Despite their current prevalence and historical significance, little is known about the economics of open air markets. This paper uses open air markets as a natural laboratory to provide initial insights into the underlying operation of such markets. Using data on thousands of individual...

Perhaps the most powerful form of framing arises through reference dependence, wherein choices are made recognizing the starting point or a goal. In labor economics, for example, a form of reference dependence, income targeting, has been argued to represent a serious challenge to traditional...

What accounts for the ubiquity of small vendors operating side-by-side in the urban centers of developing countries? Why don't competitive forces drive some vendors out of the market? We ran an experiment in Kolkata vegetable markets in which we induced (via subsidizing) some vendors to sell...

"This paper investigates the impacts of cotton marketing reforms on farm productivity, a key element for poverty alleviation, in rural Zambia. The reforms comprised the elimination of the Zambian cotton marketing board that was in place since 1977. Following liberalization, the sector adopted an...

"This paper studies empirically the relationship between trade policy and individual income risk faced by workers, and uses the estimates of this empirical analysis to evaluate the welfare effect of trade reform. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, longitudinal data on workers are used...

"The objective of the paper is to answer an often-asked question : if tariff rates are reduced, what will happen to wage inequality ? We consider two types of wage inequality : between occupations (skills premium), and between industries. We use two large data bases of wage inequality that have...