New“Bid Shopping” in Procurement Auctions with Subcontracting 25 January 2025 Raymond Deneckere and Daniel QuintWe analyze the equilibrium effects of “bid shopping” – a contractor soliciting a subcontractor bid for part of a project prior to a procurement auction, then showing that bid to a competing subcontractor in an attempt to secure a lower price. Such conduct is widely criticized as unethical by professional organizations, and has been the target of legislation at both the federal and state level, but is widespread in procurement auctions in many places.
NewA Theory of Cash Flow-Based Financing with Distress Resolution 25 January 2025 Barney Hartman-Glaser, Simon Mayer, and Konstantin MilbradtWe develop a dynamic contracting theory of asset- and cash flow-based financing that demonstrates how firm, intermediary, and capital market characteristics jointly shape firms’ financing constraints. A firm with imperfect access to equity financing covers financing needs through costly sources: an intermediary and retained cash. The firm’s financing capacity is endogenously determined by either the liquidation value of assets (asset-based) or the intermediary’s going-concern valuation of the firm’s cash flows (cash flow-based).
NewWealth Inequality and Asset Prices 25 January 2025 Matthieu GomezWealthy households disproportionately invest in equity, causing equity returns to generate large and persistent fluctuations in top wealth inequality. Motivated by this observation, I study the joint dynamics of asset prices and wealth inequality in a model where a subset of agents (“entrepreneurs”) hold levered positions on the economy. In the model, as in the data, the wealth distribution is stochastic and it exhibits a Pareto tail, with a tail index that depends on the logarithmic average return of top households.
NewMelons as Lemons: Asymmetric Information, Consumer Learning and Seller Reputation 15 January 2025 Jie BaiQuality provision is often low in many developing markets, and firms commonly lack a reputation for quality. This paper examines this issue both theoretically and empirically in the context of retail watermelon markets in China. I first demonstrate the existence of significant asymmetric information on quality between sellers and buyers, as well as the absence of a quality premium at baseline. To explain this, I develop a theoretical model that highlights the role of consumer beliefs and costly signaling in influencing sellers’ reputation incentives.
Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence 10 January 2025 Sonia Bhalotra, Diogo Britto, Paolo Pinotti, and Breno SampaioWe estimate impacts of male job loss, female job loss, and male unemployment benefits on domestic violence (DV) in Brazil. We merge individual-level employment and welfare registers with different measures of domestic violence: judicial cases brought to criminal courts, the use of public shelters by victims, and mandatory DV notifications by health providers. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we first show that both male and female job loss, independently, lead to large and pervasive increases in DV.
Voting on a Trade Agreement: Firm Networks and Attitudes Toward Openness 9 January 2025 Esteban Méndez and Diana Van PattenWe exploit a unique event to study the extent to which popular attitudes toward trade are driven by economic fundamentals. In 2007, Costa Rica put a free trade agreement (FTA) to a national referendum. With a single question on the ballot, 59% of Costa Rican adult citizens cast a vote on whether they wanted an FTA with the United States to be ratified or not. We merge disaggregated referendum results, which break new ground on anonymity-compatible voting data, with employer-employee, customs, and firm-to-firm transactions data, and data on household composition and expenditures.
Inference with a single treated cluster 3 January 2025 Andreas HagemannI introduce a generic method for inference about a scalar parameter in research designs with a finite number of heterogeneous clusters where only a single cluster received treatment. This situation is commonplace in difference-in-differences estimation but the test developed here applies more broadly. I show that the test controls size and has power under asymptotics where the number of observations within each cluster is large but the number of clusters is fixed. The test combines weighted, approximately Gaussian parameter estimates with a rearrangement procedure to obtain its critical values.
Valuing the Time of the Self-Employed 3 January 2025 Daniel Agness, Travis Baseler, Sylvain Chassang, Pascaline Dupas, and Erik SnowbergPeople’s value of their own time is a key input in public policy evaluations – these evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Measuring this value for the self-employed is challenging, as, by definition, it is not priced by the market. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive preferences. As a result, neither market wages nor standard valuation techniques correctly measure participants’ value of time.
