Cigarettes are experience goods - most of their utility value only gets revealed when one consumes them. We hypothesize a three phase consumer life cycle for experience goods. Consumers initially do not know their utility from the good or their preferences for particular characteristics, and may...

We analyze the performance of Indian banks during 2007-09 relative to their vulnerability to a crisis measured using pre-crisis data, in order to study the impact of government guarantees on bank performance during a crisis. Using bank branch-level regulatory data, we exploit geographic...

A set of randomized experiments shed light on how markets and information influence household decisions to adopt nutritional innovations. Of 400 Indian villages, we randomly assigned half to an intervention where all shopkeepers were offered the option to sell a new salt, fortified with both...