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2604.24757 2026-04-28 econ.TH

Coordination in complex environments

Pietro Dall'Ara

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英文摘要

Coordination is an important aspect of innovative contexts, where: the more innovative a course of action, the more uncertain its outcome. To study the interplay of coordination and informational ``complexity'', I embed a beauty-contest game into a complex environment. I identify a new conformity phenomenon. This effect may push towards the exploration of unknown alternatives or constitute a status-quo bias, depending on the network structure of players' interactions. In an application, I show that an organization with decentralized authority can implement profit maximization in a sufficiently complex environment.

2604.24705 2026-04-28 econ.EM cs.LG

Energy-Arena: A Dynamic Benchmark for Operational Energy Forecasting

Max Kleinebrahm, Jonathan Berrisch, Philipp Eiser, Wolf Fichtner, Veit Hagenmeyer, Matthias Hertel, Nils Koster, Sebastian Lerch, Ralf Mikut, Jan Priesmann, Melanie Schienle, Benjamin Schaefer, Jann Weinand, Florian Ziel

Comments 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Submitted to the European Electricity Markets (EEM) conference

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英文摘要

Energy forecasting research faces a persistent comparability gap that makes it difficult to measure consistent progress over time. Reported accuracy gains are often not directly comparable because models are evaluated under study-specific datasets, time periods, information sets, and scoring setups, while widely used benchmarks and competition datasets are typically tied to fixed historical windows. This paper introduces the Energy-Arena, a dynamic benchmarking platform for operational energy time series forecasting that provides a continuously updated reference point as energy systems evolve. The platform operates as an open, API-based submission system and standardizes challenge definitions and submission deadlines aligned with operational constraints. Performance is reported on rolling evaluation windows via persistent leaderboards. By moving from retrospective backtesting to forward-looking benchmarking, the Energy-Arena enforces standardized ex-ante submission and ex-post evaluation, thereby improving transparency by preventing information leakage and retroactive tuning. The platform is publicly available at Energy-Arena.org.

2604.24652 2026-04-28 stat.ME econ.EM

Benefits and Costs of Adaptive Sampling

Yu-Shiou Willy Lin, Dae Woong Ham, Iavor Bojinov

Comments 41 pages, 3 figures

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Multi-armed bandits are widely used for sequential experimentation in clinical trials, recommendation systems, and online platforms. While regret minimization and valid inference from adaptively collected data have each been studied extensively, a basic question remains: when does adaptivity \emph{improve estimation precision} relative to uniform designs, and how should inference be balanced against the online cost of experimentation? We first study arm-level mean estimation under mean-squared-error (MSE) objectives. We characterize when an adaptive Neyman allocation, which allocates samples according to arm variance, yields strict MSE improvements over uniform sampling. When there is variance heterogeneity across arms, these improvements arise at modest sample sizes, clarifying that adaptivity can be preferable for inference not only asymptotically, but also in many practical finite-sample settings. We then study a joint inference-regret objective that accounts for the cost of assigning units to inferior arms during experimentation. We propose the Static-Allocation Rate Policy (SARP) and Neyman-Adaptive Rate Policy (NARP), which interpolates between inference- and regret-oriented policies by adjusting exploration to the local structure of the instance. We show that SARP and NARP converge to the complete-information benchmark at the optimal rate as the sampling budget grows. Our proposed policies are practically attractive as it linearly interpolates between any standard regret-minimizing algorithm and inference-targeting adaptive policies. Yet we show it still enjoys the oracle-based asymptotic optimal rate. Simulations support the theory by demonstrating improved precision over uniform allocation while controlling performance loss across a range of instances.

2604.24546 2026-04-28 econ.TH q-fin.MF

Comonotonic improvement under feasibility constraints

Christopher Blier-Wong, Jean-Gabriel Lauzier

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Regulatory and contractual constraints on individual exposures are standard in insurance and reinsurance markets, but a poorly designed constraint can distort the economic incentives of risk-averse agents. In the unconstrained problem, the classical comonotonic improvement theorem guarantees Pareto-optimal allocations that are nondecreasing in the aggregate loss. A constraint that is not stable under risk reduction can destroy this property. We show by example that Value-at-Risk caps lead to optimal allocations that are non-comonotonic in the aggregate loss. We identify componentwise convex-order solidity as a sufficient condition on the feasible set that restores the comonotonic improvement under constraints. If replacing any agent's allocation by a less risky one preserves feasibility, then every feasible allocation admits a feasible comonotonic improvement for all convex-order-consistent preferences. This criterion covers many constraints typical in risk management, but excludes Value-at-Risk caps and idiosyncratic deductibles. We illustrate the implications of our main result in a mean-variance risk-sharing application.

2604.24344 2026-04-28 econ.GN math.OC math.PR q-fin.EC

Optimal incentive scheme for ESG disclosure

Imen Ben Tahar, Dylan Possamaï, Xiaolu Tan

Comments 29 pages

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This paper characterises optimal incentive schemes for ESG disclosure in a continuous-time principal-agent setting. We model a risk-averse principal (e.g., a platform or standard-setter) contracting with a team of heterogeneous agents whose disclosure signals are each correlated with a traded climate risk factor. The optimal contract balances incentive provision against the variance of aggregate payouts by leveraging three instruments: own-signal loading, cross-signal loadings across agents, and hedging tilts on the traded asset. We derive closed-form linear optimal controls in a tractable linear-quadratic-Gaussian framework. When the principal is nearly risk-neutral, the contract uses the traded asset purely to hedge the specific `enforcement risk' generated by high-powered incentives. As the principal's risk aversion increases, the optimal scheme converges to a `market-neutral' regime where aggregate asset exposure is eliminated and the cross-signal structure tightens to an `identity pooling' constraint. We characterise this limit analytically as a constrained quadratic program governed by an M-matrix. In the high-risk-aversion regime, heterogeneity creates genuinely new effects absent under symmetry: the cross-section of S-tilts must change sign (unless degenerate), and an agent's own-signal diagonal can turn negative when that row is too strongly exposed to the common traded factor relative to the rest of the group. The results provide a theoretical foundation for `mixed' compensation structures in Regenerative Finance (ReFi), rationalising the use of both stable payments and volatile governance tokens to optimise risk-sharing.

2604.24336 2026-04-28 econ.GN q-fin.EC

Effects of Genetic Propensity for Education on Labor Market and Health Trajectories across the Working Life

Stefano Lombardi, Nurfatima Jandarova, Kristina Zguro, Jarkko Harju, Aldo Rustichini, Andrea Ganna

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Education is a major source of inequality in income and health. Polygenic indices for educational attainment (EA-PGI) capture both direct and indirect genetic influences on education, but their effects on income and health remain unclear. Using Finnish registry data on 51,056 graduates followed annually since graduation for up to 25 years, we report three findings. First, higher EA-PGI strongly predicts income growth, but only among higher educated people: tertiary-educated graduates at the 90th percentile earn EUR 45,392 (13.1 percent) higher discounted lifetime income than those at the 10th percentile. This effect is not mediated by overall health and is entirely absent for the secondary (high school)-educated workers, who do not benefit from higher EA-PGI levels. Second, EA-PGI does not predict income differences at labor market entry or the quality of the first employer, but rather higher job-to-job mobility toward higher-quality firms that drives the long-run income divergence. Third, controlling for parental EA-PGI in 12,871 parent-offspring trios reduces the discounted lifetime income gap by 71 percent, and the effect of paternal (but not maternal) EA-PGI on offspring income exceeds that of the offspring's own EA-PGI. These findings suggest that genetic factors associated with educational attainment predict income trajectories primarily through faster and more frequent changes to higher-paying employers. However, much of this association reflects indirect paternal genetic effects, consistent with enduring paternal patterns of intergenerational job and income transmission.

2604.17697 2026-04-28 econ.GN q-fin.EC

Hysteresis and Selection in the Rise of Fascism: The `Ordinary Men' of the Nazi Party

Luis Bosshart, Max Deter, Leander Heldring, Cathrin Mohr, Matthias Weigand

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We digitize and analyze the near-universe of National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) membership records and link them to newly digitized population and industrial censuses. Four findings emerge. First, as the party expanded, its membership came to resemble the broader population more closely in occupational, demographic, and religious terms. Second, SS members remained distinctly different: younger, more educated, and more fanatical, as proxied by membership portraits. Third, within communities, coworkers, and families, early membership generated hysteresis, with subsequent entrants drawn from the same groups. Finally, local increases in party membership are associated with subsequent deportations of Germany's Jews.

2603.20683 2026-04-28 econ.TH

Distribution-Free Equilibrium in Search Contests

Emre Ozdenoren, Murat Erkurt

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We study a contest in which $N$ players sequentially draw from a distribution as many times as they want at a fixed cost per draw, with no recall, and the highest accepted value wins a prize. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, the acceptance probability, expected search cost, and players' payoffs do not depend on the underlying distribution. Total search expenditure equals the prize (full rent dissipation). These distribution-free equilibrium properties extend to multiple prizes and to hierarchical competition among designers. The efficient prize that aligns competitive incentives with the social optimum is distribution-dependent: heavy-tailed distributions require much larger prizes. With finite number of draws, adding competitors can raise the quality threshold when search costs are low, reversing the discouragement of the unlimited-draw case. A planner choosing both the prize and the field size always prefers the minimum field ($N=2$) with unlimited draws, but heavy-tailed distributions and finitely many draws favor larger fields, as breadth of parallel exploration compensates for limited depth of individual search.

2510.12420 2026-04-28 econ.TH

Game Theory Analysis of Third-Party Regulation in Organic Supply Chains

Joao Zambujal-Oliveira, Andre Silva, Rui Vasconcelos

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As awareness of health and environmental issues grows, the demand for organic food is rising worldwide, yet consumers still struggle to distinguish genuine organic products from conventional ones. This information asymmetry creates incentives for some producers to mislabel conventional goods as organic in order to charge higher prices, threatening market integrity and trust. This paper develops a game-theoretic model of interactions among producers, consumers, and regulators in organic supply chains to study when fraud emerges and how it can be deterred. By analyzing extensive-form and repeated games with monitoring and penalties, we identify conditions under which honest labeling becomes a stable equilibrium and show how inspection frequency and reputation losses shape strategic behavior. Our results highlight the critical role of a neutral third party in overcoming information asymmetries and sustaining trust in organic markets. Government regulation and independent certification, combined with credible monitoring and meaningful penalties, discourage mislabeling, and support the sustainable growth of the organic food supply chain.

2508.09079 2026-04-28 econ.GN cs.DL q-fin.EC stat.OT

Exploring the Shape of Economics: A Multilayer Network Analysis of Social Communities and Intellectual Similarity Among Journals Before and After the 2008 Financial Crisis

Alberto Baccini, Lucio Barabesi, Carlo Debernardi

Comments 66 pages, 3 figures, 7 tables

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This paper develops a multilayer network approach for exploring the evolution of scientific disciplines, using the case of economics before and after the 2008 global financial crisis as a large-scale empirical testing ground. The units of analysis are journals, linked by social and intellectual relationships. The analysis covers all journals indexed in EconLit across three years (2006, 2012 and 2019). In the most recent year (2019), the dataset includes 909 journals, over 30,000 editorial board members, more than 260,000 authors, 134,000 articles, and nearly 2 million cited references. For each period, we model journals as connected in a four-layer multiplex network: the social relationships are based on shared editors (interlocking editorship) and shared authors (interlocking authorship), while the intellectual ones are based on shared references (bibliographic coupling) and textual similarity between articles. These four layers are integrated using Similarity Network Fusion to produce unified similarity networks from which journal communities are identified. Comparing the field across the three periods reveals a high degree of structural continuity. Although research topics changed after the crisis, the fundamental social and intellectual relationships among journals remained remarkably stable. A major result of the analysis is that editorial networks play the dominant role in shaping hierarchies and legitimize knowledge production within the discipline. Whether this finding holds in other scientific disciplines remains an open question for future research.

2403.00347 2026-04-28 econ.EM

Set-Valued Control Functions

Sukjin Han, Hiroaki Kaido

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The control function approach allows the researcher to identify various causal effects of interest. While powerful, it requires a strong invertibility assumption in the selection process, which limits its applicability. This paper expands the scope of the nonparametric control function approach by allowing the control function to be set-valued and derive sharp bounds on structural parameters. The proposed generalization accommodates a wide range of selection processes involving discrete endogenous variables, random coefficients, treatment selections with interference, and dynamic treatment selections. The framework also applies to partially observed or identified controls that are directly motivated from economic models.

2311.09972 2026-04-28 econ.EM

Inference in Auctions with Many Bidders Using Transaction Prices

Federico A. Bugni, Yulong Wang

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This paper studies inference in first-price and second-price sealed-bid auctions with many bidders, using an asymptotic framework where the number of bidders increases while the number of auctions remains fixed. Our approach enables asymptotically exact inference on key features, such as the winner's expected utility, the seller's expected revenue, and the tail of the valuation distribution, using only transaction price data. Our simulations demonstrate the accuracy of the methods in finite samples. We apply our methods to Hong Kong vehicle license auctions, focusing on high-priced, single-letter plates. Other relevant applications include online and art auctions.

2301.07855 2026-04-28 econ.EM stat.AP

Digital Divide: Evidence from the 2020 Canadian Internet Use Survey

Joann Jasiak, Peter MacKenzie, Purevdorj Tuvaandorj

Comments 47 pages, 8 figures, 15 tables. Substantially revised analysis based on the PUMF of the Statistics Canada 2020 Canadian Internet Use Survey

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This paper studies inequality in digital participation across socioeconomic and demographic groups using the 2020 Canadian Internet Use Survey (CIUS). We combine survey-weighted logistic Lasso, an exact Shapley decomposition of age--education gaps, a sequential logit, and a bifactor item response theory (IRT) measure of digital literacy to identify who is excluded, why gaps persist, and where along the adoption path they arise. Education is the only determinant that remains significant at every rung of the digital ladder. Income inequality is most pronounced for virtual-wallet adoption; for online banking, employment and education together account for nearly half of the pro-rich concentration, indicating a broad socioeconomic gradient rather than a purely income-based divide. Persons with disabilities face the largest penalty at the digital-payments stage rather than at online banking, pointing to accessibility gaps in retail payment interfaces. Conditioning on digital literacy eliminates the education gradient at internet entry and reduces it by 61\% at the online banking rung, but a substantial residual persists, pointing to behavioral and institutional frictions beyond measurable competence. The youngest cohort records the lowest information-seeking score despite high digital engagement, and security deficits are concentrated among landed immigrants and visible minorities.

2604.24150 2026-04-28 econ.EM

Linear estimations of dynamic fixed effects logit models only with time effects

Yoshitsugu Kitazawa

Comments 32 pages, Revised Manuscript (April 27, 2026) of Discussion Paper

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This paper proposes linear estimation methods for dynamic fixed effects logit models only with time effects (i.e., those only with time dummies and only with time trends). The linear estimators point-identify transformations of parameters of interest for the models if five or more time periods are provided and then point-identify the parameters of interest. What it boils down to is that root-N consistent estimations are attainable for these models. Monte Carlo results corroborate this conclusion.

2604.24049 2026-04-28 econ.EM

Difference-in-differences with a mediator

Yuhao Deng, Haoyu Wei, Zhongzhe Ouyang

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Causal mediation analysis is a powerful tool for disentangling the total effect of a treatment into its direct effect on the outcome and its indirect effect mediated through an intermediate variable. However, in observational studies, confounding between treatment and potential outcomes typically renders the total and natural effects non-identifiable. In this work, we advance mediation analysis within the difference-in-differences framework. Under a mediator-adjusted parallel trends assumption and additional conditions, we demonstrate that natural indirect, direct, and total effects are identifiable in the treated group. We further derive efficient influence functions for these estimands, enabling the construction of multiply robust and nonparametrically efficient estimators. We establish the asymptotic properties of these estimators. Applying our methodology to data from the Job Corps Study, we find that job training significantly increases both short-term and long-term earnings, after controlling for the indirect effect through the proportion of weeks employed.

2604.24035 2026-04-28 econ.GN physics.data-an physics.soc-ph q-fin.EC

A phase transition in monetary function explains expansion without inflation

Ran Huang

Comments 10 pages, 5 figure, 2 supplementary materials

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Large monetary expansions do not necessarily generate consumer-price inflation, challenging scalar views of "money supply." Here we propose that monetary function is phase-dependent: newly issued base money can occupy distinct functional compartments with different coupling to prices. Starting from an accounting framework that separates reproduction, consumption, and reservation, we operationalize a measurable order parameter, phi=RB/MB, the reserve-share fraction of the monetary base. Using Japan's monthly record (1971-2026), we identify a compositional phase transition after 2013 from a cash-dominated to a reserve-dominated regime, quantitatively captured by a Landau-type order-parameter transition. Phase-conditional local projections using unexpected (residual) base-growth shocks show that, in Japan, unexpected base expansions are absorbed primarily as reserve balances-phi rises significantly-rather than entering the consumption-goods transaction sector; consequently, the core CPI inflation response is strongly attenuated and can even reverse sign. This demonstrates that increases in monetary supply do not necessarily cause inflation: the key is the "phase" in which incremental money accumulates (reservoir versus circulation). We further define function-specific efficiencies for reservation absorption and CPI transmission and provide an operational distinction between circulation-driven and reservation-dominant inflation regimes.

2604.23971 2026-04-28 econ.TH

Decomposing Common Agency

Zhiming Feng

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This paper develops a decomposition methodology for common agency games in which each principal's payoff depends on her own outcome and the agent's type, but not on rivals' outcomes. The key step reduces each principal's best-response problem to a standard screening problem defined over the agent's indirect utility -- the upper envelope of her payoff over rivals' offerings. Individually best-responding mechanisms then assemble into a pure-menu perfect Bayesian equilibrium when a compatibility condition (utility-preserving recombination) ensures aligned tie-breaking across principals. Under a non-indifference condition, the decomposition recovers all equilibria except those sustained by menu items that no type of the agent actually selects but which nevertheless discipline the rival's screening problem. When principals' payoffs depend on the full allocation profile, the decomposition adapts only under substantive regularity conditions on the agent's off-path choice behavior, one of which coincides with Luce's choice axiom. I apply the methodology to two settings. In a quadratic-loss delegation model, equilibria feature one principal offering a finite menu of discrete ``regimes'' while the other receives piecewise full delegation within each regime. In a competitive bundling duopoly under intrinsic common agency, the decomposition yields equilibria exhibiting market splitting, in which firms specialize in complementary bundles, and asymmetric equilibria with a take-it-or-leave-it base contract paired with a nested or tree menu of upgrades.

2604.23897 2026-04-28 cs.AI econ.GN q-fin.EC

MarketBench: Evaluating AI Agents as Market Participants

Andrey Fradkin, Rohit Krishnan

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Markets are a promising way to coordinate AI agent activity for similar reasons to those used to justify markets more broadly. In order to effectively participate in markets, agents need to have informative signals of their own ability to successfully complete a task and the cost of doing so. We propose MarketBench, a benchmark for assessing whether AI agents have these capabilities. We use a 93-task subset of SWE-bench Lite, a software engineering benchmark, with six recently released LLMs as a demonstration. These LLMs are miscalibrated on both success probability and token usage, and auctions built from these self-reports diverge from a full-information allocation. A follow-up intervention where we add information about capabilities from prior experiments to the context improves calibration, but only modestly narrows the gap to a full-information benchmark. We also document the performance of a market-based scaffolding with these LLMs. Our results point to self-assessment as a key bottleneck for market-style coordination of AI agents.

2604.23770 2026-04-28 econ.EM stat.ML

Bootstrapping with AI/ML-generated labels

Timothy Christensen, Silvia Goncalves, Benoit Perron

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AI/ML methods are increasingly used in economics to generate binary variables (or labels) via classification algorithms. When these generated variables are included as covariates in regressions, even small misclassification errors can induce large biases in OLS estimators and invalidate standard inference. We study whether the bootstrap can correct this bias and deliver valid inference. We first show that a seemingly natural fixed-label bootstrap, which generates data using estimated labels but relies on a corrupted version in estimation, is generally invalid unless a strong independence condition between the latent true labels and other covariates holds. We then propose a coupled-label bootstrap that jointly resamples the true and imputed labels, and show it is valid without this condition. Two finite-sample adjustments further improve coverage: a variance correction for uncertainty in estimated misclassification rates and a Hessian rotation for near-singular designs. We illustrate the methods in simulations and apply them to investigate the relationship between wages and remote work status.

2604.23645 2026-04-28 econ.GN q-fin.EC

Buying the Right to Monitor:Editorial Design in AI-Assisted Peer Review

Zaruhi Hakobyan

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Generative AI acts as a disruptive technological shock to evaluative organizations. In academic peer review, it enters both sides of the market: authors use AI to polish submissions, and reviewers use it to generate plausible reports without exerting evaluative effort. We develop a three-sided equilibrium model to analyze this dual adoption and derive a counterintuitive managerial implication for journal policy. We show that when AI capability crosses a critical threshold, reviewer effort collapses discontinuously. This transition creates a welfare misalignment: authors benefit from a weakened ``rat race,'' while editors suffer from degraded signal informativeness. Characterizing the editor's optimal constrained response, we identify a strict policy reversal. Before the AI transition, editors should tighten acceptance standards to curb rent-dissipating author polishing. After the transition, conventional intuition fails: editors must loosen acceptance standards while investing in AI detection, because further tightening only amplifies dissipative polishing without improving sorting. We prove analytically that this sign reversal is a structural consequence of the reviewer effort collapse under log-concave quality distributions. Ultimately, addressing AI in evaluative systems requires treating monitoring and loosened selectivity as complementary design instruments.

2604.23566 2026-04-28 econ.TH math.OC

Rigidity and default in production networks

Giacomo Como, Fabio Fagnani, Elisa Luciano, Alessandro Milazzo, Marco Scarsini

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This paper studies the transmission of productivity shocks in general equilibrium production networks, when firms in different sectors operate under informational rigidity and rely on external debt. Rigidity breaks the Modigliani-Miller irrelevance of leverage and may generate default following shocks, even in equilibrium. The economy consists of firms, banks, and consumers. Under proportional shock transmission, we prove that a unique Walrasian rigid equilibrium exists and provide explicit expressions for equilibrium quantities, prices, and interest rates. We show that, on the one hand, Hulten's theorem fails under rigidity, even without leverage. On the other hand, we prove that welfare is smaller than in the first best if and only if both leverage and rigidity exist. The latter increase the total cost of debt and have inflationary effects on the levered sectors, which propagate downstream, and shift consumption and labor upstream. The occurrence of default depends solely on real shocks and the network structure, while the magnitude of the losses depends also on the connectedness of the economy and the cost of debt of the connected sectors. We provide conditions for default cascades to occur and study two examples of default propagation.

2604.12611 2026-04-28 econ.EM

Distributional Change in Ordinal Data with Missing Observations: Minimal Mobility and Partial Identification

Rami V. Tabri

Comments Updated Theorem 1 and its proof, and improved writing in all sections

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Empirical analyses of ordinal outcomes using repeated cross-sectional data rely on marginal distributions, leaving the joint distribution unobserved and the sources of distributional change unidentified. This paper develops a framework to measure and interpret such changes under limited information. The $L_1$ distance between cumulative distribution functions admits an optimal transport representation as the minimal reallocation of probability mass across ordered categories, which provides a foundation for the analysis. This yields both a scalar measure of discrepancy and a structured characterization of how distributional change must occur, which I term minimal-mobility configurations. To address missing data, I adopt a partial identification approach that delivers sharp bounds on the marginal distributions and, in turn, on both the discrepancy measure and its associated configurations. The resulting framework supports inference using standard resampling methods and provides a transparent basis for assessing sensitivity to nonresponse. An application to Arab Barometer data illustrates the approach.

2604.12082 2026-04-28 q-fin.TR cs.CE econ.GN q-fin.EC

When Forecast Accuracy Fails: Rank Correlation and Decision Quality in Multi-Market Battery Storage Optimization

Alessandro Falezza

Comments 32 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. v2: added Section 3.5 (Note on Synthetic Forecast Generation) documenting variance attenuation in the alpha-interpolation method and robustness findings under rank-perturbation and Gaussian copula. Structural results unchanged

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Battery energy storage systems (BESS) participating in multi-market electricity trading require price forecasts to optimize dispatch decisions. A widely held assumption is that forecast accuracy, measured by standard metrics such as mean absolute error (MAE), drives trading performance. We challenge this assumption using a hierarchical three-layer optimization system trading simultaneously on frequency containment reserve (FCR), automatic frequency restoration reserve (aFRR), day-ahead, and continuous intraday (XBID) markets in Germany and Switzerland over 2020-2025, with real market data from Regelleistung.net and Swissgrid. We find that rank correlation (Kendall tau), rather than MAE, is the primary predictor of intraday dispatch value: forecasts above an empirical threshold of tau approximately 0.85-0.95 capture up to 97-100% of perfect-foresight revenue, while persistence forecasts with near-zero tau capture only 33%. This threshold is stable across market regimes and volatility levels, and reflects the ordinal structure of the dispatch problem. Furthermore, under reserve market constraints, FCR capacity revenue exceeds XBID by 6.5x per MW, making capacity allocation -- not forecast accuracy -- the primary driver of total revenue. In the Swiss market, hydrological surplus anomalies are significantly associated with balancing market revenue (p = 0.0005), a mechanism absent from existing German-focused literature. These findings reframe forecast evaluation for BESS operators: the relevant question is not what the MAE is, but whether the forecast achieves tau-sufficiency.

2510.24990 2026-04-28 cs.CY econ.GN q-fin.EC

The Economics of AI Training Data: A Research Agenda

Hamidah Oderinwale, Anna Kazlauskas

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Despite data's central role in AI production, it remains the least understood input. As AI labs exhaust public data and turn to proprietary sources, with deals reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, research across computer science, economics, law, and policy has fragmented. We establish data economics as a coherent field through three contributions. First, we characterize data's distinctive properties -- nonrivalry, context dependence, and emergent rivalry through contamination -- and trace historical precedents for market formation in commodities such as oil and grain. Second, we present systematic documentation of AI training data deals from 2020 to 2025, revealing persistent market fragmentation, five distinct pricing mechanisms (from per-unit licensing to commissioning), and that most deals exclude original creators from compensation. Third, we propose a formal hierarchy of exchangeable data units (token, record, dataset, corpus, stream) and argue for data's explicit representation in production functions. Building on these foundations, we outline four open research problems foundational to data economics: measuring context-dependent value, balancing governance with privacy, estimating data's contribution to production, and designing mechanisms for heterogeneous, compositional goods.

2509.12084 2026-04-28 econ.GN q-fin.EC

Geopolitical Barriers to Globalization

Tianyu Fan, Mai Wo, Wei Xiang

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We show that since the mid-1990s, the trade-promoting effects of tariff liberalization have been increasingly offset by deteriorating geopolitical alignment, slowing trade globalization after 2007. To quantify this barrier, we use large language models to compile 833,485 geopolitical events across 193 countries, 1950--2024, and construct a bilateral geopolitical alignment score. Using local projections, we estimate that a one-standard-deviation permanent improvement in alignment raises bilateral trade by 22 percent in the long run. In an Armington framework, tariff reductions raised 2021 global trade by about 7.5 percent, while geopolitical deterioration reduced it by about 5.3 percent, with uneven welfare effects.

2504.19832 2026-04-28 econ.EM econ.GN q-fin.EC

Assignment at the Frontier: Identifying the Frontier Structural Function and Bounding Mean Deviations

Dan Ben-Moshe, David Genesove

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This paper analyzes a model in which an outcome equals a frontier function of inputs minus a nonnegative unobserved deviation. The inputs may be endogenous (statistically dependent on the deviation). If zero lies in the support of the deviation given the inputs -- an assumption we term assignment at the frontier -- then the frontier is identified by the supremum of the outcome given those inputs, obviating the need for instruments. We then consider estimation with random error that is mean-independent of the inputs. Motivated by the assignment at the frontier assumption, we regularize estimation by requiring the fitted distribution of the deviation to maintain a minimum probability mass in a neighborhood of zero. Finally, we derive a lower bound on mean deviation, using only variance and skewness, that is robust to scarcity of data near the frontier. We apply our methods to estimate a frontier production function and mean inefficiency.

2504.12413 2026-04-28 econ.GN q-fin.EC

Digital Adoption and Cyber Security: An Analysis of Canadian Businesses

Joann Jasiak, Peter MacKenzie, Purevdorj Tuvaandorj

Comments 47 pages, 3 figures, 7 tables

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Journal ref
Journal of Productivity Analysis 65, 19 (2026)
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This paper examines how Canadian firms balance the benefits of technology adoption against the rising risk of cyber security breaches. We merge data from the 2021 Canadian Survey of Digital Technology and Internet Use and the 2021 Canadian Survey of Cyber Security and Cybercrime to investigate the trade-off firms face when pursuing digitalization to enhance productivity and efficiency, balanced against the potential increase in cyber security risk. The analysis explores the extent of digital technology adoption, differences across industries, the subsequent associations with efficiency, and associated cyber security vulnerabilities. We build aggregate variables, such as the Business Digital Usage Score and a cyber security incidence variable to quantify each firm's digital engagement and cyber security risk. A survey-weight-adjusted Lasso estimator is employed, and a debiasing method for high-dimensional logit models is introduced to identify the predictors of technological efficiency and cyber risk. The analysis reveals a digital divide linked to firm size, industry, and workforce composition. While rapid expansion of tools such as cloud services or artificial intelligence can raise efficiency, it simultaneously heightens exposure to cyber threats, particularly among larger enterprises.

2411.16978 2026-04-28 econ.EM

Normal Approximation for U-Statistics with Cross-Sectional Dependence

Weiguang Liu

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We establish normal approximation in the Wasserstein metric for both non-degenerate and degenerate second-order U-statistics under cross-sectional dependence using Stein's method. For the non-degenerate case, our results extend recent studies on the asymptotic properties of sums of cross-sectionally dependent random variables. The degenerate case is more challenging due to the additional dependence induced by the nonlinearity of the U-statistic kernel. Through a specific implementation of Stein's method, we derive convergence rates under conditions on the mixing rate, the sparsity of the cross-sectional dependence structure, and the moments of the U-statistic kernel. Finally, we demonstrate the application of our theoretical results with a nonparametric specification test for data with cross-sectional dependence.

2408.13047 2026-04-28 econ.EM

Difference-in-differences with as few as two cross-sectional units -- A new perspective to the democracy-growth debate

Gilles Koumou, Emmanuel Selorm Tsyawo

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英文摘要

Pooled panel analyses often mask heterogeneity in unit-specific treatment effects. This challenge, for example, crops up in studies of the impact of democracy on economic growth, where findings vary substantially due to differences in country composition. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the Temporal Difference-in-Differences (T-DiD) estimator that leverages temporal variation in the data to estimate unit-specific average treatment effects on the treated (ATT) with as few as two cross-sectional units. Under asymptotic parallel trends, limited anticipation, and temporal dependence conditions, the proposed DiD estimator is shown to be asymptotically normal. Provided at least two control units are available, the method is further complemented with an identification test that, unlike pre-trends tests, is more powerful and can detect violations of parallel trends in post-treatment periods. Empirical results using the DiD estimator suggest Benin's economy would have been 6.4% smaller on average over the 1993-2018 period had she not democratised.

2604.23469 2026-04-28 stat.ME econ.EM

Estimation of MIDAS Regressions with Errors-in-the-Variables

Sukhbir Kaur, Sukhbir Singh, Kanchan Jain, Pooja Soni

详情
英文摘要

In this paper, a Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) model is studied when both low and high frequency variables are contaminated with measurement error. It is shown that the profile likelihood estimator becomes inconsistent in the presence of measurement error. Using the corrected score approach along with profile likelihood approach, a consistent estimator for parameters of MIDAS Measurement Error model is proposed. Small and large sample properties of the estimator are examined by performing a monte carlo simulation study and considering the effect of sample size, number of lags and profiling parameter.