Prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) interventions reduce the cumulative probability of transmission from a HIV positive woman to her child by as much as 40 percentage points. This paper is the first economic analysis of the behavioral effects of PMTCT. I examine fertility...

A frequently cited argument against the use of market-based instruments to provide public goods is that they diminish our sense of responsibility to be good citizens. In this paper, we report on the results of a laboratory experiment designed to explore the idea that this distrust stems from the...

This paper revisits the relationship between interest rates and house prices. Surveying a number of recent studies and bringing to bear some new evidence on the question, this paper argues that in the data, the impact of interest rates on house prices appears to be quite modest. Specifically,...

This paper examines the effect of introducing a new HIV/AIDS service, prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT), on overall quality of prenatal and postnatal care. My results suggest that local PMTCT introduction in Zambia may have actually increased all cause child mortality in...

People have been shown to engage in favor-trading when it is efficiency-enhancing to do so. Will they also trade favors when it reduces efficiency, as in a series of wasteful public projects that each benefits an individual? We introduce the “Stakeholder Public Bad” game to study this...

This paper is an exploratory analysis of the role that banks play in supporting what Jevons called the mechanism of exchange. It considers a model economy in which exchange activities are facilitated and coordinated by a self-organizing network of entrepreneurial trading firms. Collectively,...

Mass adult male circumcision campaigns for HIV prevention are underway across much of Sub-Saharan Africa. However, concern remains about risk compensation associated with the reduction in the probability of HIV transmission per risky act. This paper examines the be- havioral response to male...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...

This paper takes up the issue of the flexibility of inflation targeting regimes, with the specific goal of determining whether the monetary policy of the Bank of England, which has a formal inflation target, has been any less flexible than that of the Federal Reserve, which does not have such a...

This paper examines the effects of antiretroviral therapy (ART) on demand for HIV testing and of ART-induced testing on demand for risky sexual behavior. I provide a model of sexual behavior decision-making under uncertainty and estimate the structural parameters of the model using nationally...