96. July 6, 2018, Friday
95. June 28, 2018, Thursday
94. June 8, 2018, Friday
93. June 7, 2018, Thursday
92. May 30, 2018, Wednesday
91. May 21, 2018, Monday
90. May 17, 2018, Thursday
89. May 9, 2018, Wednesday
88. May 3, 2018, Friday
87. April 24, 2018, Tuesday
86. April 26, 2018, Thursday
- Speaker: Dr. Li, Nan (Shanghai Jiaotong University)
- Title: Ambiguity, Information Advantage and the Family Firm Ownership Puzzle
- Time: 14:30--16:00
- Venue: B226
- Chair: Dr. Cui, Jingbo,
- Abstract: Conventional wisdom suggests that family shareholders should exit their large, concentrated equity stakes in publicly traded firms and seek the benefits of diversification. We find that concerns for Knightian Uncertainty or ambiguity, especially about return volatility are critical to understanding the decision of family owners to hold a large portion of their wealth in a single firm. Furthermore, in contrast to models without ambiguity, our model predicts that less wealthy, less risk averse and younger families are more likely to exit the firm. As the information advantage possessed by family owners is more useful in industries with higher unceratinty to reduce the ambiguity about the family firm relative to other firms, the model implies that family owners concentrate more in their firms in industries with higher uncertainty, as measured by stock exposure to the economic uncertainty index of Jurado, Ludvigson, and Ng (2015), or proxied by higher entry barrier, less innovation, and higher kurtosis in analyst forecast. The empirical evidences based on the cross-sectional data of more than 500 U.S. family firms lend support to these novel predictions.
95. June 28, 2018, Thursday
- Speaker: Dr. Xu, Zibo (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
- Title: Stability of Settled Equilibria
- Time: 10:00--11:30
- Venue: B249
- Chair: Dr. Li, Xiaoxi
- Abstract: This paper defines a rationally tenable block and a rationally settled equilibrium in a symmetric game. Examples and properties for evolutionary stability are shown.
94. June 8, 2018, Friday
- Speaker: Dr. Zhang, Lingsong (Purdue University)
- Title: Machine learning introduction and selected progress on high dimension low sample size imbalance classification
- Time: 09:30--11:30
- Venue: B251
- Chair: Dr. Liu, Cheng
- Abstract: In the talk, we will give a general introduction to machine learning, with emphasis on supervised machine learning. Some popular methods and its implementation on big data will be discussed. Specially we will introduce support vector machine, its nice properties and some drawbacks when applying it to high dimension low sample size and imbalance data. Such data is widely available in observational studies. An improved classifier will be introduced. We will show the improvement both in theory and by using simulation examples. Application of such approach to a call center data will be provided as well.
93. June 7, 2018, Thursday
- Speaker: Dr. Luo, Zijun (Sam Houston State University)
- Title: Mass Media, Information and Demand for Environmental Quality: Evidence from “Under the Dome”
- Time: 14:30--16:00
- Venue: A204
- Chair: Dr. Cui, Jingbo
- Abstract: This research estimates the effect of mass media on the public’s willingness to pay (WTP) for better environmental quality. The analysis exploits the exogenous shock of the environmental documentary “Under the Dome” with a regression discontinuity design using its unexpected release as the assignment, and the number of days away from the release date as the running variable. Using one-year survey dada in Nanjing China, the analysis shows that “Under the Dome” significantly increased people WTP for environmental quality by 21.6%, which represent CNY 1097 per capita increment for WTP in average. Further analysis suggests that mass media affects WTP by increasing the public’s awareness of environmental pollution and risk perception. Our results also found the effect of documentary would exist within long-term.
92. May 30, 2018, Wednesday
- Speaker: Dr. Huang, Zongbo (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)
- Title: Asset-side Bank Runs and Liquidity Rationing: A Vicious Cycle
- Time: 10:00--11:30
- Venue: B226
- Chair: Dr. Li, Xiaoxi
- Abstract: This article studies the role of bank liquidity rationing in managing panics in a dynamic model of credit line run. In downturns banks tighten liquidity by cutting credit lines. Anticipating this, borrowers run to draw down credit lines in the first place, which imposes further pressure on banks. Thus liquidity rationing and credit line runs form a feedback loop that amplifies bank distress. I fit the model to the U.S. commercial bank data and find that the feedback effects contribute to about two thirds of the total credit contraction in downturns. From a normative perspective, a commitment tax on cutting credit lines is effective in mitigating runs.
91. May 21, 2018, Monday
- Speaker: Prof. Yu, Jianyu (Southwestern University of Finance and Economics)
- Title: Quality Control through Retail Contracting---On the Role of Agricultural Cooperative
- Time: 10:00--11:30
- Venue: B228
- Chair: Dr. Li, Xiaoxi
- Abstract: Agricultural cooperatives (coops) play an important role in coordinating production of different stakeholders along the agri-food production chain. However, empirical evidence in both developed and developing countries show that coops are inefficient in providing quality and high-value added products. Question arises why coops still prevail in coordinating quality provision of retailers in the agri-food chain? Based on the theory of secret contract (Rey and Tirole 2007, McAfee and Schwartz 1994), we develop a model to investigate the behavior of farmers facing a representative retailer who uses contract to control quality of the agricultural product. We find that when the retailer deals with individual farmers and cannot observe individual quality, inefficiency arises because the retailer may have incentive to behave opportunistically and provides a contract that exploits the interest of other farmers, leading to inefficiency in quality provision. The outcome is the same as the free-riding outcome when farmers form a coop and sells directly to final market. However, when farmers form a coop and the retailer signs contract with the coop based on the average quality, the industry efficiency can be achieved because coop can be seen by the retailer as a commitment device to prevent the opportunistic behavior of the retailer. This paper thus provides a new explanation on the positive role of coop in quality provision along agri-food chain.
90. May 17, 2018, Thursday
- Speaker: Dr. Liu, Bin (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)
- Title: Sequential Screening with Hidden Actions
- Time: 14:00--15:30
- Venue: B226
- Chair: Dr. Sun, Xiang
- Abstract: One common insight in the sequential screening literature (e.g., Courty and Li, 2000, and Eső and Szentes, 2007) is that the allocation (implemented in the second stage) is in general discriminatory over the first stage types. In this paper, we study how introducing a first-stage type-enhancing hidden action of the agent would affect the degree of discrimination at the optimum in a two-stage procurement setting where the agent can make costly unobservable investment to improve his first stage type, which is the distribution of his second-stage realized private cost of delivering the product. The principal's goal is to minimize the expected procurement cost. We find that the introduction of moral hazard unambiguously mitigates the allocative discrimination in the second stage. In particular, the second stage mechanism can even be non-discriminatory when the marginal cost of investment is small enough.
89. May 9, 2018, Wednesday
- Speaker: Dr. Beissner, Patrick (Australian National University)
- Title: Equilibria under Knightian Price Uncertainty
- Time: 10:00--11:30
- Venue: B226
- Chair: Dr. Lin, Qian
- Abstract: We study economies where agents face Knightian uncertainty about state prices. Knightian uncertainty leads naturally to nonlinear expectations. We introduce a corresponding equilibrium concept with sublinear prices and prove existence. In general, such equilibria lead to Pareto ineffcient allocations; the equilibria coincide with Arrow-Debreu equilibria only if the values of net trades are ambiguity-free in the mean. In economies without aggregate uncertainty, inefficiencies are generic. We introduce a constrained eiency concept, uncertainty-neutral eiency and show that equilibrium allocations under price uncertainty are effcient in this constrained sense. Arrow-Debreu equilibria turn out to be non-robust with respect to the introduction of Knightian uncertainty.
88. May 3, 2018, Friday
- Speaker: Dr. Kim, Moon Joon (Duke Kunshan University)
- Title: Unintended Impacts of Abolition of Co-payment on Outpatient Utilization in South Korea: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design
- Time: 14:30--16:00
- Venue: B226
- Chair: Dr. Cui, Jingbo
- Abstract: In June 2007, a medical amendment was passed in South Korea to transition from a co-payment to a co-insurance program for use in outpatient services effective August 2007 in order to increase the medical burden of the insured and to control excessive use of healthcare services and expenditures. This paper estimates the impact of health insurance reform on outpatient healthcare utilization. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that the abolition of the co-payment program significantly increases system-wide outpatient healthcare utilization and outpatient visits per capita by approximately 120 percent and 30 percent, respectively, while healthcare cost per visit significantly decreases by 12 percent. The abolition of co-payment incentivized beneficiaries to enroll for private health insurance that covers outpatient medical costs, allowing them access to more medical services with less cost. Therefore, this study suggests that interaction effects between related policies should be taken into careful consideration.
87. April 24, 2018, Tuesday
- Speaker: Dr. Zhou, Junjie (National University of Singapore)
- Title: Coordination on Networks
- Time: 13:00--14:30
- Venue: B226
- Chair: Dr. Sun, Xiang
- Abstract: We study a coordination game among agents on a network, who choose whether or not to take an action that yields value increasing in the actions of neighbors. In a standard global game setting, players receive noisy information of the technology’s common state-dependent value. We show the existence and uniqueness of a pure equilibrium in the noiseless limit. We derive limiting cutoffs, which allocate players into coordination sets, within members take a common cutoff strategy and are path connected. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for agents to inhabit the same coordination set. The strategic effects of perturbations to players’ underlining values are shown to spread throughout but be contained within the perturbed players’ coordination sets. Welfare properties are investigated.
86. April 26, 2018, Thursday
- Speaker: Prof. Cao, Zhigang (Beijing Jiaotong University)
- Title: A network game of dynamic traffic
- Time: 14:00--15:30
- Venue: B226
- Chair: Dr. Sun, Xiang
- Abstract: We study a network congestion game of discrete-time dynamic traffic of atomic agents with a single origin-destination pair. Any agent freely makes a dynamic decision at each vertex (e.g., road crossing) and traffic is regulated with given priorities on edges (e.g., road segments). We first constructively prove that there always exists a sub-game perfect equilibrium (SPE) in this game. We then study the relationship between this model and a simplified model, in which agents select and fix an origin-destination path simultaneously. We show that the set of Nash equilibrium (NE) flows of the simplified model is a proper subset of the set of SPE flows of our main model. We prove that each NE is also a strong NE and hence weakly Pareto optimal. We establish several other nice properties of NE flows, including global First-In-First-Out. Then for two classes of networks, including series-parallel ones, we show that the queue lengths at equilibrium are bounded at any given instance, which means the price of anarchy of any given game instance is bounded, provided that the inflow size never exceeds the network capacity. (joint work with Bo Chen, Xujin Chen, and Changjun Wang)