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Robustly Optimal Mechanisms for Selling Multiple Goods

Yeon-Koo Che and Weijie Zhong

We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer’s valuations within a set of distributions, called an “ambiguity” set. We identify the exact forms of robustly optimal selling mechanisms and the worst-case distributions when the ambiguity set satisfies various moment conditions on the values of subsets of goods.

Auctioning Long-Term Projects under Financial Constraints

Malin Arve and David Martimort

We consider a procurement auction for the provision of a basic service to which an add-on must later be appended. Potential providers are symmetric, have private information on their cost for the basic service and the winning firm must also implement the add-on. To finance value-enhancing activities related to the add-on, this firm may need extra funding by outside financiers. Non-verifiable effort related to these activities creates a moral hazard problem which makes the firm’s payoff function for the second period concave in returns over the relevant range.

Untying the Knot: How Child Support and Alimony Affect Couples’ Dynamic Decisions and Welfare

Hanno Foerster

In many countries, divorce law mandates post-marital maintenance payments (child support and alimony) to insure the lower earner in married couples against financial losses upon divorce. This paper studies how maintenance payments affect couples’ intertemporal decisions and welfare. I develop a dynamic model of family labor supply, home production, savings, and divorce and estimate it using Danish register and survey data. The model captures the policy tradeoff between providing insurance to the lower earner and enabling couples to specialize efficiently, on the one hand, and maintaining labor supply incentives for divorcees, on the other hand.

Markups and Inequality

Corina Boar and Virgiliu Midrigan

We characterize optimal product market policy in an unequal economy in which firm ownership is concentrated and markups increase with firm market shares. We study the problem of a utilitarian regulator who designs revenue-neutral interventions in the product market. We show that optimal policy increases product market concentration. This is because policies that encourage larger producers to expand improve allocative efficiency, increase the demand for labor and equilibrium wages.

The Child Penalty Atlas

Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and Gabriel Leite Mariante

This paper builds a world atlas of child penalties in employment based on micro data from 134 countries. The estimation of child penalties is based on pseudo-event studies of first child birth using cross-sectional data. The pseudo-event studies are validated against true event studies using panel data for a subset of countries. Most countries display clear and sizable child penalties: men and women follow parallel trends before parenthood, but diverge sharply and persistently after parenthood. While this pattern is pervasive, there is enormous variation in the magnitude of the effects across different regions of the world.

On the family origins of human capital formation: Evidence from donor children

Petter Lundborg, Erik Plug, and Astrid Würtz-Rasmussen

We introduce a novel strategy to study the intergenerational transmission of human capital skills, net of genetic skill transfers. For this purpose, we use unique Danish data on children conceived through sperm and egg donation in IVF treatments to estimate the relationship between child test scores and parental years of schooling. Because the assignment of donors is not selective, these parental schooling estimates allow for a causal nurture interpretation.

Firm Inattention and the Efficacy of Monetary Policy: A Text-Based Approach

Wenting Song and Samuel Stern

This paper provides empirical evidence of the importance of firm attention to macroeconomic dynamics. We construct a text-based measure of attention to macroeconomic news and document that attention is polarized across firms and countercyclical. Differences in attention lead to asymmetric responses to monetary policy: expansionary monetary shocks raise market values of attentive firms more than those of inattentive firms, and contractionary shocks lower values of attentive firms by less.

Standard Errors for Calibrated Parameters

Matthew D. Cocci and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller

Calibration, the practice of choosing the parameters of a structural model to match certain empirical moments, can be viewed as minimum distance estimation. Existing standard error formulas for such estimators require a consistent estimate of the correlation structure of the empirical moments, which is often unavailable in practice. Instead, the variances of the individual empirical moments are usually readily estimable. Using only these variances, we derive conservative standard errors and confidence intervals for the structural parameters that are valid even under the worst-case correlation structure.

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