In many countries, banks lend to firms controlled by the bank's owners. We examine the benefits of related lending using a newly assembled data set for Mexico. Related lending is prevalent (20 percent of commercial loans) and takes place on better terms than arm's-length lending (annual interest...

Critics of privatization argue that the increased profitability of privatized companies comes at the expense of society. Using data from 97 percent of those nonfinancial firms privatized in Mexico during the period 1983-1991, we study two channels for social losses: (1) increased prices, and (2)...

We present a model of intuitive inference, called "local thinking," in which an agent combines data received from the external world with information retrieved from memory to evaluate a hypothesis. In this model, selected and limited recall of information follows a version of the...

We document that, in a cross section of countries, government regulation is strongly negatively correlated with measures of trust. In a simple model explaining this correlation, distrust creates public demand for regulation, whereas regulation in turn discourages formation of trust, leading to...

We present a theory of choice among lotteries in which the decision maker's attention is drawn to (precisely defined) salient payoffs. This leads the decision maker to a context-dependent representation of lotteries in which true probabilities are replaced by decision weights distorted in favor...

We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1,569 subnational regions from 110 countries covering 74% of the world's surface and 97% of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and human capital...

We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1,569 subnational regions from 110 countries covering 74% of the world's surface and 97% of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and human capital...

When should a government provide a service in-house and when should it contract out provision? The authors develop a model in which the provider can invest in improving the quality of service or reducing cost. If contracts are incomplete, the private provider has a stronger incentive to engage...

We present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals "think coarsely": they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category. Coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage of: (i) transference,...

A country's most talented people typically organize production by others, so they can spread their ability advantage over a larger scale. When the start firms, they innovate and foster growth, but when they become rent seekers, they only redistribute wealth and reduce growth. Occupational choice...