Research Database

The Boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world. To resolve overdemands, priority is often given to families who live in the neighborhood school. We note that such priorities define some schools as being safer. We exploit an unexpected change in the definition of neighborhood in Barcelona to show that when allowing school choice under the BM with priorities: (1) the resulting allocation is not very different from a neighborhood-based assignment, and (2) important inequalities emerge beyond parents’ naivete found in the literature.

We characterize equilibria of general equilibrium models with externalities and taxes as solutions to optimization problems. This characterization is similar to Negishi’s characterization of equilibria of economies without externalities or taxes as solutions to social planning problems. It is often useful for computing equilibria or deriving their properties. Frequently, however, finding the optimization problem that a particular equilibrium solves is difficult. This is especially true in economies with multiple equilibria. In a dynamic economy with externalities or taxes there may be a robust continuum of equilibria even if there is a representative consumer. This indeterminacy of equilibria is closely related to that in overlapping generations economies.

This paper investigates the impact on aggregate variables of changes in government consumption in the context of a stochastic, neoclassical growth model. We show, theoretically, that the impact on output and employment of a persistent change in government consumption exceeds that of temporary change. We also show that, in principle, there can be an analog to the Keynesian multiplier in the neoclassical growth model. Finally, in an empirically plausible version of the model, we show that the interest rate impact of a persistent government consumption shock exceeds that of a temporary one. Our results provide counterexamples to existing claims in the literature.

We consider the large class of dynamic games in which each player's actions are unobservable to the other players, and each player's actions can influence a state variable that is unobservable to the other players. We develop an algorithm that solves for the subset of sequential equilibria in which equilibrium strategies are Markov in the privately observed state.

We develop a theory of general equilibrium with endogenous debt limits in the form of individual rationality constraints similar to those in the dynamic consistency literature. If an agent defaults on a contract, he can be excluded from future contingent claims markets trading and can have his assets seized. He cannot be excluded from spot markets trading, however, and he has some private endowments that cannot be seized. All information is publicly held and common knowledge, and there is a complete set of contingent claims markets. Since there is complete information, an agent cannot enter into a contract in which he would have an incentive to default in some state. In general there is only partial insurance: variations in consumption may be imperfectly correlated across agents; interest rates may be lower than they would be without constraints; and equilibria may be Pareto ranked.

In this article we use the techniques developed in examining optimal contracting with imperfect information to build a simple equilibrium model of a labor market with imperfect information. We then use the model to examine the effects that imperfect information imposes on labor markets, particularly when compared with full information and noncontractual base lines. We demonstrate that quits increase in periods of high output, without postulating exogenous price rigidity.