Farmers in developing countries often lack access to timely and reliable information about modern technologies that are essential to improve agricultural productivity. The recent diffusion of mobile phones has the potential to overcome these barriers by making information available to those...

During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the U.S. varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. We find that financial distress among U.S. households amplified the sensitivity of consumption to house-price shocks. We uncover two essential facts: (1) the...

We survey some of the literature on the effects of improved market transparency on competition in ologopoly. Generally, improved transparency from the perspective of irms makes detection of deviations from tacitly collusive agreements easier, thus facilitating oligopolistic coordination. On the...

I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

We study consumer spending dynamics during the first infection wave of the COVID-19 pandemic using household scanner data covering fast-moving consumer goods in the United Kingdom. We document a large spike in spending for storable products, such as food staples and household supplies, in the...

Digital payments have increasingly been adopted by consumers and firms in Latin America and the Caribbean. This policy research paper analyzes recent post-pandemic data on digital payments in the region to describe adoption patterns, measure adoption gaps, and identify adoption barriers. The...

This paper examines the impact of borrower-based macroprudential policy tightening on mortgage lending in Slovakia, focusing in particular on the role of financial advisors in shaping loan characteristics. Using a comprehensive loan-level dataset from Slovak banks, we analyze the effects of key...

The paper analyzes the excess entry hypothesis for sealed-bid first price public procurement auctions.The hypothesis is proved analytically for any feasible combination of bid preparation cost and bid evaluation cost when the bidders face a rectangular cost density function and confirmed in...