Workshops

2009年4月7日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

中田啓之（Hiroyuki Nakata) （University of Essex）

Defaults, Shortsales and the Social Costs of Volatility [PDF]

This paper examines the welfare effects of credit and short-sales constraints and limited liability/minimum consumption guarantee in an overlapping generations (OLG) model with rational beliefs in the sense of Kurz (1994). To measure the social welfare, it instead adopts an ex post social welfare concept in the sense of Hammond (1981), since the standard Pareto criterion becomes inappropriate when heterogeneous beliefs are present. Simulation results indicate a trade-off between a larger opportunity set and a larger room for 'mistakes', and thus, the existence of a socially optimal level of various constraints.

2009年4月14日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Albert Park（Department of Economics, University of Oxford)

Exporting and Firm Performance: Chinese Exporters during the Asian Financial Crisis (joint with Dean Yang, Xinzheng Shi, and Yuan Jiang) [PDF]

This paper analyzes firm panel data to examine how export demand shocks associated with the 1997 Asian financial crisis affected Chinese exporters. We construct firm-specific exchange rate shocks based on the pre-crisis destinations of firms' exports. Because the shocks were unanticipated and large in magnitude, they are a plausible instrument for identifying the impact of exporting on firm productivity and other aspects of firm performance. We find that firms whose export destinations experience greater currency depreciation have slower growth in exports and that export growth increases firm productivity as well as other measures of firm performance. Consistent with the "learning-by-exporting" hypothesis, the productivity impact of export growth is greater when firms export to more developed countries.

2009年4月21日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Karl Warneryd（Stockholm School of Economics)

Observable Strategies [PDF]

Abstract: The idea that reciprocal cooperation can be obtained in a one-shot game if the players observe each other's strategies before taking action has attracted many authors. From a strictly logical perspective, however, there cannot be such games. Nevertheless, there are games in which each player can observe which class, out of a collection of classes smaller than the number of strategies, the opponent's strategy belongs to. For any underlying 2-player, finite, normal- form game there is a game extended with such coarsely observable strategies that has equilibria with payoffs arbitrarily close to any feasible, individually rational payoff profile.

2009年5月12日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

報告者：　齋藤経史　(科学技術政策研究所（NISTEP))
討論者：　神門善久　（明治学院大学）

『農地の転用機会が稲作の経営規模および生産性に与える影響：日本ではなぜ零 細農家が滞留し続けるのか』 [PDF]
"Farm Size, Productivity, and Speculative Motives in Agricultural Land: Why Japanese Farmers are So Small in Scale?"

本論文では、1990年から2005年までの都道府県別／経営耕地規模別の農林業センサスを用いて、農 地の転用期待が日本における稲作の経営規模およびその生産性に与える影響を構造型推計モデルに よって定量的に分析する。日本では宅地等への転用目的で農地が売却される場合、耕作目的にて取 引される農地価格に比べ高額で取引される。この農地の転用機会が存在するために、日本の農家は 転用目的で売却できる機会を待って農地を手放さず、小規模農家の滞留に繋がっていることが広く指 摘されている。この論文ではまず農家の離農および経営規模の選択行動を離散選択モデルにより定式 化を行い、次にその推計結果を用いて農地の転用機会が消失するという仮想的な状況をシミュレーショ ンを現出させることで、農地の転用機会が経営規模および稲作生産性に与える影響を分析する。分析 の結果、転用目的での農地売却価格が耕作目的での売却価格にまで低下すると、平均的な稲作の作 付面積は約35％増加し、労働生産性も約30％向上することが分かった。つまり、農地の転用機会が存 在することによって稲作生産が本来持つ規模の経済性が生かされず、生産性の劣る零細農家が滞留 している日本の稲作農業の現状が実証的に明らかにされた。一方、本論文の結果から、農地の転用を 規制するだけでは我が国の稲作農業は赤字体質から脱却できず、自立した稲作経営を確立するため には、さらに踏み込んだ農地制度の改革が検討されるべきことも示唆された。

2009年5月19日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　※ Macro Workshop と共催

鈴木通雄(Michio Suzuki)（日本銀行金融研究所(Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan)）

Occupational mobility and consumption insurance [PDF]

Evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey shows that over the 1980- 1992 period, between-group consumption inequality for occupation groups has remained stable, while within-group consumption inequality has increased. Meanwhile, evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics shows that involuntary occupational mobility has increased. Within a model with limited commitment, I show that under certain conditions a rise in occupational mobility increases the desire for insurance for low income individuals more than that of high income individuals, thereby increasing consumption inequality within that group. Numerical experiments suggest that taking account of occupational mobility is quantitatively important to account for the evolution of betweenand within-group consumption inequality.

2009年5月26日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Oleksandr Movshuk (Toyama University)

Household Saving over the Life Cycle: International Evidence from Micro Data [PDF]

In this paper I estimate age-saving profiles from micro data in six countries (Italy, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK, and the US) to verify whether households are saving as postulated by the life- cycle theory. The level of household savings depends on age, cohort and period effects, and the perfect collinearity among these effects is broken by applying a nonparametric regression model. In this model, the cohort effect is assumed to be an arbitrary smooth function, and the model is estimated by the generalized additive model with a penalized smoothing spline approach. Estimated saving-age profiles showed declining savings in the old age for the majority of examined countries. An interesting feature for Asian households was a double hump in savings, with a temporal dip for households for the age bracket at around mid-40s.

2009年6月2日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

奥村綱雄(Tsunao Okumura)(Yokohama National University)

Concave-Monotone Treatment Response and Monotone Treatment Selection: With Returns to Schooling Application （joint with Emiko Usui） [PDF]

This paper identifies sharp bounds on the mean treatment response and average treatment effect under the concave monotone treatment response (concave-MTR) and monotone treatment selection (MTS) assumptions. We use our bounds and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the mean returns to schooling. Our upper bound estimates of the returns to college education are: 0.079-0.133 for the local returns and 0.087 for the four-year average. They are substantially smaller than (1) the estimates using only the concave-MTR assumption of Manski (1997) and (2) the estimates using only MTR and MTS assumptions of Manski and Pepper (2000). They fall in the lower range of the point estimates given in previous studies which assume linear wage functions. This is because our sharp upper bounds are obtained when the curve of the concave-MTR function is close to linear. Our results, therefore, imply a possibility that higher average returns reported in previous studies are attributed to the specification of linear wage functions.

2009年6月9日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

Jeff Kline（Bond University）

Transpersonal Understanding through Social Roles, and Emergence of Cooperation （joint with Mamoru Kaneko) [PDF]

Inductive game theory has been developed to explore the origin/emergence of beliefs/knowledge of a person from his accumulated experiences of a game situation. So far, the theory has been restricted to a person's view of the structure not including another person's thoughts. In this paper, we explore the experiential origin/emergence of one's view of the other's beliefs/knowledge about the game situation. We restrict our exploration to a 2-role (strategic) game, which has been recurrently played by two persons with switching the roles of positions (players). By switching roles, each person accumulates experiences of both roles and these experiences become the source of a person's transpersonal view about the other person's view. We consider how a person can use his and the other's understandings for his behavior revision, and define an equilibrium called an intrapersonal coordination equilibrium. Based on this concept, we sho w that cooperation will emerge as the degree of reciprocity increases.

2009年6月16日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　
※　UTIPE Distinguished Research Seminar Seriesと共催

小島武仁 (Fuhito Kojima)（Stanford University）

Implementing Random Assignments: A Generalization of the Birkhoff-von Neumann Theorem (joint with Eric Budish, Yeon-Koo Che and Paul Milgrom) [PDF]

The Birkhoff-von Neumann Theorem shows that any bistochastic matrix can be written as a convex combination of permutation matrices. In particular, in a setting where n objects must be assigned to n agents, one object per agent, any random assignment matrix can be resolved into a deterministic assignment in accordance with the specified probability matrix. We generalize the theorem to accommodate a complex set of constraints encountered in many real-life market design problems. Specifically, the theorem can be extended to any environment in which the set of constraints can be partitioned into two hierarchies. Further, we show that this bihierarchy structure constitutes a maximal domain for the theorem, and we provide a constructive algorithm for implementing a random assignment under bihierarchical constraints. We provide several applications, including (i) single-unit random assignment, such as school choice; (ii) multi-unit random assignment, such as course allocation and fair division; and (iii) two-sided matching problems, such as the scheduling of inter-league sports matchups. The same method also finds applications beyond economics, generalizing previous results on the minimize makespan problem in the computer science literature.

2009年6月23日（火　Tuesday）12:00-13:30
※　時間・場所にご注意下さい
※ 金融センター特別セミナーと共催　

Edward Green (Penn State University)

Efficient Contracts, Inefficient Equilibria, and Renegotiation [PDF]

Consider truthful reporting in a continuum-of-agents model of risk sharing with private `shocks'. A `Law of Large Numbers' constrains shock pro les. Any unilateral deviation from truthfulness might also have been truthful under that assumption, so outcomes need only be de ned on such pro les in order to verify Bayesian in- centive compatibility. Might there be another, Pareto inferior, equilibrium? This phenomenon, akin to a bank run in the Diamond-Dybvig (JPE, 1983) model, can occur in an Atkeson-Lucas (REStud, 1993) model, reformulated with production and costly capital adjustment, if the full contract is required to be renegotiation proof.

2009年6月23日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

Masazumi Hattori (服部正純)(日本銀行 (Bank of Japan))

Incentive of Loan Screening and Credit Quality of Securitized Products in OTD Business Model [PDF]

We consider an economy where a lender finances his loans to borrowers by issuing a securitized product to an investor and where the credit quality of the product may depend on whether the lender screens the borrowers. In the presence of asymmetric information between the lender and the investor about the credit quality of potential borrowers, overvaluation of the low quality securitized product may occur, which inefficiently induces the lender not to screen the borrowers and hence to issue the securitized product with low credit quality. This is likely to occur when the investor finds it difficult to distinguish the good state from the bad state, or when the seed of recession creeps toward the booming economy.

2009年6月30日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

山本裕一 (Yuichi Yamamoto)（Harvard University）

Perfect Public Ex-Post Equilibria of Repeated Games with Uncertain Outcomes (joint with Drew Fudenberg) [PDF]

This paper studies repeated games with imperfect public monitoring where the players are uncertain both about the payoff functions and about the relationship between the distribution of signals and the actions played. To analyze these games, we introduce the concept of perfect public ex-post equilibrium (PPXE), and show that it can be characterized with an extension of the techniques used to study perfect public equilibria. We then develop identifiability conditions that are sufficient for a folk theorem; these conditions imply that there are PPXE in which the payoffs are approximately the same as if the monitoring structure and payoff functions were known.

2009年7月7日（火　Tuesday）12:00-13:30
※　時間・場所にご注意下さい　

渡辺安虎 (Yasutora Watanabe)（Northwestern University)

Inferring Strategic Voting (joint with Kei Kawai) [PDF]

We estimate a model of strategic voting by adopting a recently developed inequality-based estimator and quantify the impact of strategic voting on election outcomes. The difficulty of identification comes from the fact that preference and voting behavior do not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence for strategic voters. We obtain partial identification of preference parameters from the restriction that voting for the least-preferred candidate is a weakly dominated strategy. The extent of strategic voting is identified using variation generated by multiple equilibria. Using Japanese general-election data, we find a large fraction (68.2%, 82.7%) of strategic voters, only a small fraction (2.2%, 7.4%) of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred (misaligned voting). Existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two, estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting. Accordingly, while our estimate of strategic voting is high, our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies.

2009年7月7日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

宇井貴志 (Takashi Ui)（横浜国立大学 (Yokohama National University)）

Ambiguity and Risk in Global Games [PDF]

This paper introduces global games with multiple priors, in which players are ambiguity averse having maxmin expected utility preferences, and study how the distinction between risk and ambiguity matters in a global game analysis. It proposes a tractable procedure to obtain a unique equilibrium and to conduct comparative statics. As applications, global game models of bank runs and currency attacks are considered. In the model of currency attacks, news of less ambiguous quality can lead to the currency collapse. In the model of bank runs, news of more ambiguous quality can lead to the bank failure.

2009年7月9日（木 Thursday）18:30-21:00　　※　日時・場所にご注意下さい
※ Presentation in Japanese ※

中田啓之 (Hiroyuki Nakata)（エセックス大学ビジネススクール）

特別講義「災害リスクの経済学入門：理論と実証」　

期待効用の検証方法について簡単にレビューしたあと、ベトナムで独自に調査したマイクロデータを用 いたプレリミナリーな分析結果について紹介・議論する。

2009年7月14日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

手島健介(Kensuke Teshima) （京都大学 (Kyoto University)）

Import Competition and Innovation at the Plant-level: Evidence from Mexico [PDF]

A key idea in the literature on trade and growth is that trade liberalization may affect plants' innovative activities through increased competition. Theoretical predictions remain ambiguous, however, and it has been difficult to investigate this relationship empirically because R&D expenditure data is rarely available at the plant level. This paper takes the advantage of a newly constructed combination of Mexican plant-level datasets to examine the extent to which tariff changes lead to changes in R&D through increased competition. The combined dataset has two unique features: it contains (1) the amount of R&D on product innovation and on process innovation, and (2) the trade-classification categories of plants' outputs and inputs, which allows me o construct plant-level tariff changes and to control for industry time effects. The degree of tariff reduction is not correlated with initial plant characteristics, suggesting that the tariff reduction is exogenous for plants. The key finding is that the reduction of tariff s of the goods produced by Mexican plants induced those plants to increase total R&D. This suggests that trade liberalization stimulates plants' innovative activities through increased competition. I also find that the pattern would not be discernable using the measures of plant behavior and trade exposure available in typical plant-level datasets--measured total factor productivity and industry-level average tariffs. Additional results using process R&D and product R&D expenditure information suggest that trade liberalization affects plants' capability through the effects of competition on plants' incentives to increase cost efficiency rather than through the effects on incentives to create new products or to upgrade quality.

2009年7月21日（火　Tuesday）12:00-13:30
※　時間・場所にご注意下さい　

中島大輔 (Daisuke Nakajima) （University of Michigan)

Revealed Attention (Joint with Yusufcan Masatlioglu and Erkut Ozbay) [PDF]

One of the underlying assumptions of classical choice theory is that the presented choice set is the same as what the agent indeed considers while deciding. However, marketing literature provides well-established evidence that consumers do not consider all brands in a given market before making a purchase decision. Instead, they restrict their attention to only a subset of it and then undertake a more detailed analysis of the reduced sets of alternatives. Building on this idea, we model individuals who are able to pay attention to only a subset of the choice problem presented to them. Within this smaller set, a decision maker is rational in the standard sense and she chooses the maximal element with respect to her preference. We show that from the observed behavior we can derive which alternatives individuals pay attention to and according to which preference they maximize.

2009年7月21日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

田中知美 (Tomomi Tanaka)（Arizona State University）

Handouts without handshakes: Patronizing out-group preferences (joint with Colin F. Camerer)

People often show favoritism toward in-group members and discriminate members of out-groups. We present evidence of high-status groups (Vietnamese and Chinese) exhibiting favoritism toward a lower- status out-group (Khmer) in southern Vietnam. This pattern is evident in high-stakes experimental games that measure altruistic giving and third-party punishment of giving-norm violations. The high-status groups give to the Khmer and defend the Khmer when they are treated poorly as strongly as they give to and defend their own groups. However, the high-status groups show more typical out-group prejudice against the Khmer in trust game involving risky investment, or when forming mutually-beneficial limited coalitions. The high-status groups seem to offer a Handout, but not a Handshake a pattern we call patronizing out-group preference. We also report measures of cross- group stereotyping which are consistent with patronizing treatment of out-groups based on a stereotype of the Khmer as warm but incompetent.

2009年7月27日（月　Monday）10:30-12:30　※日時・場所にご注意下さい。　
※　科学研究費補助金特定領域研究「実験社会科学」政治班「政治制度 の選択と機能分析」, CREST 「脳発達」領域, 科学技術振興機構, UTIPE Distinguished Research Seminar Seriesと共催

Daeyeol Lee （Yale　University）

Neurobiological basis of social decision making
参考資料）　Game theory and neural basis of social decision making , Nature Neurosci. 11: 404-409 (2008).
* こちらよりダウンロード可能です。

Game theory provides a rigorous and crisp description for interactive decision making in a social group. In particular, it specifies the strategies that must be adopted by a group of players trying to maximize their individual payoffs selfishly. However, many examples of social behaviors frequently demonstrate violate such equilibrium predictions. These failures are largely due to two factors. First, humans often behave altruistically. Second, equilibrium strategies are sometimes gradually approximated by way of heuristic learning algorithms. In this lecture, I will explain how these two different aspects of social decision making can be investigated using neurobiological methods, such as functional brain imaging and single-neuron recording. Recent progress in neuroeconomic research has begun to provide quite detailed knowledge about the biological factors that can account for the human choice behaviors at least during relatively simple social interactions.

2009年7月27日（月　Monday）17:00-18:30　※日時にご注意下さい。　
科学研究費補助金特定領域研究「実験社会科学」政治班「政治制度の選択と機能分析」, CREST 「脳発達」領域, 科学技術振興機構と共催

Daeyeol Lee （Yale　University）

Single neurons and decision making in the primate brain
参考資料）　
・Valuation of uncertain and delayed rewards in primate prefrontal cortex (Joint with Soyoun Kim, Jaewon Hwang and Hyojung Seo), Neural Networks 22: 294-304 (2009).
・Behavioral and Neural Changes after Gains and Losses of Conditioned Reinforcers (Joint with Hyojung Seo), J Neurosci. 29: 3627-3641 (2009).
* こちらよりダウンロード可能です。

The value of an action is determined by multiple factors, such as the magnitude, probability, and immediacy of expected reward. In addition, decision outcomes are often compared to a specific reference point, and therefore evaluated as gains and losses. However, how these multiple types of information are combined in the brain is not known. We developed a novel inter-temporal choice task for monkeys in which monkeys choose between a small immediate reward and a larger but more delayed reward. During this task, animals discount the value of reward according to a hyperbolic function of its delay, and the information about the reward magnitude and delay is transformed into temporally discounted values in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. Using a token-based decision-making task in which the decisions could lead to gains or losses of tokens exchanged with juice reward, we also identified multiple types of signals related to gains and losses in the same areas, suggesting that the corticostriatal network plays a key role in evaluating decision outcomes and updating the animal's decision-making strategies.

2009年7月28日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

鎌田雄一郎 (Yuichiro Kamada) (Harvard University)

Sequential Implementation of Unenforceable Contracts with Stochastic Transaction Costs (joint with Neel Rao) [PDF]

This paper analyzes the problem of bilateral trade of a divisible good in a continuous-time environment with stochastic transaction costs. In our basic setup, each of two parties is endowed with a durable good that is valued only by the other party, and the cost of transferring the good to the other party follows a geometric Brownian motion. The first-best solution to the problem requires each agent to transfer all of her good to the other agent when the transaction cost reaches a certain threshold value. However, in the absence of court-enforceable contracts, such a policy is not incentive-compatible, because an agent is unwilling to transfer her own good once she has received all of the other agent's good. This paper provides a closed-form solution for a second-best transaction scheme in which agents can realize some gains from trade as part of a subgame-perfect equilibrium. In the second-best solution, agents transfer the good in a sequential manner with the transfers becoming smaller over time. Moreover, as the discount rate approaches zero, the expected discounted payo s from the first- and second-best policies converge, provided that the drift of the cost process is not excessively high relative to its volatility. In addition to obtaining a number of comparative statics results for the basic model, we prove an equivalence result stating that a model with decay or volatility in the amount of the good can be analyzed in terms of our basic framework. An implication of this result is that as long as there is some volatility in the amount of the good, positive gains from trade can be realized, even if the transaction cost is bounded away from zero.

2009年8月6日（木　Thursday）16:50-18:30　※曜日・場所にご注意下さい。　

Yuliy Sannikov(Princeton University)

Macroeconomic Model with a Financial Sector (joint with Marcus Brunnermeier)

2009年9月1日（火　Tuesday）10:20-12:00　
※　時間にご注意下さい。　
UTIPE Distinguished Research Seminar Seriesと共催 (※ 大学院生向け特別講義です。)

John Gibson (University of Waikato)

Geo-referenced Household Surveys: Opportunities and Constraints

Distance and location are important determinants of many choices that households make. Evidence on these variables typically available to economists comes from self-reports in surveys. There is growing evidence that self-reported distance is measured with error and that these errors are correlated with outcomes of interest. In contrast to self-reports, the Global Positioning System (GPS) can determine almost exact location (typically within 15 meters) and when linked with a Geographic Information System (GIS) can allow measures of distance that account for topography and transport networks. The falling cost of GPS receivers (typically below US$100) makes it increasingly feasible for field surveys to use GPS to geo-reference household locations. The increasing availability of other layers of spatial information also increases the returns to having geo-referenced household survey data. In this lecture I review four ways that geo-referencing household survey data can lead to better economics and better policy: (i) by helping to understand policy externalities and spillovers, (ii) through better understanding of the access to services, (iii) by improving the collection of household survey data, and (iv) through use in econometric modeling to understand the causal impact of policies. I also discuss possible linkages of geo-referenced survey data to other layers of spatial information. Several pitfalls and unresolved problems with using GPS in household surveys are also discussed.

Background papers are available at:
http://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/wbrobs/v22y2007i2p217-241.html
http://ideas.repec.org/p/wai/econwp/08-19.html
http://ideas.repec.org/p/wai/econwp/08-14.html

2009年9月1日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30　

Bhaskar Dutta (University of Warwick)

Nash Implementation with Partially Honest Individuals (joint with Arunava Sen) [PDF]

We investigate the problem of Nash implementation in the pres- ence of \partially honest" individuals. A partially honest player is one who has a strict preference for revealing the true state over ly- ing when truthtelling does not lead to a worse outcome (according to preferences in the true state) than that which obtains when lying. We show that when there are at least three individuals, the presence of even a single partially honest individual (whose identity is not known to the planner) can lead to a dramatic increase in the class of Nash implementable social choice correspondences. In particular, all social choice correspondences satisfying No Veto Power can be implemented. We also provide necessary and sufficient conditions for implementa- tion in the two-person case when there is exactly one partially honest individual and when both individuals are partially honest. We provide examples which illustrate the possibilities for implementation in these cases.

2009年9月4日（金　Friday）16:50-18:30　
※曜日にご注意下さい。

John Gibson (University of Waikato)

Pressure Cookers or Pressure Valves: Do Roads Lead to Deforestation in China?

The effect of roads on forests is ambiguous. Many studies conclude that building and upgrading roads increases pressure on forests but some find that new and better roads may reduce the rate of deforestation. In this seminar satellite remote sensing images of forest cover in Jiangxi province, China are used to test whether the existence and the size of roads (ranging from expressways to tertiary roads) in 1995 affected the level of forest cover in 2000 or the rate of change between 1995 and 2000. To account for road access for each of the one square kilometer ('pixel') units of forest cover we measure whether or not and what type of roads penetrate the "watershed" in which the pixel lies. These watersheds allow more plausible measures of accessibility than do traditional "crowfly" distance measures that ignore topography. To account for spatial autocorrelation and to reduce computational burden, a 1-in-25 regular grid sample is taken and to account for possible confounding additional covariates: geographical and climatic variables (e.g., elevation, slope, rainfall, temperature, soil properties); demographic and economic variables (e.g., local population and GDP per square kilometer); distance variables (e.g., distance to the nearest provincial capital and to the nearest pixel with cultivated land); and road density are used with both OLS and covariate matching techniques to estimate treatment effects. The results suggest that roads can most safely be described as having a neutral impact on the level of forests and the rate of deforestation.

2009年10月7日（水　Wednesday）16:50-18:30　
※曜日に注意／会場が変わりましたのでご注意下さい※

Tor Eriksson（University of Aarhus）

Vacancy Duration, Wage Offers and Job Requirements -- Pre-Match Data Evidence

Besides wage offers, credentials like education, work experience and skill requirements are key screening tools for firms in their recruitment of new employees. This paper contributes some new evidence to a relatively tiny literature on firms' recruitment behaviour. In particular, our analysis is concerned with how vacancy durations vary with firms' minimum wage offers and minimum job requirements (regarding education, skills, age, gender and earlier work experience). The empirical analysis is based on ten employer surveys carried out by the DGBAS on Taiwan during the period 1996-2006. We estimate logistic discrete hazard models with a rich set of job and firm characteristics as explanatory variables. The results show that vacancies associated with higher wage offers take, ceteris paribus, longer to be filled. The impact of firms' wage offers and credential requirements does not vary over the business cycle. However, firms vary their skills requirements over the business cycle: our empirical analysis shows that, for a given wage offer, requirements are stricter in recessions and downturns. Separating between reasons for posting vacancies turned out important in explaining differences in vacancy durations. The duration of vacancies due to regular turnover and changing business cycle condition are less affected by skill requirements than that of other vacant jobs.

2009年10月13日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30
※マクロワークショップと共催

上東貴志（Takashi Kamihigashi) （Kobe University）

Rational Asset Price Bubbles in Small Open Economies

This paper examines the possibility of rational asset price bubbles in small open economies. Our model is similar to the Lucas asset price model except that the economy may be partially or completely open. There are good, asset, and loan markets, and we consider all possible cases depending on whether each market is open or closed. We show that bubbles are possible if and only if the good market and at least one of the asset and loan markets is open. We characterize the response of an economy with a positive bubble to an unanticipated introduction of a restriction on loan supply or asset ownership.

2009年10月20日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Ricardo Alonso （University of Southern California）

Organize to Compete (joint with Wouter Dessein and Niko Matouschek) [PDF]

We examine the e?ect of competition on the internal organization of a multi-divisional .rm. Managers need to adapt production to demand but also to cooperate and coordinate produc- tion across divisions. Because headquarters is imperfectly informed about demand, centraliza- tion performs poorly in terms of adaptation. And because division managers are biased and imperfectly informed about demand in each others.markets, decentralization performs poorly in terms of cooperation and coordination. The e?ect of competition depends on the underlying reasons for the increase in competition. If it simply lowers demand, it favors decentralization. But if it also makes demand more price sensitive, it can favor centralization.

2009年10月27日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

武岡則男 (Norio Takeoka) （Yokohama National University）

Uphill Self-Control (joint with Jawwad Noor) [PDF]

This paper is motivated by the idea that self-control is more difficult to exert the more it is exerted. We extend the theory of temptation and self-control introduced by Gul and Pesendorfer [8] to allow for an increasing marginal cost of resisting temptation, that is, convex self-control costs. We also prove a general representation theorem that admits a general class of self-control cost functions. Both models maintain Gul and Pesendorfer's Order, Continuity and Set-Betweenness axioms but violate Independence.

2009年11月10日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Zaifu Yang （Yokohama National University）

Constrainedly Fair Job Assignments under Minimum Wages (joint with T. Andersson and L-G. Svensson,[PDF]

A number of jobs are to be assigned to a greater number of workers. While having to abide by the law of minimum wages, firms must determine who should be assigned which job and at what salary. In such situations fair (envy-free) allocations usually fail to exist. To cope with this situation, this paper proposes a new concept of fairness, called constrained fairness. Among the set of constrainedly fair allocations, the so-called constrainedly fair and minimal allocations are of particular interest. The reason for this is that the salaries are not only compatible with the minimum wages; they are also optimal from the standpoint of cost-minimizing firms and the assignment of jobs is efficient from the viewpoint of workers. A convergent dynamic procedure that identifies constrainedly fair and minimal allocations is proposed. Furthermore, strategic properties of the mechanism are derived, and two notions of efficiency are evaluated.

2009年11月17日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Eugenio Miravete （University of Texas at Austin ）

The Doubtful Profitability of Foggy Pricing [paper]

Firms engage in foggy pricing when they design tariff options in order to profit from consumer mistakes. This paper analyzes whether the transition from monopoly to competition in the early U.S. cellular telephone industry facilitated the use of deceptive strategies. Results indicate that competition does not appear to foster the use of deceptive strategies in general. The use of foggy pricing appears to be profitable only when consumers are very bad at predicting their future usage. Entrants always offer less foggy tariffs than incumbent firms, a result that questions that competiton per se leads to a more frequent use of deceptive strategies. All results are robust to the existence of uncertainty regarding future consumption at the time of choosing a particular tariff option, as well as to consumers' heterogeneity with respect to cellular telephone usage. There is some evidence that that a year after entry of the second firm, nonlinear tariffs offered by competing firms become less powerful as predicted by theoretical models of nonlinear pricing competition.

2009年11月24日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Bill Sandholm （University of Wisconsin）

Survival of Dominated Strategies under Evolutionary Dynamics [paper]

We prove that any deterministic evolutionary dynamic satisfying four mild requirements fails to eliminate strictly dominated strategies in some games. We also show that existing elimination results for evolutionary dynamics are not robust to small changes in the specifications of the dynamics. Numerical analysis reveals that dominated strategies can persist at nontrivial frequencies even when the level of domination is not small.

2009年12月1日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Federico Etro （University of Milan Bicocca）

Endogernous　Market　Structure　and　the　Business　Cycle (joint with Andrea Colciago) [PDF]

We characterize endogenous market structures under Bertrand and Cournot competition in a DSGE model. Short run markups vary countercyclically because of the impact of entry on competi- tion. Long run markups are decreasing in the discount factor and in productivity, and increasing in the exit rate and in the entry costs. Dynamic inefficiency can emerge due to excessive entry under Cournot competition. Positive temporary shocks attract entry, which strengthens competition so as to temporary reduce the markups and increase real wages: this competition e?ect creates an intertemporal substitution e?ect which boosts consumption and employment. Endogenous market structures improve the ability of a .exible prices model in matching impulse response functions and second moments for US data.

2009年12月8日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30
UTIPE Distinguished Research Seminar Seriesと共催

Steven　Stern （University of Virginia）

Marriage, Divorce, and Asymmetric Information [paper]

In answers to unique questions from the National Survey of Fam- ilies and Households, people reveal their valuations of their options outside of marriage as well as their beliefs about their spouses.options. We use this data to demonstrate several features of household bargaining. First, we document marriages in which one spouse would be happier outside the marriage and the other spouse would be unhappier. This provides a new type of evidence that bargaining takes place. Second, we show that spouses have private information about their outside options, and we estimate a bargaining model that quanti.es the extent of resulting inefficiencies. Third, we incorporate caring preferences and imperfect substitutability of utility into the estimation. Without these features, estimation predicts unrealistically high divorce rates, arising because spouses drive too hard a bargain in the presence of asymmetric information and linear utility. After allowing for interdependent and diminishing marginal util- ity from marital surplus, both of which are identi.ed by incorporating divorce data, our divorce predictions are reasonable. These results show that agents forego their own utility in order to raise the utility of their spouses, and, in doing so, o?set much of the inefficiency generated by their imperfect knowledge. In contrast, a social planner with only public information about spouses.outside options reduces welfare considerably by keeping far too many couples together. In sum, we .nd evidence about two key features of marriage .asymmetric in- formation and interdependent utility .which are difficult to identify in most studies of interpersonal relationships. 

2009年12月15日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

中島賢太郎 (Kentaro Nakajima) （Tohoku University）

Agglomeration or Selection? The Case of the Japanese Silk-Reeling Industry, 1909-1916 (joint with Yutaka Arimoto and Tetsuji Okazaki) [PDF]

Plants in clusters are often more productive than those located in non-clusters. This has been explained by agglomeration effects that improve productivity of all plants in a region. However, recent theoretical development of trade and spatial economic theories with heterogeneous firms has shed light on another channel of productivity improvement in clusters, "plant-selection effects". This paper uses plant-level data on the Japanese silk reeling industry in 1909-1916 to distinguish between these two effects based on a nested model of firm-selection and agglomeration. We identify the plant-selection effect by using the fact that the two effects have different implications on the distribution of plant-level productivity. Major findings are as follows. First, we confirmed that plants in clusters were indeed more productive. Second, at the same time, the widths of distribution of plant productivity in clusters were narrower and more severely truncated than those in non-clusters. Finally, productivity distribution did not shift rightwards in clusters. Our findings imply that the plant-selection effect was the source of the higher plant-level productivity in silk-reeling clusters in this period.

2009年12月22日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30

Vijay Krishna （Pennsylvania State University）

Voluntary Voting: Costs and Benefits (joint with John Morgan) [PDF]

We compare voluntary and compulsory voting in a Condorcet-type model in which voters have identical preferences but differential information. With voluntary voting, all equilibria involve sincere voting and positive participation. Thus, in contrast to situations with compulsory voting, there is no conflict between strategic and sincere behavior. When voting is costless, voluntary voting is welfare superior to compulsory voting. Even when voting is costly, participation rates are such that, in the limit, the correct candidate is elected---that is, information fully aggregates.

2009年1月18日（月　Monday）12:00-13:30
※日時にご注意下さい。

渡辺誠 (Makoto Watanabe) （Universitad Carlos III)

Merchants/Middlemen [PDF1] [PDF2]

2009年2月2日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30
※　UTIPE Distinguished Research Seminar Seriesと共催

川越敏司 (Toshiji Kawagoe) （Future University-Hakodate)

Level-k Analysis of Experimental Centipede Games (joint with Hirokazu Takizawa) [PDF]

The centipede game is one of the most celebrated examples of the paradox of backward induction. Experiments of the centipede game have been conducted in various settings: two-person games with linearly increasing payoffs (McKelvey and Palfrey, 1992), two-person games with constant-sum payoffs (Fey, McKelvey and Palfrey, 1996) and three-person games (Rapoport et al. 2003). Several models have been proposed for explaining the observed deviations from the subgame-perfect equilibrium prediction, which include models with fairness concern or altruism. Focusing on the initial responses, this paper attempts to offer another explanation for the observed deviations by using level-k analysis, a non-equilibrium model of strategic thinking. We show that level-k analysis gives consistently good predictions for the experimental centipede games. The results suggest that experimental results of centipede games be explained without resorting to fairness concern or altruism.

2010年2月3日（水 Wednesday） 12:00-13:30
*UTIPE　Junior Research Seminar Seriesと共催
※　日時にご注意下さい。

Hwa Ryung Lee （University of California, Berkeley)

Bankruptcy and Low Cost Carrier Expansion in the Airline Industry [PDF]

This paper studies how .nancial distress affects competition and how incumbent bankruptcy affects the growth of rivals, specifically in the context of airline bankruptcies. We begin by studying whether bankrupt airlines put competitive pressures on rivals by cutting fares and maintaining or expanding capacity on the 1000 most popular domestic routes from 1998-2008. Our results suggest that, although bankrupt legacy airlines reduce fares, they also reduce capacities signi.cantly. Low-cost carrier (LCC) rivals do not match the fare cuts and expand capacities by 13-18% above trend growth. The significant capacity reductions associated with legacy airline bankruptcies create growth opportunities for LCC rivals. This indicates the existence of barriers that have limited LCCs from expanding faster and more extensively. The LCC expansion during rivals' bankruptcies is even greater when we consider the 200 most popular airports instead of the 1000 most popular routes. During legacy airlines. bankruptcy, non-LCC rivals reduce capacities on the routes affected by the bankruptcy but expand at the affected airports. A likely explanation for this result is that non-LCCs avoid "bankruptcy" routes as more competitive pressure is expected with increasing presence of LCCs, but they pick up the terminals or time slots given up by the bankrupt airlines to expand on other routes. On balance the total route capacity on the 1000 popular routes shows only a modest decrease during bankruptcy and eventually recovers, but the capacity mix changes in favor of LCCs.

2010年2月4日（木 Thursday） 12:00-13:30
*UTIPE　Junior Research Seminar Seriesと共催
※　日時にご注意下さい。

Seung-Gyu (Andrew) Sim （University of Wisconsin-Madison）

Equilibrium Wage-Tenure Contract with Unobserved Human Capital [PDF]

This paper develops an equilibrium job search model in which the employed worker privately accumulates human capital and continually searches for a better paying job. The firm cannot observe the level of human capital of the worker nor the job search outcome. In order to induce truthful revelation on the level of human capital, the firm offers a menu of contracts with different lifetime values conditioning on the worker's output. Given the lifetime value, the firm back-loads some portion of wage payments to discourage potential job turnover and extract more surplus from early leavers. In this environment, wage grows due to job-to-job transition, human capital accumulation (productive promotion), and the strategic back-loading scheme (non-productive promotion). We estimate the model using indirect inference to investigate the effect of human capital accumulation on individual wage growth. In the NLSY79 data, the average wage of white male high school graduates after 20 years of market experience is 1.88 times larger than the average of the first full-time wages. A counterfactual analysis using the structural parameter estimates shows that if a typical worker were not able to accumulate human capital, his wage would grow by 41.8%.

2009年2月9日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30
※　UTIPE Distinguished Research Seminar Seriesと共催

中林　純 (Jun Nakabayashi) （University of Tsukuba)

Small Business Set-asides in Procurement Auctions: An Empirical Analysis[paper]

As part of public procurement, many governments adopt small business programs to provide contract opportunities for businesses often with preferences for firms operated by members of groups designated as disadvantaged. The redistribution arising from such programs, however, can introduce significant added costs to government procurement budgets. In this paper, the extent to which small business set-asides increase government procurement costs is examined. The estimates employ data on Japanese public construction projects, where approximately half of the procurement budget is set aside for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Applying a positive relationship between pro tability and firm size obtained by the non-parametric estimation of asymmetric rst-price auctions with aliated private values, a counterfactual simulation is undertaken to demonstrate that approximately 40 percent of SMEs would exit the procurement market if set-asides were to be removed. Surprisingly, the resulting lack of competition would increase government procurement costs more than it would offset the production cost inefficiency.

2010年2月12日（金 Friday） 12:00-13:30
*UTIPE　Junior Research Seminar Seriesと共催
※　日時にご注意下さい。

Sommart Chantarat (Cornell University)

The Performance of Index Based livestock Insurance: Ex Ante Assessment in the Presence of a Poverty Trap [PDF]

Index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) is designed to compensate vulnerable pastoralists for area average predicted livestock mortality loss in northern Kenya, where previous work has established the presence of poverty traps. This paper conducts initial, ex-ante evaluation of the effectiveness of this new insurance product, scheduled for commercial pilot in early 2010, given the tradeoff between its advantages in reducing transaction costs and asymmetric information problems and the presence of basis risk resulted from imperfect correlation between the insurance coverage and individuals' loss experience. We simulate household-specific wealth dynamics based on a dynamic model parameterized using rich panel and experimental data from the region. The simulations allow us to establish the welfare effects of and to investigate patterns of willingness to pay for this asset index insurance. We show that the bifurcated livestock dynamics associated with the poverty trap gives rise to insurance valuation that is highly nonlinear in individual herd size. Willingness to pay among vulnerable groups who most need insurance are, on average, lower than commercially viable rates. And some schemes of targeted subsidization of IBLI premiums appear to offer more cost-effective poverty reduction than direct need-based transfers to the poor.

2010年2月15日（月 Monday） 12:00-13:30
*UTIPE　Junior Research Seminar Seriesと共催
※　日時にご注意下さい。

Jade Vichyanond （Princeton University）

Intellectual Property Protection and Patterns of Trade [paper]

The paper provides a simple theoretical model for understanding how the difference in the level of intellectual property rights protection determines trade patterns. In particular, I examine how countries' levels of patent rights protection affect exports in industries with different degrees of reliance on innovation. In contrast to most models of institutional comparative advantage, which predict that countries with superior institutions specialize in industries that are very dependent on institutions, I show that higher patent rights protection does not necessarily lead to specialization in industries that rely heavily on innovation. There may exist a threshold beyond which occurs a reversal of specialization patterns, a consequence of monopoly power inherent in intellectual property rights protection. I then use the model's implications to assess empirically whether such predicted patterns hold in cross-country trade data and find evidence for general patterns of specialization as well as a reversal of such patterns among countries with high levels of patent rights protection.

2009年2月16日（火　Tuesday）16:50-18:30
※　都合によりセミナー中止となりました

Debraj Ray (New York University)

Inequality and Markets (Joint with Dilip Mookherjee) [paper]

This paper characterizes long run income distribution in a competitive economy with borrowing constraints. Parents decide both on nancial bequests and investments in their children's education. The occupational structure is "rich": there is a continuum of occupations with varying entry costs that are imperfect substitutes in the production process. Occupational returns are endogenously determined by market conditions. If the span of occupational investments is wide enough, the wealth distribution is non- degenerate and long-run inequality arises. In this case, the average return to education must rise with the level of educational investment - the return to human capital is endogenously nonconcave. This finding, which contrasts with the usual presumption that the private return to human capital is decreasing, constitutes the central empirically testable proposition of this paper.

2009年2月19日（金　Friday）15:30-18:30
※都市経済ワークショップと共催　
※時間と場所にご注意下さい。　

北野泰樹 (Taiju Kitano)　(National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)

Assessing the Pass-through Effect of U.S. Trade Remedy Investigations: Canadian Softwood Lumber (joint with Hiroshi Ohashi)
松村敏弘 (Toshihiro Matsumura) （University of Tokyo）
Regional Restriction, Strategic Delegation, and Welfare (joint with Noriaki Matsushima)

※ 2010年1月　修士論文報告会 Master's Thesis Presentations ※

１．下記の予定は変更の可能性もありますのでご注意下さい

（Please note that the schedule below might be changed)。

２．発表は基本的に日本語で行われます

（Presentations are basically in Japanese)。

配布資料の印刷をご希望の方は、下記の期日までにセンター研究支援室の田中(kimiko[at mark]e.u-tokyo.ac.jp)まで発表論文のファイルを送るか、ハードコピーをセンター研究支援室（経済学研究科 学術交流棟（小島ホール） ６階）までご持参下さい。提出されたファイルはすぐに印刷にまわしてしまいますので、その後の差し替えがないよう、最終稿を１度だけ提出してください。 期限内に届いたものについては当日配布用印刷物を用意いたしますが、間に合わない場合やその後の差し替えについては、当日ご自分で１５部ほどコピーをご持参下さい。期限内に提出されなかった場合は、印刷を受け付けられませんのでご注意ください。

※※　ミクロ経済学ワークショップを履修しているが、スケジュールの都合で修士論 文の発表がマクロ経済学ワークショップで行われる学生は、ミクロ経済学ワーク ショップで発表したものとみなし、ミクロ経済学ワークショップの単位を認定し ます。

※　印刷物は会場に届けられます。

※　パソコン・ポインターはセミナー室ロッカー内の機器をご使用下さい。（プロジェクターは会場に備え付けられています。） 　　　　　
設置、片づけは参加者の学生が各自で行ってください。

発表論文提出期限：

1月12日（火）発表者＝1月12日（火）朝9:00（必着）まで

1月19日（火）発表者＝1月18日（月）朝9:00（必着）まで

1月26日（火）発表者＝1月25日（月）朝9:00（必着）まで

2009年1月12日（火　Tuesday）16:50-17:30

友枝健太郎

Probabilistic Matching in Many-to-one Matching Market

2009年1月12日（火　Tuesday）17:30-18:10

中島可友奈

Efficient Steady State in Money Search Model : A Mechanism Design Approach

2009年1月12日（火　Tuesday）18:10-18:50

糟谷祐介

Propensity and Expected Utility Theory

2009年1月19日（火　Tuesday）16:50-17:30

川口康平

Introduction of capitation payment reduced agency problem between physician and patient?

2009年1月19日（火　Tuesday）17:30-18:10

加藤秀忠

新築分譲マンション市場の実証分析

2009年1月19日（火　Tuesday）18:10-18:50

酒井祐典

常磐道における休日特別割引の費用使益分析

2009年1月26日（火　Tuesday）16:50-17:30

林原賢悟

固有支持層が選挙活動に与える影響について

2009年1月26日（火　Tuesday）17:30-18:10

磯野太佑

Auctions and Information structures

2009年1月26日（火　Tuesday）18:10-18:50

会田剛史

Social Capital as an Instrument for Common Pool Resource Management