Graduate Program

Title: "Local Gossip and Inter-generational Family Transfers: Comparative Political Economy of Insurance Provision" (2011)                                                                     Abstract:  Why are generous transfers from the younger to the older generations generous in some societies and not in others? For example, people in the northeast Japan tend to provide better nursing care to their aged parents and invest more in their children's education than those in the southwest. Communities in the northeast tend to be small and isolated compared to those in the southwest. This paper argues that differences in intergenerational dependence are due to demographic variation in community networks. This analysis of sustainability of intergenerational transfers posits game theoretical models of overlapping generations in which breadwinners make transfers to their parents and children. A novel feature of the models is that there is a local community that may supply information about its members' past behaviors. I demonstrate that an efficient level of intergenerational transfers can be sustained if neighbors "gossip" about each other. As an implication, my theory suggests that individuals in a close-knit community prefer lower levels of social protection. Empirical results from Japan support this argument: Individuals who interact with their neighbors tend to provide better nursing care to their aged parents, spend more on their childrens' education, and demand less from the government than those who do not interact with their neighbors.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Title: "A Theory of Hung Juries and Informative Voting" (2010), with Fuhito Kojima, Games and Economic Behavior, 69, pp498-502.                                                                                                                                                                                                     Abstract: This paper investigates a jury decision when hung juries and retri- als are possible. When jurors in subsequent trials know that previous trials resulted in hung juries, informative voting cannot be an equilib- rium regardless of voting rules unless the probability that each juror receives the correct signal when the defendant is guilty is identical to the one when he is innocent. Thus, while Coughlan (2000) claims that mistrials facilitate informative voting, our result shows that such an assertion holds only in limited circumstances.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Title: "Legislative committees as information intermediaries: a unified theory of committee selection and amendment rules" (2010), with Attila Ambrus, Eduardo Azevedo and Yuichiro Kamada.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Abstract:  This paper contributes to understanding the role of interest groups in legislative decision-making, and offers an explanation to two widely discussed puzzles concerning the legislative process: why legislative bodies sometimes tie their own hands by delegating power to specialized committees, and why committees consist of preference outliers. In our model, the legislature has to collect information from a strategic lobbyist. Depending on the lobbyist’s bias, the legislature either wants to delegate power to a committee aligned with the lobbyist, or retain power but communicate with the lobbyist through an adversely biased committee.        Supplementary Notes