Journal Article

Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation:

Markets and New Industrial Policy: Systemic directionality or polycentric evolutionism?

Bryan Cheang and Mark Pennington

Proponents of “new industrial policy” claim that systemic directionality can be imparted to market economies in ways recognising the epistemic challenges of complexity and uncertainty. This paper evaluates these efforts ...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

Inference Without Smoothing for Large Panels with Cross- Sectional and Temporal Dependence

Javier Hidalgo and Marcia M Schafgans

This paper addresses inference in large panel data models in the presence of both cross-sectional and temporal dependence of unknown form. We are interested in making inferences without relying on the choice of any smoo...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

Likelihood corrections for two-way models

Koen Jochmans and Taisuke Otsu

The use of two-way fixed-effect models is widespread. The presence of incidental parameter bias, however, invalidates statistical inference based on the likelihood. In this paper we consider modifications to the (profile...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

Information theoretic approach to high dimensional multiplicative models: Stochastic discount factor and treatment effect

Taisuke Otsu and Chen Qiu

This paper is concerned with estimation of functionals of a latent weight function that satisfies possibly high dimensional multiplicative moment conditions. Main examples are missing data problems, treatment effects, an...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Peer Effects in Endogenous Networks

Timo Hiller and Timo Hiller

This paper presents a simple model of strategic network formation with local complementarities in effort levels and positive local externalities for a general class of payoff functions. Results are obtained for one-sided...Read more...

Development Discussion Paper

Motivating Knowledge Agents: Can Incentive Pay Overcome Social Distance?

Erlend Berg, Maitreesh Ghatak, R Manjula, D Rajasekhar and Sanchari Roy

This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information. We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objecti...Read more...

Political Economy and Public Policy Paper

Group deliberation and the transformation of judgments: an impossibility result

Christian List

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is relatively little formal work on the transformation of individual judgments in group delib...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Active Courts and Menu Contracts

Luca Anderlini, Leonardo Felli and Andrew Postlewaite

We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. The model we analyze is the same as in Anderlini, Felli, and Postlewaite (2006). An active court can improve on the outcome that t...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

SHOULD COURTS ALWAYS ENFORCE WHAT CONTRACTING PARTIES WRITE? This paper replaces TE/2003/464

Luca Anderlini, Leonardo Felli and Andrew Postlewaite

We find an economic rationale for the common sense answer to the question in our title — courts should not always enforce what the contracting parties write. We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows ...Read more...

Political Economy and Public Policy Paper

BEING THE NEW YORK TIMES: THE POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR OF A NEWSPAPER

Riccardo Puglisi

I analyze a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1997. Controlling for the incumbent President's activity across issues, I find that during the presidential campaign the New York Times gives more emphasi...Read more...

Political Economy and Public Policy Paper

Information Acquisition, Ideology and Turnout: Theory and Evidence from Britain

Valentino Larcinese

The amount of political information that voters decide to acquire during an electoral campaign depends, among other things, on prior ideological beliefs about parties and/or candidates. Voters that are ex ante indifferen...Read more...

DARP Paper

Anti-evasion auditing policy in the presence of common income shocks

Miguel Sanchez

When fairly homogeneous taxpayers are affected by common income shocks, a tax agency’s optimal auditing strategy consists of auditing a low-income declarer with a probability that (weakly) increases with the other taxpay...Read more...

DARP Paper

Knowledge-Based Economic Development: Mass Media and the Weightless Economy REVISED MARCH 2009

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay

We examine associations of mass media and information and communications technologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures on some economic development outcomes. We .nd that several mass media and ICT penetration var...Read more...

Political Economy and Public Policy Paper

Does Political Knowledge Increase Turnout? Evidence from the 1997 British General Election

Valentino Larcinese

A number of recent formal models predict a positive effect of political knowledge on turnout. Both information acquisition and turnout, however, are likely to be determined by a similar set of variables, rendering hard t...Read more...

CASEpaper

Teenage Expectations and Desires about Family Formation in the United States

Robert D. Plotnick

Using data collected in 2000 on a racially and ethnically diverse sample of high school seniors (typically 17-18 years old), this study analyzes teenagers’ expectations and desires about marriage, having children, and be...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

Forecasting the density of asset returns

Trino-Manuel Niguez and Javier Perote

In this paper we introduce a transformation of the Edgeworth-Sargan series expansion of the Gaussian distribution, that we call Positive Edgeworth-Sargan (PES). The main advantage of this new density is that it is well d...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Should Courts Always Enforce What Contracting Parties Write? This paper is replaced by TE/2006/510

Luca Anderlini, Leonardo Felli and Andrew Postlewaite

We find an economic rationale for the common-sense answer to the question in our title ¿ courts should not always enforce what the contracting parties write. We describe and analyse a contractual environment that allows ...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Investment Timing under Incomplete Information

Jean-Paul Decamps, Thomas Mariotti and Stephane Villeneuve

We study the decision of when to invest in an indivisible project whose value is perfectly observable but driven by a parameter that is unknown to the decision maker ex ante. This problem is equivalent to an optimal stop...Read more...

Development Economics Paper

Social Networks and Technology Adoption in Northern Mozambique

Oriana Bandiera and Imran Rasul

Despite their potentially strong impact on poverty, agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly. Using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in Mozambique, we analyse whether and how individual adoption ...Read more...

Development Economics Paper

Land Distribution, Incentives and the Choice of Production Techniques in Nicaragua

Oriana Bandiera

Does the distribution of land rights affect the choice of contractible techniques? I present evidence suggesting that Nicaraguan farmers are more likely to grow effort-intensive crops on owned rather than on rented plots...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Self-Confidence and Survival

Heski Bar-Isaac

We consider the impact of history on the survival of a monopolist selling single units in discrete time periods, whose quality is learned slowly. If the seller learns her own quality at the same rate as customers, a suff...Read more...

DARP Paper

Risk and Inequality Perceptions

Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell

We examine the relationship between risk analysis and inequality analysis, using a questionnaire-experimental approach .The experiments focus on the effect of income transformations on the perceived rankings of income di...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

Adaptive Varying-Coefficient Linear Models

Zongwu Cai, Jianqin Fan and Qiwei Yao

Varying-coefficient linear models arise from multivariate nonparametric regression, nonlinear time series modelling and forecasting, functional data analysis, longitudinal data analysis, and others. It has been a common ...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

A Theory of Supervision with Endogenous Transaction Costs

Antoine Faure-Grimaud, Jean-Jacques Laffont and David Martimort

We propose a theory of supervision with endogenous transaction costs. A principal delegates part of his authority to a supervisor who can acquire soft information about an agent's productivity. If the supervisor were ris...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Epistemic Conditions for Bayesian Nash Equilibrium, and Common Knowledge of Rationality

Ben Polak

We show that, in games of complete information, the Aumann-Brandenburger (1995) sufficient conditions for Nash equilibrium in beliefs also imply common knowledge of rationality. We then consider beliefs held in games of ...Read more...

DARP Paper

Income Transformation and Income Inequality (published in Advances in Econometrics, Income Distribution & Scientific Methodology: Essays in Honour of Camilo Dagum, Daniel Slottje (ed)(Physica Verlag, 1999, pp.209-232)

Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell

We examine the way in which across-the-board additions to incomes are perceived to change inequality. Using a questionnaire we investigate whether subjective inequality rankings correspond to the principle of scale-indep...Read more...

DARP Paper

The Allocation of Benefits underUncertainty: A Decision-Theoretic Framework

Ramses H. Abul Naga

We consider the problem of targeting benefits when the incomes of families are not accurately observable by the public authorities. By income uncertainty it is meant that the decision-maker cannot ascertain an applicant'...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

A General Model of Information Sharing in Oligopoly

Michael A. Raith

Under which circumstances do oligopolists have an incentive to share private information about a stochastic demand or stochastic costs? We present a general model which includes virtually all models of the existing liter...Read more...

Japanese Studies Programme Paper

The Formation of the Japanese Railway Network in the 1890s: The Case of the Kobu Line

Masahiro Sato

Preface: Professor Masahiro Sato of the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, presented this paper at a special session of the joint LSE-SOAS seminar series 'Japanese Economy and Society in Comparative...Read more...