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International audience; We model trip-timing decisions of rail transit users who trade off crowding costs and disutility from traveling early or late. With no fare or a uniform fare, ridership is too concentrated on timely trains. Marginal-cost-pricing calls for time-dependent fares that smooth train loads and generate more revenue than an optimal uniform fare. The welfare gains from time-dependent fares are unlikely to increase as ridership grows. However, imposing time-dependent fares raises the benefits of expanding capacity by either adding trains or increasing train capacity. We illustrate these results by calibrating the model to the Paris RER A transit system.

We use disaggregated data on car assembly and trade to estimate a model of multinational production. Our framework delineates four theory-based specifications under which all frictions relevant to multinational production can be structurally estimated. In addition to the trade costs and multinational production frictions emphasized in past work, we incorporate a third friction: regardless of production origin, it is more difficult to make sales in markets that are geographically separated from the brand's headquarters. The estimation transparently recovers internally consistent estimates of each type of friction cost. With structural parameters in hand, we investigate the consequences of three trade integration experiments: TPP, TTIP, and Brexit. We show that each type of friction makes a qualitative and quantitative difference in the reallocation of production caused by economic integration.

Most traffic congestion models assume that agents make trip-timing decisions independently and receive payoffs at the origin and destination that do not depend on whether other agents are present. We depart from this paradigm by considering a variant of Vickrey's bottleneck model of the morning commute in which individuals live as couples and value time at home more when together than when alone. We show that the costs of congestion can be higher than for a comparable population of individuals living alone. The costs can be even higher if spouses collaborate with each other when choosing their departure times. To calibrate the model we estimate trip-timing preferences for married and unmarried men and women in the Greater Paris region. Jel Classifications: D11, D70, R41.

In a context of complete financial markets where asset prices follow Ito’s processes, we characterize the set of consumption processes which are optimal for a given stochastic differential utility (e.g. [Duffie and Epstein, Econometrica 60 (1992) 353]), when beliefs are unknown. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the efficiency of a consumption process, consists of the existence of a solution to a quadratic backward stochastic differential equation and a martingale condition. We study the efficiency condition in the case of a class of homothetic stochastic differential utilities and derive some results for those particular cases. In a Markovian context, this efficiency condition becomes a partial differential equation.

Quantifications of gains from trade in heterogeneous firm models assume that productivity is Pareto distributed. Replacing this assumption with log-normal heterogeneity retains some useful Pareto features, while providing a substantially better fit to sales distributions-especially in the left tail. The cost of log-normal is that gains from trade depend on the method of calibrating the fixed cost and productivity distribution parameters. When set to match the size distribution of firm sales in a given market, the log-normal assumption delivers gains from trade in a symmetric two-country model that can be twice as large as under the Pareto assumption.

With increasing sophistication, economists have been estimating gravity equations for five decades. Robust evidence shows that borders and distance impede trade by much more than tariffs or transports costs can explain. We therefore advocate investigation of other sources of resistance, despite the greater difficulty involved in measuring and modeling them. From our selective review of recent findings, a unifying explanation emerges. A legacy of historical isolation and confl ict forged a world economy in which neither tastes nor information are homogeneously distributed. Cultural difference and inadequate information manifest themselves most strongly at national borders and over distance.

NBER Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research, n° 11441/2004; Recent research documents that aggregate stock prices are driven by shocks with persistence levels ranging from daily intervals to several decades. Building on these insights, we introduce a parsimonious equilibrium model in which regime-shifts of heterogeneous durations affect the volatility of dividend news. We estimate tightly parameterized specifications with up to 256 discrete states on daily U.S. equity returns. The multifrequency equilibrium has significantly higher likelihood than the classic Campbell and Hentschel (1992) specification, while generating volatility feedback effects 6 to 12 times larger. We show in an extension that Bayesian learning about stochastic volatility is faster for bad states than good states, providing a novel source of endogenous skewness that complements the "uncertainty" channel considered in previous literature (e.g., Veronesi, 1999). Furthermore, signal precision induces a tradeoff between skewness and kurtosis, and economies with intermediate investor information best match the data.

Free trade in audio-visual services has faced opposition on the grounds that foreign media undermine domestic culture, and ultimately, global diversity. Using a long panel of French birth registries, we assess the media-culture link using name frequencies as a measure of tastes. Controlling for the number of people who currently have a name and unobserved name effects, our regressions show that media influences choices via selective imitation. Parents are much more likely to adopt media names that they associate with youth. Using estimated parameters, we simulate our model of name choice to reveal that, absent foreign media, less than 5% of French babies would have been named differently. Our simulations also suggest a positive effect of foreign media on the welfare of parents., Plusieurs voix se sont élevées contre le libre-échange dans les services audio-visuels et ont souligné que les médias étrangers pouvaient ébranler la culture domestique et au final la diversité culturelle. A partir des certificats de naissance français, nous évaluons le lien média-culture en utilisant la fréquence d’apparition des prénoms comme mesure des préférences culturelles. Nos estimations, qui tiennent compte du nombre de personnes portant actuellement chaque prénom et des effets inobservables des prénoms, montrent que les médias influencent les choix des parents via un processus d’imitation sélective. Les parents sont beaucoup plus enclins à choisir les prénoms utilisés dans les médias et qu’ils associent à la jeunesse. A partir des paramètres estimés, nous simulons un modèle de choix de prénoms et montrons qu’en cas d’absence des médias étrangers, moins de 5% des enfants français auraient été prénommés différemment. Nous simulations suggèrent également un effet positif des médias étrangers sur le bien-être des parents.

This article provides evidence on the long-term impact of market potential on economic development. It derives from the New Economic Geography literature a structural estimation where the level of factors' income of a country is related to its proximity to large markets, referred to as 'market potential'. The empirical part evaluates this market potential for all countries in the world with available trade data over the 1965-2003 period and relates it to income per capita. Overall results show that market potential is a powerful driver of increases in income per capita.

Quality sorting and trade: Firm-level evidence for French wine Investigations of the effect of quality differences on heterogeneous performance in exporting have been limited by lack of direct measures of quality. We examine exports of French wine, matching the exporting firms to producer ratings from two wine guides. We show that high quality producers export to more markets, charge higher prices, and sell more in each market. More attractive markets are served by exporters that, on average, make lower rated Champagne. Market attractiveness has a weakly negative effect on prices and a strongly positive effect on quantities, confirming the sign predictions of a simple quality sorting model. Methodologically, we make several contributions to the literature. First, we propose an estimation method for regressions of firm-level exports on ability measures and use Monte Carlo simulations to show that it corrects a severe selection bias present in OLS estimates. Second, we show how the means of quality, price, and quantity for exporters to a given market can be used to recover estimates of core parameters (which we compare with firm-level estimates) and discriminate between productivity and quality-sorting versions of the Melitz model. Our new method regresses country means on an index of each country's attractiveness and the fixed costs of entering it. We compare our method, which utilizes explanatory variables estimated in the firm-level regressions, to the conventional approach that relies on a reduced-form relationship with proxies for attractiveness and fixed costs.

International audience; Advances in communication technology make it possible for workers in India to supply business services to head offices located anywhere. This has the potential to put high-wage workers in direct competition with much lower paid Indian workers. Service trade, however, like goods trade, is subject to strong distance effects, implying that the remote supply of services remains limited. We investigate this proposition by deriving a gravity-like equation for service trade and estimating it for a large sample of countries and different categories of service trade. We find that distance costs are high but are declining over time. Our estimates suggest that delivery costs create a significant advantage for local workers relative to competing workers in distant countries.

We study effects of using Sharpe ratio as a performance measure for compensating money managers in a dynamic and frictionless market setting. First, we demonstrate that with such a performance measure, the manager's focus on the short horizon performance is detrimental to the investor's long horizon performance. Numerical experiments illustrate that when returns are iid, the performance loss is significant, even when the investor's investment horizon is not much longer than the manager's. When expected returns are mean reverting, the performance loss is exacerbated. Second, we show that Sharpe ratio maximization strategies tend to increase (decrease) the risk in the later part of the optimization period after a bad (good) performance in the earlier part of the optimization period. As illustrated by a simulation exercise, this prediction is in agreement with empirical observations, and it presents a rational expectations alternative to the prevalent tournament theory explanation.

Recent theoretical work on economic geography emphasizes the interplay of transport costs and plant-level increasing returns. In these models, the spatial distribution of demand is a key determinant of economic outcomes. In one strand, it is argued that higher demand gives rise to a more than proportionate increase in production, a result known as the home market effect. Another strand emphasizes the effects of market sizes on factor prices. In this paper we highlight the theoretical connection between these two strands. We use data on 57 European regions to show how wages and employment respond to differentials in what we call real market potential, a discounted sum of demands derived from the theory.

International audience; Paul Krugman's model of trade predicts that the country with the relatively large number of consumers is the net exporter and hosts a disproportionate share of firms in the increasing returns sector. He terms these results ‘home market effects'. This paper analyses three additional models featuring increasing returns, firm mobility, and trade costs to assess the robustness of home market effects to alternative modelling assumptions. We find strikingly similar results for two of the models that relax assumptions about the nature of demand, competition and trade costs. However, a model that links varieties to nations rather than firms can generate opposite results.

International audience; Non-Europe: The Magnitude and Causes of Market Fragmentation in the EU. — In 1985 the European Commission diagnosed its member states as suffering from excessive market fragmentation, later referred to as “Non-Europe.” The authors examine the empirical basis for the Commission's diagnosis using a trade model derived from monopolistic competition. They then investigate the links between the initial size and subsequent evolution of border effects within the EU. The findings support the view that European consumers act as if imports from other members were subject to high nontariff barriers. However, there appears to be almost no relationship between market fragmentation and the barriers that were identified and removed by Europe's Single Market Programme.

Knickerbocker (1973) introduced the notion of oligopolistic reaction to explain why firms follow rivals into foreign markets. We develop a model that incorporates central features of Knickerbocker's story--oligopoly, uncertainty, and risk aversion--to establish the conditions required to generate follow-the-leader behavior. We find that rival foreign investment will make risk-neutral firms less inclined to move abroad once its rivals have done so. We show that Knickerbocker's prediction relies on risk aversion and derive an expression for the minimum amount of risk aversion needed to generate oligopolistic reaction.