We study the demand for household water connections in urban Morocco, and the effect of such connections on household welfare. In the northern city of Tangiers, among homeowners without a private connection to the city’s water grid, a random subset was offered a simplified procedure to...

This paper experimentally studies the effects of competition in an environment where people's actions can not be contractually fixed. We find that, in comparison with no competition, the presence of competition does neither increase efficiency nor does it yield any gains in earnings for the...

This Paper studies a model where individuals have imperfect self-knowledge and learning is costly. It shows that the endogenous decision to collect information before taking an action creates a systematic and testable bias in the aggregate behaviour of agents in the economy. More precisely,...

In this Paper we introduce flexibility as an economic concept and apply it to the firm’s security-issuance decisions and capital structure choice. Flexibility is the ability to make decisions that one thinks are best even when others disagree. Firms value flexibility because it allows...

There is a well-established positive correlation between life-satisfaction measures and income in individual level cross-sectional data. This paper attempts to provide some evidence on whether this correlation reflects causality running from money to happiness. I use industry wage differentials...

This paper analyses whether the different powers and resources at the disposal of local and regional governments across Europe deliver greater satisfaction with political institutions and lead to greater personal happiness. The analysis uses microdata from the four available waves of the...

This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions and economic development. It discusses the various measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms that explain the influence of trust on economic performance...

This paper uses a unique data set on more than 600,000 mortgage contracts to estimate a credit supply function which allows for risk-heterogeneity. Non-linearity is modeled using quantile regressions. We propose an instrumental variable approach in which changes in the tax treatment of housing...