This paper studies the supply of and demand for moral values in recent US presidential elections. Using a combination of large-scale survey data and text analyses, I find support for the hypothesis that both voters and politicians exhibit heterogeneity in their emphasis on universalist relative to communal moral values and that politicians’ vote shares partly reflect the extent to which their moral appeal matches the values of the electorate. Over the last decade, Americans’ values have become increasingly communal—especially in rural areas—which generated increased moral polarization and is associated with changes in voting patterns across space.
参考文献：Enke, B. (2020). "Moral Values and Voting." Journal of Political Economy 128(10): 3679-3729.
2、经济大萧条中的代际再分配
Intergenerational Redistribution in the Great Recession
The Great Recession saw sharp drops in labor earnings and even larger declines in asset prices. How were the welfare losses from these declines distributed across different age groups? To address this question we construct an overlapping-generations general equilibrium model in which households face large aggregate shocks. A calibrated version of the model replicates observed dynamics for asset prices. Younger households experience larger earnings losses in a model Great Recession, but benefit from being able to buy assets at temporarily depressed prices. As a result, the model predicts that the young experience smaller welfare losses than older cohorts.
参考文献：Glover, A., et al. (2020). "Intergenerational Redistribution in the Great Recession." Journal of Political Economy 128(10): 3730-3778.
Many markets are syndicated, including those for initial public offerings, club deal leveraged buyouts, and debt issuances; in such markets, each winning bidder invites competitors to join a syndicate to complete production. We show that in syndicated markets, collusion may become easier as market concentration falls and market entry may facilitate collusion. In particular, firms can sustain collusion by refusing to syndicate with any firm that undercuts the collusive price, thereby raising that firm’s production costs. Our results can thus rationalize the paradoxical empirical observations that many real-world syndicated markets exhibit seemingly collusive pricing despite low levels of market concentration.
参考文献：Hatfield, J. W., et al. (2020). "Collusion in Markets with Syndication." Journal of Political Economy 128(10): 3779-3819.
4、识别拍卖模型中的相关成本
Identification in Auction Models with Interdependent Costs
This paper provides a nonparametric identification result for procurement models with asymmetric bidders, dependent private information, and interdependent costs. For risk-neutral bidders, the model’s payoff-relevant primitives are the joint distribution of private information and each bidder’s full-information expected cost. The joint distribution of bids identifies the joint distribution of signals. First-order conditions identify the expected cost conditional on tying with at least one competitor for the lowest bid. I show identification of each bidder’s full-information cost, using variation in competitors’ cost shifters that are excludable from bidders’ own full-information costs, and generate variation in the set of competitors’ signals that induce a tie for the lowest bid. I estimate the relevant payoff primitives using data from Michigan highway procurements and evaluate policies that affect the winner’s curse’s severity.
参考文献：Somaini, P. (2020). "Identification in Auction Models with Interdependent Costs." Journal of Political Economy 128(10): 3820-3871.
5、共同价值、异质性差异与潜在投标人——基于美国海上石油租赁拍卖的现实依据
Common Values, Unobserved Heterogeneity, and Endogenous Entry in US Offshore Oil Lease Auctions
Although an auction of drilling rights is often cited as an example of common values, formal evidence has been limited by the problem of auction-level unobserved heterogeneity. We develop an empirical approach for first-price sealed-bid auctions with affiliated values, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogenous bidder entry. We show that important features of the model are nonparametrically identified and apply a semiparametric estimation approach to data from US offshore oil and gas lease auctions. We find that common values, affiliated private information, and unobserved heterogeneity are all present. Failing to account for unobserved heterogeneity obscures the evidence of common values. We examine implications of our estimates for the interaction between affiliation, the winner’s curse, the auction rules, and the number of bidders in determining the aggressiveness of bidding and seller revenue.
参考文献：Compiani, G., et al. (2020). "Common Values, Unobserved Heterogeneity, and Endogenous Entry in US Offshore Oil Lease Auctions." Journal of Political Economy 128(10): 3872-3912.
People often forget and sometimes fantasize. This paper reports a large-scale experiment on memory errors and their relation to preferential traits including time preference, attitudes toward risk and ambiguity, and psychological characteristics such as anticipatory feelings. We observe systematic incidences of false memory in favor of positive events and positive amnesia in forgetting past negative events. Both positive delusion and positive confabulation significantly relate to present bias, but this is not the case for positive amnesia. In an intraperson, multiple-self model, we demonstrate that positive false memory, rather than selective amnesia, serves to enhance confidence in one’s future self in equilibrium, thereby accounting for our experimental findings.
参考文献：Chew, S. H., et al. (2020). "Motivated False Memory." Journal of Political Economy 128(10): 3913-3939.
We study the impact of global food price shocks on local violence across Africa. In food-producing areas, higher prices reduce conflict over the control of territory (“factor conflict”) and increase conflict over the appropriation of surplus (“output conflict”). We argue that this difference arises because higher prices increase the opportunity cost of soldiering for producers while simultaneously inducing consumers to appropriate surplus as real wages fall. In areas without crop agriculture, higher prices increase both forms of conflict. We validate our local-level findings on output conflict using survey data. Our findings help reconcile a growing but ambiguous literature on the economic roots of conflict.
参考文献：McGuirk, E. and M. Burke (2020). "The Economic Origins of Conflict in Africa." Journal of Political Economy 128(10): 3940-3997.
