We investigate the economic impacts of one of the world's largest anti-corruption crackdowns, Brazil's Operação Lava Jato (Car Wash). Using a difference-in-differences analysis of unique, matched firm-bank data, we find sizable declines in employment and wage bills for investigated firms,...

The US spends more than 4 trillion dollars per year on health care, largely conducted by private providers and reimbursed by insurers. A major concern in this system is overbilling, waste and fraud by providers, who face incentives to misreport on their claims in order to receive higher...

Given the use of an individual's arrest history for many economic and social outcomes, reducing conviction-less arrests (arrests that result in no charges or where the defendant is found not guilty) is an important policy goal. This paper examines which officers are making conviction-less...

We study the implications of police discretion for public safety. Highway patrol officers exercise discretion over fines by deviating from statutory fine rules. Relying on variation across officers in this discretionary behavior, we find that harsher sanctions reduce future traffic offending and...

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement--the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history--and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on...

Households' insurance against shocks to income and asset values (that is, household risk management) is limited, especially for poor households. We argue that a trade-off between intertemporal financing needs and insurance across states explains this basic insurance pattern. In a model with...

When people can self-insure via migration, they may have less need for informal risk sharing. At the same time, informal insurance may reduce the need to migrate. To understand the joint determination of migration and risk sharing I study a dynamic model of risk sharing with limited commitment...

We propose a novel mechanism, "financial dampening," whereby loan retrenchment by banks attenuates the effectiveness of monetary policy. The theory unifies an endogenous supply of illiquid local loans and risk-sharing among subsidiaries of bank holding companies (BHCs). We derive an IV-strategy...

Management risk occurs when uncertainty about future managerial decisions increases a firm's overall risk. This paper argues that management risk is an important yet unexplored determinant of a firm's default risk and the pricing of its debt. CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all...

In this chapter we study dynamic incentive models in which risk sharing is endogenously limited by the presence of informational or enforcement frictions. We comprehensively overview one of the most important tools for the analysis such problems -- the theory of recursive contracts. Recursive...