We develop a theoretical model in which firms may choose multiple banking relationships to reduce the risk that financing will be denied by "relationship banks" should the latter experience liquidity problems and refuse to roll over lines of credit. The inability to refinance from relationship...

This paper studies the restructuring of non-marketable debt, when the number of creditors is arbitrary, and there is asymmetric information. With multiple creditors, debt forgiveness has the character of a public good. As for the case of private provision of a public good, mechanism design...

This paper investigates how the measures of genetic distance between populations, which have been used in anthropology and historical linguistics, can be used in economics. What does the correlation between genetic distance and economic variables mean? Using the measure of genetic distance, a...

Do generations growing up during recessions have different socio-economic beliefs than generations growing up in good times? We study the relationship between recessions and beliefs by matching macroeconomic shocks during early adulthood with self-reported answers from the General Social Survey....

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and...

This paper examines the determinants of illegal immigration in the United States from Mexico from 1976 to 1995. The main challenge in the empirical work is that the observations are not the number of individuals that attempt to enter the United States illegally, but rather the number of...

This paper presents a test to discriminate among behaviors of producers of exhaustible resources. The behavior of a competitive producer of an exhaustible resource should follow an Euler equation. The existence of futures markets allows us to sidestep the difficult issues related to estimating...

This paper studies the empirical links among factor endowments, trade, and personal income distribution. The motivation is that many developing countries have implemented radical trade reforms in recent years. These reforms have changed relative prices, induced a reallocation of resources, and...