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Working Paper
The Illusion of School Choice: Empirical Evidence from Barcelona
School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students? educa-tional outcomes. Yet, the concern is that disadvantaged families are less able to exercise choice, which raises (3) equity concerns. The Boston mechanism (BM) is a procedure that is widely used around the world to resolve overdemands for particular schools by defining a set of priority points based on neigh-borhood and socioeconomic characteristics. The mechanism design literature has shown that under the BM, parents may not have incentives to provide their true preferences, thereby ...
Working Paper
Bargaining Under Liquidity Constraints: Nash vs. Kalai in the Laboratory
We report on an experiment in which buyers and sellers engage in semi-structured bargaining in two dimensions: how much of a good the seller will produce and how much money the buyer will offer the seller in exchange. Our aim is to evaluate the empirical relevance of two axiomatic bargaining solutions, the generalized Nash bargaining solution and Kalai's proportional bargaining solution. These bargaining solutions predict different outcomes when buyers are constrained in their money holdings. We first use the case when the buyer is not liquidity constrained to estimate the bargaining power ...
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
A simple model of price dispersion
This article considers a simple stock-flow matching model with fully informed market participants. Unlike in the standard matching literature, prices are assumed to be set ex-ante. When sellers pre-commit themselves to sell their products at an advertised price, the unique equilibrium is characterized by price dispersion due to the idiosyncratic match payoffs (in a marketplace with full information). This provides new insights into the price dispersion literature, where price dispersion is commonly assumed to be generated by a costly search of uninformed buyers.
Working Paper
Bad Jobs and Low Inflation
We study a model in which firms compete to retain and attract workers searching on the job. A drop in the rate of on-the-job search makes such wage competition less likely, reducing expected labor costs and lowering inflation. This model explains why inflation has remained subdued over the last decade, which is a conundrum for general equilibrium models and Phillips curves. Key to this success is the observed slowdown in the recovery of the employment-to-employment transition rate in the last five years, which is interpreted by the model as a decline in the share of employed workers searching ...
Working Paper
Targeted Search in Matching Markets
We propose a parsimonious matching model where a person's choice of whom to meet endogenizes the degree of randomness in matching. The analysis highlights the interaction between a productive motive, driven by the surplus attainable in a match, and a strategic motive, driven by reciprocity of interest of potential matches. We find that the interaction between these two motives differs with preferences?vertical versus horizontal?and that this interaction implies that preferences recovered using our model can look markedly different from those recovered using a model where the degree of ...
Working Paper
The Over-the-Counter Theory of the Fed Funds Market: A Primer
We present a dynamic over-the-counter model of the fed funds market and use it to study the determination of the fed funds rate, the volume of loans traded, and the intraday evolution of the distribution of reserve balances across banks. We also investigate the implications of changes in the market structure, as well as the effects of central bank policy instruments such as open market operations, the discount window lending rate, and the interest rate on bank reserves.
Working Paper
Deconstructing Delays in Sovereign Debt Restructuring
Negotiations to restructure sovereign debt are time consuming, taking almost a decade on average to resolve. In this paper, we analyze a class of widely used complete information models of delays in sovereign debt restructuring and show that, despite superficial similarities, there are major differences across models in the driving force for equilibrium delay, the circumstances in which delay occurs, and the efficiency of the debt restructuring process. We focus on three key assumptions. First, if delay has a permanent effect on economic activity in the defaulting country, equilibrium delay ...
Working Paper
Competition, syndication, and entry in the venture capital market
There are two ways for a venture capital (VC) firm to enter a new market: initiate a new deal or form a syndicate with an incumbent. Both types of entry are extensively observed in the data. In this paper, I examine (i) the causes of syndication between entrant and incumbent VC firms, (ii) the impact of entry on VC contract terms and survival rates of VC-backed start-up companies, and (iii) the effect of syndication between entrant and incumbent VC firms on the competition in the VC market and the outcomes of incumbent-backed ventures. By developing a theoretical model featuring endogenous ...
Working Paper
Targeted search in matching markets
We propose a parsimonious matching model where people's choice of whom to meet endogenizes the degree of randomness in matching. The analysis highlights the interaction between a productive motive, driven by the surplus attainable in a match, and a strategic motive, driven by reciprocity of interest of potential matches. We find that the interaction between these two motives differs with preferences ? vertical versus horizontal ? and that this interaction implies that preferences estimated using our model can look markedly different from those estimated using a model where the degree of ...