Luis H. B. Braido

Testing Household-Specific Explanations for the Inverse Productivity Relationship

The inverse relationship between land productivity and farm size is an old and puzzling empirical regularity. Most explanations for this relationship rely on market imperfections that jointly determine the farm size and the households shadow price of some productive inputs. We use plot-level data from the ICRISAT/VLS to assess whether these household-specific theories can explain the puzzle. The data exhibit plots of different sizes being simultaneously cropped by the same household. The inverse relationship is shown to hold true with the same magnitude across the plots of each household, thus cross-household heterogeneity does not suffice to explain the puzzle. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Gender Bias in Intrahousehold Allocation: Evidence from an Unintentional Experiment

We use data from a Brazilian social program to investigate the existence of gender bias in intrahousehold allocations of resources. The program makes cash transfers to mothers and pregnant women in poor households. Bureaucratic mistakes, beyond the control of the applicants, have inadvertently excluded many households that had applied and were accepted to the program. This unintentional natural experiment is used to identify the impact of an exogenous variation in female nonlabor income over household consumption. We find that program participation led to an increase in food expenditure, but this effect is not due to women being the benefit recipients.

Dynamic Price Competition in Auto-Insurance Brokerage

Brazilian data on auto-insurance present an intriguing fact: the coexistence of policies being sold with zero and positive brokerage fees. We extend the Bertrand model of price competition to a dynamic environment in which agents face a .xed cost to switch to a new (unmatched) broker. This incumbent?s advantage drives unmatched brokers to set fees aggressively. We explicitly derive symmetric re-cursive Nash equilibrium in which zero and positive brokerage fees are played with positive probability. We then use the mixed-strategy equilibrium distribution to perform a maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters. Using data on brokerage fees alone, this structural econometric procedure allows us to identify: (i) the number of brokers effectively bidding to a given consumer; (ii) the insuree?s cost of switching brokers; and (iii) the expected life-time discounted profits of matched and unmatched brokers.

Adverse Selection and Risk Aversion in Capital Markets

We generalize Boadway and Keens model of adverse selection in capital markets to allow for risk aversion on the part of entrepreneurs. We use the new model to analyze two types of policies. We first consider policies that would allow entrepreneurs to use a greater fraction of their total wealth in financing their projects, thus allowing them to reduce reliance on debt or equity finance by outside investors. We show that such policies may not be welfare-improving, because they expose entrepreneurs to more downside risk. This result highlights the importance of allowing for risk aversion, since policies that aim at alleviating inefficiencies associated with adverse selection may increase risk exposure and ultimately reduce welfare. We then consider how the tax treatment of losses affects social welfare. We show that if a society places a high value on distributional equity or if entrepreneurs are sufficiently risk-averse, a full-loss-offset system may be desirable even when there is excessive investment.

Ergodic Markov equilibrium with incomplete markets and short sales

This paper studies recursive exchange economies with short sales. Agents maximize discounted expected utility. The asset structure is general and includes real securities, infinite-lived stocks, options, and other derivatives. The main result shows the existence of a competitive equilibrium process that is stationary and has an invariant ergodic measure. Ergodicity is required in finance for time series analysis of structural asset pricing models. This equilibrium property is difficult to obtain when heterogeneous agents can accumulate debt over time. Bounded marginal utility is shown to be a key condition for ergodicity in this setting.

OUTPUT CONTINGENT SECURITIES AND EFFICIENT INVESTMENT BY FIRMS: OUTPUT CONTINGENT SECURITIES

We analyze competitive economies with risky investments. Unlike the classic Arrow--Debreu framing, firms and agents cannot contract upon the exogenous states underlying production risks. They can trade equities and any security written on the endogenous aggregate output. This financial structure is rich enough to promote efficient risk sharing among consumers. However, markets are incomplete from the production perspective, and the absence of prices for each primitive state of nature raises the question about the objective of firms. We show that output-contingent asset prices convey sufficient information to compute the competitive shareholder value that leads to efficient investment by firms.

Supplement to 'Output Contingent Securities and Efficient Investment by Firms'

We complement the analysis in Braido and Martins-da-Rocha (forthcoming) by showing the existence of a competitive equilibrium in a model with a continuum of identical firms and perfectly correlated success-or-failure shocks.