| 1. |
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al.
(författare)
-
Agency Costs in the Process of Development
- 1996
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We analyze an economy where production is subject to moral hazard. The degree of the incentive (agency) costs introduced by the presence of moral hazard naturally depends on the information structure in the economy; it is cheaper to induce correct incentives in a society which posesses better ex post information. The degree of ex post information depends on the number of projects and entrepreneurs in the economy; the more projects, the better the information. This implies that at the early stages of development, the range of projects and the amount of information are limited and agency costs are high. Since the information created by a project is an externality on others, the decentralized economy is constrained inefficient; in particular, it does not 'experiment' enough. The analysis of the role of information also opens the way to an investigation of the development of financial institutions. We contrast the information aggregation role of stock markets and information production role of banks. Because the amount of available information increases with development, our model predicts the pattern of financial development observed in practice; banks first and stock markets later.
|
|
| 2. |
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al.
(författare)
-
Harmonic influence in largescale networks
- 2014. - 3
-
Ingår i: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 0163-5999. - 9781450327893 ; 42, s. 24-24
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)
|
|
| 3. |
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al.
(författare)
-
Information Accumulation in Development
- 1998
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We propose a model in which economic relations and intritutions in advanced and less developed countries differ as these societies have access to different amounts of information. The lack of information in less developed economies makes it hard to evaluate the performance of manager, and leads to high "agency costs". Differences in the amount of information have a variety of sources. As well as factors related to the informational infrastructure, we emphasize that societies accumulate information partly because the scarcity of capital restricts the repetition of various activities. Two implications of our model are: (i) as an economy develops and generates more information, it achieves better risk-sharing at a given level of effort, but because agents are exerting more effort and the types of activities are changing, the overall level of risk-sharing may decline; (ii) with development, the share of financial intermediation carried out through market institutions should increase.
|
|
| 4. |
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al.
(författare)
-
Opinion fluctuations and disagreement in social networks
- 2013
-
Ingår i: Mathematics of Operations Research. - : Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). - 0364-765X .- 1526-5471. ; 38:1, s. 1-27
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We study a tractable opinion dynamics model that generates long-run disagreements and persistent opinion fluctuations. Our model involves an inhomogeneous stochastic gossip process of continuous opinion dynamics in a society consisting of two types of agents: (1) regular agents who update their beliefs according to information that they receive from their social neighbors and (2) stubborn agents who never update their opinions and might represent leaders, political parties, or media sources attempting to influence the beliefs in the rest of the society. When the society contains stubborn agents with different opinions, the belief dynamics never lead to a consensus (among the regular agents). Instead, beliefs in the society fail to converge almost surely, the belief profile keeps on fluctuating in an ergodic fashion, and it converges in law to a nondegenerate random vector. The structure of the graph describing the social network and the location of the stubborn agents within it shape the opinion dynamics. The expected belief vector is proved to evolve according to an ordinary differential equation coinciding with the Kolmogorov backward equation of a continuous-time Markov chain on the graph with absorbing states corresponding to the stubborn agents, and hence to converge to a harmonic vector, with every regular agent's value being the weighted average of its neighbors' values, and boundary conditions corresponding to the stubborn agents' beliefs. Expected cross products of the agents' beliefs allow for a similar characterization in terms of coupled Markov chains on the graph describing the social network. We prove that, in large-scale societies, which are highly fluid, meaning that the product of the mixing time of the Markov chain on the graph describing the social network and the relative size of the linkages to stubborn agents vanishes as the population size grows large, a condition of homogeneous influence emerges, whereby the stationary beliefs' marginal distributions of most of the regular agents have approximately equal first and second moments.
|
|
| 5. |
|
|
| 6. |
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al.
(författare)
-
Productivity Differences
- 1998
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Many technologies used by the LDCs are developed in the OECD economies, and as such, are designed to make optimal use of the skills of these richer countries' workforces. Due to differences in the supply of skills, some of the tasks performed by skilled workers in the OECD economies will be carried out by unskilled workers in the LDCs. Since the technologies in these tasks are designed to be used by skilled workers, productivity in the LDCs will be low. Even when all countries have equal access to new technologies, this mismatch between skills and technology can lead to sizable differences in total factor productivity and output per worker. Our theory also suggests that productivity differences should be highest in medium-tech sectors, and that the trade regime and the degree of intellectual property right enforcement in the LDCs have an important effect on the direction of technical change and on productivity differences.
|
|
| 7. |
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al.
(författare)
-
Technology, Information, and the Decentralization of the Firm
- 2007
-
Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. ; 122:4, s. 1759-1799
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper analyzes the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the other hand, delegates authority to a manager with superior information. However, the manager can use his informational advantage to make choices that are not in the best interest of the principal. As the available public information about the specific technology increases, the tradeoff shifts in favor of centralization. We show that firms closer to the technological frontier, firms in more heterogeneous environments, and younger firms are more likely to choose decentralization. Using three data sets on French and British firms in the 1990s, we report robust correlations consistent with these predictions.
|
|
| 8. |
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al.
(författare)
-
The Environment and Directed Technical Change
- 2010
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper introduces endogenous and directed technical change in a growth model with environmental constraints. A unique final good is produced by combining inputs from two sectors. One of these sectors uses “dirty” machines and thus creates environmental degradation. Research can be directed to improving the technology of machines in either sector. We characterize dynamic tax policies that achieve sustainable growth or maximize intertemporal welfare. We show that: (i) in the case where the inputs are sufficiently substitutable, sustainable long-run growth can be achieved with temporary taxation of dirty innovation and production; (ii) optimal policy involves both “carbon taxes” and research subsidies, so that excessive use of carbon taxes is avoided; (iii) delay in intervention is costly: the sooner and the stronger is the policy response, the shorter is the growth transition phase; (iv) the use of an exhaustible resource in dirty input production helps the switch to clean innovation under laissez-faire when the two inputs are substitutes. Under reasonable parameter values and with sufficient substitutability between inputs, it is optimal to redirect technical change towards clean technologies immediately and optimal environmental regulation need not reduce long-run growth.
|
|
| 9. |
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al.
(författare)
-
The Environment and Directed Technical Change
- 2012
-
Ingår i: The American Economic Review. - : American Economic Association. - 0002-8282 .- 1944-7981. ; 102:1, s. 131-166
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper introduces endogenous and directed technical change in a growth model with environmental constraints. The final good is produced from dirty and clean inputs. We show that: (i) when inputs are sufficiently substitutable, sustainable growth can be achieved with temporary taxes/subsidies that redirect innovation toward clean inputs; (ii) optimal policy involves both carbon taxes and research subsidies, avoiding excessive use of carbon taxes; (iii) delay in intervention is costly, as it later necessitates a longer transition phase with slow growth; and (iv) use of an exhaustible resource in dirty input production helps the switch to clean innovation under laissez-faire.
|
|
| 10. |
|
|
