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Congratulations to Michael Dickstein, one of 2021's Best 40-Under-40 Professors
'It’s the impactful research and the work Dickstein does with students that put him securely on this year’s list of the world’s 40 best business school professors under 40.'
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PhD Alumna Abigail Hornstein appointed the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University
Horstein's research constitutes the studies of corporate finance, multinationals, business strategy and governance, and legal institutions, with a particular expertise in the Chinese financial markets. Her publications include articles in journals such as the Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Journal of Corporate Finance, and China Economic Review.
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Congratulations to Roxana Mihet, the winner of the ECB's Young economists' competition 2020
“I show that the explosion of financial technologies for retail investors does not guarantee broad increases in household wealth. Instead, the sophisticated investors who already have relatively high levels of wealth are most likely to benefit from many of the new technologies.”
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Luis Cabral and Lei Xu's "Seller reputation and price gouging: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic," published in the Economic Inquiry
From mid-January to March 2020, 3M masks sold on Amazon by third party sellers were priced 2.4 times higher than Amazon's 2019 price. However, this price increase was not uniform across sellers. We estimate that when Amazon is stocked out (one of our measures of scarcity) new (entrant) sellers increase price by 178%, whereas the continuing sellers' increase is limited to 56.7%. This is consistent with the idea that seller reputation limits the extent of profitable price gouging. Similar...
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Niklas Engbom's "Contagious Unemployment," published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research
Recent micro evidence of how workers search for jobs is shown to have critical implications for the macroeconomic propagation of labor market shocks. Unemployed workers send over 10 times as many job applications in a month as their employed peers, but are less than half as likely per application to make a move. I interpret these patterns as the unemployed applying for more jobs that they are less likely to be a good fit for. During periods of high unemployment, it consequently becomes harder...
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Paul Scott, Jonathan Elliott, Georges V. Houngbonon, and Marc Ivaldi's "Market Structure, Investment and Technical Efficiencies in Mobile Telecommunications," published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research
Paul Scott and coauthors develop a model of competition in prices and infrastructural investment among mobile network providers. Market shares and service quality (download speed) are simultaneously determined, for demand affects the network load just as delivered quality affects consumer demand. While consolidation typically has adverse impacts on consumer surplus, economies of scale push in the other direction. Consumer surplus is maximized at a moderate number of firms, and that the...
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Larry White's "Rethinking Antitrust," published in the Milken Institute Review
Antitrust policy in the U.S. has recently gained an unusual amount of media attention. There are critics who have argued that a major overhaul of antitrust policy is needed. This paper argues that instead there are some important but more modest changes that could go a long way toward significantly strengthening the role that antitrust can play in keeping the U.S. economy competitive, vibrant, and innovative.
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Paul Wachtel, Moritz Kuhn, Alina Bartscher, and Moritz Schularick's "Monetary Policy and Racial Inequality," published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
This paper aims at an improved understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and racial inequality. We investigate the distributional effects of monetary policy in a unified framework, linking monetary policy shocks both to earnings and wealth differentials between black and white households. Specifically, we show that, although a more accommodative monetary policy increases employment of black households more than white households, the overall effects are small. At the same time...
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Adam Brandenburger, Alexander Danieli, and Amanda Friedenberg's "The Implications of Finite-Order Reasoning," forthcoming in Theoretical Economics
The epistemic conditions of rationality and mth-order strong belief of rationality (RmSBR, Battigalli and Siniscalchi, 2002) formalize the idea that players engage in contextualized forward-induction reasoning. This paper characterizes the behavior consistent with RmSBR across all type structures. In particular, in a class of generic games, R(m −1)SBR is characterized by a new solution concept we call an m-best response sequence (m-BRS). Such sequences are an iterative version of...
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Adam Brandenburger, Amanda Friedenberg, and Terri Kneeland's "Two Approaches to Iterated Reasoning in Games"
Level-k analysis and epistemic game theory are two different ways of investigating iterative reasoning in games. This paper explores the relationship between these two approaches. An important difference between them is that level-k analysis begins with an exogenous anchor on the players’ beliefs, while epistemic analysis begins with arbitrary epistemic types (hierarchies of beliefs). To close the gap, we develop the concept of a level-k epistemic type structure, that incorporates the...
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Larry White and John Kwoka's "The “Antitrust Revolution” and The Antitrust Revolution: A Perspective from the Inside" published in The Antitrust Bulletin
There clearly has been a revolution in the way that modern microeconomics has come to occupy a central role in the development of antitrust policy and in the structuring of antitrust cases over the past forty years or so. And during the past thirty plus years, there have been seven editions of The Antitrust Revolution that we have edited. In this essay, we offer our perspective on the “antitrust revolution,” as well as provide an insiders’ view of those seven editions and how they came to be.
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Luis Cabral, Ajay Bhaskarabhatla, Deepak Hegde, & Thomas Peeters' "Are Inventors or Firms the Engines of Innovation?" published in Management Science
In this study, we empirically assess the contributions of inventors and firms for innovation using a 37-year panel of U.S. patenting activity. We estimate that inventors’ human capital is 5–10 times more important than firm capabilities for explaining the variance in inventor output. We then examine matching between inventors and firms and find highly talented inventors are attracted to firms that (i) have weak firm-specific invention capabilities and (ii) employ other talented inventors...
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Larry White's "Antitrust Economics and Consumer Protection Economics in Policy and Litigation: Why the Disparity?" published in the Economic Inquiry
The article argues that the disparity between the greater attention that economics has given to antitrust policy versus the lesser attention to consumer protection policy is due to 3 causes: a) the longer intellectual history and development of industrial organization; the history and culture of the Federal Trade Commission (where both policies are supposed to be pursued); and the splintering of consumer protection policy among a large number of federal and state agencies.
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