We study the impact of the MeToo movement on coauthorships in economics, by analyzing NBER and CEPR working papers between January 2004 and December 2020. Compared to pre-MeToo levels, collaborations across genders increased: we estimate a 12.5% increase of women coauthors per 100 men-authored papers. However, the movement led to an overall decline in new coauthorships, with senior researchers reducing new collaborations, especially with junior authors. In particular, they reduced their new collaborations with junior women by an estimated 33% per 100 senior-authored papers. The Covid-19 pandemic partially reversed the first of these two trends.

This paper develops concentration inequalities that can be used for finite-sample inference of moment condition models. The statistics are similar in spirit to Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests; analysing regional differences between the empirical distribution function (EDF) and the distribution function implied by the moment conditions. Implied probabilities present an information-theoretic tool to estimate such a distribution function. Model misspecification due to parameter instability yields systematic differences in the behaviour of generalised empirical Likelihood (GEL) implied probabilities relative to the EDF weights. Parameter heterogeneity may therefore be identified by the contrast of GEL implied probabilities and the EDF over regions of the sample space partitioned by characteristics suspected to be driving the heterogeneity. Data-driven methods can carefully select partitions that pick out points that are inconsistent with the moment restrictions. Using VC theory, tail bounds are provided for maximum deviations of the sum of GEL implied probabilities from their empirical average.

The paper consider models where the parameter of interest is described by one set of conditional moment restrictions and there exists another set of conditional moment restrictions with unknown nuisance parameters. A leading example is the study of conditional treatment effects; one set of moment restrictions describe a treatment effects model and another set describes the propensity score. This paper introduces two-step conditional empirical likelihood-weighted estimation of the parameter of interest. The estimator gives guaranteed efficiency gains over just using the identifying moment restrictions. To achieve this, moment restrictions may need to be adjusted to account for first-stage nuisance estimation of plug-in components (Chernozhukov, V., J.C. Escanciano, H. Ichimura and W.K. Newey (2016): “Locally Robust Semiparametric Estimation”, Cemmap working paper CWP31/16). When auxiliary restrictions require no nuisance estimation, the estimator is asymptotically efficient. This generalises existing the approach of F. Bravo (2010) “Efficient M-Estimators with Auxiliary Information”, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, to the conditional moments setting.

I propose a dynamic general equilibrium model in which strategic interactions between banks and depositors may lead to endogenous bank fragility and slow recovery from crises. When banks' investment decisions are not contractible, depositors form expectations about bank risk-taking and demand a return on deposits according to their risk. This creates strategic complementarities and possibly multiple equilibria: in response to an increase in funding costs, banks may optimally choose to pursue risky portfolios that undermine their solvency prospects. In a bad equilibrium, high funding costs hinder the accumulation of bank net worth, leading to a persistent drop in investment and output. I bring the model to bear on the European sovereign debt crisis, in the course of which under-capitalized banks in default-risky countries experienced an increase in funding costs and raised their holdings of domestic government debt. The model is quantified using Portuguese data and accounts for macroeconomic dynamics in Portugal in 2010-2016. Policy interventions face a trade-off between alleviating banks' funding conditions and strengthening risk-taking incentives. Liquidity provision to banks may eliminate the good equilibrium when not targeted. Targeted interventions have the capacity to eliminate adverse equilibria.

Inequality leads to a misallocation of talent when individuals are credit constrained. This paper studies such misallocation by tracing the effects of a large reduction in the cost of patenting on innovation. I exploit a patent fee reform in the United Kingdom in 1884 to investigate the responsiveness of inventors, and create a novel dataset on 54,000 inventors and their patent renewals. The reduction in the cost of inventing leads to a considerable and persistent rise in the quantity of lower- and high-quality ideas patented. Inventors respond strongly by delaying to patent lower-quality ideas before the reform and by bunching patents just after the reform. Innovation, as proxied by high-quality patents, increases in the longer run with an elasticity of 1.25. To test for the presence of credit constraints I generate two proxy measures of wealth using inventor names and addresses, and find a larger innovation response for poorer inventors. These results indicate efficiency gains from decreasing the cost of inventing and in addition, from relaxing credit constraints.

We inquire into the effects of infrastructure spending and road construction on the development of the manufacturing sector during the Great Depression. We use a novel dataset on road construction and manufacturing firms between 1930 and 1940. We distinguish between local effects, measured with the change in road mileage by county, and global effects, measured with the change in market access to all other counties through the road network. We also distinguish between the whole manufacturing sector and the least tradable industries. We find that global market access is correlated with an expansion of manufacturing (increase in number of firms, firm size, firm output, and a decrease in average labor productivity) for the whole manufacturing sector and not for the least tradable industries. We also find that the change in local market access has no correlation with manufacturing outcomes, either all of manufacturing or the least tradable industries.

We consider situations in which a significant proportion of observations in a time series are zero, but the remaining observations are positive and measured on a continuous scale. We propose a new dynamic model in which the conditional distribution of the observations is constructed by shifting a distribution for non-zero observations to the left and censoring negative values. The key to generalizing the censoring approach to the dynamic case is to have (the logarithm of) the location/scale parameter driven by a filter that depends on the score of the conditional distribution.  An exponential link function means that seasonal effects can be incorporated into the model and this is done by means of a cubic spline (which can potentially be time- varying). The model is fitted to daily rainfall in northern Australia and compared with a dynamic zero-augmented model.

This paper uses proprietary data to evaluate the efficacy of single-stock circuit breakers on the London Stock Exchange during July and August 2011. We exploit exogenous variation in the length of the uncrossing periods that follow a trading suspension to estimate the effect of auction length on market quality, measured by volume of trades, frequency of trading and the change in realised variance of returns. We also estimate the effect of a trading suspension in one FTSE-100 stock on the volume of trades, trading frequency and the change in realised variance of returns for other FTSE-100 stocks in the same industrial sector as the event stock and in other sectors. We find that auction length has a significant detrimental effect on market quality for the suspended security when returns are negative but no discernible effect when returns are positive. We also find that trading suspensions help to ameliorate the spread of market microstructure noise and price inefficiency across securities during falling markets but the reverse is true during rising markets. Although trading suspensions may not improve the trading process within a particular security, they do play an important role preventing the spread of poor market quality across securities in falling markets and therefore can be effective tools for promoting market-wide stability.

Firms face a trade-off between patenting, thereby disclosing innovation, and secrecy. In this paper, we show that this trade-off extends to financing relationships. We exploit the American Inventor's Protection Act of 1999, which forced firms to disclose the content of their patent applications within 18 months after filing for them. Firms in industries that experienced a greater change in the publicity of their patent applications were significantly more likely to break up their previous banking relationships and switch lenders. In addition, we explore whether deeper banking relationships tip the trade-off in favor of secrecy by increasing the value of private information. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that increased lender informedness following the creation of universal banks leads to fewer patents issued by publicly listed U.S. firms, without affecting investment in innovation and its outcomes, such as new-product announcements.

We propose a model to study the provision of monitoring incentives in loan syndicates when banks differ in scope. Because bank scope increases a bank's total exposure to firm performance beyond its loan share, banks of wide scope have incentives to monitor the firm even when they receive small loan shares. As such, they are more likely to be chosen as lead arrangers, yet receive comparatively small lead shares. We confirm these predictions empirically by exploiting the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Our findings suggest that the observed increases in syndicated-loan volumes and simultaneous decreases in lead shares over the last two decades are not associated with losses in monitoring efficiency.