It is often alleged that high auction prices inhibit build-out. We investigate this claim under the extreme case of budget-constrained bidders. Low prices maximize overall the gains from trade. If there are n licenses, the price where the budget constraint just binds maximizes consumer surplus...

A recent literature has criticised the sensitivity of a firm's investment to its own cash flow as an adequate measure of financing constraints. In this paper we develop a new method to detect the presence of financing constraints at firm level. We consider a structural dynamic model of...

We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard level-k models, in this framework the player's `depth of reasoning' is endogenously determined, and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent's cognitive bound. In our approach, individuals...

We combine existing balance sheet and stock market data with two new datasets to study whether, how much, and why bank lending to firms matters for the transmission of monetary policy. The first new dataset enables us to quantify the bank dependence of firms precisely, as the ratio of bank debt...

We study innovation contests with asymmetric information and identical contestants, where contestants’ efforts and innate abilities generate inventions of varying qualities. The designer offers a reward to the contestant achieving the highest quality and receives the revenue generated by the...

We introduce rule-of-thumb consumers in an otherwise standard dynamic sticky price model, and show how their presence can change dramatically the properties of widely used interest rate rules. In particular, the existence of a unique equilibrium is no longer guaranteed by an interest rate rule...

We implement a family of efficient proposals to share benefits generated in environments with externalities. These proposals extend the Shapley value to games with externalities and are parametrized through the method by which the externalities are averaged. We construct two slightly different...

In contrast to the simplifying assumption of selfishness, social incentives have been shown to play a role in economic interactions. Before incorporating social incentives into models and policies, however, one needs to know their efficiency relative to standard pay-for-performance incentives....

This paper investigates the effects of government spending on the real exchange rate and the trade balance in the US using a new VAR identification procedure based on spending forecast revisions. I find that the real exchange rate appreciates and the trade balance deteriorates after a government...

We extend Aumann's theorem [Aumann 1987], deriving correlated equilibria as a consequence of common priors and common knowledge of rationality, by explicitly allowing for non-rational behavior. We replace the assumption of common knowledge of rationality with a substantially weaker one, joint...