We develop a test of precautionary behavior in the consumption decisions of rural agricultural households. Among surveyed households facing a median level of consumption risk, we find that 10 percent of savings can be attributed to a precautionary motive, and this increases to 15 percent for...

We precisely geolocate more than one million mortgage choices and use a nearest-neighbor research design to find that households' refinance, lender, and loan type choices are all socially influenced by their hyperlocal neighbors. Consistent with a word-of-mouth mechanism, households moving to...

Do new migration opportunities for rural households change the nature and extent of informal risk sharing? We experimentally document that randomly offering poor rural households subsidies to migrate leads to a 40% improvement in risk sharing in their villages. We explain this finding using a...

Do new migration opportunities for rural households change the nature and extent of informal risk sharing? We experimentally document that randomly offering poor rural households subsidies to migrate leads to a 40% improvement in risk sharing in their villages. We explain this finding using a...

Home ownership is widely stimulated by policy yet its effects are poorly understood. Exploiting privatization decisions of municipally-owned apartment buildings, we obtain random variation in home ownership for otherwise similar buildings with similar tenants. Granular data on demographics,...

This article reports a complete two stage hedonic analysis for road noise. For the estimation of the hedonic price function I develop a spatial research design which simultaneously reduces the risk of omitted variable bias and the risk of measurement error in the noise measure. The preference...

This study empirically extends the Tiebout hypothesis of ‘voting with one's feet' in two ways. First, it provides updated estimates using net migration data for the period 2000-2008. Second, in addition to investigating variables reflecting public education outlays, property taxation and...

Despite large interest in CSR in China, the role of consumers has been underexplored in empirical research, with studies mainly focused on specific subcomponents of CSR, based on evidence from small, urban samples. Using a country-wide consumer survey, this article examines 1) how Chinese...