optimal pricing of intraday liquidity abstract this paper presents a general equilibrium model where intraday liquidity is needed because the timing of payments is uncertain a necessary and sufficient condition for an equilibrium to be efficient is that the nominal intraday interest rate be zero even when the overnight rate is strictly positive because a market for liquidity may not achieve efficiency this creates a role for the central bank i allow for the possibility of moral hazard and study policies commonly used by central banks to reduce their exposure to risk i show collateralized lending achieves the efficient allocation while for certain parameters caps cannot prevent moral hazard

remittances from international migration a comparison of el salvador and nicaragua i use household data from el salvador and nicaragua to examine the determinants of remittances from international migration nearly twice as many households in san salvador the capital of el salvador receive remittances from relatives abroad than do households in managua the capital of nicaragua and of those who receive remittances the average remittances received in san salvador is over double that in managua 119 month to 45 month the difference is explained by differences in the behavioral coefficients and by differences in the self selection bias of those who remit out of the pool of emigrants between the two countries excerpt

an efficiency theorem for incompletely known preferences there are n agents who have von neumann morgenstern utility functions on a finite set of alternatives a each agent i s utility function is known to lie in the nonempty convex relatively open set ui suppose l is a lottery on a that is undominated meaning that there is no other lottery that is guaranteed to pareto dominate l no matter what the true utility functions are then there exist utility functions ui ui for which l is pareto efficient this result includes the ordinal efficiency welfare theorem as a special case

on the existence of a strictly strong nash equilibrium under the student optimal deferred acceptance algorithm abstract this study analyzes a preference revelation game in the student optimal deferred acceptance algorithm in a college admission problem we assume that each college s true preferences are known publicly and analyze the strategic behavior of students we demonstrate the existence of a strictly strong nash equilibrium in the preference revelation game through a simple algorithm that finds it specifically i the equilibrium outcome from our algorithm is the same matching as in the efficiency adjusted deferred acceptance algorithm and ii in a one to one matching market it coincides with the student optimal von neumann morgenstern vnm stable matching we also show that i when a strict core allocation in a housing market derived from a college admission market exists it can be supported by a strictly strong nash equilibrium and ii there exists a strictly strong nash equilibrium under the college optimal deferred acceptance algorithm if and only if the student optimal stable matching is pareto efficient for students

optimality of the friedman rule in an overlapping generations model with spatial separation recent models with spatial separation and limited communication suggest that the friedman rule may not be optimal this is important in light of the disparity between theory and practice concerning optimal monetary policy we take a close look at these models and show that intergenerational transfers are key to the suboptimality of the friedman rule the friedman rule is a necessary condition for achieving the efficient allocation in equilibrium we also show that the friedman rule is chosen whenever agents can implement mutually beneficial arrangements

why does overnight liquidity cost more than intraday liquidity abstract in this paper we argue that the observed difference in the cost of intraday and overnight liquidity is part of an optimal payments system design in our environment overnight liquidity affects output while intraday liquidity affects only the distribution of resources between money holders and non money holders the low cost of intraday liquidity is explained by the friedman rule the optimal cost differential achieves the twin objective of reducing the incentive to overuse money at night and encouraging payment risk sharing during the day

an overlapping generations model for monetary policy analysis abstract we integrate an overlapping generations structure into the standard lagos and wright 2005 framework and show that mild inflation can be welfare improving the reason behind this result is that inflation induces young agents to reduce their savings and to increase their consumption which overpowers the utility loss of old agents however the beneficial effect disappears for higher inflation rates such that the optimal inflation rate is one at an intermediate level

research design meets market design using centralized assignment for impact evaluation a growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed the resulting random assignment opens the door to credible quasi experimental research designs for the evaluation of school effectiveness yet the question of how best to separate the lottery generated randomization integral to such designs from non random preferences and priorities remains open this paper develops easily implemented empirical strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded in a wide class of mechanisms while also revealing why seats are randomized at one school but not another we use these methods to evaluate charter schools in denver one of a growing number of districts that combine charter and traditional public schools in a unified assignment system the resulting estimates show large achievement gains from charter school attendance our approach generates efficiency gains over ad hoc methods such as those that focus on schools ranked first while also identifying a more representative average causal effect we also show how to use centralized assignment mechanisms to identify causal effects in models with multiple school sectors

on two competing mechanisms for priority based allocation problems we consider the priority based allocation problem there is a set of indivisible objects with multiple supplies e g schools with seats and a set of agents e g students with priorities over objects e g proximity of residence area we study two well known and competing mechanisms the agentoptimal stable mechanism aosm allots objects via the deferred acceptance algorithm the top trading cycles mechanism ttcm allots objects via gale s top trading cycles algorithm we show that the two mechanisms are equivalent or ttcm is fair i e respects agents priorities or resource monotonic o rpopulation monotonic if and only if the priority structure is acyclic furthermore if aosm fails to be efficient consistent for a problem ttcm also fails to be fair consistent for it however the converse is not necessarily true

boston versus deferred acceptance in an interim setting an experimental investigation abstract while much of the school choice literature advocates strategyproofness recent research has aimed to improve efficiency using mechanisms that rely on non truthtelling equilibria we address two issues that arise from this approach we first show that even in simple environments with ample feedback and repetition agents fail to reach non truthtelling equilibria we offer another way forward implementing truth telling as an ordinal bayes nash equilibrium rather than as a dominant strategy equilibrium we show that this weaker solution concept can allow for more efficient mechanisms in theory and provide experimental evidence that this is also the case in practice in fact truth telling rates are basically the same whether truthtelling is implemented as an ordinal bayes nash equilibrium or a dominant strategy equilibrium this provides a proof of concept that ordinal bayes nash design might provide a middle path achieving efficiency gains over strategy proof mechanisms without relying on real life agents playing a non truth telling equilibrium

heterogeneity redistribution and the friedman rule we study monetary models with nondegenerate stationary distributions of money holdings we find that the friedman rule does not typically maximize ex post social welfare an increase in the rate of growth of the money supply has two effects the standard distortionary or rate of return effect makes money a less desirable asset for all moneyholders a second redistributive effect creates a transfer from one type of agent to the other an increase in the rate of growth of money away from the friedman rule can produce a rate of return effect that dominates the standard effect

constrained school choice an experimental study 31 pages 18 tables jel classification c72 c78 d78 i20 trabajo publicado como articulo en american economic review 100 4 1860 1874 2010 http dx doi org 10 1257 aer 100 4 1860

efficient resource allocation under multi unit demand abstract we study resource allocation with multi unit demand such as the allocation of courses to students in contrast to the case of single unit demand no stable mechanism not even the student proposing deferred acceptance algorithm achieves desirable properties it is not strategy proof and the resulting allocation is not even weakly efficient under submitted preferences we characterize the priority structure of courses over students under which stability is consistent with strategy proofness or efficiency we show that stability is compatible with strategy proofness or efficiency if and only if the priority structure is essentially homogeneous this result suggests that efficient allocation under multi unit demand is difficult and that the use of stable mechanisms may not deliver desirable outcomes

matching markets with mixed ownership the case for a real life assignment mechanism we consider a common indivisible good allocation problem whose popular applications include on campus housing kidney exchange and school choice we show that the so called new house 4 nh4 mechanism which has been in use at mit since the 1980s is equivalent to a natural adaptation of the well known gale shapley gs mechanism we run two experiments comparing nh4 with the prominently advocated top trading cycles ttc mechanism and nh4 with gs we find that under nh4 the participation rate is significantly higher than under ttc based on a new ordinal test of efficiency nh4 is more likely to pareto dominate ttc

precautionary reserves and the interbank market large excess reserve balances are held by banks in the u s despite the ability of large banks to closely target end of day balances close to zero we show that the friction faced by small banks to participate in the fed funds market leads to all banks holding precautionary reserves the precautionary motive for reserves can explain that small banks hold relatively large amounts of excess reserves overnight while at the same time lending large amounts to large banks small banks are large net lenders despite their reluctance to lend as large of a percentage of available balances during the day as large banks we also explain an increase in the volatility of the fed funds rate late in the day

broadening the market design approach to school choice school choice refers to policies that allow parents preferences to be an input to the decision of which school a student will attend a rich body of research has developed over the past 10 15 years to study mechanisms that implement school choice this literature has mostly taken the inputs of school choice preferences priorities and capacities as exogenous more recently researchers have sought to embed the school choice problem into its wider context thereby broadening the scope of market design questions and enriching the analysis this article discusses current school choice policy issues in light of this recent literature and outlines remaining open questions

the intraday liquidity management game abstract we use a game theoretical framework to analyze the intraday behavior of banks with respect to settlement of interbank claims in a real time gross settlement setting the game played by banks depends upon the intraday credit policy of the central bank and it encompasses two well known game theoretical paradigms the prisoner s dilemma and the stag hunt the former arises in a collateralized credit regime where banks have an incentive to postpone payments when daylight liquidity is costly an outcome that is socially inefficient the latter arises in a priced credit regime where the postponement of payments can be socially efficient banks are risk neutral but we show that most of the results are unaffected by risk aversion

the equitable top trading cycles mechanism for school choice the equitable top trading cycles mechanism a particular adaptation of gale s top trading cycles ttc procedure applied to school choice the so called ttc mechanism has attracted much attention both in theory and practice due to its superior efficiency and incentive features we discuss and introduce alternative adaptations of gale s original procedure that can offer improvements over ttc in terms of equity along with various other distributional considerations instead of giving all the trading power to those students with the highest priority for a school we argue for the distribution of the trading rights of all slots of each school this allows them to trade in a thick market where additional constraints can be accommodated by choosing an appropriate pointing rule we propose a particular mechanism of this kind the equitable top trading cycle ettc mechanism which is also pareto efficient and group strategy proof just like ttc and eliminates avoidable justified envy situations ettc generates significantly fewer justified envy situations than ttc both in simulations and the lab

variations in market liquidity and the intraday interest rate most central banks offer banks participating in large value real time gross settlement rtgs systems a free intraday overdraft facility to discourage banks from actively managing their daylight liquidity in this paper we ask whether this facility has kept the intraday interest rate at zero using a unique transaction level data set on collateralized interbank loans for 2006 12 we find that during periods of financial distress rates for morning transactions are higher than those in the afternoon moreover this intraday rate correlates with market liquidity suggesting that rates contain a liquidity premium this intraday pattern is reduced but not eliminated by the eurosystem s accommodative liquidity provision

matching with couples stability and incentives in large markets accommodating couples has been a longstanding issue in the design of centralized labor market clearinghouses for doctors and psychologists because couples view pairs of jobs as complements a stable matching may not exist when couples are present this paper s main result is that a stable matching exists when there are relatively few couples and preference lists are suciently short relative to market size we also discuss incentives in markets with couples we relate these theoretical results to the job market for psychologists in which stable matchings exist for all years of the data despite the presence of couples

the mechanism is truthful why aren t you abstract honesty is the best policy in the face of a strategy proof mechanism irrespective of others behavior the best course of action is to report one s preferences truthfully we review evide

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

unraveling reduces mobility in a labor market gastroenterology with and without a centralized match the entry level market for american gastroenterologists was organized by a centralized clearinghouse from 1986 to 1996 before and since it has been conducted via a decentralized market in which appointment dates have unraveled to well over a year before the start of employment we find that both before and after the years in which the centralized clearinghouse was used gastroenterologists are less mobile and more likely to be employed at the same hospital in which they were internal medicine residents than when the clearinghouse was in use this suggests that the clearinghouse not only coordinates the timing of appointments but also increases the scope of the market compared to a decentralized market with early appointments

stable and strategy proof matching with flexible allotments we introduce a framework of matching with flexible allotments that can be used to model firms with cross division hiring restrictions our framework also allows us to nest some prior models of matching with distributional constraints building upon our recent work on observable substitutability we show that multi division choice functions with flexible allotments enable stable and strategy proof matching these results illustrate the value of clearly mapping when stable and strategy proof matching is possible

remittances and savings from international migration theory and evidence using a matched sample abstract the central question of this paper concerns the implications of remittance flows for migrants and their origin households in the country of origin this paper represents the first attempt to present a disaggregated view of international remittance flows using a matched sample of international migrants and their origin families i investigate two types of remittances transfers to the home family and savings in the country of origin the empirical evidence provides support for the altruistic model of transfer behavior wealthier origin families tend to receive lower transfers other things being equal however remittances sent to finance origin country investments are positively associated with origin household wealth the estimation strategy addresses two common problems that arise in investigating remittance behavior omitted variable bias and the measurement of origin household resources

the welfare effects of coordinated assignment evidence from the new york city high school match abstract coordinated single offer school assignment systems are a popular education reform we show that uncoordinated offers in nyc s school assignment mechanism generated mismatches one third of

currency elasticity and banking panics theory and evidence existing models of banking panics contain no role for monetary factors and fail to explain why some banking systems experienced panics while others did not a monetary model is constructed where seasonal variations in the demand for liquidity and credit play a critical role in generating banking panics these panics occur when there are restrictions on the issue of currency in private banks but they do not occur if banks are unrestricted empirical evidence from canada and the united states for the period 1880 1910 is largely consistent with the predictions of the model

economic organization with limited communication this paper presents formal stylized representations of communication accounting systems oral assignment portable object written message and telecommunication systems are considered the environments that allow this formalization are characterized by spatial separation private information and a need to keep track of past actions transfers and shocks in environments that have spatial separation and private information beneficial multilateral arrangements can depend critically on agents ability to communicate to one another values of contemporary shocks and to keep track of histories of past transfers or past announced shocks this paper formalizes this idea and focuses on com

transferability finality and debt settlement abstract payment fundamental to exchange in a decentralized economy often takes the form of transfers of inside money i e specialized forms of debt associated with each type of inside money is a set of rules that governs both the legitimacy of such transfers as means of extinguishing other debts and the allocation of the ensuing risks in this paper we develop a model of debt as inside money in a simple mechanism design framework we show that transferable debt that can be used to settle other debt obligations with finality can be a welfare improving arrangement in the presence of limited enforcement powers transferable debt has two advantages over simple chains of credit it allows for removal of less than perfectly reliable agents from the chain in a timely fashion and it allows agents to direct payments to the proper party without direct communication with other members of the credit chain

panel thoughts on the future of payments and central banking we need to think straight about electronic payments electronic money and emerging payments are sometimes regarded these days as being entirely new types of money some economists model them as new types of barter in a sense that i ll try to be more specific about in a moment actually they are neither of these what they are is netting arrangements from this perspective the fact that emerging payment arrangements use new electronic technologies is really secondary it is not electronic technology but rather the deeper logic of how payments are made that raises very difficult questions about for instance what is the trade off between the economies of net payment and the risk that multilateral netting is thought by many people to create that is there is a risk when you are part of a large payment coalition that someone will fail to whom you are not directly exposed but that the legal arrangements for mutualizing the losses will nevertheless impose a loss on you the fact that new payment arrangements tend to involve creation of debt in the process of payment which also has to do with the logic of how the payments are made rather than with the coincidental fact that an electronic technology is used raises another set of difficult issues we are only now beginning to have adequate theories that address any of these issues by a model being adequate here i mean simply that economists feel comfortable about saying that our recommendations reflect our professional expertise rather than being personal opinion off the top of our heads about what is right or wrong we are only at the beginning of having research that we as economists can really be comfortable in claiming to be mature enough well enough able to confront with facts either in the form of history or econometrics evidence or whatever to be regarded as a highly corroborated model with compelling welfare implications and until such research has been accomplished those of us who are asked for professional advice by policymakers are in an awkward position the main points that i want to make in these remarks concern the urgency of this situation the high value of the type of foundationally oriented research on payments that is being presented in this conference and the fallacy of thinking that faster progress might be made if less scrupulous attention were to be paid to foundations

survey measures of family decision processes for econometric analysis of schooling decisions in this article we consider the collection of novel subjective data on family processes of schooling decisions in particular we review recent progress on survey measurement of expectations information and locus of decision of american families within the context of secondary schooling and we discuss possible future developments by providing concrete examples from recent exploratory efforts we argue that collection of data on adolescents and parents perceptions of the available school options and the application and admission rules their subjective expectations about short and long term consequences of alternative choices and their assessments of the locus of decision making within families could greatly enhance economic modeling and contribute to effective econometric analysis of schooling decisions jel c83 d19 d79 d83 d84 i21 i26 j24

the roles of destination gender and household composition in explaining remittances an analysis for the dominican sierra two non exclusive hypotheses about what motivates remittances sent by dominican migrants to their rural parents in the sierra are tested a an insurance contract taken by parents with their migrant children and b an investment by migrants in potential bequests results show that the relative importance of these two motives to remit is affected by destination us vs cities in the dominican republic gender and household composition the insurance function is mainly fulfilled by female migrants to the us only when a male is the sole migrant in his household does he play the role of insurer investment by contrast is pursued by both males and females but only among those migrating to the us d 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

money banking and capital formation we consider a monetary growth model in which banks arise to provide liquidity in addition there is a government that issues not only money but interest bearing bonds these bonds compete with capital in private portfolios when the government fixes a constant growth rate for the money stock we show that there can exist multiple nontrivial monetary steady states one of these steady states is a saddle while the other can be a sink moreover paths approaching a steady state can display damped endogenous fluctuations and development trap phenomena are common across different steady states low capital stocks are associated with high nominal interest rates the latter signal the comparative inefficiency of the financial system also increases in the steady state inflation rate can easily reduce the steady state capital stock journal of economic literatureclassification numbers e13 e44 e50 g20 o16

affirmative action through minority reserves an experimental study on school choice abstract minority reserves are an affirmative action policy proposed by hafalir et al 2013 in the context of school choice in a laboratory experiment we find that adding minority reserves to the gs and ttc mechanisms has positive effects on stability but is quite disappointing in terms of efficiency also gs induces higher rates of truth telling by minority students and thus outclasses ttc

native internal migration and the labor market impact of immigration this paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native born workers in local labor markets using data from the 1960 2000 decennial censuses the study shows that immigration is associated with lower in migration rates higher out migration rates and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce the native migration response attenuates the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market by 40 to 60 per cent depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level

remittances deteriorate governance abstract i use a natural experiment of oil price driven remittance flows to poor non oil producing muslim countries to demonstrate that remittances deteriorate the quality of governance especially in countries with weak democratic institutions the results indicate that a 1 standard deviation increase in remittances raises corruption by 1 5 index points on a 6 point scale which is equivalent to a dollar 600 decrease in per capita gdp concomitantly remittances may enable governments to reduce their delivery of public services for example health care school enrollment the results suggest that political institutions may mediate the potentially beneficial socioeconomic effects of remittance inflows

remittances and the wage impact of immigration this paper examines how the outflow of remittances affect the wages of native workers the model shows that the wage impact of immigration depends on the competing effects of an increase in labor market competition and an increase in the consumer base immigrant remittances provide a unique way of isolating this latter effect because they reduce the consumer base but not the workforce the predictions of the model are tested using an unusually rich german data set that has detailed information on remittances and wages as expected the results indicate that a 1 percent increase in remittances depress the wages of native workers by 0 06 percent furthermore remittances predominantly affect workers in nontraded industries that are more reliant on domestic consumption

international migration remittances and household investment evidence from philippine migrants exchange rate shocks how do households respond to overseas members economic shocks overseas filipinos in dozens of countries experienced sudden heterogeneous changes in exchange rates during the 1997 asian financial crisis appreciation of a migrant s currency against the philippine peso leads to increases in household remittances from overseas the estimated elasticity of philippine peso remittances with respect to the exchange rate is 0 60 positive migrant shocks lead to enhanced human capital accumulation and entrepreneurship in origin households child schooling and educational expenditure rise while child labour falls households also work more hours in self employment and become more likely to start relatively capital intensive household enterprises

reserve design unintended consequences and the demise of boston s walk zones we show that in the presence of admissions reserves the effect of the precedence order i e the order in which different types of seats are filled is comparable to the effect of adjusting reser

the effect of low skilled immigration on u s prices evidence from cpi data i exploit the large variation across u s cities and through time in the relative size of the low skilled immigrant population to estimate the causal effect of immigration on prices of nontraded goods and services using an instrumental variables strategy i find that at current immigration levels a 10 percent increase in the share of low skilled immigrants in the labor force decreases the price of immigrant intensive services such as housekeeping and gardening by 2 percent wage equations suggest that lower wages are a likely channel through which these effects take place however wage effects are significantly larger for low skilled immigrants than for low skilled natives implying that the two are imperfect substitutes

obviously strategy proof mechanisms what makes some strategy proof mechanisms easier to understand than others to address this question i propose a new solution concept a mechanism is obviously strategy proof osp if it has an equilibrium in obviously dominant strategies this has a behavioral interpretation a strategy is obviously dominant if and only if a cognitively limited agent can recognize it as weakly dominant it also has a classical interpretation a choice rule is osp implementable if and only if it can be carried out by a social planner under a particular regime of partial commitment i fully characterize the set of osp mechanisms in a canonical setting with one dimensional types and transfers a laboratory experiment tests and corroborates the theory

leveling the playing field sincere and sophisticated players in the boston mechanism empirical and experimental evidence suggests different levels of sophistication among families in the boston public school student assignment plan we analyze the preference revelation game induced by the boston mechanism with sincere players who report their true preferences and sophisticated players who play a best response we characterize the set of nash equilibrium outcomes as the set of stable matchings of a modified economy where sincere students lose priority to sophisticated students any sophisticated student weakly prefers her assignment under the pareto dominant nash equilibrium of the boston mechanism to her assignment under the recently adopted student optimal stable mechanism jel d82 i21

optimal indirect and capital taxation we consider an environment in which agents skills are private information and follow arbitrary stochastic processes we prove that it is typically pareto optimal for an individual s marginal benefit of investing in capital to exceed his marginal cost of doing so this wedge is consistent with a positive tax on capital income we also prove that it is pareto optimal for the marginal rate of substitution between any two consumption goods to equal the marginal rate of transformation this lack of a wedge is consistent with uniform taxation of consumption goods within a period

migration remittances and male and female employment patterns little is known about the labor market impacts of workers remittances despite their magnitude in countries with considerable outmigration reports that families receiving international remittances severely curtail their work efforts are fairly common in the popular press e g robert frank 2001 yet we lack rigorous analyses of how male and female labor supplies respond to increases in remittance income to either support or refute these anecdotal observations according to the neoclassical model of labor leisure choice mark r killingsworth 1983 remittances a source of nonlabor income may lift budget constraints raise reservation wages and through an income effect reduce the employment likelihood and hours worked by remittance receiving individuals the receipt of remittances is usually preceded by the out migration of working aged household members however which may induce changes in the labor supply of nonmigrating household members in order to compensate for forgone income or to defray migration related expenses distinguishing the disruptive effect from the income effect of remittance inflows is problematic as most surveys do not contain detailed information on household outmigration and remittance receipt to the extent that these two effects are expected to have opposite impacts on labor supply however we can assess which effect dominates the impact of remittances on the decision to work has been previously examined by edgard rodriguez and erwin r tiongson 2001 in manila and by edward funkhouser 1992 in managua without accounting for the endogeneity of remittances with respect to labor supply they conclude that remittances reduce employment funkhouser also finds that remittances slightly increase self employment while informative these studies focus on the decision to work and do not consider that without altering employment rates remittances may change the hours worked and or the type of work performed in the receiving economy furthermore the impact may be different on male and female labor supplies and responsiveness to remittance income may vary from rural to urban areas using data from mexico a country with a large and growing remittance inflow we address the following questions how does the employment status and hours worked by men and women vary owing to international remittances do male and female labor supplies differ across various types of employment in rural versus urban areas due to higher remittance inflows

the labor market impact of immigration in western germany in the 1990 s in this article we estimate the wage and employment effects of recent immigration in western germany using administrative data for the period 1987 2001 and a labor market equilibrium model we find that the substantial immigration of the 1990s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels instead it had a sizeable adverse employment effect on previous immigrants as well as a small adverse effect on their wages these asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market and in part by the rigidity of wages in less than flexible labor markets in a simple counter factual experiment we show that in a world of perfect wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance the wage bill loss of old immigrants would be much smaller

matching with branch of choice contracts at the united states military academy branch selection is a key decision in a cadet s military career cadets at usma can increase their branch priorities at a fraction of slots by extending their service agreement this real life matching problem lls an important gap in market design literature although priorities fail a key substitutes condition the agent optimal stable mechanism is well dened and in contrast to the current usma mechanism it is fair stable and strategy proof adoption of this mechanism benets cadets and the army this new

eurosystem monetary targeting lessons from u s data abstract using a small empirical model of inflation output and money estimated on u s data we compare the relative performance of monetary targeting and inflation targeting the results show monetary targeting to be quite inefficient yielding both higher inflation and output variability this is true even with a nonstochastic money demand formulation our results are also robust to using a p model of inflation therefore in these popular frameworks there is no support for the prominent role given to money growth in the eurosystem s monetary policy strategy

what parents want school preferences and school choice we investigate parents preferences for school attributes in a unique data set of survey administrative census and spatial data using a conditional logit incorporating characteristics of households schools and home school distance we show that most families have strong preferences for schools academic performance parents also value schools socio economic composition and distance which may limit the potential of school choice to improve academic standards most of the variation in preferences for school quality across socio economic groups arises from differences in the quality of accessible schools rather than differences in parents preferences although more advantaged parents have stronger preferences for academic performance

sincere and sophisticated players in an equal income market abstract we study the simultaneous direct revelation mechanism associated with each equal income competitive social choice function in the allocation of objects and money among sincere and strategic agents strategic agents take advantage of sincere agents they non cooperatively coordinate on the equal income competitive allocations for the true preferences that are pareto undominated for them within the set of equal income competitive allocations sincere agents are protected to some extent however their welfare is usually above their maximin payoff

strategy proofness and stability of the boston mechanism an almost impossibility result abstract public school systems generally use one of the three competing mechanisms the boston mechanism the deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycle mechanism for assigning students to specific schools although the literature generally claims that the boston mechanism is pareto efficient but neither stable nor strategy proof this study delineates a subset of school priority structures for which it fulfills all three criteria we show that the boston mechanism is stable if and only if it is strategy proof if and only if the priority structure is strongly acyclic however we find that the condition of strong acyclicity is nearly impossible to satisfy any priority structure is quasi cyclic whenever there are two schools whose admission quotas are less than the number of students seeking admission

an experimental study on decentralized networked markets abstract we design a laboratory experiment to investigate matching in a decentralized market of deferred acceptance agents are undifferentiated and may have multiple partners their payoff depends on who they match with the experiment is designed in such a way that a stable configuration exists but cannot be eyeballed by the participants due to the computational complexity of the game in spite of this subjects are remarkably good at reaching a stable match even when the payoffs of others are not publicly observed more information does however speed up convergence thanks to self censoring we trace irrational matching choices mostly to two sources the tendency of over think in a setting where strategic thinking is not necessary and the reluctance to accept matching offers from those who have been disloyal in the past

priorities in school choice the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona abstract the boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world and has been criticized for its incentive problems in order to resolve overdemands for a given school most often priority is given to families living in the neighborhood of the school using a very rich data set on school applications for the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona we exploit an unexpected change in the definition of neighborhood this change allows us to identify that a large fraction of families systematically ranks first high priority schools neighborhood schools in this case additional data on school enrollment decisions and census data shows that some seemingly unsophisticated parents are high income families that can rank hard to get schools because they can afford the outside option of a private school in case they do not get in this sheds light on important inequalities beyond parents lack of sophistication found in the literature

is the new immigration really so bad this article reviews the recent evidence on us immigration focusing on two key questions 1 does immigration reduce the labour market opportunities of less skilled natives 2 have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 immigration reform act been successfully assimilated overall evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant on the question of assimilation the success of the us born children of immigrants is a key yardstick by this metric post 1965 immigrants are doing reasonably well even children of the least educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives

structural estimation of a model of school choices the boston mechanism vs its alternatives we model household choice of schools under the boston mechanism bm and develop a new method applicable to a broad class of mechanisms to fully solve the choice problem even if it is infeasible

remittances and temporary migration in this paper we study the remittance behavior of immigrants and how it relates to temporary versus permanent migration plans we use a unique data source that provides unusual detail on remittances and return plans and follows the same household over time our data allows us also to distinguish between different purposes of remittances we analyze the association between individual and household characteristics and the geographic location of the family as well as return plans and remittances the panel nature of our data allows us to condition on household fixed effects to address measurement error and reverse causality we use an instrumental variable estimator our results show that changes in return plans are related to large changes in remittance flows

the payments system liquidity and rediscounting in an economy where fiat money serves both as a medium of exchange and the means by which debts are cleared it is shown that nonoptimal equilibria of constrained liquidity may arise optimality may be restored by temporary expansions of the monetary base e g an active central bank discount window copyright 1996 by american economic association

production hidden action and the payment system abstract using a modified version of freeman s 1996 payment system model the optimal intraday rate is examined the production set is modified to account for a non degenerate distribution of settlements within a day in addition to the modified production set the consumption set is modified a positive intraday interest rate may be able to implement the planner s allocation

resolving conflicting preferences in school choice the boston mechanism reconsidered the boston mechanism is among the most popular school choice pro cedures in use yet the mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances which led the boston public schools to recently replace it with gale and shapley s deferred acceptance algorithm henceforth da the da elicits truthful revelation of ordinal preferences whereas the boston mechanism does not but the latter induces participants to reveal their cardinal preferences i e their relative preference intensities whereas the former does not we show that cardinal preferences matter more when families have similar ordinal preferences and schools have coarse priorities two common features of many school choice environ ments speci cally when students have the same ordinal preferences and schools have no priorities the boston mechanism pareto dominates the da in ex ante wel fare the boston mechanism may not harm but rather bene t participants who may not strategize well in the presence of school priorities the boston mechanism also tends to facilitate a greater access than the da to good schools by those lack ing priorities at those schools these results contrast with the standard view and cautions against a hasty rejection of the boston mechanism in favor of mechanisms such as the da

mistaken play in the deferred acceptance algorithm implications for positive assortative matching abstract recent literature has documented failures of truthful preference reporting in the strategy proof deferred acceptance algorithm i consider the implications of these strategic mistakes for a common welfare consideration the ability of the mechanism to sort the best students to the best schools i find that these mistakes have the potential to significantly help or significantly hinder sorting through this channel the presence of mistaken play may have widely varying welfare effects i discuss related considerations in the welfare evaluation of mistaken play in the deferred acceptance algorithm and the implications for nudges that correct these mistakes

welfare of naive and sophisticated players in school choice two main school choice mechanisms have attracted the attention in the liter ature boston and deferred acceptance da the question arises on the ex ante welfare implications when the game is played by participants that vary in terms of their strategic sophistication abdulkadiroglu che and yasuda 2011 have shown that the chances of naive participants getting into a good school are higher under the boston mechanism than under da and some naive participants are actually better o in this note we show that these results can be extended to show that under the veil of ignorance i e students not yet knowing their utility values all naive students may prefer to adopt the boston mechanism

demand analysis using strategic reports an application to a school choice mechanism several school districts use assignment systems that give students an incentive to misrepresent their preferences we find evidence consistent with strategic behavior in cambridge such strategizing can complicate preference analysis this paper develops empirical methods for studying random utility models in a new and large class of school choice mechanisms we show that preferences are non parametrically identified under either sufficient variation in choice environments or a preference shifter we then develop a tractable estimation procedure and apply it to cambridge estimates suggest that while 82 of students are assigned to their stated first choice only 72 are assigned to their true first choice because students avoid ranking competitive schools assuming that students behave optimally the immediate acceptance mechanism is preferred by the average student to the deferred acceptance mechanism by an equivalent of 0 08 miles the estimated difference is smaller if beliefs are biased and reversed if students report truthfully

sub optimality of the friedman rule in townsend s turnpike and stochastic relocation models of money do finite lives and initial dates matter abstract the friedman rule a widely studied prescription for monetary policy is optimal in townsend s turnpike model of money it is not so in the overlapping generations version of his stochastic relocation model of money we investigate these monetary models in the light of this disparity to this end we create a modified version of the turnpike model that generates the same stationary monetary equilibria as does the two period overlapping generations model with random relocation we exploit this equivalence to explain the aforementioned disparity we also discuss the importance of whether or not the economy has an initial date

recombinant estimation for normal form games with applications to auctions and bargaining abstract when analyzing economic games researchers frequently estimate quantities describing group outcomes such as the expected revenue in an auction for such applications we propose an improved statistical estimation technique called recombinant estimation the technique takes observations of players strategies and recombines them to compute all possible group outcomes that could have resulted from different player combinations in applications to an auction and a bargaining game the improved efficiency of our estimator is equivalent to increasing the sample size between 25 and 200 we discuss how to design experiments in order to utilize recombinant estimation we also discuss practical computational issues and provide software for computing estimates and standard errors

do immigrant inflows lead to native outflows we use 1980 and 1990 census data for 119 larger metropolitan statistical areas to examine the effect of skill group specific immigrant inflows on the location decisions of natives in the same skill group and on the overall distribution of human capital to control for unobserved skill group specific demand factors our models include lagged mobility flows of natives over the 1970 80 period we also estimate instrumental variables models that use the fraction of mexican immigrants in 1970 to predict skill group specific relative immigrant inflows over the 1980s despite wide variation across cities in the size and relative skill composition of immigrant population changes we find no evidence of selective out migration by natives we conclude that immigrant inflows exert a direct effect on the relative skill composition of cities cities that have received relatively unskilled immigrant flows have experienced proportional rises in the size of their unskilled populations this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

bidding for army career specialties improving the rotc branching mechanism motivated by the low retention rates of us military academy and reserve officer training corps graduates the army recently introduced incentives programs in which cadets could bid 3 years of additional service obligation to obtain higher priority for their desired branches the full potential of this incentives program is not utilized because of the rotc s deficient matching mechanism i propose a design that eliminates these shortcomings and mitigates several policy problems the army has identified in contrast to the rotc mechanism my design utilizes market principles more extensively and it is a hybrid between a market mechanism and a priority based allocation mechanism