This paper examines whether giving large cash transfers to financially distressed people causes them to avoid bankruptcy. A comparison of Florida Lottery winners who randomly received $50,000 to $150,000 to small winners indicates that such transfers only postpone bankruptcy rather than prevent...

Economists have long been interested in the extent to which economic resources affect decisions to marry and divorce. However, this issue has been difficult to address empirically due to a lack of exogenous income shocks. We overcome this problem by exploiting the randomness of the Florida...

Information asymmetries are prominent in theory but difficult to estimate. This paper exploits discontinuities in loan eligibility to test for moral hazard and adverse selection in the payday loan market. Regression discontinuity and regression kink approaches suggest that payday borrowers are...

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. The increase in obesity over the past thirty years has led researchers to investigate the role of social networks as a contributing...