Recent QED Working Papers

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#1542.
Luca Corazzini, Christopher Cotton, Enrico Longo
Should Star Performers Lead or Anchor Their Teams? Sequential Contributions in a Threshold Public Goods Experiment

Collective efforts often rely on high-capacity “stars”—star employees, lead investors, or major donors—whose participation disproportionately determines success. Is it better to engage them early to set direction, or later to ensure completion? We investigate this strategic design problem experimentally, where collective success requires coordination on both direction and effort. We find that sequential engagement significantly outperforms simultaneous action, following a clear heuristic: stars should lead when the broader team is disorganized (to focus attention) but anchor…

#1541.
Foroogh Nazzari Chamaki, Glenn P. Jenkins, Frank Milne
Taxation Made Easy: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Prefilled Sales Tax Returns

Small and medium-sized enterprises incur disproportionately high compliance costs under the current Goods and Services Tax/Harmonized Sales Tax (GST/HST) reporting system. To reduce these costs, some EU and Latin American countries have successfully adopted prefilled tax return systems supported by national e-invoicing infrastructures. Canada has not yet adopted this innovation. This study estimates the economic welfare improvement that would result if Canada were to implement a system of prefilled GST/HST returns. An integrated financial, economic, and stakeholder cost-benefit analysis is…

#1540.
Frank Milne
The Australian Energy Policy Debacle

For the past 20 years, Australia has introduced policies encouraging and subsidizing renewable electricity generation. Since the election of the Australian Labor Party government in 2022, these policies have been accelerated. We show that international evidence of the heavy cost of renewable energy projects has been ignored. Cost-benefit studies show that these projects cannot be justified with any reasonable price for carbon dioxide emissions. Consequently, the Australian economy has suffered greatly increased prices for electricity provided by the grid. In turn, this has increased the…

#1539.
visitor_michael_waldman, Jan Zabojnik
Asymmetric Learning and the CEO Labor Market

Many models of the CEO market build on the classic analyses of Lucas (1978) and Rosen (1982) characterized by full information, a limited role for firm-specific human capital, and efficient allocation of workers across jobs and firms. But empirical evidence is not consistent with this approach. We explore an alternative focused on asymmetry of information between an executive's prospective employer and other potential employers, and an important role for firm-specific human capital. We show that our model better captures findings in the empirical literature concerning the CEO labor market…

#1538.
John Hartwick
The Stochastic Matrix Model of Evolution and Linear Programming

We construct a linear programming model of Darwinian evolution, inspired by "the stochastic matrix model". We present a detailed numerical example based on a 3 X  3 stochastic matrix. The linear program uses the stochastic matrix in the specification of its objective function. The program "selects" from an "input" vector to meet a given next period "output" vector. Novel for a model of Darwinian evolution is the presence of costs and shadow prices.

#1537.
Luke Rawling
Improving the Economic Integration of Canadian Immigrants

Immigrants tend to have substantially worse labour market outcomes than Canadian-born workers. This paper provides an overview of immigrants in the Canadian labour market, describing the key barriers that can arise when changing cultures and labour markets and that can hinder immigrants from realizing their economic potential. It then summarizes the efforts Canada has made to alleviate these barriers and highlights some persistent challenges going forward, such as the current state of foreign credential recognition (FCR) and cautioning against the rise of the two-step immigration scheme.…

#1536.
Maria Garcia-Osipendo, Nicholas Vreugdenhil, Nahim Bin Zahur
Endogenous Rigidities and Capital Misallocation: Evidence from Containerships

We investigate how endogenous rigidities inhibit physical capital reallocation. We focus on the role of contract duration - a classic example of an adjustment rigidity. We argue when agents sign longer contracts in booms when markets are thin, they generate a contracting externality which further amplifies thinness and impedes the adjustment of markets to shocks. We develop a framework with booms and busts where agents search and choose match duration. Applying the framework to the containership leasing market, we find substantial misallocation from endogenous rigidities, particularly in…

#1535.
Stelios Arvanitis
Frequentist Model Averaging with Nash Bargaining: A Stochastic Dominance Approach

Within the Frequentist Model Averaging framework for linear models, we introduce a multi-objective model averaging methodology that extends both the generalized Jackknife Model Averaging (JMA) and the Mallows Model Averaging (MMA) criteria. Our approach constructs estimators based on stochastic dominance principles and explores averaging methods that minimize multiple scalarizations of the joint criterion integrating MMA and JMA. Additionally, we propose an estimator that can be interpreted as a Nash bargaining solution between the competing scalar criteria. We establish the asymptotic…

#1534.
Stelios Arvanitis
Universal Choice Spaces and Expected Utility: A Banach-type Functorial Fixed Point

This paper utilizes a Banach-type fixed point theorem in a functorial context to develop Universal Choice Spaces for addressing decision problems, focusing on expected utility and preference uncertainty. This generates an infinite sequence of optimal selection problems involving probability measures on utility sets. Each solution at a given stage addresses the preference ambiguity from the previous stage, enabling optimal choices at that level. The Universal Choice Space is characterized as a collection of finite-dimensional vectors of probability distributions, with the mth component…

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