Numerous empirical studies find a substantial extent of discrimination in hiring decisions. Anonymous job applications have gained attention and popularity to identify and combat this form of discrimination. To test whether their intended effects result in practice, in several European countries...

We measure willingness to pay for privacy in a field experiment. Participants were given the choice to buy a maximum of one DVD from one of two online stores. One store consistently required more sensitive personal data than the other, but otherwise the stores were identical. In one treatment,...

We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the...

We analyze the spread of policies dealing with international trafficking in human beings. Arguing that countries are unlikely to make independent choices, we identify pressure, externalities and learning or emulation as plausible diffusion mechanisms for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking...

The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...

Migration is an important and yet neglected determinant of institutions. The paper documents the channels through which emigration affects home country institutions and considers dynamic-panel regressions for a large sample of developing countries. We find that emigration and human capital both...

We develop entrepreneurship and institutional theory to explain variation in different types of entrepreneurship across individuals and institutional contexts. Our framework generates hypotheses about the negative impact of higher levels of corruption, weaker property rights and especially...

We develop a general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms, where countries can invest into basic research to improve their technological potential. These research investments tighten firm selection and raise the average productivity of firms in the market, thereby...

This paper argues, in line with the proposals of the recent Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, that we should now be measuring a nation's emotional prosperity rather than its economic prosperity (that is, we ought to focus on the level of mental...