Financial crisis can trigger policy reversals, i.e. they can lead to a process of re- regulation of financial markets. Using a recent comprehensive dataset on financial liberalization across 94 countries for the period between 1973 and 2015, we formally test the validity of this prediction for...

This paper presents a review of empirical methods used to assess the behavioral, economic, and political outcomes of Internet and social media usage. Instead of merely surveying the various impacts of the Internet, we examine the methods adopted to identify these impacts. We describe two main...

Insufficient sleep is commonplace, and understanding how this affects interpersonal conflict holds implications for personal and workplace settings. We experimentally manipulated participant sleep state for a full week prior to administering a stylized bargaining task that models payoff...

How does media coverage of minorities affect their rule compliance? Using data from 800,000 random audits at supermarket self-checkouts in Italy, we show that heightened refugee media coverage reduces under-reporting of items among shoppers born in major refugee-source countries, but not other...

Freedom of speech is central to democracy, but protests that amplify extremist views expose a critical trade-off between civil liberties and public safety. This paper investigates how right-wing demonstrations affect the incidence of hate crimes, focusing on Germany's largest far-right movement...

In this paper we investigate the effect of local banking development on firms' innovative activities, using a rich data set on innovation for a large number of Italian firms over the 1990's. There is evidence that banking development affects the probability of process innovation, particularly...

Small Business Administration (SBA) loans have long been one of the most significant policy interventions in the U.S. affecting firm behavior, but little is known about their outcomes. This paper estimates the effects on employment using a list of all SBA loans linked to annual data on all U.S....

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role in credit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causal impact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causal determinant for...

Many emerging markets have undertaken significant financial sector reforms especially in their banking sectors that have been quite critical for both financial development and real economic activity. In this paper, we investigate the success of banking reforms in India where significant banking...

We analyze linked databases on all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, on all SBA lenders, and on all U.S. employers to estimate the effects of financial access on employment growth. Our methods combine regressions with matching on firm age, size, industry, year, and employment history,...