New technologies have enabled firms to elicit granular behavioral data from consumers in exchange for lower prices and better experiences. This data can mitigate asymmetric information and moral hazard, but it may also increase firms' market power if kept proprietary. We study a voluntary...

Using Visa debit and credit card transactions in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019, we document the importance of customers in accounting for sales variation across merchants, across stores within retail chains, and over time for individual merchants and stores. Customers, as opposed to transactions...

In settings where an individual's labor choices are constrained, the inability to work may generate psychosocial harm. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh. We engage 745 individuals in a field experiment with...

I examine the relationship between unhappiness and age using data from six well-being data files on nearly ten million respondents across forty European countries and the United States. I use fifteen different individual characterizations of unhappiness including despair; anxiety; loneliness;...

This chapter uses happiness data to assess the quality of government. Our happiness data are drawn from the Gallup World Poll, starting in 2005 and extending to 2017 or 2018. In our analysis of the panel of more than 150 countries and generally over 1,500 national-level observations, we show...