A parent whose child is born in December can claim child-related tax benefits when she files her tax return a few months later. Parents of children born in January must wait more than a year before they can receive child-related tax benefits. As a result, families with December births have...

We use a panel of tax returns spanning 1999 to 2011 to provide new evidence on household experiences during unemployment. Unemployment is associated with roughly a 20% reduction in household wage earnings. Unemployment insurance compensates for half of these wage losses. Households also...

Financial intermediation naturally arises when borrowers' payoffs are correlated. I show this using a costly enforcement model in which lenders need ex post incentives to enforce payments from defaulted loans. When projects have correlated outcomes, learning the state of one project (via...

We use lab experiments to study policies that address common pool resource overuse. We look at a price mechanism, specifically a Pigouvian subsidy, and four non-price interventions. The non-price policies are information alone, information with a normative message, communication alone, and...

This paper investigates whether the global spread of the English language provides an inherent advantage to native English speakers. This question is studied within the context of the economics profession, where the impact of being a native English speaker on future publishing success is...

This paper investigates how financial-sector leverage affects macroeconomic instability and household welfare. In the model, banks use leverage to allocate resources to productive projects and provide liquidity. When banks do not actively issue new equity, aggregate outcomes depend on the level...

This paper uses a general equilibrium model with collateralized borrowing to show that increases in risk can have ambiguous effects on leverage, loan margins, loan amounts, and asset prices. Increasing risk about future payoffs can lead to riskier loans with larger balances and lower spreads...

Despite the importance attributed to the effects of diversity on the stability and prosperity of nations, the origins of the uneven distribution of ethnic and cultural fragmentation across countries have been underexplored. Building on the role of deeply-rooted biogeographical forces in...