In a recent paper, Hart and Moore (2008) introduce new behavioral assumptions that can explain long term contracts and important aspects of the employment relation. However, so far there exists no direct evidence that supports these assumptions and, in particular, Hart and Moore's notion that...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

In this paper, we argue that important labor market phenomena can be better understood if one takes (i) the inherent incompleteness and relational nature of most employment contracts and (ii) the existence of reference-dependent fairness concerns among a substantial share of the population into...

Local beer breweries in Burkina Faso absorb a considerable amount of urban woodfuel demand. We assess the woodfuel savings caused by the adoption of improved brewing stoves by these, mostly female owned, small enterprises and estimate the implied welfare effects through the woodfuel market on...

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havocs on economies around the world. Yet, barely any evidence currently exists on the distributional impacts of the pandemic. We provide the first study that offers new theoretical and empirical evidence on the distributional impacts of the pandemic on...

We study the impact of expert reviews on the demand for HIV treatments. A novel feature of our study is that we observe two reviews for each HIV drug and focus attention on consumer responses when experts disagree. Reviews are provided by both a doctor and an activist in the HIV lifestyle...

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some...

Friedman (1962) suggested that in general, unfettered markets ensure the efficient provision of goods and services. Applying this logic to Education, he recommended that students be provided with vouchers and allowed to purchase schooling services in a free market ((Friedman (1955, 1962)). Hoxby...

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households' and firms' economic...

This paper studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the arguably unambiguous net benefits of the...