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 study the direct and indirect effects of randomized entry. In partnership with the two largest service providers in Ghana, we implement a three-step design that randomizes the entry of new financial mobile money vendors, who also sell non-financial goods/services, across local markets. This...

The elegant economic picture of rational consumers achieving Pareto optimality through trade in decentralized self-organized markets is blurred by market imperfections and choices inconsistent with consumer self-interest. Behavioral economics has documented these errors in choice, and considered...

The provision of long-term care (LTC) for senior citizens in Italy is at the center of the recent policy debate. Italy has witnessed a spectacular increase in the share of people aged 65 and over and in particular of people aged 80 and over, which could translate in large increases in the number...

Positive assortative matching refers to the tendency of individuals with similar characteristics to form partnerships. Measuring the extent to which assortative matching differs between two economies is challenging when the marginal distributions of the characteristic along which sorting takes...

We use administrative records on the healthcare utilization and economic outcomes of the universe of Danish households to characterize survivors' mental health following their spouse's death. We provide visually clear evidence for the inevitable immediate, large, and lingering adverse impacts...

Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents. The unemployment rate at 23-27 year old for the 1996 college graduation cohort was 9%, whereas it rose to 12% for the 2013 graduation...

Housing expense inflation has historically averaged an annual growth rate of 3.0 percent. However, starting in early 2021 housing expense inflation surged, peaking at 8.2 percent by March 2023. Substance use also increased concurrently. This study investigates the impact of rising housing...

Despite extensive use of bargaining models in economics and despite Becker's insistence on the importance of altruism in families, the theoretical literature on bargaining ignores altruism and assumes that everyone is an egoist. This paper shows that incorporating altruism into cooperative...

Efficient diffusion of economic information plays a critical role in the functioning of society, and, more specifically, households. We study information diffusion between spouses in a representative sample of the German population. We focus on an important economic belief: the household's...