How effective are “smart” sanctions in imposing costs on an adversary? We consider this question in a model where a targeted regime may choose to “shield” strategically important firms from harm. Using detailed firm and individual data, we estimate the impact on firm performance from...

Under extraterritorial sanctions the sanctioning country extends its policies to trade of third countries with the sanctioned country. A prominent example is former US President Trump’s decision to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a multilateral agreement with Iran. The...

Many important intertemporal decisions, such as investments of firms or households, are made by groups rather than individuals. Little is known what happens to such collective decisions when group members have different incentives for waiting, because the economics literature on group decision...

Many decisions are interactive; the outcome of one party depends not only on its decisions or on acts of nature but also on the decisions of others. In the present article, we review the literature on decision making made by groups of the past 25 years. Researchers have compared the strategic...

This paper develops an algorithm that enables to solve macroeconomic models with Rotemberg pricing and imperfect common knowledge. Under the concept of imperfect common knowledge, Rotemberg pricing requires the solution algorithm to take prices explicitly into account. The state space includes...

Using a long-panel dataset of Japanese firms that contains firm-level sales forecasts, we provide evidence on firm-level uncertainty and imperfect information over their life cycle. We find that firms make non-negligible and positively correlated forecast errors. However, they make more precise...

We investigate how the pass-through rate of commodity taxes depends on competition in a setting where consumers have imperfect information about prices. We use a theoretical search model that has two key predictions: First, the larger the number of price sensitive consumers, the higher the...

We experimentally study decentralized one-to-one matching markets with transfers. We vary the information available to participants, complete or incomplete, and the surplus structure, supermodular or submodular. Several insights emerge. First, while markets often culminate in efficient...

Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction...