This paper presents a conceptual framework for explaining credit union (CU) loan delinquency and profitability in developing countries. It also offers an empirical estimation for a unique sample of Latin American CUs.

Prior studies have shown that newly public firms exhibit a high degree of uncertainty and asymmetric information, with few reliable sources of information. These findings suggest that investors could benefit if some independent party is able to assess the quality of a newly public firm. Since...

Using data from US labour market areas, we quantify empirical associations between entry by small firms and a vector of economic performance measures encompassing levels, volatilities and growth rates of several income and employment variables. Distinct and robust associations are found for net...

Compensation schemes in which land owners receive payments for voluntarily managing their land in a biodiversity-enhancing manner have become one of the most important instruments for biodiversity conservation worldwide. One key challenge when designing such schemes is to account for the spatial...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to measure welfare effects of taxes for correcting environmental externalities caused by domestic trade, focusing on exter- nalities that arise through exports. Externalities from exports come from a number of sources. Domestically owned ships,...

We examine consumer certainty of future preferences and overconfidence in predicting future preferences. We explore how preference certainty and overconfidence impact the option value to revise today's decisions in the future. We design a laboratory experiment that creates a controlled choice...

While becoming a parent is transformational as one focuses more on the future, the time constraints are more binding right now. Using a unique data set that allows us to compare CO2 emissions from Swedish two-adult households with and without children, we find becoming a Swedish parent causes a...

We examine the causes and policy consequences of strategic (willful) ignorance of risk as an excuse to overengage in risky health behavior. In an experiment on Copenhagen adults, we allow subjects to choose whether to learn the calorie content of a meal before consuming it, and measure their...

How does a choice experiment (CE) model derived under standard preference axioms perform for respondents with incomplete preferences? Using simulated data, we show how such miss-specification results in unnecessary noise and bias in welfare estimates, and can be avoided.

We examine strategic self-ignorance—the use of ignorance as an excuse to over-indulge in pleasurable activities that may be harmful to one's future self. Our model shows that guilt aversion provides a behavioral rationale for present-biased agents to avoid information about negative future...