Search Results
Working Paper
Reputation and Investor Activism: A Structural Approach
We measure the impact of reputation for proxy fighting on investor activism by estimating a dynamic model in which activists engage a sequence of target firms. Our estimation produces an evolving reputation measure for each activist and quantifies its impact on campaign frequency and outcomes. We find that high reputation activists initiate 3.5 times as many campaigns and extract 85% more settlements from targets, and that reputation-building incentives explain 20% of campaign initiations and 19% of proxy fights. Our estimates indicate these reputation effects combine to nearly double the ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature studies the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international trade and show that ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature has studied the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ industry and occupation employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international ...
Working Paper
Robust Inference in First-Price Auctions : Experimental Findings as Identifying Restrictions
In laboratory experiments bidding in first-price auctions is more aggressive than predicted by the risk-neutral Bayesian Nash Equilibrium (RNBNE) - a finding known as the overbidding puzzle. Several models have been proposed to explain the overbidding puzzle, but no canonical alternative to RNBNE has emerged, and RNBNE remains the basis of the structural auction literature. Instead of estimating a particular model of overbidding, we use the overbidding restriction itself for identification, which allows us to bound the valuation distribution, the seller's payoff function, and the optimal ...
Working Paper
Interactions between job search and housing decisions: a structural estimation
In this paper, we investigate to what extent shocks in housing and financial markets account for wage and employment variations in a frictional labor market. To explain these interactions, we use a model of job search with accumulation of wealth as liquid funds and residential real estate, in which house prices are randomly persistent. First, we show that reservation wages and unemployment are increasing in total wealth. And, second, we show that reservation wages and unemployment are also responsive to the composition of wealth. Specifically, when house prices are expected to rise, holding a ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature has studied the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ industry and occupation employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
International trade has increased at a rapid pace in the last decades, altering production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. The estimated effects of trade on employment and welfare critically depend on data about workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. I show that the estimated employment and welfare effects of international trade, and the estimated structural parameters of standard models are biased when the analysis uses data subject to misclassification errors. I develop an econometric framework to estimate misclassification ...
Working Paper
Nonlinear Pricing in Village Economies
This paper examines the price of basic staples in rural Mexico. We document that nonlinear pricing in the form of quantity discounts is common, that quantity discounts are sizable for typical staples, and that the well-known conditional cash transfer program Progresa has significantly increased quantity discounts, although the program, as documented in previous studies, has not affected on average unit prices. To account for these patterns, we propose a model of price discrimination that nests those of Maskin and Riley (1984) and Jullien (2000), in which consumers differ in their tastes and, ...
Report
Financial Transaction Taxes and the Informational Efficiency of Financial Markets: A Structural Estimation
We develop a new methodology to estimate the impact of a financial transaction tax (FTT) on financial market outcomes. In our sequential trading model, there are price-elastic noise and informed traders. We estimate the model through maximum likelihood for a sample of sixty New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks in 2017. We quantify the effect of introducing an FTT given the parameter estimates. An FTT increases the proportion of informed trading, improves information aggregation, but lowers trading volume and welfare. For some less-liquid stocks, however, an FTT blocks private information ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
International trade has increased at a rapid pace in the last decades, altering production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. The estimated effects of trade on employment and welfare critically depend on data about workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. I show that the estimated employment and welfare effects of international trade, and the estimated structural parameters of standard models are biased when the analysis uses data subject to misclassification errors. I develop an econometric framework to estimate misclassification ...