We report results from a large randomized natural field experiment conducted in southwestern China in the context of insurance for sows. Our study sheds light on two important questions about microinsurance. First, how does access to formal insurance affect farmers' production decisions? Second,...

The problem of allocating bundles of indivisible objects without transfers arises in the assignment of courses to students, of computing resources like CPU time, memory and disk space to computing tasks and the truck loads of food to food banks. In these settings the complementarities in...

In many real world negotiations, from wage contract bargaining to product liability disputes, the bargaining parties often interact repeatedly and have the option of seeking outside judgement. This paper studies a model of repeated bargaining with a third party to analyze how and why bargaining...

Marcet and Marimon (1994, revised 1998) developed a recursive saddle point method which can be used to solve dynamic contracting problems that include participation, enforcement and incentive constraints. Their method uses a recursive multiplier to capture implicit prior promises to the agent(s)...

We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments that reduce flexibility. We show that such consumption commitments can induce consumers with risk-neutral underlying utility functions to be risk averse over small variations in income, but...

There is an increasing interest in the concept of social exclusion and the related concept of social isolation and their potential role in understanding inequality. We examine the degree to which voluntary separation from social activities during adolescence affects adult wages. It is well-known...

Over the past two decades the venture capital industry became a major focus for the financial media. With potential for high rates of return, this industry attracts entrepreneurs looking for opportunities to invest. While some investments are successful and highly publicized, many are not. This...

Taller workers receive a wage premium. Net of differences in family background, the disparity is similar in magnitude to the race and gender gaps. We exploit variation in an individual’s height over time to explore how height affects wages. Controlling for teen height essentially eliminates...