Advertisements provide consumers with knowledge about private products, whereas political information is required to provide voters with knowledge of public issues. Modern information technologies and globalization are increasing the exposure of individuals to information. Goods advertising is...

This paper makes two contributions to the empirical matching literature. First, a recent study by Anderson and Burgess (2000) testing for endogenous competition among job seekers in a matching frame-work, is replicated with a richer and more accurate data set for Germany. Their results are...

Typically, when two people decide to become parents, they procreate by copulation and produce a child. What do people do if, for some reason, they can?t produce their own children but want to be parents? Today, a prospective parent can go to the web, drop a vial of sperm from a donor with...

We present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the...

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals' behaviors and...