讲座题目：Nonparametric Identification of Moral Hazard Problems: First Order Approach and Statistical Inference（道德风险问题的非参数识别：一阶条件方法与统计推断）

主 讲 人： 柯荣住 教授

讲座时间：2022年6月22日（周三）15：00—16：30

地点：综合楼644会议室

主讲人简介：

         柯荣住，浙江苍南人，浙江大学经济学学士、硕士，麻省理工学院经济学博士，浙江大学“文科领军人才”特聘教授，浙江省特聘专家（海外高层次引才创新长期计划）。从本科生时期开始在《经济研究》、《中国社会科学》等国内各类杂志发表学术论文20余篇，其中有3篇被收入《中国经济学》系列。并在Journal of Labor Economics, Theoretical Economics, Operations Research, Management Science，SIAM Journal on Optimization等国际权威刊物发表论文多篇；主持国家自然科学基金重点课题、香港政府研究局课题、浙江省哲学社会科学重大规划课题等多项。

讲座摘要：

This paper develops a non-parametric methodology for identifying moral hazard problem, based on the first order condition (known as the Mirrlees-Holmstrom Condition (MHC)) of contract optimality in standard principal-agent model (Holmstrom, 1979). I show that MHC is equivalent to the attainment of the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) of estimation of marginal incentive cost. Therefore, a non-parametric testing for contract optimality is a correlation coefficient test between inverse marginal utility and the score function with respect to the nuisance effort parameter. The test is non-parametric in a sense that the contractual form, monetary utility, cost function of effort or the distribution of output are unknown, but the

score function is estimated based additivity assumption of production technology. We show the agent‘s inverse marginal utility can be identified up to an a￠ ne transformation, under the null hypothesis.  Meanwhile, we also propose an estimator for the loss of pro.t, compared with the unobserved counterfactual. In addition, the present approach is applied to test optimality and estimate bounds on the loss of pro.t for a piece-rate contract adopted by a cotton weaving factory in Zhejiang Province, China.