The Productivity Advantages of Large Cities: Distinguishing Agglomeration From Firm Selection

Firms are more productive, on average, in larger cities. Two main explanations have been offered: firm selection (larger cities toughen competition, allowing only the most productive to survive) and agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity), possibly reinforced by localized natural advantage. To distinguish between them, we nest a generalized version of a tractable firm selection model and a standard model of agglomeration. Stronger selection in larger cities left‐truncates the productivity distribution, whereas stronger agglomeration right‐shifts and dilates the distribution. Using this prediction, French establishment‐level data, and a new quantile approach, we show that firm selection cannot explain spatial productivity differences. This result holds across sectors, city size thresholds, establishment samples, and area definitions.     

At what price should Bordeaux wines be released?

This paper models optimal release prices of an experience good recurrently issued on markets. Using a sample of Bordeaux wines, we find that using a minimal number of intrinsic and extrinsic attributes is sufficient to explain a large proportion of release prices. We further observe a significant relationship between primary market prices and secondary market prices and general economic conditions. Release prices can deviate from secondary market prices in the short run but remain aligned over the long run. Finally, an out-of-sample analysis indicates that short-run mispricing directly affects the purchase behavior of customers.     

对美国农业市场上合作性谈判协会的考察

一、引言合作性谈判协会是一些美国农业市场的一种制度特征。这种协会以为农民社员提供广泛的多样化服务为特征,其中主要是与各种市场中间商的价格合同谈判。从发展历程来看,     

Exploitation of a crisp relation in a ranking problem

The outranking methods usually contain two main steps: determination of a (sometimes valued) relation which aggregates the preferences and exploitation of this relation in order to choose, sort or rank the actions. In a ranking problem, the second step is the construction of a (complete or partial) preorder from a (valued) relation. We have considered it was interesting to list the good properties such a construction should verify and to analyze some procedures in this context. We present here the first results of this study, which concern the construction of a complete preorder from a non valued relation.     

Determinants of outcome in the pathways through care for children hearing voices

Auditory hallucination, or hearing voices, is generally associated with psychopathology. In psychiatry it is inter-preted as a symptom of an illness, with no connection to the individual's life history. Voice hallucinations in childhood occur in a variety of contexts and have variable long-term outcomes. Little is known about the course of the experience. In this study, 80 children and youngsters hearing voices were interviewed on four occasions over a period of three years about the content of the voices and their overall experience of voices, focusing on the determinants for a promising outcome in the pathways through care. The results indicate that the need for care in the context of the experience of voices is associated not only with high levels of problem behaviour and associated negative symptoms of psychosis, but also, independently, with an appraisal of the voices in terms of anxiety, depression, dissociation and frequency of occurrence. In 60 per cent of the participants the voices disappeared during the three-year research period. The relationship between the disappearance of voices and the course of mental health treatment is, however, ambiguous.     

Identification of Nonseparable Triangular Models With Discrete Instruments

We study the identification through instruments of a nonseparable function that relates a continuous outcome to a continuous endogenous variable. Using group and dynamical systems theories, we show that full identification can be achieved under strong exogeneity of the instrument and a dual monotonicity condition, even if the instrument is discrete. When identified, the model is also testable. Our results therefore highlight the identifying power of strong exogeneity when combined with monotonicity restrictions.     

CREDIT CONSTRAINTS AND THE CYCLICALITY OF R&D INVESTMENT: EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

We use a French firm‐level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1994–2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms’ R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) R&D investment is countercyclical without credit constraints, but it becomes procyclical as firms face tighter credit constraints; (ii) this result is only observed for firms in sectors that depend more heavily upon external finance, or that are characterized by a low degree of asset tangibility; (iii) in more credit‐constrained firms, R&D investment plummets during recessions but does not increase proportionally during upturns.     

TRANSFERABLE CONTROL

In this paper, we introduce the notion of transferable control, defined as a situation where one party (the principal, say) can transfer control to another party (the agent) but cannot commit herself to do so. One theoretical foundation for this notion builds on the distinction between formal and real authority introduced by Aghion and Tirole, in which the actual exercise of authority may require noncontractible information, absent which formal control rights are vacuous. We use this notion to study the extent to which control transfers may allow an agent to reveal information regarding his ability or willingness to cooperate with the principal in the future. We show that the distinction between contractible and transferable control can drastically influence how learning takes place: with contractible control, information about the agent can often be acquired through revelation mechanisms that involve communication and message‐contingent control allocations; in contrast, when control is transferable but not contractible, it can be optimal to transfer control unconditionally and learn instead from the way in which the agent exercises control. (JEL: C70, C72, D23, L2)