Implementing incentive systems can sometimes backfire in practice: experimental evidence and folklore both suggest that offers of explicit rewards can expose surprising discontinuities in behaviour. This Paper models two such discontinuities that have been claimed by psychologists and...

Using detailed geographical and household survey data from Nepal, this article investigates the relationship between isolation and subjective welfare. This is achieved by examining how distance to markets and proximity to large urban centers affect responses to questions about income and...

China was the largest economy in the world before the end of the 19th century; then became one of the poorest countries in the world in a few decades. Now China is returning to its historical past. To understand China’s development, and to understand where and how far China will move forward,...

Loss aversion is one of the most robust findings to have emerged from behavioral economics. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been devoted to nominal loss aversion, the interaction of loss aversion and money illusion. People tend to think of transactions in terms of their nominal...

The inheritance of contemporary financial economics invites us to consider financial stability as integral to a liberal market setting. The crisis however demonstrated that financial markets may prove highly dysfunctional in the absence of adequate mechanisms of regulation and governance. This...

This paper analyzes the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics, addressing the following questions: Are there major productivity differences between graduates from American and European institutions? If so, how relevant is the quality of the training received (i.e....

Since Max Weber, there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people’s economic attitudes. Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors. We use the World Values Surveys...

Productivity growth in the United States was considerably faster during 2000-03 than in the boom years of 1995-2000. This ebullient productivity performance raises numerous questions about its interpretation and its implications for the future, and these are stated here in the form of five...

This Paper investigates the relationship between risk and productive activity and the degree of financial intermediation in a model with moral hazard. Entreprenuers can simultaneously get credit from two types of competing institutions: ‘financial intermediaries’ and ‘local lenders’. The...

The most fundamental solution concepts in Game Theory – Nash equilibrium, backward induction, and iterated elimination of dominated strategies – are based on the assumption that people are capable of predicting others' actions. These concepts require people to be able to view the game from...