Manuel Amador

Learning from Prices: Public Communication and Welfare

We study the effect of releasing public information about productivity or monetary shocks using a micro-founded macroeconomic model in which agents learn from the distribution of nominal prices. While a public release has the direct beneficial effect of providing new information, it also has the indirect adverse effect of reducing the informational efficiency of the price system. We show that the negative indirect effect can dominate. Thus, the public information release may increase uncertainty about the monetary shock and reduce welfare. We find that the optimal communication policy is always to release either all or none of the information.

Learning from private and public observations of othersʼ actions

We study how a continuum of agents learn about disseminated information by observing others’ actions. Every period each agent observes a public and private noisy signal centered around the aggregate action taken by the population. The public signal represents an endogenous aggregate variable such as a price or a quantity. The private signal represents the information gathered through private communication and local interactions. We identify conditions such that the average learning curve is S-shaped: learning is slow initially, intensifies rapidly, and finally converges slowly to the truth. We show that increasing public information always slows down learning in the long run and, under some conditions, reduces welfare. Lastly, optimal diffusion of information requires that agents “strive to be different”: agents need to be rewarded for choosing actions away from the population average.

THE THEORY OF OPTIMAL DELEGATION WITH AN APPLICATION TO TARIFF CAPS

We consider a general representation of the delegation problem, with and without money burning, and provide sufficient and necessary conditions under which an interval allocation is optimal. We also apply our results to the theory of trade agreements among privately informed governments. For both perfect and monopolistic competition settings, we provide conditions under which tariff caps are optimal. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Entrepreneurial Pressure and Innovation

Ideas occur to managers that can replace existing technologies. Managers choose between contracts offered by an existing firm and a competitive venture capitalist. Implementing ideas within the existing firm has costs and advantages. Relying on existing assets makes implementation cheaper. But it also reduces contractual flexibility which is valuable in the presence of behavioral or informational frictions. To implement a new idea, the incumbent firm has to pay the manager an amount that depends on the venture capitalist offer. Venture capital affects the innovation policy of incumbents by changing both the threat of new ideas and their price. The value of an incumbent firm is endogenous and negatively related to the intensity of venture capital pressure. More innovative projects tend to be implemented in new ventures because of the importance of contractual flexibility. In equilibrium, the relation between innovation and the effciency of external capital markets is non-monotonic. A better venture capital market increases the innovation rate if the marginal innovation is done by the incumbent under pressure from outside.

Chapter 11 - Sovereign Debt☆

In this chapter, we use a benchmark limited-commitment model to explore key issues in the economics of sovereign debt. After highlighting conceptual issues that distinguish sovereign debt as well as reviewing a number of empirical facts, we use the model to discuss debt overhang, risk-sharing, and capital flows in an environment of limited enforcement. We also discuss recent progress on default and renegotiation; self-fulfilling debt crises; and incomplete markets and their quantitative implications. We conclude with a brief assessment of the current state of the literature and highlight some directions for future research.

Efficient expropriation: sustainable fiscal policy in a small open economy

We study a small open economy characterized by two empirically important frictions— incomplete financial markets and an inability of the government to commit to policy. We characterize the best sustainable fiscal policy and show that it can amplify and prolong shocks to output. In particular, even when the government is completely benevolent, the government’s credibility not to expropriate capital varies endogenously with the state of the economy and may be “scarcest” during recessions. This increased threat of expropriation depresses investment, prolonging downturns. It is the incompleteness of financial markets and the lack of commitment that generate investment cycles even in an environment where first-best capital stock is constant.

Fiscal policy in debt constrained economies

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk and limited commitment to tax plans. The SOEs government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the tax on labor goes to zero in the long run, while the tax on capital income may be non-zero, reversing the standard prediction of the Ramsey tax literature. The zero labor tax is an optimal long run outcome if the economy is subject to sovereign debt constraints and the domestic households are impatient relative to the international interest rate. The front loading of tax distortions allows the economy to build a large (aggregate) debt position in the presence of limited commitment. We show that a similar result holds in a closed economy with imperfect inter-generational altruism, providing a link with the closed-economy literature that has explored disagreement between the government and its citizens regarding inter-temporal tradeoffs.

Exchange Rate Policies at the Zero Lower Bound

We study the problem of a monetary authority pursuing an exchange rate policy that is inconsistent with interest rate parity because of a binding zero lower bound constraint. The resulting violation in interest rate parity generates an inflow of capital that the monetary authority needs to absorb by accumulating foreign reserves. We show that these interventions by the monetary authority are costly, and we derive a simple measure of these costs: they are proportional to deviations from the covered interest parity (CIP) condition and the amount of accumulated foreign reserves. Our framework can account for the recent experiences of “safe-haven” currencies and the sign of their observed deviations from CIP.

Self-Fulfilling Debt Dilution: Maturity and Multiplicity in Debt Models

We establish that creditor beliefs regarding future borrowing can be self-fulfilling, leading to multiple equilibria with markedly different debt accumulation patterns. We characterize such indeterminacy in the Eaton-Gersovitz sovereign debt model augmented with long maturity bonds. Two necessary conditions for the multiplicity are: (i) the government is more impatient than foreign creditors, and (ii) there are deadweight losses from default; both are realistic and standard assumptions in the quantitative literature. The multiplicity is dynamic and stems from the self-fulfilling beliefs of how future creditors will price bonds; long maturity bonds are therefore a crucial component of the multiplicity. We introduce a third party with deep pockets to discuss the policy implications of this source of multiplicity and identify the potentially perverse consequences of traditional “lender of last resort�? policies.