Econometrica 2024年 11月刊 目录与摘要

刊发卷期：Volume 92, Issue 6

刊发时间：November 2024

期刊等级：ABS 4*

出版厂商：Wiley-Blackwell

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目录

1.The Impacts of Managerial Autonomy on Firm Outcomes

Namrata Kala

2.Aggregate Implications of Barriers to Female Entrepreneurship

Gaurav Chiplunkar, Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg

3.Sparse Network Asymptotics for Logistic Regression Under Possible Misspecification

Bryan S. Graham

4.Matching and Agglomeration: Theory and Evidence From Japanese Firm‐to‐Firm Trade

Yuhei Miyauchi

5.Privacy‐Preserving Signals

Philipp Strack, Kai Hao Yang

6.Stationary Social Learning in a Changing Environment

Raphaël Levy, Marcin Pęski, Nicolas Vieille

7.Ambiguous Contracts

Paul Dütting, Michal Feldman, Daniel Peretz, Larry Samuelson

9.Adaptive, Rate‐Optimal Hypothesis Testing in Nonparametric IV Models

Christoph Breunig, Xiaohong Chen

10.Caution and Reference Effects

Simone Cerreia-Vioglio, David Dillenberger, Pietro Ortoleva

摘要

1.The Impacts of Managerial Autonomy on Firm Outcomes

Namrata Kala

The allocation of decision-making power is a critical choice that organizations make to mitigate agency problems and information frictions. This paper investigates the role of delegation for organizations where the agency problem is both pervasive and has potentially high welfare consequences: state-owned enterprises (SOEs). I use a natural experiment in India to uncover the causal effects of granting SOE managers more autonomy over strategic decisions. Managers meaningfully exercise this autonomy, which results in greater value added, but also a reduced emphasis on outcomes valued by the government, such as a reduction in worker amenities (employee housing), and an increase in markups. Returns to autonomy are higher for firms with higher baseline incentive conflict.

2.Aggregate Implications of Barriers to Female Entrepreneurship

Gaurav Chiplunkar, Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg

We develop a framework for quantifying barriers to labor force participation (LFP) and entrepreneurship faced by women in India. We find substantial barriers to LFP, and higher costs of expanding businesses through hiring workers for women entrepreneurs. However, there is one area where female entrepreneurs have an advantage: the hiring of female workers. We show that this is not driven by the sectoral composition of female employment. Consistent with this pattern, policies promoting female entrepreneurship can significantly increase female LFP even without explicitly targeting female LFP. Counterfactual simulations indicate that removing all excess barriers faced by women entrepreneurs would substantially increase the fraction of female-owned firms, female LFP, earnings, and generate substantial gains for the economy. These gains are due to higher LFP, higher real wages and profits, and reallocation: low productivity male-owned firms previously sheltered from female competition are replaced by higher productivity female-owned firms previously excluded from the economy.

3.Sparse Network Asymptotics for Logistic Regression Under Possible Misspecification

Bryan S. Graham

Consider a bipartite network where N consumers choose to buy or not to buy M different products. This paper considers the properties of the logit fit of the N × M array of “i-buys-j” purchase decisions, mathematical equation, onto a vector of known functions of consumer and product attributes under asymptotic sequences where (i) both N and M grow large, (ii) the average number of products purchased per consumer is finite in the limit, (iii) there exists dependence across elements in the same row or same column of Y (i.e., dyadic dependence), and (iv) the true conditional probability of making a purchase may, or may not, take the assumed logit form. Condition (ii) implies that the limiting network of purchases is sparse: only a vanishing fraction of all possible purchases are actually made. Under sparse network asymptotics, I show that the parameter indexing the logit approximation solves a particular Kullback–Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC) minimization problem (defined with respect to a certain Poisson population). This finding provides a simple characterization of the logit pseudo-true parameter under general misspecification (analogous to a (mean squared error (MSE) minimizing) linear predictor approximation of a general conditional expectation function (CEF)). With respect to sampling theory, sparseness implies that the first and last terms in an extended Hoeffding-type variance decomposition of the score of the logit pseudo composite log-likelihood are of equal order. In contrast, under dense network asymptotics, the last term is asymptotically negligible. Asymptotic normality of the logistic regression coefficients is shown using a martingale central limit theorem (CLT) for triangular arrays. Unlike in the dense case, the normality result derived here also holds under degeneracy of the network graphon. Relatedly, when there “happens to be” no dyadic dependence in the data set in hand, it specializes to recently derived results on the behavior of logistic regression with rare events and i.i.d. data. Simulation results suggest that sparse network asymptotics better approximate the finite network distribution of the logit estimator. A short empirical illustration, and additional calibrated Monte Carlo experiments, further illustrate the main theoretical ideas.

4.Matching and Agglomeration: Theory and Evidence From Japanese Firm‐to‐Firm Trade

Yuhei Miyauchi

This paper shows that matching frictions and a thick market externality in firm-to-firm trade shape the agglomeration of economic activity. Using panel data of firm-to-firm trade in Japan, I demonstrate that firms gradually match with alternative suppliers following an unanticipated supplier bankruptcy, and that the rate of rematching increases in the geographic density of alternative suppliers. Motivated by these empirical findings, I develop a general equilibrium model of firm-to-firm matching in input trade across space. The model reveals that the thick market externality gives rise to an agglomeration externality affecting regional production and welfare. Using the calibrated model to the reduced-form patterns of firm-to-firm matching, I estimate that the elasticity of a region's real wage with respect to population density due to the thick market externality is approximately 0.02. This finding highlights the substantial impact of the thick market externality on the overall agglomeration benefit.

5.Privacy‐Preserving Signals

Philipp Strack, Kai Hao Yang

A signal is privacy-preserving with respect to a collection of privacy sets if the posterior probability assigned to every privacy set remains unchanged conditional on any signal realization. We characterize the privacy-preserving signals for arbitrary state space and arbitrary privacy sets. A signal is privacy-preserving if and only if it is a garbling of a reordered quantile signal. Furthermore, distributions of posterior means induced by privacy-preserving signals are exactly mean-preserving contractions of that induced by the quantile signal. We discuss the economic implications of our characterization for statistical discrimination, the revelation of sensitive information in auctions and price discrimination.

6.Stationary Social Learning in a Changing Environment

Raphaël Levy, Marcin Pęski, Nicolas Vieille

We consider social learning in a changing world. With changing states, societies can be responsive only if agents regularly act upon fresh information, which significantly limits the value of observational learning. When the state is close to persistent, a consensus whereby most agents choose the same action typically emerges. However, the consensus action is not perfectly correlated with the state, because societies exhibit inertia following state changes. When signals are precise enough, learning is incomplete, even if agents draw large samples of past actions, as actions then become too correlated within samples, thereby reducing informativeness and welfare.

7.Ambiguous Contracts

Paul Dütting, Michal Feldman, Daniel Peretz, Larry Samuelson

We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an ambiguous contract, and this gain can be arbitrarily high. We characterize the structure of optimal ambiguous contracts, showing that ambiguity drives optimal contracts toward simplicity. We also provide a characterization of ambiguity-proof classes of contracts, where the principal cannot gain by infusing ambiguity. Finally, we show that when the agent can engage in mixed actions, the advantages of ambiguous contracts disappear

9.Adaptive, Rate‐Optimal Hypothesis Testing in Nonparametric IV Models

Christoph Breunig, Xiaohong Chen

We propose a new adaptive hypothesis test for inequality (e.g., monotonicity, convexity) and equality (e.g., parametric, semiparametric) restrictions on a structural function in a nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) model. Our test statistic is based on a modified leave-one-out sample analog of a quadratic distance between the restricted and unrestricted sieve two-stage least squares estimators. We provide computationally simple, data-driven choices of sieve tuning parameters and Bonferroni adjusted chi-squared critical values. Our test adapts to the unknown smoothness of alternative functions in the presence of unknown degree of endogeneity and unknown strength of the instruments. It attains the adaptive minimax rate of testing in L2. That is, the sum of the supremum of type I error over the composite null and the supremum of type II error over nonparametric alternative models cannot be minimized by any other tests for NPIV models of unknown regularities. Confidence sets in L2 are obtained by inverting the adaptive test. Simulations confirm that, across different strength of instruments and sample sizes, our adaptive test controls size and its finite-sample power greatly exceeds existing non-adaptive tests for monotonicity and parametric restrictions in NPIV models. Empirical applications to test for shape restrictions of differentiated products demand and of Engel curves are presented.

10.Caution and Reference Effects

Simone Cerreia-Vioglio, David Dillenberger, Pietro Ortoleva

We introduce Cautious Utility, a new model based on the idea that individuals are unsure of trade-offs between goods and apply caution. The model yields an endowment effect, even when gains and losses are treated symmetrically. Moreover, it implies either loss aversion or loss neutrality for risk, but in a way unrelated to the endowment effect, and it captures the certainty effect, providing a novel unified explanation of all three phenomena. Cautious Utility can help organize empirical evidence, including some that directly contradicts leading alternatives.