Ghanaian manufacturing firms face a highly risky environment. Firms may attempt to manage these risks by undertaking production, input, and investment strategies designed to lower profit variability. Mean-variance analysis implies, however, that these strategies involve a trade-off with lower...

This note determines the precise connection between an agent`s attitude towards income risks and his attitude over risks in the underlying consumption space. Our results follow a general mathematical theory connecting the curvature properties of an objective function with the ray-curvature...

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This is a preliminary draft of an Invited Symposium paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society to be held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and standard economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can...

Trust in political institutions has declined across developed democracies.  One of the main reasons cited for this lack of trust in public opinion polls has been the role of money in politics.  The Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon, amongst others, have increased the...

We experimentally investigate the extent to which social obervability of one's actions and the possibility of social non-monetary judgment affect the decision to engage in rule breaking behavior.  We consider three rule bfeaking scenarios - theft, bribery and embezzlement - in the absence of...

Internet commerce has made it easier to compare prices and shop online.  However, it has also exposed consumers to a new kind of crime in the form of the electronic theft of payment details.  However the skills required to successfully intercept payment data differ from the skills required to...

Opportunist land encroachment, resulting from costly and incomplete enforcement of common land boundaries, is a problem in many less-developed countries. A multi-period model of such encroachment is presented in this paper. The model accounts explicitly for the cumulative effects of...

Criminals who wear gang colors are acting in a surprisingly brazen way which must increase the probability of being caught and punished by the police.  In our model this brazen behavior is a solution to an enforcement problem.  The central idea is that less able criminals see lower gains from...

This paper investigates the relationship between criminal activity and geographical isolation. Using data from Madagascar, we show that, after we control for population composition and risk factors, crime increases with distance from urban centers and, with few exceptions, decreases with...