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Working Paper
Optimal Epidemic Control in Equilibrium with Imperfect Testing and Enforcement
We analyze equilibrium behavior and optimal policy within a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered epidemic model augmented with potentially undiagnosed agents who infer their health status and a social planner with imperfect enforcement of social distancing. We define and prove the existence of a perfect Bayesian Markov competitive equilibrium and contrast it with the efficient allocation subject to the same informational constraints. We identify two externalities, static (individual actions affect current risk of infection) and dynamic (individual actions affect future disease prevalence), and ...
Working Paper
Very Simple Markov-Perfect Industry Dynamics
This paper develops an econometric model of industry dynamics for concentrated markets that can be estimated very quickly from market-level panel data on the number of producers and consumers using a nested fixed-point algorithm. We show that the model has an essentially unique symmetric Markov-perfect equilibrium that can be calculated from the fixed points of a finite sequence of low-dimensional contraction mappings. Our nested fixed point procedure extends Rust's (1987) to account for the observable implications of mixed strategies on survival. We illustrate the model's empirical ...
Report
Rollover risk as market discipline: a two-sided inefficiency
Why does the market discipline that financial intermediaries face seem too weak during booms and too strong during crises? This paper shows in a general equilibrium setting that rollover risk as a disciplining device is effective only if all intermediaries face purely idiosyncratic risk. However, if assets are correlated, a two-sided inefficiency arises: Good aggregate states have intermediaries taking excessive risks, while bad aggregate states suffer from costly fire sales. The driving force behind this inefficiency is an amplifying feedback loop between asset values and market discipline. ...
Report
Signaling with Private Monitoring
A sender signals her private information to a receiver who privately monitors the sender’s behavior, while the receiver transmits his private inferences back through an imperfect public signal of his actions. In a linear-quadratic-Gaussian setup in continuous time, we construct linear Markov equilibria, where the state variables are the players’ beliefs up to the sender’s second order belief. This state is an explicit function of the sender’s past play—hence, her private information—which leads to separation through the second-order belief channel. We examine the implications of ...
Working Paper
Very Simple Markov-Perfect Industry Dynamics: Empirics
This paper develops an econometric model of firm entry, competition, and exit in oligopolistic markets. The model has an essentially unique symmetric Markov-perfect equilibrium, which can be computed very quickly. We show that its primitives are identified from market-level data on the number of active firms and demand shifters, and we implement a nested fixed point procedure for its estimation. Estimates from County Business Patterns data on U.S. local cinema markets point to tough local competition. Sunk costs make the industry's transition following a permanent demand shock last 10 to 15 ...
Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
We study optimal insurance contracts for an agent with Markovian private information. Our main results characterize the implications of constrained efficiency for long-run welfare and inequality. Under minimal technical conditions, there is Absolute Immiseration: in the long run, the agent?s consumption and utility converge to their lower bounds. When types are persistent and utility is unbounded below, there is Relative Immiseration: low-type agents are immiserated at a faster rate than high-type agents, and ?pathwise welfare inequality? grows without bound. These results extend and ...
Working Paper
A Crises-Bailouts Game
This paper studies the optimal design of a liability-sharing arrangement as an infinitely repeated game. We construct a noncooperative model with two agents: one active and one passive. The active agent can take a costly and unobservable action to reduce the incidence of crisis, but a crisis is costly for both agents. When a crisis occurs, each agent decides unilaterally how much to contribute mitigating it. For the one-shot game, when the avoidance cost is too high relative to the expected loss of crisis for the active agent, the first-best is not achievable. That is, the active agent ...
Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
This paper studies the optimal tradeoff between insurance and inequality in economies with persistent private information.We consider a principal-agent model in which the principal insures the agent against privately-observed shocks to his endowment, which follows an ergodic finite-state Markov chain that may exhibit arbitrary serial correlation. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility become arbitrarily negative in the long run. When the endowment is positively serially correlated, the optimal contract provides increasingly high-powered ...
Working Paper
Intermediation in Networks
I study intermediation in networked markets using a stochastic model of multilateral bargaining in which players compete on different routes through the network. I characterize stationary equilibrium payoffs as the fixed point of a set of intuitive value function equations and study efficiency and the impact of network structure on payoffs. There is never too little trade but there may be an inefficiency through too much trade in states where delay would be efficient. With homogeneous trade surplus the payoffs for players that are not essential to a trade opportunity go to zero as trade ...
Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
This paper studies the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. We consider a model in which a principal insures an agent whose privately observed endowment follows an ergodic, finite Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, the optimal contract also features backloaded high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his report increases without bound. ...