東北大学現代経済学研究会
2014年度記録
2014年4月11日(金)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

Michal Fabinger 氏 (東京大学)

"Analytic Approaches to International Trade"

Abstract: This talk will discuss ways in which our understanding of international trade may be advanced using analytic methods. It will consist of two parts. The first part, based on the paper "Trade and interdependence in a spatially complex world", will be concerned with spatial reach of economic shocks in standard models of international trade consistent with the gravity equation. The second part will be based on a paper in collaboration with Glen Weyl, which is currently being written and whose tentative title is "Why are some imperfect competition models so much more tractable than others? How to flexibly approximate incidence in closed form". The paper introduces a novel perspective on demand functions and supply functions and proposes ways to tractably approximate equilibrium systems that would otherwise have to be solved numerically. In the case of the Melitz model, this approach leads to novel generalizations that are significantly more flexible, but still allow for explicit aggregation over heterogeneous firms.


4月17日(木)　15:00-18:10　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)
通常と開催時間が異なりますのでご注意ください

(1) 15:00-16:30

田村 翔平 氏 (東北大学)

"Characterizations of impartial nomination correspondences"

Abstract: We study the problem of awarding a prize among experts based on their mutual nominations for the prize. A nomination correspondence assigns the set of winners to each profile of nominations, and it is impartial if it determines each agent's winning independently of her own nomination. In this paper, we consider three axioms of anonymity, symmetry, and monotonicity, and characterize the minimal nomination correspondence that is impartial, anonymous, symmetric, and monotonic. We find that such a nomination correspondence is a modification of the plurality correspondence, which is called plurality with runners-up.

(2) 16:40-18:10

釈野 晃 氏 (東北大学)

"Public education policy, endogenous fertility and economic growth"

Abstract: Using a closed-economy overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility, child quality choice and human capital formation, this paper analyzes the effects of public education policy on fertility rate and per capita output growth rate under a pay-as-you-go social security system. Contrary to previous studies, I show that the effects of public education policy depend on the contribution rate to the PAYG scheme. Small sized public education policy stimulates fertility and impedes growth. On the contrary, if it is large, an increase in public education reduces fertility and stimulates growth.


5月8日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

上田 晃三 氏 (早稲田大学)

"Working Less and Bargain Hunting More: Macro Implications of Sales during Japan's Lost Decades"

Abstract: During the lost decades in the 1990s and 2000s, Japan witnessed the rising frequency of temporary sales and the declining hours worked. Motivated by this negative correlation, we construct a DSGE model with sales, wherein households go bargain hunting and firms determine its sale frequency endogenously. In the model, bargain hunting helps households avoid purchasing regular-priced goods, but it is time consuming like labor supply. We show that the real effects of monetary policy may weaken, because sales prices are frequently revised and endogenous bargain hunting enhances the strategic substitutability of sales. The real effects of technology shock, by contrast, may strengthen. The model reveals that declines in hours worked during Japan's lost decades account for an actual rise in the frequency of sales and a rise in the fraction of bargain hunters.


5月29日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

図斎 大 氏 (Temple University)

"An agent-based dynamic model on assimilation and segregation"

Abstract: While conformity pressures assimilate people in a community, an individual occasionally migrates among communities when the individual feels discontent with the community. These two factors cause segregation and cultural diversity over communities in the society. By formulating migration dynamic as best response dynamic and embedding it into Kuran & Sandholm's model (2008) on dynamic of preference assimilation, we build an agent-based dynamic model to see how the variance of preferences in the entire society quantitatively changes over time. We find from Monte-Carlo simulations that, while preferences assimilate within a community, self-selected migrations enlarge diversity of preferences over communities in the society. We further study how the arrival rate of migration opportunities and the degree of conformity pressures affect the variance of preferences.


6月5日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

平野 智裕 氏 (東京大学)

"Lean versus Clean in a Rational Bubble Model"

Abstract: We examine lean versus clean in a rational-bubble model. Over-speculation in asset bubbles is more likely to occur if the quality of the financial system is relatively high. Contrary to the conventional view, we show that macro-prudential regulation against bubble may end up increasing bubbly boom-bust cycles, while expectations about government's bailouts after the collapse of bubbles dampen bubbly boom-bust cycles. However, from a welfare perspective, macro-prudential regulation is of first-order importance for taxpayers (workers who are non-bubble holders). Under some conditions, the optimal policy for taxpayers is a combination of macro-prudential regulation against bubble with government's partial bailouts after the collapse of bubbles, irrespective of whether government can commit to future bailout policy. This finding provides a theoretical foundation of the case for leaning against bubble policy as well as for clean up policy after the collapse of bubbles. By contrast, for entrepreneurs rescued by government (bubble-holders), macro-prudential regulation is welfare-reducing, while bailout policy is welfare-improving. These results suggest that if government favors bubble-holders (wall-street people), bailout policy is more likely to be undertaken, and as a result, a large bubble is creaded, which results in increasing inequality between taxpayers and bubble-holders.


6月30日(月)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)
通常と曜日が異なりますのでご注意ください

手島 健介 氏 (メキシコ自治工科大学)

"Productivity Differences Between and Within Firms"

Abstract: We document how plants belonging to the same firm are heterogenous in their characteristics and then quantify a previously undocumented margin of aggregate labor productivity changes: within-firm across-plant reallocation of resources, Exploiting Mexican manufacturing plant-level panel data from 2003 to 2010, which allow us to identify which plants belong to which firms, we find that plants that have a bigger size within firm (i) are more productive, (ii) pay higher wages, (iii) are more likely to be export-oriented, and (iv) depend more on imported intermediate inputs. Reallocation of resources across plants within firms is a non-negligible part of aggregate labor productivity changes, especially for some important industries. We then explore the implication of within-firm across-plant heterogeneity, in particular non-exporting plants of exporting firms, on inferences from plant-level data and firm-level data. Within an exporting firm, non-exporting plants enjoy the same productivity levels as exporting plants, suggesting that the link between exporting and productivity arises at the firm level, but not additionally at the plant level. This induces plant-level data analysis to underestimate the exporter premium on productivity. On the other hand, non-exporting plants of exporting firms did not suffer at all during the trade crisis of 2008-09, which induces now firm-level data analysis to underestimate the impact of trade crisis. These findings together suggest that resource allocation within firms across plants is an important component of productivity changes and that conclusions drawn from the two types of data without considering this resource allocation may not be quantitatively comparable, and may also result in misleading inferences.


7月3日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

石瀬 寛和 氏 (大阪大学)

"Capital Heterogeneity as a Source of Comparative Advantage: Putty-Clay Technology in a Ricardian Model"

Abstract: I consider how heterogeneity in capital goods affects international trade patterns, and I show a novel source of comparative advantage: the magnitude of capital goods heterogeneity. Capital goods are heterogeneous in their productivity, and due to capacity constraints, only productive capital goods are activated in the equilibrium. Through this selection, the distribution of capital goods determines the industry-level productivity: industry-level productivity is higher in an industry with relatively larger variation in capital goods, and hence in a perfectly competitive two-country, two-good, two-factor equilibrium, the industry has Ricardian comparative advantage. An empirical examination using cross-country industry-level data shows that larger heterogeneity, which is empirically captured by a lower average capacity utilization rate, is positively correlated with higher international competitiveness of the industry. An extension of the model, including fixed trade cost, describes a sorting situation in which the most productive production units export, the moderately productive units serve domestic market, and the least productive units do not operate.


7月18日(金)　16:20-17:50　第24演習室(経済学研究科棟1階)
通常と曜日・開催場所が異なりますのでご注意ください

Stacey Chen 氏 (Academia Sinica)

"The Impact of Family Composition on Educational Achievement"

Abstract: Parents preferring sons tend to go on to have more children until a boy is born, and to concentrate investment in boys for a given family size. Thus, having a brother may affect the human capital formation of a child in two ways: an indirect effect by decreasing family size, and a direct effect where family size remains constant. We develop an identification strategy that allows us to separate these two effects. We then apply this to capture the direct and indirect effects using 0.8 million Taiwanese first-born children. We find that neither effect is important in explaining first-born boys’ education levels. In contrast, first-born girls receive a negative direct effect and a positive indirect effect, both being statistically significant and cancelling each other out. This result offers new evidence of sibling rivalry and gender bias in family settings that has not been detected in the previous literature.


7月25日(金)　14:40-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)
通常と曜日・開催時間が異なりますのでご注意ください

(1) 14:40-16:10

Yongseung Jung 氏 (Kyung Hee University)

"Price Stability and Gains from Cooperation in Open Economies with External Habit"

Abstract: This paper analyzes optimal monetary policy and gains from cooperation in a two country sticky price model with external habit persistence in consumption and global productivity shocks only. It shows that price stability in both countries is optimal only if time varying optimal tax on labor income is implemented to completely eliminate time-varyng distortions associated with external habit and monopolistic competition in goods market. If time-invariant tax on labor income to attain the efficient steady-state is implemented, the monetary policy authority should optimally try to undo the time-varying distortions associated with external habit and monopoly power in goods market by deviating from price stability. Under this circumstance, there are gains from cooperation for unitary elasticity of intertemporal and intratemporal elasticity, i.e. the Cole and Obstfeld case (1991). These findings sharply contrast the findings of existing literature such as Benigno and Benigno (2006, 2008), Clarida et al. (2002), Corsetti et al. (2010), and Obstfeld and Rogo§ (2002). The income and substitution effect from international relative price changes cannot exactly cancel out and the marginal cost spillover exists in the economy with external habit persistence and global productivity shocks only. The potential gains from the international policy cooperation tends to increase with the degree of habit persistence in consumption.

(2) 16:20-17:50

片山 宗親 氏 (京都大学)

"Inter-sectoral Labor Immobility, Sectoral Co-movement, and News Shocks"

Abstract: The sectoral co-movement of output and hours worked is a prominent feature of business cycle data. However, most two-sector neoclassical models fail to generate this sectoral co-movement. We construct and estimate a realistic two-sector neoclassical DSGE model that generates the sectoral co-movement in response to both anticipated and unanticipated shocks. The key to our model’s success is a significant degree of inter-sectoral labor immobility, which we estimate using data on sectoral hours worked. Furthermore, we demonstrate that imperfect inter-sectoral labor mobility provides a better explanation for the sectoral co-movement than some alternative model emphasizing the role of labor-supply wealth effects. Finally, we find that news shocks make a sizable contribution to accounting for the business-cycle fluctuations in the context of our two-sector DSGE model.


10月16日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

山田 克宣 氏 (近畿大学)

"Can We Steer Income Comparison Attitudes by Information Provision? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments in the US and the UK"

Abstract: Economists have long been concerned that a tendency to compare one’s own income to others may reduce social welfare. This paper investigates whether such tendency can be mitigated by a simple information intervention. To this end, we conduct an original randomized online survey experiments in the US and the UK. About each 4,500 respondents in each country are randomized into two treatments and one control group of information provision: first treatment group sees a figure on the famous Easterlin paradox--there seems no link between time series evolutions of happiness scores and the GDP. The second treatment group sees the same figure but salience of making income comparisons is introduced. We find that while the first treatment does not have any effects, the second treatment made respondents compare even more not less. Interestingly, we only find such effects among the UK sample. Further, all the results among UK respondents are driven by women. This paper has implications for the recently emerging literature discussing whether government intervention can affect preferences in a desired way to improve social welfare.


10月30日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

荒 知宏 氏 (福島大学)

"Relationship Specificity, Market Thickness and International Trade"

Abstract: How does the sectoral relationship specificity affect the market thickness? How does the market thickness respond to opening international trade? To address these questions, we develop a dynamic industry model in which the relationship specificity endogenously pins down the market thickness in a general-equilibrium setting. Downstream firms match with upstream firms to obtain a customized component, and matched pairs can produce higher quality products relative to unmatched counterparts in industries that rely on relationship specific investments to raise the quality of a final good. We find that in a closed economy, an industry with higher relationship specificity has a thinner market. In an open economy, opening trade (or the reduction of trade costs) in final goods leads to a thinner market, and this effect is greater the higher is the relationship specificity.


11月6日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

大坪 陽一 氏 (日本銀行)

"Market Perceptions of US and European Policy Actions Around the Subprime Crisis"

Abstract: This paper explores the impacts of key policy actions by US and European authorities on stock returns of systemically important banks in Europe and US around the subprime crisis. We find that the US policy announcements had a stronger impact on the European and US banking industry than the European policy announcements. In particular, the announcements of monetary policies by the US authorities were accompanied by higher abnormal returns compared to related announcements of European authorities. We also find that the policy announcements, regardless of which side of the Atlantic the news arrived from, has increased the return volatility during the crisis. We further analyze the reactions of implied volatility. The findings suggest that the currency swaps had a non-negligible effect in reducing future uncertainty.


11月20日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

堀 敬一 氏 (立命館大学)

"A Dynamic Agency Theory of Investment and Managerial Replacement"

Abstract: In this paper, we explore a dynamic theory of investment and costly managerial turnover given agency conflicts between the firm manager and investors. We incorporate the possibility of the successive replacement of managers until the firm is finally liquidated, and develop a continuous-time agency model with the q-theory of investment. We derive the dynamic variations of average q, marginal q, and the optimal investment―capital ratio surrounding manager turnover. Furthermore, we also indicate that the firm’s optimal replacement/ retention decision becomes more permissive with the frequency of the replacement of managers. Our theoretical findings yield empirical implications for the joint dynamics of investment and CEO turnover policy, which are consistent with evidence provided by the existing empirical literature, and provide novel testable hypotheses.


11月27日(木)　14:40-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

(1) 14:40-16:10

西山 慎一 氏 (Congressional Budget Office)

"Joint Labor Supply Decision of Married Couples and the Social Security Pension System"

Abstract: The current U.S. Social Security program redistributes resources from high-wage workers to low-wage workers through its progressive benefit schedule and from two-earner couples and singles to one-earner couples through its spousal and survivors benefits. This paper extends a standard general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model with uninsurable wage shocks to analyze the effect of the spousal and survivors benefits on the labor supply of married households and the overall economy. The heterogeneous-agent model calibrated to the current U.S. economy predicts that, in the long run, removing spousal and survivors benefits would increase the female labor participation rate by 1.6-1.7%, the total working hours of women by 1.9-2.0%, and the total output of the economy by 0.6-0.7%. If the increase in tax revenue due to higher economic activity after the policy change was redistributed in a lump-sum manner, a phased-in cohort-by-cohort removal of these benefits would make all age cohorts, on average, better off, although the policy change would make most young married households worse off in the short run.
（関西大学ソシオネットワーク戦略機構 (RISS) との共催）

(2) 16:20-17:50

朝井 友紀子 氏 (東京大学)

"Parental Leave Reforms and the Employment of New Mothers: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Japan"

Abstract: This study assesses the impact of changes in the parental leave income replacement rate on job continuity of new mothers' after childbearing. The Japanese government increased the parental leave income replacement rate from 0% to 25% in 1995 and from 25% to 40% in 2001, creating two natural experiments. I identify the causal effects of these reforms by comparing the changes in the regular employment of mothers who gave birth after the reforms and those who gave birth before the reforms. My results suggest that the two reforms had no significant effects on the job continuity of mothers who qualified for the reforms.


12月18日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

Hidenori Takahashi 氏 (University of Mannheim)

"Strategic Design under Uncertain Evaluations: Structural Analysis of Design-Build Auctions"

Abstract: I investigate firms’ competition over price and product design in the context of Design-Build (DB) auctions. In a DB auction, firms’ design proposals are independently evaluated by reviewers of the government. Reviewers’ evaluations contain uncertainty from a bidder’s point of view, leading luck to curtail differences in firms’ chances of winning. The estimated model predicts that uncertain evaluations exacerbate auctioneer’s uncertainty in auction outcomes. An alternative mechanism that shuts down the impact of uncertain evaluations on bidders’ behaviour would mitigate the auctioneer’s uncertainty in the price and the design quality by 22% and 33%, respectively.


1月29日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

橋本 和彦 氏 (大阪大学)

"Strategy-Proof Rule in Probabilistic Allocation Problem of an Indivisible Good and Money"

Abstract: We consider the problem of probabilistically allocating a single indivisible good among agents when monetary transfers are allowed. We construct a new strategy-proof rule, called the second price trading rule, and show that it is second best efficient. Furthermore, we give the second price trading rule three characterizations with (1) strategy-proofness, “budget-balance”, equal treatment of equals, weak decision-efficiency, and simple generatability, (2) strategy-proofness, “equal rights lower bound”, equal treatment of equals, weak decision-efficiency, and simple generatability, (3) strategy-proofness, “envy-freeness, no-trade-no-transfer”, equal treatment of equals, weak decision-efficiency, and simple generatability.


2月5日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

砂川 武貴 氏 (東京大学)

"Sustainable Monetary Policy Cooperation"

Abstract: This study examines monetary policy cooperation regimes in a New-Keynesian two-country DSGE model based on Benigno et al. (2006). Each country may have incentive to deviate from the cooperation regime to the non-cooperation regime. A cooperation regime may be endogenously sustained by a cross-country and state-contingent contract. We name such a regime the sustainable cooperation regime. It is shown that in response to a positive markup shock in the home country, the home country has an incentive to deviate from cooperation to non-cooperation. Under the sustainable cooperation, the responses of inflation and the output gap in both countries are quite different from the ones under the cooperation and non-cooperation.


2月19日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

重岡 仁 氏 (Simon Fraser University)

"Do Risk Preferences Change? Evidence from Panel Data before and after the Great East Japan Earthquake"

Abstract: We investigate whether individuals’ risk preferences change after experiencing a natural disaster―specifically, the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. The novelty of our study is that we use panels of nationally representative surveys, and thus, we can track the changes in risk preferences of the same individuals. We find that people who experienced greater intensity of the Earthquake become more risk tolerant. Interestingly, all the results are driven by men. Furthermore, these men gamble and drink more. Finally, we compare the estimates from cross-sectional and panel specifications, demonstrating that the cross-sectional estimate may be biased due to unobserved heterogeneity.


3月5日(木)　16:20-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)

渡部 和孝 氏 (慶應義塾大学)

"Does the Policy Lending of the Government Financial Institution Substitute for the Private Lending during the Period of the Credit Crunch? Evidence from loan level data in Japan"

Abstract: Using the data of individual loan contracts extended by the Japan Finance Corporation for Small and Medium Enterprise (JASME), which is one of the predecessor institutions of the Japan Finance Corporation (JFC) that aimed at lending to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), we examine whether the JASME’s lending substituted for the reduced lending supply by private banks during the period of the credit crunch. We find that the JASME made larger loans to the firms whose main bank reduced more lending due to losses on their capital.


3月10日(火)　14:40-17:50　第401演習室(文科系総合研究棟4階)
通常と曜日・開催時間が異なりますのでご注意ください

(1) 14:40-16:10

楊 晨 氏 (立命館大学)

"Idiosyncratic Volatility Biases and the Pricing of Cross-sectional Illiquidity: Evidence from China"

Abstract: Under the NTS Reform (Non-Tradable Share Reform), this paper explores the cross-sectional relations between illiquidity and stock returns by considering the idiosyncratic volatility biases in the Chinese stock market. To this end, we propose a new illiquidity index that measures the liquidity of the Chinese stock market more precisely than indexes used in previous studies. Differing from prior studies, stock returns are decreasing in a stock’s illiquidity both before and after the NTS Reform. Regarding the negative relation between illiquidity and stock returns, we find that stock returns show no clear relation with illiquidity after controlling for idiosyncratic volatility biases. Furthermore, we use residual approach to eliminate the effect of idiosyncratic volatility, and find there exists a positive relation between illiquidity and stock returns after the NTS Reform.

(2) 16:20-17:50

松木 佑介 氏 (東北大学)

"A Dynamic Model of Online Auction Market: Theory, Identification and Estimation"

Abstract: I develop a method for identifying and estimating a dynamic model of auctions like eBay. The market is modeled as an infinite sequence of second-price, sealed bid auctions of a homogenous good. Bidders have unit demands. They arrive randomly and, upon arrival, they enter a pool of potential bidders. The actual bidders in an auction are drawn randomly from the pool. Conditional on bidding, a bidder exits if she wins and returns to the pool if she loses. Bidders in the pool exit with some probability each period but, if they do not exit, they can bid again. Thus, bidders need to take into account the option value of losing and bidding again when they submit their bids. This is the source of the dynamics. I define and solve for the oblivious equilibrium (Weintraub et al. (2008)). In this equilibrium, bidders consider only their valuation and the long run average market state when they bid. I prove the stochastic stability and the existence of an equilibrium. The equilibrium yields a closed form solution for the bid function in which bidders shade their bids by their continuation values. I demonstrate that the model is identified (modulo the discount factor) from the data of bidder identities and the second highest bid. Based on the identification result, an estimation procedure is developed. Monte Carlo simulations of estimation suggest the estimator works well with a limited amount of data if the true values of the entry and exit parameters are moderate. I apply the model to a data from a Japanese online auction website. The estimation results suggest that market dynamics are important. The estimate of the valuations obtained when each auction is treated independently is 23% smaller than the estimates obtained from the dynamic model.