are far sighted however since each generation views its children s bequest as pure waste it must bequeath a larger sum to obtain the same consumption value in this paper we obtain steady state results for equilibrium capital stocks completely analogous to the well known optimal planning results by comparing steady states we

income distribution and macroeconomics this paper analyzes the role of wealth distribution in macroeconomics through investment in human capital it is shown that in the presence of credit markets imperfections and indivisibilities in investment in human capital the initial distribution of wealth affects aggregate output and investment both in the short and in the long run as there are multiple steady states this paper therefore provides an additional explanation for the persistent differences in per capita output across countries furthermore the paper shows that cross country differences in macroeconomic adjustment to aggregate shocks can be attributed among other factors to differences in wealth and income distribution across countries

borrowing constraints and progress through school evidence from peru this paper investigates the effect of borrowing constraints on the timing of human capital investment in a developing country by looking at how quickly children with different family backgrounds progress through the primary school system in peru the main findings are that children start withdrawing from school earlier as indicated by repetition of grades in households with lower income and durable good holdings and when children are more closely spaced behavior also differs as predicted between children from households that appear to be borrowing constrained and those that appear unconstrained copyright 1994 by mit press

findings biased but efficient an investigation of coordination facilitated by asymmetric dominance in several marketing contexts strategic complementarity between the actions of individual players demands that players coordinate their decisions to reach efficient outcomes yet coordination failure is a common occurrence we show that the well established psychological phenomenon of asymmetric dominance can facilitate coordination in two experiments thus we demonstrate a counterintuitive result a common bias in individual decision making can help players to coordinate their decisions to obtain efficient outcomes further limited steps of thinking alone cannot account for the observed asymmetric dominance effect the effect appears to be due to increased psychological attractiveness of the dominating strategy with our estimates of the incremental attractiveness ranging from 3 6 a learning analysis further clarifies that asymmetric dominance and adaptive learning can guide players to an efficient outcome

economic growth and the demand for education is there a wealth effect abstract human capital investment in developing countries is thought to be significantly constrained by household resources this paper studies the relationship between household resources and the demand for education using recent household survey data from vietnam the data cover a period 1993 1998 of exceptional income growth in vietnam during which secondary school enrollment rose substantially using consumption expenditures to measure household wealth we find a positive and significant relationship between changes in wealth and changes in the demand for education this wealth effect persists even after controlling for locality specific factors such as changes in education returns and the supply and quality of schools and for the opportunity costs of schooling

coordination in the presence of asset markets markets aggregate widely dispersed information and direct resources to where they produce the greatest value friedrich a hayek 1945 adam smith 1776 these dual roles of informational and allocative efficiency help explain why asset markets are often used to guide economic activity such as production and investment many economic contexts involving production and investment are characterized by multiple equilibria john bryant 1983 jack hirshleifer 1983 russell w cooper 1999 colin camerer and marc knez 1997 jordi brandts and david j cooper 2006 when asset markets are linked to such contexts it is important to understand what role they play in aiding coordination and selecting equilibria if asset markets obtain both informational and allocative efficiency in a multiple equilibrium con text then they should coordinate the beliefs of economic agents and guide behavior to an efficient equilibrium indeed some evidence suggests that one sided auction markets may facilitate efficient coordination in an environment with multiple equi libria john b van huyck raymond c battalio and richard o beil 1993 vincent crawford and bruno broseta 1998 however the broader question of whether asset markets generally lead to efficient coordination in environments with multiple equi libria remains an open question in this paper we explore experimentally the influence of two sided futures asset markets on behavior and outcomes in an economic activity characterized by multi plicity of equilibria we use laboratory experiments where we can control impor tant features of both the market and the underlying activity and focus on situations where the outcome of the economic activity is sensitive to the behavior of small numbers of agents the economic activity in our setting consists of a coordination game with pareto ranked equilibria in which the payoff to each player is a function of her own choice or input and group output which is some order statistic such as the minimum of all players input choices see van huyck battalio and beil 1990 van huyck battalio and beil 1991 crawford 1995 players all do better if they coordinate on the highest output efficient equilibrium which is pareto optimal but they also prefer to select a lower input if they believe others will do so coordination games of this kind have been applied widely to model economic activity from the relationship between beliefs and output in macroeconomic models cooper 1999 to public good provision hirshleifer 1983 to firm production

walras keynes equilibria coordination and macroeconomics in decentralised market economies supply constrained equilibria may persist as coordination failures sustained but not caused by price rigidities this feature may be arbitrarily severe even at prices compatible with competitive equilibrium the supply constraints may originate in rational expectations some implications for macroeconomics are drawn the possibility of coordination failures explains why organised labour may resist wage flexibility these features are illustrated in elementary macroeconomic prototypes like rbc or barro grossman malinvaud prototypes

the effect of gnp announcements on fluctuations of gnp growth abstract this paper is an empirical study of the degree in which perceptions affect the evolution of the economy we study the effects of the announcements that the government makes on gnp growth these announcements are subject to a substantial degree of noise and its accuracy improves with time a revised number is published several years after the first announcement was made public we consider that the final revision is the true value of gnp growth we show that once announcements are taken into account the true value of gnp growth at time t has no predictive power in determining growth at any future time all the predictive power lies in the announcements and not in the true level of growth actually we show that the variable that determines future growth is the unexpected part of the announcements we also show that announcements affect growth via aggregate investment

strategic risk and coordination failure in blame games within a class of games that we call blame games we discuss how strategic risk may discourage play of a unique and efficient strictly dominance solvable equilibrium

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

consumer confidence and economic fluctuations if consumers become pessimistic about the state of the economy can there be a slowdown in output even if their pessimism is not based on economic fundamentals recent macroeconomic models show the answer is yes if there are strategic complementarities and multiple equilibria we investigate the link between consumer confidence and economic fluctuations using vector autoregressions in all models after controlling for economic fundamentals the hypothesis that consumer sentiment does not cause gnp in the granger sense can be rejected variance decompositions suggest that consumer sentiment accounts for between 13 and 26 percent of the innovation variance of gnp

green investment and coordination failure an investors perspective abstract to achieve the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 c private investors have to shift capital from brown to green infrastructures and technologies and provide additional green investment in this paper we present a game theoretic perspective on the challenge of triggering such investments the question of climate change mitigation is often related to the prisoner s dilemma a game with one nash equilibrium however the authors perceive investment for mitigation and adaptation as a coordination problem of selecting among multiple equilibria to illustrate this we model a non cooperative coordination game related to the stag hunt with a brown equilibrium with lower payoffs that can be achieved single handedly and a green equilibrium with higher payoffs that requires coordination as multiple experiments show in such games actors often fail to coordinate on a payoff dominant equilibrium due to uncertainty thus we discuss how uncertainty could be reduced along two options one that concerns a change in the payoff structure of the game and another that concerns subjective probabilities

aggregate pattern of time dependent adjustment rules ii strategic complementarity and endogenous nonsynchronization abstract this paper provides an explanation for an important institutional feature of staggered time dependent adjustment rules assumed in a number of macroeconomic models it identifies strategic complementarity as the crucial factor leading to nonsynchronized decisions in a game theoretic framework the paper first shows that nonsynchronization is the equilibrium outcome in an infinite horizon game in which strategic complementarity is present whether the players choose predetermined or fixed actions by pursuing the interpretation of a nonsynchronized move dynamic game as a series of games with symmetric stackelberg leadership it is further suggested that the relationship between strategic complementarity and the benefit to the stackelberg follower provides the insight to the game theoretic explanation of nonsynchronization the results of this paper reveal a link between strategic complementarity and nonsynchronization two important macroeconomic features journal of economic literature classification numbers e30 l16

noisy equilibrium selection in coordination games abstract by perturbing symmetric coordination games a la bryant bryant j 1983 quarterly journal of economics 98 525 528 we derive unique solutions the noise proof equilibria our results agree with the experimental findings in van huyck et al van huyck j b r c battalio and r o beil 1990 american economic review 80 234 248 and have an interesting connection with the notion of potential we also briefly discuss median games

the paradox of indian growth a comment on kochhar et al the paradox of india s current success we learn from kochhar et al 2006 is that it is rooted in what were once seen as some of its most egregious policy failures in particular in the 1980s and even the 1990s one always heard complaints about how india invested so much more in tertiary education compared to countries at similar levels of development and how primary education by comparison was under funded and not enough of a priority and it did look like the critics were right highly qualified engineers educated at great public expense worked as bank officers or sales representatives for large multinationals or cooled their heels as minor functionaries in the overfilled bureaucracies of large public companies if they were exceptionally brilliant or fortunate they won a scholarship to do an advanced degree somewhere in the west few came back if there was one thing that has worse press in the community of economists today than india s education policy it was its policy of self reliance this meant making everything at home often behind gargantuan walls of tariffs and quotas this created an industrial sector that was enormously diversified at least compared to other economies at the same level of development and probably in many ways quite inefficient yet according to kochar and company it was the combination of these two policy errors that were instrumental in shaping the indian economy of today the two things that distinguish india from any other economy at its level of development are the skillintensity of its exports and the diversity of what it produces indeed 15 years after liberalization began the indian economy seems to be even more diversified than it used to be

floodplain price impacts by property type in boulder county colorado condominiums versus standalone properties studies find various and often small or negligible impacts of floodplain designation on home sales prices in the united states calling into question the u s s national flood insurance program s nfip effectiveness at internalizing flood risk into the residential property market however studies also tend to focus only on standalone homes although a substantial portion of the u s housing market particularly within designated floodplains consists of condominiums single unit residences that are bundled with an ownership share in common property this study investigates the price impact of floodplain designation for condominiums and for standalone properties in boulder county colorado u s and finds a strong impact for condominiums but none for standalone properties results are consistent across hedonic price estimation and non parametric matching estimation numerous factors may contribute to this difference including differences in the pre transaction provision of flood insurance cost information and whether maintaining ongoing flood insurance is compulsory these results have implications for the nfip and offer insights for policy interventions for internalizing risks more generally they also caution against generalizing from the experience of the nfip without detailed consideration of the contexts and specific conditions in which it is applied

microeconomic uncertainty and macroeconomic indeterminacy we propose a stylized intertemporal macroeconomic model wherein the combination of decentralized trading and microeconomic uncertainty taking the form of privately observed and uninsured idiosyncratic shocks creates an information problem between agents and generates indeterminacy of the macroeconomic equilibrium for a given value of the economic fundamentals the economy admits a continuum of equilibria that can be indexed by the sales expectations of firms at the time of investment the walrasian equilibrium is one of these possible equilibria but it is reached only if firms are optimistic enough with a weaker degree of optimism equilibrium output employment and real wages will be lower than in the walrasian equilibrium moreover the range of possible equilibria will depend positively on the wage elasticity of the labour supply and on the magnitude of the information problem between buyers and sellers in our case the variance of the idiosyncratic shocks stochastic simulations performed on a calibrated version of the model show that pure demand expectation shocks may generate business cycle statistics that are not inconsistent with the observed ones 2006 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the schooling decision family preferences intergenerational conflict and moral hazard in the brazilian favelas this paper experimentally analyzes the schooling decisions of poor households in urban brazil we elicit parents choices between monthly government transfers conditional on their adolescent child attending school and guaranteed unconditional transfers of varying sizes in the baseline treatment an overwhelming majority of parents prefer conditional transfers to larger unconditional transfers however few parents prefer conditional payments if they are offered text message notifications whenever their child misses school these findings suggest important intergenerational conflicts in these schooling decisions a lack of parental control and observability of school attendance and an additional rationale for conditional cash transfer programs the monitoring they provide

can natural experiments measure behavioral responses to environmental risks efforts to measure people s responses to spatially delineated risks confront the potential for correlation between these risks and other unobserved characteristics of these locations the possibility of correlation arises in part because individuals observe other locational attributes that can be expected to influence the hedonic equilibrium one response to this problem is to use events from nature to exploit both temporal and spatial variation in the behavioral responses of interest this paper evaluates the use of hurricanes as a source of new risk information to households in coastal counties potentially subject to the effects of these storms we study the extent to which housing prices before and after hurricane andrew a hurricane with unprecedented property loss reveal how floridians responded to the risk information provided by the storm two counties are selected one without and another with damage from the hurricane to evaluate the plausibility of using quasi random experiments for locations not directly affected by natural events we compare lee county s results to those of dade county where the majority of the damage occurred our findings suggest after controlling for ex post storm damage and changes in insurance markets there is a reasonably high level of consistency in a repeat sales model s ability to estimate the effects of the risk information conveyed by the storm for both counties

educational choice families and young people s earnings this paper presents two optimizing models of educational choice discusses issues of identification estimates earnings equations in the context of these models and presents conditions under which we can test one against the other the estimates indicate that education is endogenous for young people s earnings creating a downward bias in estimated returns from education that assume exogeneity identification and estimation relies on family background information from a special sample from the british household panel study 1991 95 which matches mothers and their young adult children our estimates favor a family model over an individual model and they suggest that parents allocate resources to education to compensate for differences in their children s earnings endowments

education and the poverty trap an overlapping generations model is constructed in which individual wealth is related to educational attainment and in which liquidity constraints may induce children to invest in a sub optimal level of education given their ability financing for education is obtained from within the family abilities differ among children and may be related to parental ability stationary state equilibria are found to exist in which children of poorer families are caught in a poverty trap because of an inability to finance their education the role of redistributive policy is studied in this context

trade credit and systemic fragility this paper treats an idealized monetary framework in which merchant banks finance trade trade which is induced by decentralized production indeed merchant bank credit instruments coupled with local bank deposits facilitate decentralization of both production and trade at the same time decentralized production exhibiting technological complementarity induces systemic monetary fragility however with the decentralization of trade the indemnification of either merchant bank credit instruments or of local bank deposits eliminates fragility in particular deposit insurance also stabilizes credit the result is a stable cashless economy a replacement of trade in specie 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

motives for private income transfers private income transfers are becoming increasingly recognized as a key aspect of the u s economy the majority of private income transfers occur inter vivos i e between living persons but very little is known about this type of transfer behavior this paper tests alternative hypotheses concerning motivation for inter vivos transfers two motives are considered altruism and exchange evidence presented here casts doubt on the altruistic model of transfer behavior observed patterns for inter vivos transfers are more consistent with exchange related motives this finding has important implications for the effects of public transfer programs on the distribution of economic well being

changes in implicit flood risk premiums empirical evidence from the housing market abstract hedonic valuation models have shown that sales prices can capitalize property risk factors such as flood zone properties facing lower risk sell at a premium all else being equal previous research has indicated that price differentials reflecting risk of flooding become much larger in the wake of a storm we re examine these findings for pitt county north carolina using multiple storm events within a difference in differences framework and we compare flood zone price differentials for a more recent sample of property sales prior to hurricane fran in 1996 we detect no market risk premium for the presence in a flood zone but we find significant price differentials after major flooding events amounting to a 5 7 decrease after hurricane fran and 8 8 decrease after hurricane floyd results from a separate model that examines more recent data covering a period without significant storm related flood impacts indicate a significant risk premium ranging between 6 0 and 20 2 for homes sold in the flood zone but this effect is diminishing over time essentially disappearing about 5 or 6 years after hurricane floyd the lack of a persistent effect suggests that buyers and sellers risk perceptions may change with the prevalence of hazard events and that homebuyers are unaware of flood risks and insurance requirements when bidding on properties

evolution and long run equilibria in coordination games with summary statistic payoff technologies abstract this note applies the evolutionary dynamic of kandori mailath and rob econometrica61 1993 29 65 to class coordination games that the entire population plays simultaneously in these games payoffs and best replies are determined by a symmary statistic of the population strategy profile as in crawford econometrica63 1995 103 144 a simple characterization of the set of long run equilibria analogous to the one given by kandori mailath and rob for random pairing is provided journal of economic literatureclassification number c79

characterising equilibrium selection in global games with strategic complementarities abstract global games are widely used to predict behaviour in games with strategic complementarities and multiple equilibria we establish two results on the global game selection first we show that for any supermodular complete information game the global game selection is independent of the payoff functions chosen for the game s global game embedding second we give a simple sufficient criterion to derive the selection and establish noise independence in many action games by decomposing them into games with smaller action sets to which we may often apply simple criteria we also report in which small games noise independence may be established by counting the number of players or actions

market failure in information the national flood insurance program the national flood insurance program nfip was established in 1968 and requires mandatory flood insurance for property owners who have federally backed mortgages krutilla 1966 noted that a compulsory national flood insurance program could greatly improve the economic efficiency of flood plain occupancy in the united states however in order to realize the efficiency gains suggested by krutilla property owners must have sufficient information about flood risk and insurance premiums to make well informed home purchase decisions using survey data from boulder colorado we find significant evidence of market failure in information in the nfip program the majority of survey respondents all of whom live in a special flood hazard area report they did not fully understand the degree of flood risk or the cost of insuring against this risk when negotiating the purchase of their property

child control in education decisions an evaluation of targeted incentives to learn in india i report the results of a field experiment in gurgaon india that offered cash and noncash incentives to learn either to children or to their parents while i find no evidence that the identity of the recipient or form of the reward mattered in the aggregate noncash incentives targeted to children were more effective for initially low performing children while cash incentives were more effective for high performing children to explore the mechanisms behind this result i present a model of household education production and find additional empirical results consistent with the model

wildfire risk salience housing demand abstract in this paper we develop a parsimonious model that links underlying changes in location specific risk perceptions to housing market dynamics given estimates of both the price and quantity effects induced by shocks to agents beliefs the model allows us to draw inferences about the underlying changes in risk perceptions that gave rise to observed housing market dynamics we apply the model s predictions to an empirical analysis of the influence of severe wildfires on housing prices and sales rates in the front range of colorado interpreted in the context of the model our empirical results suggest that natural disasters lead to significant but short lived increases in risk perceptions

forgetting the flood an analysis of the flood risk discount over time we examine whether property price differentials reflecting flood risk increase following a large flood event and whether this change is temporary or permanent we use single family residential property sales in dougherty county georgia between 1985 and 2004 in a difference in differences spatial hedonic model framework after the 1994 flood of the century prices of properties in the 100 year floodplain fell significantly this effect was however short lived in spatial hedonic models that explicitly incorporate both linear and nonlinear temporal flood zone effects we show that the flood risk discount disappeared between four and nine years after the flood depending upon the specification jel q51 q54

idiosyncratic production risk growth and the business cycle we introduce a neoclassical growth economy with idiosyncratic production risk and incomplete markets each agent is an entrepreneur operating her own technology with her own capital stock the general equilibrium is characterized by a closed form recursion in the cara normal case incomplete markets introduce a risk premium on private equity which reduces the demand for investment as compared to complete markets the steady state can thus have both a lower capital stock due to investment risk and a lower interest rate due to precautionary savings furthermore the anticipation of high real interest rates in the future feeds back into high risk premia and low investment in the present thus slowing down convergence to the steady state our results highlight the importance of private risk premia for capital accumulation and business cycles

schooling and labor market consequences of school construction in indonesia evidence from an unusual policy experiment between 1973 and 1978 the indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the program suggests that each primary school constructed per 1 000 children led to an average increase of 0 12 to 0 19 years of education as well as a 1 5 to 2 7 percent increase in wages this implies estimates of economic returns to education ranging from 6 8 to 10 6 percent

strategic complementarity slows macroeconomic adjustment to temporary shocks i introduction starting with the work of diamond 1982 hart 1982 and bryant 1983 a number of authors have employed models which use potential coordination failure to show that many features of the keynesian framework can be captured in models consistent with the microfoundations approach 1 for example in the context of a search model diamond demonstrates the existence of equilibria with too low a level of aggregative activity hart captures this feature and the simultaneous existence of multipliers in a model of monopolistic competition while technological interactions are the crucial element of bryant s analysis one reason to refer to these seemingly diverse set of papers as a single literature is that all the models are in fact driven by the presence of the same factor strategic complementarity a macroeconomic model which exhibits strategic complementarity is simply one where the larger is aggregate production the larger is the incentive for any particular agent to produce cooper and john 1988 first demonstrated that the presence of strategic complementarity is a characteristic of all of the models mentioned above and persuasively argue that this is the critical feature which lies behind the finding of keynesian type results in this paper we argue that strategic complementarity is also important in understanding the dynamic response of economies to temporary shocks in particular we find that strategic complementarity is potentially an important factor in understanding why an economy may return only slowly to steady state behavior after a temporary shock that is given the presence of any of a variety of factors which would cause the economy not to instantaneously return to full employment after a temporary shock e g adjustment costs associated with changing the capital stock the speed with which the economy returns to steady state behavior is negatively related to the degree of strategic complementarity in the environment related analyses are those of haltiwanger and waldman 1989 bomfim and diebold 1992 and baxter and king 1990 the first two papers consider models wherein some agents are characterized by adaptive or regressive expectations while others am characterized by rational expectations among other findings these analyses demonstrate that the speed with which the economy returns to steady state behavior after a temporary shock is negatively related to the degree of strategic complementarity in the economy 2 we argue that the relationship between strategic complementarity and the dynamic response to temporary shocks is more general than is suggested by these papers in their analyses temporary shocks have long term effects because some of the agents make systematic mistakes when forming expectations here it is argued that given any of a variety of factors which would cause temporary shocks to have long term effects there is a negative relationship between adjustment speed and the degree of strategic complementarity baxter and king consider a world where because of productive externalities the economy exhibits increasing returns at the economy wide level using simulation techniques they show first that the presence of increasing returns serves to increase the output volatility exhibited by the economy in response to shocks and second that after a one time shock the return to steady state behavior is slower in a world characterized by increasing returns baxter and king do not discuss their results in terms of strategic complementarity however it is easy to show that one way of introducing strategic complementarity is to assume that the economy exhibits increasing returns at the economy wide level our paper suggests that what is central in baxter and king s study is not the introduction of increasing returns per se but rather that the introduction of increasing returns is one way of introducing strategic complementarity that is baxter and king s findings can be thought of as a manifestation of the central point of the current paper

responders versus non responders a new perspective on heterogeneity this paper considers the implications of a particular type of heterogeneity one which characterizes a large number of economic environments but that has not received any systematic treatment in the literature the authors refer to this heterogeneity as responders versus nonresponders the paper begins by providing a general framework for the analysis of environments characterized by this heterogeneity and then shows how this framework can be used to help understand a wide variety of economic environments particular applications considered are near rationality network externalities and models of reputation copyright 1991 by royal economic society

rationalizability learning and equilibrium in games with strategic complementarities we study a rich class of noncooperative games that includes models of oligopoly competition macroeconomic coordination failures arms races bank runs technology adoption and diffusion r d competition pretrial bargaining coordination in teams and many others for all these games the sets of pure strategy nash equilibria correlated equilibria and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds also for a class of models of dynamic adaptive choice behavior that encompasses both best response dynamics and bayesian learning the players choices lie eventually within the same bounds these bounds are shown to vary monotonically with certain exogenous parameters we study the class of noncooperative supermodular games introduced by topkis 1979 and further analyzed by vives 1985 1989 who also pointed out the importance of these games in industrial economics supermodular games are games in which each player s strategy set is partially ordered the marginal returns to increasing one s strategy rise with increases in the competitors strategies so that the game exhibits strategic complementarity 2 and if a player s strategies are multidimensional marginal returns to any one com ponent of the player s strategy rise with increases in the other components this class turns out to encompass many of the most important economic applications of noncooperative game theory in macroeconomics diamond s 1982 search model and bryant s 1983 1984 rational expectations models can be represented as supermodular games in each of these models more activity by some members of the economy raises the returns to increased levels of activity by others in oligopoly theory some models of bertrand oligopoly with differentiated products qualify as supermodu lar games in these games when a firm s competitors raise their prices the marginal profitability of the firm s own price increase rises a similar structure is present in games of new technology adoption such as those of dybvig and spatt 1983 farrell and saloner 1986 and katz and shapiro 1986 when more users hook into a communication system or more manufacturers adopt an interface standard the marginal return to others of doing the same often rises similarly in some specifications of the bank runs model introduced by diamond and dybvig 1983 when more depositors withdraw their funds from a bank it is more worthwhile for other depositors to do the same in the warrant exercise

coordination failures in immigration policy abstract we propose a theoretical framework for analyzing the problems associated to unilateral immigration policy in receiving countries and for evaluating the grounds for reform of international institutions governing immigration we build a model with multiple destination countries and show that immigration policy in one country is influenced by measures adopted abroad as migrants choose where to locate in part in response to differences in immigration policy this interdependence gives rise to a leakage effect of immigration policy an international externality well documented in the empirical literature in this environment immigration policy becomes strategic and unilateral behavior may lead to coordination failures where receiving countries are stuck in welfare inferior equilibria we then use an equilibrium refinement to show that the selected equilibrium differs from the pareto dominant one and argue that multilateral institutions that help receiving countries make immigration policy commitments would address this inefficiency

natural natural experiments in economics the recent literature exploiting natural events as natural experiment instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge a weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral market and technological assumptions made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates is often absent the methodology and findings from twenty studies are summarized and simple economic models are used to elucidate the implicit assumptions made by the authors and to demonstrate the sensitivity of the interpretations of the findings to the relaxation of some of these assumptions

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded