1,721,036 research outputs found

    Douglas Gale’s contribution to bargaining and markets

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    This short piece reviews some of the seminal contributions by Douglas Gale to the study of decentralized markets, both with symmetric information and with adverse selection. A key driver of Gale s interest in these themes was the aim to provide non cooperative foundations to competitive markets. The goal of this piece is not to provide a comprehensive survey, but to highlight some key insights and results in Gale s work in this area and to emphasize their relationship with the subsequent developments in the literature on decentralized markets and its various applications to OTC markets, labor markets, money and more

    Efficient policy interventions in an epidemic

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    In the context of an epidemic, a society is forced to face a system of externalities in consumption and in production. Command economy interventions can support efficient allocations at the cost of severe information requirements. Competitive markets for infection rights (alternatively, Pigouvian taxes) can guarantee efficiency without requiring direct policy interventions on socio-economic activities. We demonstrate that this is the case also with moral hazard, when the infections cannot be associated to the specific activities which originated them. Finally, we extend the analysis to situations where governments have only incomplete information regarding the values of the parameters of the infection or of firms’ production

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Competing mechanisms in markets for lemons

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    We study directed search equilibria in a decentralized market with adverse selection, where uninformed buyers post general trading mechanisms and informed sellers select one of them. We show that this has differing and significant implications with respect to the traditional approach, based on bilateral contracting between the parties. In equilibrium, all buyers post the same mechanism and low‐quality sellers receive priority in any meeting with a buyer. Also, buyers make strictly higher profits with low‐ than with high‐type sellers. When adverse selection is severe, the equilibrium features rationing and is constrained inefficient. Compared to the equilibrium with bilateral contracting, the equilibrium with general mechanisms yields a higher surplus for most, but not all, parameter specifications

    Tax wedges, financial frictions and misallocation

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    We revisit the classical result that in a closed economy the incidence of corporate taxes on labor is approximately zero. We consider a rich general equilibrium framework, where agents differ in the level of their wealth as well as in their managerial and working ability. Potential entrepreneurs go through all the key decisions affected by corporate tax changes: the choice of (i) occupation, (ii) organizational form, (iii) investment, and (iv) financing structure. We allow both for the presence of financial frictions and the traditional tax advantage of debt over corporate equity, which jointly generate misallocation of capital and talent. In this environment we characterize the effects of increasing corporate taxes both analytically and for a calibrated version of the model. We show that this tax increase reallocates production from C corporations to pass-through businesses. Since, due to distorted prices, the latter have higher capital-labor ratios, this reallocation generates a reduction in labor productivity and wages. Furthermore, the corporate tax increase induces some C corporations to reorganize as pass-throughs, which implies more restricted access to external funds and thus a socially inefficient downsizing of production in these firms. Finally, the tax increase causes further misallocation of talent by inducing agents with low wealth relative to their managerial talent to switch from entrepreneurship to being workers, while the reverse happens for agents with higher wealth and lower managerial skills. Overall, we find that both labor and capital bear a large share of the corporate tax incidence, while entrepreneurs are net beneficiaries of the tax change

    A Theory of Repurchase Agreements, Collateral Re-use, and Repo Intermediation

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    We show that repurchase agreements (repos) arise as the instrument of choice to borrow in a competitive model with limited commitment. The repo contract traded in equilibrium provides insurance against fluctuations in the asset price in states where collateral value is high and maximizes borrowing capacity when it is low. Haircuts increase both with counterparty risk and asset risk. In equilibrium, lenders choose to re-use collateral. This increases the circulation of the asset and generates a “collateral multiplier” effect. Finally, we show that intermediation by dealers may endogenously arise in equilibrium, with chains of repos among traders

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods
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