• Abrardi, L., Colombo L., Tedeschi, P. 2024. “Pretending Ignorance is Bliss: Competing Insurers with Heterogeneous Informational Advantages”, The Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming.

In recent years, the insurance sector underwent profound changes due to technological innovations reshaping its traditional business model. The growing availability of large datasets, combined with advancements in big data analytics and artificial intelligence, is enhancing the informational advantage of insurance companies. With their expertise and privileged access to data, insurers can assess risk more accurately than policyholders. This raises the question of how competition unfolds in such a setting and what its implications are for market outcomes.

It is well known that in competitive frameworks in which insurers hold perfect and homogeneous information about the policyholder’s risk, there emerge efficient outcomes and the absence of profits in equilibrium. However, in reality, insurers’ informational advantages are often imperfect and heterogeneous, due for example to the use of different algorithms and data sources, leading to different risk assessments. We investigate the competitive implications of insurers’ dispersed information advantages by assuming that each insurer receives a private signal about the policyholder’s risk and offers a menu of contracts that may or may not reveal private information, resulting in informative (separating) or non-informative (pooling) equilibria. The interaction between competing and privately informed insurers delivers novel insights on contract design, information disclosure, and market efficiency.

We show that both informative and non-informative equilibria can be profitable for insurers. In informative equilibria, the signaling content of insurers’ offers allows the policyholder to infer insurers’ information. Hence, when choosing a contract, the policyholder gains market information and is more informed than insurers are when they issue their offers. This signaling problem endogenously generates a screening problem, and the interplay between the two problems determines novel and non-standard results in terms of equilibrium characterization. Because of the screening problem, informative equilibria are inefficient, as in the traditional Rothschild and Stiglitz’s setup. At the same time, because of the signaling problem, strictly positive profits emerge in equilibrium for some (and possibly all) insurers. These results emerge even for negligible amounts of signal imperfection and differ from those obtained when insurers are identically informed, in which case the need to screen the policyholder based on market information is absent and profits can be zero.

We also find that there exist strictly profitable non-informative equilibria in which insurers make identical offers. In contrast to informative equilibria, these equilibria entail risk pooling and may be ex ante fully efficient. This is because the policyholder may reject undercutting deviations, thus hindering competition, when she holds optimistic out-of-equilibrium beliefs about insurers’ estimates of risk. The signaling content of deviations sustains non-informative equilibria, exactly as for pooling equilibria in signaling games. Our main insights are robust to changes in insurers’ information precision and market concentration, as well as to the presence of two-sided asymmetric information and withdrawable contracts.

Our findings contribute to the debate on the implications of innovative technologies in the insurance industry, showing that improved risk assessment capabilities may not necessarily erode profits or eliminate risk pooling. As insurers continue to refine their analytical models and incorporate new data sources, policymakers and regulators must consider the broader implications of these technological advancements. By highlighting the complex interplay between asymmetric information and competition, our study contributes to a deeper understanding of the evolving insurance landscape in the digital age.
 

•  Di Pace, F., G. Mangiante, and R.M. Masolo. 2024. “Do firm expectations respond to monetary policy announcements?”, Journal of Monetary Economics, 103648.

Inflation expectations are central to the price-setting decision of a forward-looking firm. Because of their role in pricing decisions, they are key to the transmission of monetary policy to inflation, i.e. for the effectiveness of monetary policy.

The macroeconomic literature went from considering expectations primarily as an unobserved model variable, to using financial market prices and then surveys to measure them. In recent years, it has become apparent that the expectations of consumers, professionals, and firms tend to differ in important respects and each deserves separate treatment.

When it comes to pricing, the focus is naturally on firm expectations. In this paper, Federico Di Pace (Bank of England), Giacomo Mangiante (Banca d’Italia) and myself use the Decision Maker Panel survey, a detailed monthly survey of UK firms, to study if and how UK firms revise their pricing plans in response to a monetary policy announcement.

The answer is generally positive, and the response is in line with theoretical predictions: firms reduce their price expectations after a monetary policy tightening, while raising them when rates are cut. There are a couple of important qualifications worth mentioning though.

First, it is important to distinguish monetary policy shocks from monetary policy announcements. A monetary policy shock amounts to the change in policy rates net of any systematic response of the central bank to macroeconomic developments. Estimating the systematic component of monetary policy requires some assumptions and the profession has come up with a number of alternative approaches. We survey the most popular. What we find is that firms and markets respond to different measures of monetary policy shocks. In particular, firms do not respond to so-called “high-frequency” surprises, derived from asset-price variations in a short window around a policy decision. Rather they respond to what we consider simpler/coarser measures of monetary policy shocks, such as rate changes — possibly net of an endogenous component estimated à la Romer and Romer (2004). By using data on the press coverage of monetary policy, we show that rate changes correlate much more closely with news coverage of monetary policy compared to high-frequency surprises. The overall picture is one in which the average firm is not up to date with the tick-by-tick evolution of asset prices, yet it responds to monetary policy decisions as conveyed by the press — hence the stress on announcements, and on communication more broadly.

The second caveat has to do with important nonlinearities. The survey in question only starts after the 2016 Brexit referendum. Yet, we can identify two periods in which firms appeared to be particularly sensitive to monetary policy announcements. The first corresponds to the monetary policy stimulus imparted by the Bank of England in March 2020, at the onset of COVID pandemic. In a time of turmoil and unprecedented uncertainty, firms revised their price expectations up in response to that cut in rates. The second period is a series of consecutive and large (at least 50 basis points each) rate hikes in late 2022 and early 2023. In a period of high inflation, these measures appear to have succeeded at significantly reducing firm price expectations.

Overall, we find that monetary policy can indeed affect firm price expectations, but we also stress the importance of treating firm expectations as separate from those of financial market participants, consumers, and professionals.
 

• Battigalli, P., Panebianco, F., and Pin, P. 2023. “Learning and selfconfirming equilibria in network games”, Journal of Economic Theory, 212, 105700. 

Consider a set of agents who play a network game repeatedly. Agents may not know the network topology. They may even be unaware that they are actually interacting with other agents in a network. Possibly, they just understand that their optimal action depends on an unknown state, that is, actually, an aggregate of the actions of their neighbors. In each period, every agent chooses an action that maximizes her instantaneous subjective expected payoff and then updates her beliefs according to what she observes. In particular, we assume that each agent only observes her realized payoff. A steady state of the resulting dynamic is a selfconfirming equilibrium given the assumed feedback. We identify conditions on the network externalities, agents’ beliefs, and learning dynamics that make agents more or less active (or even inactive) in steady state compared to Nash equilibrium.

Indeed, Nash equilibrium action profiles are limit outcomes of learning paths when agents have perfect feedback about the payoff-relevant aspects of others’ behavior. Yet, as we argue, such perfect feedback hypothesis may be too strong for some social networks applications and, if learning is based on imperfect feedback, non-Nash action profiles may result as the steady-state limits of learning paths.

In our analysis we assume that the only feedback agents receive is their realized payoff. This implies that they do not always identify the payoff-relevant aspects of the actions of others, represented by a payoff state. We analyze how agents use the feedback they receive to update their conjectures about the payoff state and best respond to them, and we characterize their limit behavior under different settings of local and global externalities. We show that if externalities are only local, active players are always able to infer the correct payoff-relevant state, whereas inactive players fall into an inactivity trap, and stay inactive even when it would be objectively optimal not to do so. We study sufficient conditions over the network topology to ensure existence and stability of the selfconfirming equilibria. Conversely, if also global externalities are at play, these externalities play a confounding role and a multiplicity of equilibria arise where an arbitrary set of agents can be inactive and consistently decide to stay so, and the level of activity depends on the level of each agent’s perceived centrality in the network. In particular, players may be more active if they think that they are more linked in the network than they actually are, and this can be welfare improving for the whole society. Also, agents with excessive perceived connectedness may prevent convergence of best reply paths to interior equilibria.

All these conditions are based on the network structure and on the type of externalities, on the conjectures that agents have, and on the rules that they use to update their conjectures. Thus, in some applications, knowing these conditions, a social planner or the owner of the network can try to change the beliefs of people to induce them to increase their activity levels.

• Parodi, F. “Taxation of Consumption and Labor Income: a Quantitative Approach”, forthcoming at AEJ: Macroeconomics.

The uniform commodity taxation theorem by Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976), one of the most influential results in Public Economics, implies that dfferentiated consumption tax rates are not needed if an optimal non linear income tax is in place. Yet, in practice, most countries heavily rely on differentiated commodity taxation even if they have sophisticated progressive income tax systems. 
In order to bridge this gap between tax theory and tax practice, in this paper I quantitatively characterize the optimal consumption and income tax rates using an estimated structural life-cycle model of households' consumption, saving and labor supply choices. The model relaxes the key assumptions of the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem that could be driving the uniform commodity taxation result. First, I allow for multiple consumption goods with different degrees of necessity and durability. In particular, I include durable goods that are partially irreversible and enter the borrowing constraint. Second, I consider rich preference heterogeneity. Third, I take into account horizontal equity objectives of the social planner. 
I derive the optimal tax system under the assumption of a utilitarian social welfare function. I find that durables should be subsidized and non-durables should be taxed at a uniform rate. The durable subsidy is driven by the life-cycle features of the model together with durables irreversibility and borrowing constraints. Uniform taxation on non-durables holds under exogenous and endogenous fully or weakly separable labor supply and it relies on homogeneity of intertemporal preferences. Lastly, allowing for government’s horizontal equity concerns, I show that the model can rationalize the tax practice under a high degree of government’s inequality aversion.

• Sandi, M., with T. Kirchmaier, S. Machin, and Robert Witt. 2020. “Prices, Policing and Policy: The Dynamics of Crime Booms and Busts”, Journal of the European Economic Association, 18 (2): 1040–1077.

In many historical episodes, criminal activity displays booms and busts. One recent, very clear, example of crime boom and bust has been the case of metal crime. In the UK, starting from the mid-2000s metal theft more than doubled, reaching unprecedented levels by 2011. However, as with other (crime) booms, a bust followed this as metal theft fell very rapidly since the start of the current decade. 
This paper researches the dynamics of metal crime. The empirical analysis starts by examining whether the changing prices of metals affect the level of crime over time. Administrative records of metal crime from the British Transport Police (BTP) and the Metropolitan Police Service of London combined with data on metal prices from 2007-2015 reveal sizeable crime-price elasticities and a strong sensitivity of metal crimes to scrap metal prices. 
The subsequent parts of the paper investigate the impact on metal crime of the responses by the institutions in the UK. In 2011, the BTP conducted an anti-metal crime police initiative called “Operation Tornado” (OT). The UK government also responded by introducing the Scrap Metal Dealers Act (SMDA) in 2013. Our analysis uncovers a significant negative effect of OT on metal crime, showing the critical role of policing in shaping crime dynamics. The analysis also shows the significant impact of the SMDA 2013 on both the economic activity of Scrap Metal Dealers (SMDs) and metal crime. Following the SMDA 2013, SMDs experienced a significant reduction in their economic activity. A genuine reduction in metal crime also originated from the stricter regulation regime of the SMDA 2013. 
Therefore, prices, policing and policy matter for crime, a finding of relevance not only for the market of metals, as lessons can be learnt also on the crime-reducing potential of institutional responses (e.g. stricter regulation) in other industries.

• Ghisolfi, S. 2022. “Market Access and Quality Upgrading: Evidence from Four Field Experiments”, forthcoming in American Economic Review

Smallholder farming in many developing countries is characterized by low productivity and low quality output. Low quality limits the price farmers can command and their potential income. We conduct a series of experiments among maize farmers in Uganda to shed light on the barriers to quality upgrading and to study its potential. First, we document that quality is indeed low but partly observable with easy and quick procedures by the buyers, therefore it would be possible to reward farmers based on the quality of their produce. Second, we experimentally vary the quality of the maize produced and show that in the existing market the causal return to quality is zero, suggesting that the market for quality maize is effectively missing. Third, to understand if farmers would be willing and able to produce high quality maize when rewarded, we contract with a Ugandan vertically integrated agro trader to generate experimental variation in access to a market for premium quality maize. Following 200 farmers in 20 villages for 7 seasons (i.e. 3.5 years), we document that access to a market for high quality maize, combined with training on agricultural best-practices, produces large increases in maize quality (+60%) and in both farm productivity and income, increasing yields by 15% and mean profits by $63-$98 per season or 36%-81%. While the intervention also increased prices for lower quality maize in the treatment villages, the evidence suggests that the increase in output in the treatment group can fully be accounted for by the subgroup of farmers selling premium quality maize to the high quality buyer. Fourth, in a separate trial following 170 farmers for 6 seasons, we investigate the impact of the training program alone and find no evidence that farmers changed their farm practices, productivity or profits. Our findings reveal the importance of demand-side constraints in limiting rural income and productivity growth.

• Cipullo, D. 2021. “Political Fragmentation and Government Stability. Evidence from Local Governments in Spain”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Unstable governments have been historically associated with fragmented parliaments. Topical cases include the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Fourth Republic in France. Despite the abundance of examples, to date, we lack rigorous evidence on whether the association between fragmentation and stability is indeed causal. The main empirical issue lies in finding exogenous variation in fragmentation, especially when using national-level data. Also, occurrences of instability events at the national level are too uncommon to apply reliable econometric techniques.

A recent work by Davide Cipullo (Università Cattolica), with Carozzi (LSE) and Repetto (Uppsala University), forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics exploits data from 50,000 local elections in Spain (featuring more than 1,000 events of unseated governments), where parties can only enter the municipality council if they receive more than 5% of the votes. Using a Regression-Discontinuity design, the authors compare municipalities where a party receives just less than the required quota – and remains out from the council – with municipalities where a party receives a few more votes than the required quota – and may enter the council.

The empirical results document that the entry of an additional party causes a 5- percentage points increase in the probability that the incumbent mayor is unseated via a vote of no confidence. In relative terms, for each additional party that enters the municipality council, incumbent mayors are 140% more likely to be replaced during the term. Using the empirical results and a simulation method, the authors also show the policy impact of admission thresholds on the stability of incumbent governments. Low entry thresholds (e.g., those requiring a party to receive at least 3% of the votes to participate in the seat distribution) do not reduce instability compared to not having an admission threshold at all. 2 On the contrary, relatively high thresholds (e.g., those requiring at least 5% of the votes) may reduce occurrences of instability substantially.

• Le Moglie, M. 2020. “Revealing “Mafia Inc.”? Financial Crisis, Organized Crime, and the Birth of New Enterprises”, Review of Economics and Statistics

Organized crime has strong negative effects on the economy, the society, and the institutions of many countries, but despite these detrimental effects, and the dramatic increase in the public resources deployed to contrast organized crime, it has followed to proliferate. A possible explanation for this persistence relates to the fact that organized crime also represents an important actor within the economy of many countries, generating gains for a part of the population that partially counterbalance its negative impact and reduce the effectiveness of law enforcement.

A recent work by Le Moglie and Sorrenti, now forthcoming at the Review of Economics and Statistics, exploits the 2007-subprime mortgage crisis to detect Mafia's presence in the Italian legal economy. The credit contraction homogeneously hit all the geographic areas, while Mafia presence was stronger in some provinces and weaker in others; Mafia sources of profit and capital were barely dented, as UNODC records, allowing organized crime to invest as usual. If the Mafia invests in the legal economy, the number of newly-established enterprises should thus have decreased less in Mafia-ridden areas than in the rest of the country. That’s exactly what happened, according to the number of firms newly registered in each province in the Registry of Enterprises. The drop was 4% lower, corresponding to a provincial average of 241 enterprises established every year in the post-crisis period due to Mafia investment in the legal economy (28 for every 100,000 inhabitants), and it lowers even further when considering the sector (construction) and legal form (limited liability) most preferred by Mafia.

The analysis suggests that standard repression policies against organized crime need to be complemented by institutional interventions, e.g. provision of credit or programs to enhance employment opportunities, to undermine the roots of the social consensus obtained through its investment in the legal economy.