bidding behavior in the longer term refinancing operations of the european central bank evidence from a panel sample selection model abstract this paper analyzes individual bidding data of the longer term refinancing operations ltros of the european central bank we investigate how banks bidding behavior is related to a series of exogenous variables including collateral costs interest rate expectations market volatility and to individual bank characteristics like country of origin size and experience a specific feature of these auctions is that the number and composition of bidders varies over time therefore we estimate panel sample selection models to control for a bank s endogenous participation decision we find that bidding strategies depend on the banks attributes yet different bidding behavior generally does not translate into differences concerning bidder success there is evidence for the winner s curse effect in ltros indicating a common value component in banks demand for longer term refinancing

two models of bid taker cheating in vickrey auctions vickrey second price sealed bid auctions have attractive theoretical properties but standard first price sealed bidding is far more common explanations of the rarity of vickrey auctions rely on concern about revelation of private information and on fear of cheating the authors present two models of bid taker cheating a static game theoretic model and a reputation based model of repeated auctions in the first an honest bid taker will not choose a vickrey auction in the second a trusted bid taker who cheats when it pays eventually destroys his or her reputation and the trust on which the use of vickrey auctions depends copyright 1995 by university of chicago press

auctions of heterogeneous objects abstract simultaneous sealed bid auctions of heterogeneous objects are analyzed each bidder s reservation value for an object depends upon the other objects he obtains bidders reservation values are common knowledge in simultaneous first price auctions the set of walrasian equilibrium allocations contains the set of pure strategy nash equilibrium allocations which in turn contains the set of strict walrasian equilibrium allocations hence pure strategy nash equilibria when they exist are efficient mixed strategy nash equilibria may be inefficient in simultaneous second price auctions any efficient allocation can be implemented as a pure strategy nash equilibrium outcome if a walrasian equilibrium exists journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 d51

world war i and the postwar depression a reinterpretation based on alternative estimates of gnp abstract this paper examines the official commerce department estimates of gross national product for 1909 1928 and suggests that they are far inferior to the less commonly used kendrick gnp estimates the paper then derives a revised version of the kendrick series that alters significantly the representation of annual movements in gnp before 1919 this endorsement of a revised kendrick gnp series in place of the official commerce department estimates before 1929 suggests that aggregate demand movements had much less effect on real output during world war i and the depression of 1921 than is commonly believed

walrasian equilibrium with gross substitutes in this paper we study the problem of efficient production and allocation of indivisible objects among a set of consumers we assume that the agents preferences depend on the bundle of objects and the quantity of money they consume furthermore we assume that preferences are quasilinear in money and that agents have a large endowment of money with indivisibilities it is well known that many familiar properties of the utility functions fail to ensure existence in their striking analysis of the matching problem kelso and crawford 5 introduce the gross substitutes gs condition which ensures the non emptiness of the core we propose two new conditions and show that with quasilinearity they are equivalent article id jeth 1999 2531 available online at http www idealibrary com on

uniform vs discriminatory auctions with variable supply experimental evidence in the variable supply auction considered here the seller decides how many customers with unit demand to serve after observing their bids bidders are uncertain about the seller s cost we experimentally investigate whether a uniform or a discriminatory price auction is better for the seller in this setting exactly as predicted by theory it turns out that the uniform price auction produces substantially higher bids and consequently yields higher revenues and profits for the seller furthermore again as predicted by theory the uniform price auction yields a higher number of transactions which makes it also the more efficient auction format

using auctions to price employee stock options the case of zions bancorporation esoars the first empirical analysis of zions bancorporation s 2006 and 2007 auctions of employee stock option appreciation rights securities esoars this study examined 1 the impact of auction rules on bidding strategies and allocations 2 the efficiency of the auction clearing prices and 3 the value gap between esoars auction clearing prices and various model based estimates it found that the design features of the auctions e g ending rules significantly affected bidding strategies but not final allocations which remained highly concentrated it also found that the clearing prices 1 displayed high price elasticities of demand suggesting efficient price discovery and 2 were low relative to some but not all model based estimates these findings suggest design improvements that might benefit auctions of other illiquid derivatives e g banks troubled assets currently being considered by the u s government

wage changes and intrafirm job mobility over the business cycle two case studies despite the many reasons to expect sluggish wage adjustment recent evidence suggests that real wages are quite procyclical growing more rapidly during economic expansions than during recessions and that this wage procyclicality pertains even to workers who stay with the same employer one possible explanation for these findings is the old hypothesis that a portion of firms cyclical adjustment of labor costs is achieved not by changing the wages paid in particular jobs but by changing the quality of labor assigned to those jobs the authors analysis of interwar personnel data from the ford motor company and the a m byers company supports that hypothesis the authors recognize that case studies of only two firms cannot be definitive but they conclude that cyclicality in workers job assignments deserves further attention

salomon brothers and the may 1991 treasury auction analysis of a market corner abstract in may 1991 the treasury sold 12 29 billion in two year notes through improper bidding salomon brothers gained control of at least 86 percent of the issue this study investigates the impact of salomon s attempted corner by examining the postauction price behaviour of the two year note based on a no arbitrage relation the results show that the two year note was substantially overpriced for approximately six weeks following the auction the typical mispricing during this period is estimated at 0 16 to 0 25 percent of par in dollar terms the aggregate misvaluation averaged 20 30 million and by controlling the supply of the issue salomon stood to gain substantially from the squeeze

the real wage cyclicality of newly hired and incumbent workers in germany several recent macroeconomic models assume that real wages are rigid the wage rigidity of newly hired workers assumes a crucial role in these models as the decision of whether to open a vacancy is primarily influenced by real hiring wages this article analyses the cyclical behaviour of real wages in germany it considers recent concerns that not controlling for cyclical job up and downgrading leads to biased results the results indicate that wages are not rigid neither for all workers nor for newly hired workers but instead respond considerably to business cycle conditions

auctions with a stochastic number of bidders abstract auction theory is generalized by allowing the number of bidders to be stochastic in a first price sealed bid auction with bidders having constant absolute risk aversion the expected selling price is higher when the bidders do not know how many other bidders there are than when they do know this thus the seller should conceal the number of bidders if he can moreover a bidder s ex ante expected utility is the same whether or not there is a policy of concealing the number of bidders concealment therefore pareto dominates announcement with risk neutral bidders the optimal auction is the same whether or not the bidders know who their competitors are

compensating for the winner s curse experimental evidence abstract we conduct experiments on common value auctions with rationing in each auction the good is randomly allocated to one of the k highest bidders at the k 1 st highest price when k 1 bidders are rationed as the degree of rationing increases the equilibrium bid function increases consistent with prior literature we find that bidders suffer from the winner s curse and lose money on average however bids in the experiments do adjust in the appropriate direction as the degree of rationing changes providing support for the comparative statics implications of the theory our results are consistent with subjects having an intuitive understanding of the winner s curse but being unable to compute the equilibrium bid levels

cyclical quality adjustment in the labor market 1 introductionthe u s unemployment rate fell to very low levels during the 1990s even more impressively the unemployment rate for minorities and less educated individuals fell disproportionately convergence of relative unemployment rates in expansions and divergence in recessions has been a feature of the u s economy over the last 30 years there are many possible reasons for this feature for example if the costs of hiring and firing less skilled labor are low one would expect these individuals to have very procyclical employment in this paper i explore an alternative model when there is an excess supply of labor high skilled people take jobs that would normally be occupied by less skilled people in expansions the process reverses with less skilled workers getting access to jobs that they would normally not attain i refer to this process as cyclical quality adjustment reder 1955 p 834 was one of the first to discuss how hiring standards adjust to business cycle conditions quality variations in labor markets arise through upgrading and downgrading of members of the labor force relative to the jobs they are to fill when applicants become scarce employers tend to lower the minimum standards upon which they insist as a condition for hiring a worker to fill a particular job and vice versa when applicants become plentiful since then many papers have developed this idea theoretically and many economic commentators appear to share this view of the labor market for example the economic report of the president states that a strong labor market is particularly important to less advantaged groups in the labor market such as workers with less education younger workers racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants when employers find it hard to fill vacancies they are more willing to hire and train workers whom they might pass over when they have fewer openings and an abundance of applicants council of economic advisors 1999 p 103 likewise the expansion during the 1990s spawned many newspaper articles about the improvement in the types of jobs available to less skilled applicants however there is little systematic empirical work about changes in job assignment in the united states over the business cycle the empirical work in this paper seeks to redress this situation cyclical assignment changes are important for many reasons as mentioned earlier job upgrading is a potential explanation for the greater cyclical variation of employment experienced by less skilled workers it is well known that the unemployment rates of less skilled individuals and minorities are more countercyclical relative to more skilled individuals clark and summers 1981 kydland 1984 keane and prasad 1993 hoynes 1999 the standard explanation for this effect is that low ability workers are more likely to be laid off in downturns because training and hiring costs are lower for these workers no commensurate attention has been paid to the issue of how the decision of who to hire changes over the business cycle however assignment models present a natural explanation for the greater procyclicality of employment of the less skilled both the adjustment cost hypothesis and the upgrading hypothesis imply that less skilled workers will have more procyclical employment empirically they are distinguishable because the upgrading explanation implies that jobs obtained by comparable workers should vary systematically over the cycle the adjustment cost hypothesis relates to the composition of those whose jobs are terminated second these mechanisms suggest a reason why wages are particularly procyclical for job changers recent studies using panel data have indicated that the wages of job starters are much more procyclical than the wages of workers who do not change jobs researchers have suggested various explanations for this result beaudry and dinardo 1991 and macleod and malcomson 1993 present contracting models in which the wages of job starters depend on the state of the labor market when they join the firm

gender time use and change the impact of the cut flower industry in ecuador this article uses survey data from ecuador to examine the effects of women s employment on the allocation of paid and unpaid labor within the household the reader compares a region with high demand for female labor with a similar region in which demand for female labor is low the comparison suggests that market labor opportunities for women have no effect on women s total time in labor but increase men s time in unpaid labor the increase in men s time in unpaid work reflects women s increased bargaining power in the home

repo auctions and the market for liquidity what is the nature of imperfections in the market for liquidity studying bidder level data from european central bank ecb repo auctions we find that this market appears to be informationally efficient in the sense that participants do not have private information about future short term rates however auction allocations affect banks subsequent behavior in a way that is consistent with a degree of allocational and operational inefficiency also large bidders appear to have better access to the interbank market than small ones finally the evidence suggests that the ecb uses collateral haircuts that do not equilibrate opportunity costs

protecting the winner second price versus oral auctions abstract in oral auctions unlike sealed bid second price auctions the winner never reveals his reservation price we investigate bidders strategies in the two auctions when third parties can exploit information revealed by the auction when exploitation is likely oral auctions are more efficient than sealed bid second price auctions and preferred by all participants

real wages over the business cycle evidence from panel data one topic on which keynes did not disagree with classical economists was the cyclical behavior of real wages keynes 1936 as well as various classical writers predicted that real wages should move countercyclically quoting the general theory p 17 in general an increase in employment can only occur through the accompaniment of a decline in real wages thus i am not disputing this vital fact which the classical economists have rightly asserted as indefeasible this prediction is based on the premise of competition and a given short run capital stock increases in employment then correspond to more intensive use of capital and through diminishing product lower real wages for this reason evidence by dunlop 1938 and tarshis 1939 that real wages move procyclically was viewed as paradoxical both dunlop and tarshis based their findings on an observed positive correlation between real and money wages which given the procyclical movement of money wages implies a positive correlation between

optimal sequential auctions sequential sealed first price and open descending price procurement auctions are studied we examine which procurement auction rule achieves the low procurement cost we show that the answer to this policy question depends on whether the items are complements or substitutes with substitutes the first price procurement auction is preferred while with complements the open descending price procurement auction is preferred we also illustrate the procurement cost minimizing auction and the auction rule preferred by the bidders with substitutes bidders prefer the open descending price procurement auction while with complements bidders prefer the first price procurement auction

real wage cyclicality in urban china abstract this paper investigates the cyclical behaviour of real wages in urban china we find wage pro cyclicality in the public sector and in small medium firms but not in the private sector and in big firms

cyclicality of real wages among young men abstract this paper analyzes the cyclical behavior of real wages received by the young men in the national longitudinal surveys of labor market experience it extends the studies by bils journal of political economy 1985 93 666 689 and tremblay quarterly review of economics and business 1990 30 90 101 by using the full duration of the survey and by examining differences in wage cyclicality across industries and between workers that change employers and those that stay with the same employer

overbidding and inefficiencies in multi unit vickrey auctions for normal goods abstract i examine bid behavior in uniform price auctions and multi unit vickrey auctions without the standard quasilinearity restriction on bidder preferences instead of assuming quasilinearity i assume that bidders have weakly positive wealth effects i e the goods are normal goods my setting nests quasilinearity but also allows for budget constraints financial constraints and risk aversion i show that without the quasilinearity restriction truthful reporting is not a dominant strategy in the vickrey auction instead bidders truthfully demand for their first unit and weakly overreport their demand for later units the incentive to overreport demand means that the vickrey auction is generally inefficient this mirrors the well known demand reduction results in uniform price auctions moreover the efficiency ranking of the two auctions is ambiguous in fact there are cases where the uniform price auction is pareto efficient and the vickrey auction is pareto inefficient even if only one bidder has non quasilinear preferences

comparing the spanish and the discriminatory auction formats a discrete model with private information abstract the spanish treasury is the only treasury in the world that uses a hybrid system of discriminatory and uniform price auctions to sell government debt winning bidders pay their bid price for each unit if this is lower than the weighted average price of winning bids wap and pay the wap otherwise following gordy gordy m 1996 multiple bids in a multiple unit common value auction board of governors of the federal reserve system we model the spanish auction as a common value auction of multiple units with private information allowing for multiple bids numerical analysis shows that bidders spread their bids more in the spanish than in the discriminatory auction and bid higher for the first unit and that the expected seller s revenue is higher in the spanish than in the discriminatory auction within a reasonable set of parameter values

an efficient dynamic auction for heterogeneous commodities this paper proposes a new dynamic design for auctioning multiple heterogeneous commodities generalizing earlier work that treated identical objects an auctioneer wishes to allocate one or more units of each of k heterogeneous commodities to n bidders the auctioneer announces a vector of current prices bidders report back quantities demanded at these prices and the auctioneer adjusts the prices units are credited to bidders at the current prices as their opponents demands decline and the process continues until every commodity market clears bidders rather than being required to behave as price takers are permitted to strategically exercise their market power nevertheless with pure private values the proposed auction yields walrasian equilibrium prices an efficient outcome results as from a vickrey clarke groves mechanism but bidders are only required to evaluate their demands along a one dimensional path of prices rather than reporting their utilities over the entire k dimensional consumption set the auction is also more transparent and potentially simpler for bidders to understand and has the advantage of assuring the privacy of the upper portions of bidders demands theoretically the new auction provides a new foundation for convergence to walrasian equilibrium in an exchange economy practically it provides an efficient method for simultaneously auctioning two or more related types of securities for example three month and six month treasury bills it is also potentially useful for auctioning multiple types of communications spectrum for example licenses for paired and unpaired spectrum

auctions with variable supply uniform price versus discriminatory abstract we examine an auction in which the seller determines the supply after observing the bids we compare the uniform price and the discriminatory auction in a setting of supply uncertainty where uncertainty is caused by the interplay of two factors the seller s private information about marginal cost and the seller s incentive to sell the profit maximizing quantity given the received bids in every symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium bidders submit higher bids in the uniform price auction than in the discriminatory auction in the two bidder case this result extends to the set of rationalizable strategies as a consequence we find that the uniform price auction generates a higher expected revenue for the seller and a higher trade volume

5 information impact and allocation rules in auctions with affiliated private values a laboratory study in affiliated private value auctions each bidder has perfect information regarding his her own value for the object at auction but higher values of the item for one bidder make higher values for other bidders more likely we report on a series of experiments examining three key implications of these auctions i in a first price auction public information about rivals values increases expected revenue ii an english auction increases expected revenue compared to a first price auction and iii a second price auction is isomorphic to an english auction in examining these issues we compare predictions of some ad hoc bidding models with nash equilibrium predictions in the first price auction experiments nash equilibrium bidding theory organizes the data better than either of two ad hoc bidding models public information about others valuations does increase average revenue but the increase in revenue is smaller and less reliable than predicted under risk neutral nash equilibrium bidding lower average revenue might be attributed to risk aversion while the high variability is attributed to a sizable frequency of individual bidding errors relative to the theory bidding theory precisely organizes english auction outcomes after a brief initial learning period the dominant strategy equilibrium does not organize second price auctions nearly as well as market prices persistently exceed predicted prices the difference between english and second price outcomes is attributed to effects of different information flows inherent in the structure of the two institutions on eliminating bidding errors revenue impacts of these two institutions relative to a first price auction are examined in light of observed bidding patterns

the effect of false name bids in combinatorial auctions new fraud in internet auctions we examine the effect of false name bids on combinatorial auction protocols false name bids are bids submitted by a single bidder using multiple identifiers such as multiple e mail addresses the obtained results are summarized as follows 1 the vickrey clarke groves vcg mechanism which is strategy proof and pareto efficient when there exists no false name bid is not falsename proof 2 there exists no false name proof combinatorial auction protocol that satisfies pareto efficiency 3 one sufficient condition where the vcg mechanism is false name proof is identified i e the concavity of a surplus function over bidders

an econometric framework for evaluating the efficiency of a market for transmission congestion contracts abstract the goals of this paper are to 1 simulate the ex ante riskiness of purchasing a tcc and 2 evaluate the efficiency of the tcc market in new york state to determine if there is evidence of under pricing three var models are estimated using only market data available before the auction this model is then used to simulate the daily payouts of a tcc for the following summer a monte carlo procedure simulates the daily summer temperatures the levels of quantity demanded and prices over the summer months the main empirical result is that the market price paid for the most important tcc in terms of volume the hudson valley to new york city is higher than the mean of the simulated payouts even though the actual payout was higher than the market price the market prices for the other two tccs are lower than the means of the simulated payouts and as a result there is no consistent evidence of under pricing in this analysis of the market for six month tccs in the summer of 2006

explaining procyclical male female wage gaps abstract our analysis based on the national longitudinal survey of youth for the 1978 1999 period concludes that men s greater representation in cyclical occupational groups such as craftsmen operatives and laborers more than accounts for the gap between men and women in the cyclicality of real wages

market performance and bidders bidding behavior in the new york transmission congestion contract market abstract using publicly available bidder level bids data for transmission congestion contracts tccs and the realized awards of tccs in the nyiso monthly reconfiguration auctions from june 2000 to december 2004 we examine both market performance and bidders bidding behavior in the auctions the data show significant under pricing in the realized awards of tccs theories suggest that under pricing may arise from risk aversion monopsonistic market power or winner s curse our empirical analysis illustrates that all of the three effects play a role in the nyiso tccs market both market performance and bidders bidding strategies can be best explained by the theoretical model with asymmetric information and risk averse bidders

on strategic quantity bidding in multiple unit auctions standard studies of multiple unit auctions generally overlook the strategic role of bidders quantity decisions using a simple equilibrium model of bidding the author analyzes bidders incentives to choose quantities in discriminatory and competitive auctions the main result is that bidders have a stronger strategic incentive to bid for fewer units in competitive auctions since under competition a bidder pays the lowest accepted price for each unit she gets she may benefit from dropping her quantity to let lower valuing bidders enter the set of winners this prediction is consistent with empirical observations from foreign currency and spectrum auctions copyright 1997 by blackwell publishing ltd

cohort effects in promotions and wages evidence from sweden and the united states abstract this paper studies the long term effects of the business cycle on workers future promotions and wages using the swedish employer employee matched data we find that a cohort of workers entering the labor market during a boom gets promoted faster and reaches higher ranks this procyclical promotion cohort effect persists even after controlling for workers initial jobs and explains at least half of the wage cohort effects that previous studies have focused on we repeat the same analyses using personnel records from a single u s company and obtain the same qualitative results

an empirical study of auction revenue rankings the case of municipal bonds using a novel dataset of 386 rst price municipal bond auctions held in california i perform counterfactual revenue comparisons based on the theoretical result of milgrom and weber 1982 i show that the revenue in the second price auction is non parametrically identi ed and the counterfactual revenue in the english auction can be bounded in an informative way these results form a

opening and closing the market evidence from the london stock exchange we investigate the performance of call markets at the open and close using a unique natural experiment provided by the london stock exchange where traders can choose between a call and an off exchange dealership system although the call market dominates dealers in terms of price discovery it suffers from a high failure rate to open and close trading especially when trading conditions are difficult the call s trading costs increase with asymmetric information slow trading order flow imbalances and uncertainty traders resort to use of call auctions is negatively correlated with firm size implying that the call may not be the optimal method for opening and closing trading of medium and small sized stocks

hedging winner s curse with multiple bids evidence from the portuguese treasury bill auction auctions of government securities typically permit bidders to enter multiple price quantity bids despite the widespread adoption of this institutional feature and its use by bidders the motivations behind its use and its effects on auction outcomes are not well understood theoretically and have been little explored empirically this paper proposes that bidders use multiple bids to adjust for winner s curse by spreading her bids a bidder aligns her outcome more closely to the aggregate outcome of the auction this hypothesis is tested using bidding data from treasury bill auctions in portugal i find that ceteris paribus a bidder submits a greater number of bids and disperses prices on these bids more widely when there is a greater potential for winner s curse in particular both these measures of bid spreading increase with the volatility of market interest rates and the expected number of participating well informed bidders

an efficient ascending bid auction for multiple objects when bidders exhibit multi unit demands standard auction methods generally yield inefficient outcomes this article proposes a new ascending bid auction for homogeneous goods such as treasury bills or telecommunications spectrum the auctioneer announces a price and bidders respond with quantities items are awarded at the current price whenever they are clinched and the price is incremented until the market clears with private values this dynamic auction yields the same outcome as the sealed bid vickrey auction but has advantages of simplicity and privacy preservation with interdependent values this auction may retain efficiency whereas the vickrey auction suffers from a generalized winner s curse

bidding behavior in sequential cattle auctions the objectives of this study are to investigate the institutional speciflcs of sequential cattle auctions and their role as determinants of prices institutional speciflcs are the order of sale according to quality a secret reserve price bidders multi unit demand and difierent types of bidders prices decline and bidders with a higher demand pay on average lower prices the estimation results show that declining prices are caused by the order of sale according to quality and the secret reserve price the results further show that bidders take the strategic efiect of sequential auctions and multi unit demand into account

mechanism choice and strategic bidding in divisible good auctions an empirical analysis of the turkish treasury auction market we propose an estimation method to bound bidders marginal valuations in discriminatory auctions using individual bid level data and apply the method to data from the turkish treasury auction market using estimated bounds on marginal values we compute an upper bound on the inefficiency of realized allocations as well as bounds on how much additional revenue could have been realized in a counterfactual uniform price or vickrey auction we conclude that switching from a discriminatory auction to a uniform price or vickrey auction would not significantly increase revenue moreover such a switch would increase bidder expected surplus by at most 0 02 percent

erratum to the uniform price auction with endogenous supply abstract this paper shows that low price equilibria in the uniform price auction with endogenous supply do not exist if the seller employs the proportional rationing rule and is consistent when selecting among profit maximizing quantities in a consistent subgame perfect equilibrium the walrasian quantities are traded at the walrasian price

strategic trading behavior and price distortion in a manipulated market anatomy of a squeeze abstract this paper investigates an attempted delivery squeeze in a bond futures contract traded in london using cash and futures trades of dealers and customers we analyze their strategic trading behavior price distortion and learning in a market manipulation setting we argue that marked differences in settlement failure penalties in the cash and futures markets create conditions that favor squeezes we recommend that regulators require special flagging of forward term repurchase agreements on the key deliverables that span futures contract maturity dates and that exchanges mark to market their contract specifications more frequently or consider a cash settled contract on a basket of bonds

real wage cyclicality of job stayers within company job movers and between company job movers using the british new earnings survey panel data nespd for the period 1975 to 2001 we estimate the wage cyclicality of job stayers those remaining within single jobs in a given company within company job movers and between company job movers we also examine how the proportion of internal and external job moves varies over the business cycle we find that the wages of internal movers are slightly more procyclical and wages of external movers considerably more procyclical than those of stayers notwithstanding a decomposition shows that in britain wage cyclicality arises almost entirely from the procyclicality of wages for job stayers with across and within firm mobility playing a lesser role thus there is little evidence for rigid wage models that imply that employers use changes in job titles as a means of adjusting wages to the business cycle we also show that the distinctions between private and public sectors and between workers covered and uncovered by collective agreements have important impacts on the wage estimates of both stayers and movers

the internal economics of the firm evidence from personnel data we analyze twenty years of personnel data from one firm the hierarchical structure is quite simple and stable career movements suggest that the employee s rate of learning and the firm s learning about ability are important there are promotion fast tracks exit rates vary little with tenure or salary the firm has personnel policies like those described in the internal labor markets literature although several theoretical preconditions for ilms such as ports of entry and exit are lacking job levels are important to compensation but there is also substantial individual variation in pay within levels our companion paper in this issue explores the wage policy of this firm

the cyclicality of real wages within employer employee matches using data from the panel study of income dynamics the author examines the cyclicality of wages within employer employee matches for the years 1970 91 recent research on wage cyclicality has suggested that wages are very procyclical tending to rise and fall with economic upturns and downturns even for workers who remain with the same employer the author finds however that the evidence for wage procyclicality within the matches he examines is rather weak except for the small group of workers who were paid by piece rate or commissions despite having acyclical wage rates men who were paid hourly had earnings movements that were very procyclical salaries exhibited little cyclicality but salaried workers who had income sources from bonuses commissions or overtime had procyclical earnings the results suggest that the increasing prevalence of incentive based pay will increase the procyclicality of wages within matches

quantitative easing auctions of treasury bonds abstract the federal reserve uses reverse auctions to implement its purchases of treasury bonds in quantitative easing qe to evaluate dealers offers across multiple bonds the fed relies on its internal yield curve model fitted to secondary market bond prices from november 2010 to september 2011 a one standard deviation increase in the cheapness of a treasury bond how much the market price of the bond is below a model implied value increases the fed s purchase quantity of that bond by 276 million and increases the auction costs on that bond by 2 6 cents per 100 par value controlling for standard covariates our results suggest that the fed harvests gains from trades by purchasing undervalued bonds but strategic dealers extract some profits because the fed s relative values can be partly inferred from price data

a dominant strategy asset market mechanism abstract asset markets institutions that reallocate goods among agents with heterogeneous endowments demands and valuations abound in the real world but have received little attention in mechanism and market design assuming constant marginal private values and known endowments and maximum demands we provide a detail free dominant strategy asset market mechanism that allocates efficiently or close to efficiently respects traders individual rationality constraints ex post and never runs a deficit if it does not allocate efficiently it sacrifices the trades that under efficiency would involve the lowest value trader who efficiently would be allocated a positive amount the mechanism always allocates the quantity traded efficiently and permits clock implementation as the market becomes large the mechanism s efficiency loss converges to zero under natural conditions

the english auction with differentiated commodities abstract we study economies with indivisibilities that satisfy the gross substitutes gs condition we define an excess demand set with the property that increasing the prices of all goods in excess demand eventually leads to the smallest walrasian prices this procedure is a generalization of the auction studied by g demange d gale and m j sotomayor polit econ 94 1986 863 872 in our auction truthful revelation of demand is a perfect bayesian equilibrium if the smallest walrasian prices correspond to the vickrey clarke groves payments however no dynamic auction can reveal sufficient information to implement the vickrey mechanism if all gs preferences are allowed journal of economic literature classification numbers d4 d44 d5 d51

gender time use and change this article uses survey data from ecuador to examine the effects of women s employment on the allocation of paid and unpaid labor within the household i compare a region with high demand for female labor with a similar region in which demand for female labor is low the comparison suggests that market labor opportunities for women have no effect on women s total time in labor but increase men s time in unpaid labor the increase in men s time in unpaid work reflects women s increased bargaining power in the home

auctions of divisible goods with endogenous supply abstract uniform price auctions are studied in which the seller may cancel part of the supply after observing the bids this feature eliminates many of the collusive seeming equilibria of the auction in equilibrium the seller always sells the full quantity

an efficient multi unit ascending auction we provide an ascending auction that yields an e cient outcome when there are many identical units for sale and bidders have interdependent values and downward sloping demand our ascending auction both extends and generalizes ausubel s 1997 and yields the same outcome as perry and reny s 2000 generalization of vickrey s 1961 sealed bid auction there are two key components to our auction bidders are permitted both to

a comparison of the cyclical behavior of union and nonunion wages in the united states this paper presents an extensive analysis of the behavior of union and nonunion wages over the business cycle using quasi panels developed from the current population survey in an attempt to resolve or reconcile competing claims about the cyclical behavior of union and nonunion wages union wages were roughly as procyclical as nonunion wages were prior to the early 1980s substantial reductions in union wage procyclicality since then are associated with reductions in the procyclical exercise of bargaining power

bidder behavior in multiunit auctions evidence from swedish treasury auctions we analyze a unique data set on multiunit auctions which contains the actual demand schedules of the bidders as well as the auction awards in over 400 swedish treasury auctions first we document that bidders vary their prices bid dispersion and the quantity demanded in response to increased uncertainty at the time of bidding second we find that bid shading can be explained by a winner s curse driven model in which each bidder submits only one bid despite the fact that the bidders in our data set use much richer bidding strategies third we explore the extent to which the received theories of multiunit auctions are able to offer insights into the bidder behavior we observe our empirical evidence is consistent with some of the predictions of the models of auctions that emphasize private information the winner s curse and the champion s plague while the models of multiunit auctions serve as useful guideposts our empirical findings also point to several new areas of research in multiunit auctions

auction institutional design theory and behavior of simultaneous multiple unit generalizations of the dutch and english auctions historically english and dutch auctions have been used for the exchange of single objects such as works of art or single lots of a good such as produce fish or cut flowers where these institutions have been used for the exchange of multiple units such as the australian wool auction using english rules successive lots of the good are sometimes sold sequentially at auction in some but not all instances this is because the goods are not identical even though the various lots may be close substitutes see penny burns 1985 where the goods are accepted universally as being homogeneous as in the securities markets multiple units are often commonly auctioned simultaneously in the securities industry orders are batched for simultaneous execution in multiple unit auctions in what are referred to as call markets that is the security is called for auction at a particular point in time this type of market is used on the stock exchanges of austria belgium france germany and israel some of these are verbal and some are sealed bid auctions although the u s organized exchanges are predominantly continuous rather than call markets except that call markets are used each day to open trading in each listed security there is a growing number of exceptions such as the proliferation since 1984 of auction preferred stock goldman sachs and co october 1984 and money market preferred stock lehman brothers july 1984 we now have dutch auction rate transferable securities called darts stated rate auction preferred stock or straps and many more after the initial subscription offering of this type of security the market is called every 49 days to reset the preferred dividend rate using a multiple unit auction the exchange of shares and the dividend determination is based on the array of stated dividend rates at which existing holders and potential new holders are willing to sell and or buy corresponding quantities the dividend rate and exchange of shares every 49 days is executed using the uniform price or competitive sealed bid mechanism vernon l smith et al 1980 the discussion to follow will be confined to this sealed bid form of the call market call markets provide temporal consolidation of trade orders or other forms of expressing the desire to buy and sell by comparison with continuous trading call markets offer both advantages and disadvantages robert a schwartz 1988 pp 442 6 the cited advantages include low cost of operating the exchange information aggregation and presumed pricing efficiency price stability individual trades which are thought to have a small impact on price reduced price uncertainty and finally nondiscriminatory pricing however there are offsetting disadvantages 1 the market is inaccessible except at the time of call 2 no bid offer contract or price information is available until the results of the call are announced and 3 there is transaction uncertainty because a submitted bid offer may be too low high to execute inside the supply demand cross these conditions are only partially alleviated if there is a secondary market between calls these disadvantages may be significant in september 1988 the wall street journal published an article on the failure of a call market for the auction rate preferred stock economic science laboratory university of arizona tucson arizona this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation under grant no ses 8320121

the uniform price auction with endogenous supply abstract this paper shows that low price equilibria in the uniform price auction with endogenous supply do not exist if the seller employs the proportional rationing rule and is consistent when selecting among profit maximizing quantities in a consistent subgame perfect equilibrium the walrasian quantities are traded at the walrasian price

worker job matches job mobility and real wage cyclicality using the british new earnings survey panel data nespd this paper examines male and female real wage cyclicality over the period 1975 2001 estimation is undertaken separately for job stayers and job movers stayers are defined with respect to single jobs within the company while movers refers to individuals changing jobs both within and between companies core estimates concern real hourly standard wage rates additional features include differentiating between manual and non manual workers and distinguishing between hourly wage rates and hourly wage earnings

task assignment over the business cycle in this article i evaluate the hypothesis that firms respond to negative demand shocks by assigning workers to tasks that require less skill than the tasks they normally carry out using changes in employment in state industry cells as a measure of demand conditions facing individual firms i provide evidence in favor of the hypothesis furthermore the skill requirements of the tasks carried out by workers are procyclical the results are consistent with a specific capital model where employers move workers between tasks so that layoffs are concentrated on workers with low levels of firm specific human capital

the economics of missing markets information and games part 1 out of equilibrium beliefs and out of equilibrium behaviour david m kreps the role of common knowledge assumptions in game theory adam brandenburger and eddie dekel repeated games a survey h sabourian information dynamics and equilibrium frank hahn part 2 the economics of parallel research partha dasgupta strategy variables and theories of industrial organization christopher doyle bargaining theory david canning imperfect competition and international trade k gatsios part 3 missing markets consequences and remedies david m newberry rational expectations information and asset markets margaret bray decision making in the presence of risk mark j machina part 4 theoretical modelling of banks and bank runs luca anderlini optimal multi unit auctions eric maskin and john riley labour contract theory tim worrall part 5 intertemporal general equilibrium models timothy j kehoe sunspots stephen burnell an introduction to nonlinear dynamics and its application to economics david kelsey part 6 some micro and macro implications of inventories j p thomas keynes s liquidity preference theory a suggested reinterpretation louis makowski

implementing efficient multi object auction institutions an experimental study of the performance of boundedly rational agents abstract we study three alternative implementations of the vickrey multi unit demand auction vickrey s original static sealed bid auction and two dynamic ausubel auctions with and without public dropout information reported during the auction although implemented by a weaker solution concept behavior in the dynamic vickrey auction with the public dropout information comes significantly closer to the theoretical prediction of sincere bidding bidding one s valuations than either the static vickrey auction or the dynamic auction without dropout information this suggests a possible tradeoff between the simplicity and transparency of a mechanism and the strength of its solution concept when agents are still learning and or when players are not fully rational drawing on results from related single unit and multi unit demand auctions and the results of a new single unit demand auction experiment we provide important insights into the behavioral mechanism underlying the superior performance of the ausubel auction with feedback information

auctions and bidding a primer maybe the contractor was right to think bid jobs are different but it is more likely that he suffered from too simple a view of what is involved in preparing a competitive bid our analysis will show that even an experienced estimator working in familiar terrain can lose money if he doesn t understand the subtleties of competitive bidding the phenomenon experienced by the painting contractor known as the winner s curse is just one of the surprising and puzzling conclusions that have been turned up by modern research into auctions another is the theoretical proposition supported also by some experimental evidence that for example a sealed bid treasury bill auction in which each buyer pays a price equal to the highest rejected bid would yield more revenue to the treasury than the current procedure in which the winning bidder pays the seemingly higher amount equal to his own bid there are also subtle results that demonstrate the equivalence of such apparently different institutions as the standard sealed bid auction in which the auctioneer seller sells the goods to the highest bidder for a price equal to his bid and the dutch auction in which the auctioneer seller begins by asking a high price and gradually lowers the price until

competitive equilibrium in an exchange economy with indivisibilities abstract we analyze an exchange economy in which i all commodities except money are indivisible ii agents preferences can be described by a reservation value for each bundle of indivisible objects and iii all agents are price takers we obtain a necessary and sufficient condition under which market clearing prices exist implications for market mechanisms are discussed journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d51 c78

financial asset demand is elastic evidence from new issues of federal home loan bank debt abstract we estimate the slope of the demand curve for newly auctioned fhlb discount notes and investigate the impacts of arbitrage risk and heterogeneity of investor beliefs on demand elasticity our unique dataset of roughly 2900 observations of two price quantity pairs the first from a pre auction dealer survey the second from actual auction results provides the quantity shift necessary to identify demand in contrast to previous findings of downward sloping demand curves for equities we show that demand for newly issued fhlb notes is nearly perfectly elastic during normal market conditions we find however that frictions like arbitrage risk and to a lesser extent heterogeneity of investor beliefs negatively affect elasticity and explain the nearly 50 drop in elasticity observed during the recent financial crisis

multi item auctions a collection of items is to be distributed among several bidders and each bidder is to receive at most one item assuming that the bidders place some monetary value on each of the items it has been shown that there is a unique vector of equilibrium prices that is optimal in a suitable sense for the bidders in this paper we describe two dynamic auction mechanisms one achieves this equilibrium and the other approximates it to any desired degree of accuracy

discriminatory versus uniform treasury auctions evidence from when issued transactions abstract we use when issued transactions data to assess the treasury s current experiment with uniform auctions when issued volume is higher under uniform as compared to discriminatory auctions suggesting a higher information release which should reduce pre auction uncertainty and the winner s curse under uniform auctions when issued volatility falls after the auction and again after the outcome announcement the pattern is the opposite for discriminatory auctions this is further evidence that uniform auctions increase pre auction information and lower the short squeeze a direct comparison of markups in uniform and discriminatory auctions yields mixed results

the impact of public information on bidding in highway procurement auctions a number of papers in the theoretical auction literature show that the release of information regarding the seller s valuation of an item can cause bidders to bid more aggressively this widely accepted result in auction theory remains largely untested in the empirical literature recent theoretical work has also shown that this effect can be more pronounced in auctions with larger common cost uncertainty we examine the impact of a policy change by the oklahoma department of transportation that led to the release of the state s internal estimate of the costs to complete highway construction projects we perform a differences in differences analysis comparing bidding in texas a state that had a uniform policy of revealing the same information all throughout the period of analysis to bidding in oklahoma our results show that in comparison to texas auctions the average bid in oklahoma fell after the change in engineers cost estimate ece policy this decline in bids was even larger for projects where the common uncertainty in costs is greater moreover the within auction standard deviation of bids fell after the change in ece policy with the most significant decline observed again in projects with greater common cost uncertainty

efficient sequential bargaining suppose that a seller and a buyer have private valuations for a good and that their respective utilities from a trading mechanism are given by us and ub these utilities are determined by the valuation for the good by whether a trade occurs and by the price which is paid consider the problem of maximizing e us 1 ub for some weight in the unit interval it is shown in this article that if is sufficiently close to zero or one then the maximum value of this objective function attainable by a static revelation mechanism can be arbitrarily closely approximated by equilibria of the sequential bargaining games in which only a single player makes offers that is the welfare bound implied by the revelation principle is virtually attainable in offer counteroffer bargaining the main condition needed for this result is a monotone hazard rate assumption about the distribution of types a class of examples is presented in which the result holds for all i e the entire ex ante pareto frontier

trends in the well being of american women 1970 1995 this paper examines the trends in the well being of american women over the last 25 years a time of significant changes in the relative economic status of women and in the labor market as a whole a broad range of indicators are considered to capture changes in women s well being in the family as well as in the labor market for virtually all age and education groups substantial evidence is obtained of rising gender equality in labor market outcomes notably labor force participation wages and occupational distributions broad evidence is also found of greater gender parity within married couple families as the housework time of husbands increased relative to wives and the relative wages of wives rose compared to their husbands however parallel to the recent evidence of the declining labor market position of lower skilled men there has been a similar deterioration in the economic status of less educated women especially high school dropouts their labor force participation rates and wages have risen at a much slower pace than those of more highly educated women while their incidence of single headship has increased much more rapidly these findings for less educated women serve to underscore the widening gap between more and less skilled americans of both sexes as well as to emphasize its broad dimensions

some evidence on the winner s curse comment the theory of auctions has developed extensively since robert b wilson s 1977 seminal paper due to the complexity of equilibrium strategies however empirical researchers have been slow to incorporate and test the most basic theoretical precepts typical empirical studies estimate ad hoc bidding models with no attempt to ascertain whether the implied behaviors are theoretically plausible the recent paper by stuart e thiel 1988 attempts to bridge this gap thiel obtains closed form equilibrium bidding functions that are theoretically motivated and linear in parameters and which facilitate empirical estimation and testing if widely applicable thiel s empirical approach would constitute a major methodological breakthrough unfortunately thiel s approach applies only in special cases that are of limited practical interest linear bidding strategies emerge only under circumstances that are unlikely in the real world the limited range of thiel s approach may not be apparent to casual readers of his paper even when linear strategies do exist they are not unique under the special assumptions of thiel s model for each nash equilibrium in linear strategies there exists a related family of nonlinear strategies thus further justification must be found for basing empirical research on the linear specification we also note a significant error in thiel s work the symmetric strategies he derives on the basis of order statistics do not constitute a nash equilibrium we derive proper expressions for the symmetric nash strategies and discuss a specification error in thiel s regression analysis that would account for the mixed results obtained in his application to the highway construction industry

forward looking behavior in ecb liquidity auctions evidence from the pre crisis period abstract using data from the pre crisis period we investigate banks joint bidding behavior in the ecb s main refinancing operations mro and longer term refinancing operations ltro we test whether banks bid at lower rates in mros before the ltro and at higher rates after the ltro compared to other operations we motivate this by findings from the auction literature suggesting that agents bidding behavior is forward looking and takes sequences of future auctions into account we offer two findings first we find that in general banks bid in the mro before the ltro at lower rates as compared to other mros moreover mro participants that also bid in the following ltro bid at even lower rates compared to peers not bidding in the ltro these findings support the hypothesis that banks view obtaining liquidity from the two operations as a substitute second we find that banks generally bid more aggressively in the mro after the ltro banks that participated also in the ltro preceding the mro bid at substantially higher rates these findings reflect that short banks with potentially large net liquidity needs in the mro after the ltro bid more aggressively although size plays a considerable role for bidding behavior the conclusions are valid for banks of different sizes

anomalies the winner s curse abstract next time that you find yourself a little short of cash for lunch try the following experiment in your class take a jar and fill it with coins noting the total value of the coins now a

pricing and allocation for quality differentiated online services we explore the problem of pricing and allocation of unique one time digital products in the form of data streams we look at the short term problem where the firm has a capacitated shared resource and multiple products or service levels we formulate the allocatively efficient generalized vickrey auction gva for our setting and point out the computational challenges in determining the individual discriminatory transfer payments we propose an alternative uniform price computationally efficient revenue maximizing knapsack formulation called the multiple vickrey auction mva while not incentive compatible the mva mechanism achieves bounded posterior regret and can be solved in real time it has the added benefit of realizing imputed commodity prices for the various services a feature lacking in the discriminatory gva approach for service providers that are concerned about the incentive compatibility but want imputed service prices we suggest a maximal mva mmva uniform pricing scheme that trades off revenue maximization for allocative efficiency for sake of completeness we discuss the properties of a first price pay your bid scheme while np hard and not incentive compatible this formulation has the perceived benefit of cognitive simplicity on the parts of sellers and bidders

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

information returns and bidding behavior in ocs auctions 1954 1969 this paper examines federal auctions for leases on the outer continental shelf in the light of the predictions of the first price sealed bid common values model of auctions the authors find that the data strongly support the model for auctions in which one bidder is better informed than the other bidders the evidence for auctions in which bidders have noisy but qualitatively similar information is less conclusive but is consistent with a model in which each bidder does not know either the actual or potential number of bidders on a lease copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

low revenue equilibria in simultaneous ascending bid auctions low revenue equilibria allow participants in an auction to obtain goods at prices lower than would prevail in a competitive market these outcomes are generated as perfect equilibria of ascending bid multiunit auctions we show that these equilibria are possible under mild conditions conditions that are likely to prevail in many situations where auction formats have recently been adopted we argue that these equilibria could explain the low revenues of some recent auctions and discuss potential remedies to eliminate low revenue equilibria

the beveridge curve a survey important progress has been made in economists understanding of the beveridge curve from its measurement to its expression in canonical labor market models yet enduring puzzles remain chief among these are the empirical role of vacancies in the recruitment process the amplitude comovement and persistence of cyclical unemployment vacancy dynamics and the sources of lateral shifts in the beveridge curve the synthesis of these themes identifies several priorities for ongoing research including the role of entry costs into vacancy creation in shaping beveridge dynamics the cyclicality of search intensity both off and on the job and its relation to participation and job to job transitions the theory and measurement of mismatch and the sources of hysteresis in unemployment flows