Functional Distribution, Land Ownership and Industrial Takeoff: The Role of Effective Demand

This paper analyses how the distribution of land property rights affects industrial takeoff and aggregate income through the demand side. We study a stylized economy composed of two sectors, agriculture and manufacturing. The former produces a single subsistence good while the latter is constituted of a continuum of markets producing distinct commodities. Following Murphy et al. [20] we model industrialization as the introduction of an increasing returns technology in place of a constant returns one. However, we depart from their framework by assuming income to be distributed according to functional groups membership (landowners, capitalists, workers). We carry out an equilibrium analysis for different levels of land ownership concentration proving that, under the specified conditions, there is a non-monotonic relation between the distribution of land property rights and both industrialization and income. We clarify that non-monotonicity arises because of the way land ownership concentration affects the level and the distribution of profits among capitalists which, in turn, shape their demand. Our results suggest that i) both a too concentrated and a too diffused distribution of land property rights can be detrimental to industrialization, ii) land ownership affects the economic performance of an industrializing country by determining the demand of manufactures of both landowners and capitalists, iii) in terms of optimal land distribution there may be a tradeoff between income and industrialization.

Dynamic Adverse Selection and the Size of the Informed Side of the Market

In this paper we examine the problem of dynamic adverse selection in a stylized market where the quality of goods is a seller’s private information. We show that in equilibrium all goods can be traded if a simple piece of information is made publicly available: the size of the informed side of the market. Moreover, we show that if exchanges can take place frequently enough, then agents roughly enjoy the entire potential surplus from exchanges. We illustrate these findings with a dynamic model of trade where buyers and sellers repeatedly interact over time. More precisely we prove that, if the size of the informed side of the market is a public information at each trading stage, then there exists a weak perfect Bayesian equilibrium where all goods are sold in finite time and where the price and quality of traded goods are increasing over time. Moreover, we show that as the time between exchanges becomes arbitrarily small, full trade still obtains in finite time – i.e., all goods are actually traded in equilibrium – while total surplus from exchanges converges to the entire potential. These results suggest two policy interventions in markets suffering from dynamic adverse selection: first, the public disclosure of the size of the informed side of the market in each trading stage and, second, the increase of the frequency of trading stages

Dynamic Adverse Selection and the Supply Size

In this paper we examine the problem of dynamic adverse selection in a stylized market where the quality of goods is a seller’s private information while the realized distribution of qualities is public information. We show that in equilibrium all goods can be traded if the size of the supply is publicly available to market participants. Moreover, we show that if exchanges can take place frequently enough, then agents roughly enjoy the entire potential surplus from exchanges. We illustrate these findings with a dynamic model of trade where buyers and sellers repeatedly interact over time. We also identify circumstances under which only full trade equilibria exist. Further, we give conditions for full trade to obtain when the realized distribution of qualities is not public information and when new goods enter the market at later stages

Social Coordination with Locally Observable Types

In this paper we study the typical dilemma of social coordination between a riskdominant convention and a payoff-dominant convention. In particular, we consider a model where a population of agents play a coordination game over time, choosing both the action and the network of agents with whom to interact. The main novelty with respect to the existing literature is that: (i) agents come in two distinct types, (ii) the interaction with a different type is costly, and (iii) an agent’s type is unobservable prior to interaction. We show that when the cost of interacting with a different type is small with respect to the payoff of coordination, then the payoff-dominant convention is the only stochastically stable convention; instead, when the cost of interacting with a different type is large, the only stochastically stable conventions are those where all agents of one type play the payoff-dominant action and all agents of the other type play the risk-dominant action

Dynamic Adverse Selection and the Supply Size

In this paper we examine the problem of dynamic adverse selection in a stylized market where the quality of goods is a seller’s private information while the realized distribution of qualities is public information. We show that in equilibrium all goods can be traded if the size of the supply is publicly available to market participants. Moreover, we show that if exchanges can take place frequently enough, then agents roughly enjoy the entire potential surplus from exchanges. We illustrate these findings with a dynamic model of trade where buyers and sellers repeatedly interact over time. We also identify circumstances under which only full trade equilibria exist. Further, we give conditions for full trade to obtain when the realized distribution of qualities is not public information and when new goods enter the market at later stages

Strict Nash equilibria in large gameswith strict single crossing in types and actions

In this paper we study games where the space of player types is atomless, action spaces are second countable, and payoffs functions satisfy the property of strict single crossing in types and actions. Our main finding is that in this class of games every Nash equilibrium is essentially strict. We briefly develop and discuss the relevant consequences of our resul

A Comment On Gintis's "The Dynamics of General Equilibrium"

This is a comment on Gintis (2007, 'The Dynamics of General Equilibrium', Economic Journal 117 (523) , 1280\u20131309), who provides an agent-based model of a Walrasian economy where the t\ue2tonnement is replaced by imitation. His simulations show that the economy converges to the Walrasian equilibrium. Gintis concludes that 1) his stability results provide some justification for the importance placed upon the Walrasian model, and 2) models allowing agents to imitate successful others lead to an economy with a reasonable level of stability and efficiency. Since these conclusions appear to be intended as general, we caution that Gintis's findings can only be accepted for Walrasian models without capital goods; in models with capital goods imitation-based adjustments alter the equilibrium's data (which makes the demonstration of stability impossible) and raise other important problems (absent from Gintis's simulations) still awaiting exploration

Single-Valuedness of the Demand Correspondence and Strict Convexity of Preferences: An Equivalence Result

If preferences are rational and continuous, then strict convexity implies that the demand correspondence is single-valued (e.g. Barten and Bohm¨ , 1982, lemma 7.3). We show that if, in addition, preferences are strictly monotone then the converse is also true, namely single-valuedness of the demand correspondence implies strict convexity of preferences