Research Database

A new approach to market behavior is suggested. This approach has a coherent game theoretic foundaton, addresses such anomalous economic behaviors as strikes, rigid wages and unemployment, regulation of financial markets, depresssion, and nonmarket allocation, and, more generally, provides insights for Finance, Oligopoly Theory, Industrial Organization, and Macroeconomics. The central theme of the approach is that exchange technologies are a basic building block in a model, as are tastes, endowments, and production technologies. Moreover, the key feature of an institution of exchange is that it allows the making of a binding final offer.

We consider a simple environment in which individuals receive income shocks that are unobservable to others and can privately store resources. We show that this ability to privately store can undercut the ability to shift resources across individuals to the extent that the efficient allocation only involves consumption smoothing over time, as opposed to insurance (consumption smoothing over states) if the rate of return on savings is not too far below the rate of time preference, or, alternatively, if the worst possible outcome is sufficiently dire. We also show that unlike environments without unobservable storage, the symmetric efficient allocation is decentralizable through a competitive asset market in which individuals trade risk-free bonds among themselves.

We provide empirical evidence of a novel liquidity-based transmission mechanism through which monetary policy influences asset markets, develop a model of this mechanism, and assess the ability of the quantitative theory to match the evidence.

Many applications of search theory in monetary economics use the Shi-Trejos-Wright model, hereafter STW, while applications in finance use Duffie-Gârleanu-Pederson, hereafter DGP. These approaches have much in common, and both claim to be about liquidity, but the models also differ in a fundamental way: in STW agents use assets as payment instruments when trading goods; in DGP there are no gains from exchanging goods, but agents trade because they value assets differently with goods serving as payment instruments. We develop a framework nesting the two. This clarifies the connection between the literatures, and generates new insights and applications. Even in the special cases of the baseline STW and DGP models, we provide propositions generalizing and strengthening what is currently known, and rederiving some existing results using more tractable arguments.

A framework is developed with what we call technology capital. A country is a measure of locations. Absent policy constraints, a firm owning a unit of technology capital can produce the composite output good using the unit of technology capital at as many locations as it chooses. But it can operate only one operation at a given location, so the number of locations is what constrains the number of units it operates using this unit of technology capital. If it has two units of technology capital, it can operate twice as many operations at every location. In this paper, aggregation is carried out and the aggregate production functions for the countries are derived. Our framework interacts well with the national accounts in the same way as does the neoclassical growth model. It also interacts well with the international accounts. There are constant returns to scale, and therefore no monopoly rents. Yet there are gains to being economically integrated. In the framework, a country’s openness is measured by the effect of its policies on the productivity of foreign operations. Our analysis indicates that there are large gains to this openness.