Personalized Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other forms of hardware needed to collect survey data electronically have become more affordable and powerful in recent years, leading to their use in a number of surveys in developing countries.  Simple use of these devices can offer the prospect of...

We investigate the impact of short-term weather and long-term climate on self-reported life satisfaction using panel data. We find robust evidence that day-to-day weather variation impacts life satisfaction by a similar magnitude to acquiring a mild disability. Utilizing two sources of variation...

There are extensive literatures within economics and economic psychology on the allocation of household income within the household.  These two literatures are largely disjoint but both use a concept of 'income pooling'.  In economics this refers to the independence of household decisions from...

Sharing a common fate with some people but not others may affect how economic agents behave within firms and organizations. Recognizing that many bilateral transactions occur both within and between groups sharing some degree of common fate, we present an experimental test of the effect of...

We develop a model in which cash-constrained entrepreneurs seek a venture capitalist (VC) to finance a new firm. Costly monitoring is employed by VCs to reduce entrepreneurial moral hazard. When monitoring reveals poor performance, VCs want to punish the entrepreneur with liquidation. However,...

Despite the central importance of investors to all IPO theories, relatively little is known about their role in practice. In this paper we survey institutional investors about how they assess IPOs, what information they provide to the investment banking syndicate, and the factors they believe...

We present a model of cash constrained entrepreneurs who need an investor to finance their project. Investors can either be uninformed, such as individual bondholders, or informed, such as venture capitalists and banks. There is an entrepreneurial moral hazard problem, which can be partially...

The credit derivatives market provides a liquid but opaque forum for secondary market trading of banking assets. I show that when entrepreneurs rely upon the certification value of bank debts to obtain cheap bond market insurance, the existance of a credit derivatives market may cause them to...

Until 1970, the New York Stock Exchange prohibited public incorporation of member firms. After the rules were relaxed to allow joint stock firm membership, investment-banking concerns organized as partnerships or closely-held private corporations went public in waves, with Goldman Sachs (1999)...

We examine the costs and benefits of the global integration of primary equity markets associated with the parallel diffusion of U.S. underwriting methods. We analyze both direct and indirect costs (associated with underpricing) using a unique dataset of 2,143 IPOs by non-U.S. issuers from 65...