Contributions in Merlin

Future events are uncertain by their very nature. Therefore, people's risk preferences are likely to play a role in the valuation of allegedly guaranteed future outcomes. We show that future uncertainty conjointly with people's proneness to nonlinear probability weighting generates a unifying framework for explaining many anomalies in intertemporal choice, such as hyperbolic discounting and subadditivity of discount factors. Moreover, our approach implies that higher uncertainty of future prospects increases the hyperbolicity of discount rates, suggesting that institutional deficiencies such as lack of contract enforcement, may be a source ofnhyperbolic discounting behavior. Based on an experiment with monetary incentives, we show that people's risk taking behavior is indeed a significant determinant of their time discounting behavior: Greater departures from linear probability weighting predict a stronger decline in impatience on the level of individual behavior.

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of technology shocks in explainingnaggregate fluctuations. To this end we estimate the model’snposterior density using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods. Within this framework we extend Ireland’s (2001, 2004) hybrid estimation approach to allow for a vector autoregressive moving averagen(VARMA) process to describe the movements and co-movementsnof the model’s errors not explained by the basic RBC model. The results of marginal likelihood ratio tests reveal that the more general model of the errors significantly improves the model’s fit relative to the VAR and AR alternatives. Moreover, despite setting the RBC model a more difficult task under the VARMA specification, our analysis,nbased on forecast error and spectral decompositions, suggests that the RBC model is still capable of explaining a significant fraction of the observed variation in macroeconomic aggregates in the post-war U.S. economy.

Momentum in developed countries' stock market index returns can be exploited to form portfolios of excess returns on foreign currencies as relatively high past foreign stock market returns signal a foreign currency appreciation. Two risk factors extracted from the stock index momentum based currency portfolio returns explain more than 80 percent of their cross-sectional variation. In contrast to currency risk factors constructed from forward discount sorted currency portfolios, these risk factors are not related to business cycle or liquidity risk. But high currency risk premia are associated with relatively deep financial integration and a high level of risk sharing.

This paper studies coordination in a multi-stage elimination tournament with large monetarynincentives and a diversified subject pool drawn from the adult British population. In thentournament, members of an ad hoc team earn money by answering general knowledgenquestions and then eliminate one contestant by plurality voting without prior communication. We find that in the early rounds of the tournament, contestants use a focal principle and coordinate on one of the multiple Nash equilibria in pure strategies by eliminating the weakest member of the team. However, in the later rounds, contestants switch to playing a mixednstrategy Nash equilibrium.

Although the real exchange rate - real interest rate (RERI) relationship is central to most open economy macroeconomic models, empirical support for the relationship is generally found to be rather weak. In this paper we re-investigate the RERI relationship using bilateral U.S. real exchange rate data spanning the period 1978 to 2007. Instead of testing one particular model, we build on Campbell and Shiller (1987) to propose a metric of the economic significance of the relationship. Our empirical results provide robust evidence that the RERI link is economically significant and that the real interest rate differential is a reasonable approximation of the expectednrate of depreciation over longer horizons.

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to detect and avoid spurious correlation. It then applies it to a recent contribution by Lichtenberg (2004), which relates longevity in the United States to pharmaceutical innovation and public health care expenditure. The results of the bounds testing procedure show longevity to be linearly related to these two factors. Therefore, the estimates reported by Lichtenberg (2004) cannot be said to be result of spurious correlation, to the contrary, they very likely reflect an effective relationship, at least for the United States.

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic interactions has proven to be elusive. It is still not clear whether trust is just an epiphenomenon of good institutions or whether it plays an independent causal role capable of shaping important aggregate economic outcomes. In this paper, I rely on a behavioral definition of trust that enables us to relate it to economic primitives such as preferences and beliefs. I review strong biological and behavioral evidence indicating that trusting is not just a special case of risk-taking, but based on important forms of social preferences such as betrayal aversion. Behaviorally defined trust also opens the door for understanding national and ethnic trust differences in terms of differences in preferences and beliefs, and it suggests ways to examine and interpret a causal role of trust.

This paper considers the problem of testing s null hypotheses simultaneously while controlling the false discovery rate (FDR). Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) provide a method for controlling the FDR based on p-values for each of the null hypotheses under the assumption that the p-values are independent. Subsequent research has since shown that this procedure is valid under weaker assumptions on the joint distribution of the p-values. Related procedures that are valid under no assumptions on the joint distribution of the p-values have also been developed. None of these procedures, however, incorporate information about the dependence structure of the test statistics. This paper develops methods for control of the FDR under weak assumptions that incorporate such information and, by doing so, are better able to detect false null hypotheses. We illustrate this property via a simulation study and two empirical applications. In particular, the bootstrap method is competitive with methods that require independence if independence holds, but it outperforms these methods under dependence.

This paper reports data from an ultimatum mini-game in which responders first had to choose whether or not to participate. Participation was costly, but the participation cost was smaller than the minimum payoff that a responder could guarantee himself in the ultimatum game. Compared to a standard treatment, we find that the rejection rate of unfavorable offers is significantly reduced when participation is costly. A possible explanation based on cognitive dissonance is offered.

We explore the impact of mortgage securitization on the international diversification of macroeconomic risk. By making mortgage-related risks internationally tradeable, securitization contributes considerably to better international consumption risk sharing: we find that countries with the most highly developed markets for securitized mortgage debt have consumption responses to a typical idiosyncratic business cycle shock that are 20-30 percent less volatile than those experienced by countries that do not allow for mortgage securitization. Our results are based on quarterly data from a panel of 16 industrialized countries and cover the sample period 1985-2008Q1. They are robust to a range of controls for other aspects of financial globalization, international differences in the structure of housing markets and the financial system etc. Against the backdrop of the subprime crisis, these findings inevitably raise the question whether securitization could notnjust facilitate risk sharing in tranquil times but that it actually fails to provide international insurance in severe crisis periods. Indeed, we find that international risk sharing decreases in global asset price downturns and increases in booms. But we do not find evidence that countries with more developed securitization markets are systematically more exposed to these fluctuations in the extent to which risk can be shared across national boundaries.