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We analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers' tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge different prices to different segments of the market, i.e., carry out \"third degree price discrimination.\" We show that the segmentation and pricing induced by the additional information can achieve every combination of consumer and producer surplus such that: (i) consumer surplus is nonnegative, (ii) producer surplus is at least as high as profits under the uniform monopoly price, and (iii) total surplus does not exceed the surplus generated by efficient trade.

This paper analyzes a bilateral trade model where the buyer's valuation for the object is uncertain and she observes only a signal about her valuation. The seller gives a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the buyer. Our goal is to characterize those signal structures which maximize the buyer's expected payoff. We identify a buyer-optimal signal structure which generates (i) efficient trade and (ii) a unitelastic demand. Furthermore, we show that every other buyer-optimal signal structure yields the same outcome as the one we identify: in particular, the same price.

Governments are present-biased toward spending. Fiscal rules are deficit limits that trade off commitment to not overspend and flexibility to react to shocks. We compare coordinated rules, chosen jointly by a group of countries, to uncoordinated rules. If governments’ present bias is small, coordinated rules are tighter than uncoordinated rules: individual countries do not internalize the redistributive effect of interest rates. However, if the bias is large, coordinated rules are slacker: countries do not internalize the disciplining effect of interest rates. Surplus limits enhance welfare, and increased savings by some countries or outside economies can hurt the rest.

This paper analyses the effect immigration has on the wages of native workers. Unlike most previous work, we estimate wage effects along the distribution of native wages. We derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre-allocating immigrants to particular skill groups. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival. As for the effects on native wages, we find a pattern of effects whereby immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution. This pattern mirrors the evidence on the location of immigrants in the wage distribution. We suggest that possible explanations for the overall slightly positive effect on native wages, besides standard immigration surplus arguments, could involve deviations of immigrant remuneration from contribution to production either because of initial mismatch or immigrant downgrading.

We argue that a contract provides a reference point for a trading relationship: more precisely, for parties' feelings of entitlement. A party's ex post performance depends on whether he gets what he is entitled to relative to outcomes permitted by the contract. A party who is shortchanged shades on performance. A flexible contract allows parties to adjust their outcomes to uncertainty but causes inefficient shading. Our analysis provides a basis for long-term contracts in the absence of noncontractible investments and elucidates why \"employment\" contracts, which fix wages in advance and allow the employer to choose the task, can be optimal.

We explore the impact of private information in sealed-bid first-price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning-bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information and equilibrium attaining this minimum leave bidders indifferent between their equilibrium bids and all higher bids. Our results provide lower bounds for bids and revenue with asymmetric distributions over values. We also report further characterizations of revenue and bidder surplus including upper bounds on revenue. Our work has implications for the identification of value distributions from data on winning bids and for the informationally robust comparison of alternative auction mechanisms.

Efforts to address the logic of extraction, which arguably is at the core of our current environmental catastrophe, are examples for a non-reductive material turn in the study of religion and theology. These efforts are linked with the logics of property, possession, human/nature, and human/land relations. This emphasis on materiality and relationship creates welcome openings for another set of relationships that is still under-reflected in the material turn in religion and theology, namely the various connections between extraction and exploitation, specifically of labor, both productive and reproductive, human and other-than-human. In this article, the logic of extraction will be interpreted and reevaluated in its relation to exploitative relationships of labor, which in turn will be deepened in conversation with extraction. Relationships of extraction, production, and reproduction will further be investigated in terms of the notion of a religious surplus, which examines the multiple contributions of religion and theology as generated in broader surplus-producing relationships.

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment valuations of Facebook, suggesting that traditional metrics may overstate consumer surplus.

IMF forecasts and the EU’s Fiscal Compact foresee Europe’s heavily indebted countries running primary budget surpluses of as much as 5 percent of GDP for as long as 10 years in order to maintain debt sustainability and bring their debt/GDP ratios down to the Compact’s 60 percent target. We show that primary surpluses this large and persistent are rare. In an extensive sample of high- and middle-income countries there are just three (non-overlapping) episodes where countries ran primary surpluses of at least 5 per cent of GDP for 10 years. Analyzing a less restrictive definition of persistent surplus episodes (primary surpluses averaging at least 3 percent of GDP for five years), we find that surplus episodes are more likely when growth is strong, when the current account of the balance of payments is in surplus (savings rates are high), when the debt-to-GDP ratio is high (heightening the urgency of fiscal adjustment), and when the governing party controls all houses of parliament or congress (its bargaining position is strong). Left wing governments, strikingly, are more likely to run large, persistent primary surpluses. In advanced countries, proportional representation electoral systems that give rise to encompassing coalitions are associated with surplus episodes. The point estimates do not provide much encouragement for the view that high-debt European countries will be able to run a primary budget surplus as large and persistent as officially projected.