Stimulating Efforts by Coarsening Information and Prize Design (joint with Fabio Michelucci)   We study a principal who jointly designs an information disclosure rule and a prize structure to maximize total effort in a two-agent contest. Agents are uncertain about their own ability and their opponent's ability. The principal commits to a public disclosure rule […]

Room A406.

U.S. Monetary Policy Spillovers to Emerging Equity Markets This paper examines the transmission of U.S. monetary policy shocks to stock return volatility in emerging economies. It develops a small open economy DSGE framework as a proof of concept for the propagation mechanism, showing how foreign monetary shocks can affect exchange rates, borrowing conditions, inflation, and […]

Important: The seminar will be held online. Mass Layoffs and Lemons: Evidence from Chile Who gets displaced in mass-layoff episodes can be far from random, and selection can generate sizable heterogeneity in both post-layoff employment and criminal charges. We link Chilean administrative worker-firm records to universe-level public defender data, and compare matched displaced and non-displaced […]

Competition and Personalized Pricing in the Age of AI Artificial intelligence creates new possibilities for firms and digital platforms to use detailed consumer information to personalize prices. We study how an information intermediary can strategically reveal such information to competing firms and thereby shape pricing, competition, and welfare. Using Bayes correlated equilibrium, we characterize outcomes […]

The slippery slope: misconduct despite ethics We study the decision of ethical managers to double down on misconduct such as securities fraud. We use neuroscience evidence to appropriately model ethics in the utility function. We characterise lying equilibria as a function of:     the category of ethics induced;     the punishment regime;     and the longevity of the […]

Heterogeneity in MPC Beyond Liquid Wealth: The Role of Permanent Earnings While MPCs are mostly known to decrease with liquid wealth, I show that they are also increasing in the permanent component of earnings. In a standard model, permanent earnings raise MPCs because they reduce the ratio of risk-free-liquid-wealth-to-risky-future-earnings, strengthening precautionary behavior. This can explain […]

Nature-Related Risks in Syndicated Lending We examine whether banks price firms’ dependence on nature. Loan spreads are higher for firms that depend more heavily on nature. A 1% increase in dependence is associated with a 0.32% increase in spreads. We provide evidence consistent with a causal interpretation by using two quasi-natural experiments that change lenders’ information and firms’ costs […]

A case for divided government (joint with Wiola Dziuda) American voters complain about gridlock under divided government, yet they often elect it. We reconcile these facts with a model built on two realistic features: voters are uncertain which reforms they will find beneficial once the election has passed, and governments face an agenda constraint—they cannot […]