A policy of deputization asks agents to monitor others without providing explicit incentives. It is often used to prevent dangerous activities. To calibrate whether and why it works, we study recent laws that deputized financial professionals to help fight elder financial abuse. We show...

There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues, or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In...

A number of development assistance programs promote community interaction as a means of building social capital. Yet, despite strong theoretical underpinnings, the role of repeat interactions in sustaining cooperation has proven difficult to identify empirically. We provide the first...

Why should multilateral lending exist in a world where private capital markets are well developed and governments have their own bilateral aid programs? If lending by the World Bank, IMF, and regional development banks has an independent rationale, it must rest on advantages generated by the...

On their fiftieth anniversary, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were" extensively reviewed, both to mark the occasion and to consider, often critically roles and performance. This paper reviews the functions of the two institutions in light of their" evolution over the past...

Using records of the bank accounts of individual depositors, this paper provides a detailed microeconomic analysis of two nineteenth century banking panics. The panics of 1854 and 1857 were not characterized by an immediate mass panic of depositors and had important time dimensions. We examine...

Audit studies testing for discrimination have been criticized because applicants from different groups may not appear identical to employers. Correspondence studies address this criticism by using fictitious paper applicants whose qualifications can be made identical across groups. However,...

This paper highlights unanswered research questions in the economics of retirement, and shows how these issues can be addressed using the new Health and Retirement Survey (HRS). Unique features of the survey are described including administrative records on earnings and social security benefits,...

Social experiments are powerful sources of information about the effectiveness of interventions. In practice, initial randomization plans are almost always compromised. Multiple hypotheses are frequently tested. "Significant" effects are often reported with p-values that do not account for...

We use Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data and data from a 2008 telephone survey of adults conducted by Westat for the Princeton Data Improvement Initiative (PDII) to explore the importance and feasibility of adding retrospective questions about actual work experience to cross-sectional...