Despite its promise to help low-wealth households manage climate risk, index insurance remains hampered by downside basis risk, meaning that an insured party suffers a loss, but receives no payment because the insurance index fails to register a loss. While efforts to reduce basis risk focus on...

Water suppliers are showing greater interest in using different mechanisms to promote conservation. One such mechanism is conducting home water audits, which involves assessing water use and providing tailored suggestions for conserving water for residential customers. Yet, very little is known...

Although fake online customer reviews have become prevalent on platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, little is known about how these reviews influence consumer behavior. This paper provides the first experimental estimates of the effects of fake reviews on individual demand and...

We characterize the large number of mortgage offers for which people qualify in the United Kingdom. Very few pick the cheapest option, nonetheless the one selected is not usually noticeably more expensive. A few borrowers make very expensive choices. These are most common when the menu they face...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

Many multinational firms (MNEs) pay low or no corporation tax in high-tax countries because they shift taxable income to tax havens. We incorporate nonconvex costs of profit shifting and unobserved heterogeneity in profit-shifting ability in the MNEs' value maximization problem to study...

Macro data suggests a convex relationship between inflation and economic slack, but identifying causality is challenging. Using micro data from large panel surveys of UK and US firms we show that the response of prices to demand shocks is also convex at the firm level. We obtain similar results...

This paper studies a form of liquidity risk that we call 'Liquidity After Solvency Hedging' or "LASH" risk. Financial institutions take LASH risk when they hedge against solvency risk, using strategies that require liquidity when the solvency of the institution improves. We focus on LASH risk...

"We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies...

Mortgage interest tax deductibility is needed to treat debt and equity financing of homes equally. Countries that limit deductibility create a debt tax penalty that presumably leads households to shift from debt toward equity financing. The greater the shift, the less is the tax revenue raised...