Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the empirical importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major South...

Most scholars assume firms are politically unified - at least at the industry level. Yet recent contributions data reveal considerable variation in political preferences exhibited among firms in the same industry. This paper investigates what drives this intra-industry variation in partisan...

We examine how competition impacts the provision of product quality. Using a unique data set of inflight amenities provided by U.S. airlines, we find that the composition of competition matters with significantly higher product quality (Wi-Fi, entertainment, and power) on more competitive routes...

Okun's (1962) seminal paper is an important study on economic growth and unemployment but a detailed exploration of the effect of productivity growth on unemployment has been left aside. Yet, the relationship between productivity growth and unemployment has been debated since long. In this paper...

This paper estimates the impacts of China's preferential policies on the economic performance of domestic firms in urban agglomerations. First, several proxies for China's heterogenous policies (e.g. subsidies, access to loans, and tax breaks) are developed in order to examine their individual...

This paper examines how degree of competition affects incentives to innovate in product quality in a symmetric Cournot oligopolistic model. We model product quality in a quality-ladder framework, and find an inverted-U shaped relationship between the number of firms in an industry and R&D...

In simple static models, migration increases with the wage differential between host and home country. In a dynamic framework, and if migrations are temporary, the size of the migrant population in the host country depends also on the migration duration. This paper analyses optimal migration...

If migrants return to their origin countries, two questions arise which are of immediate economic interest for both immigration and emigration country: What determines their optimal migration duration, and what are the activities migrants choose after a return. Little research has been devoted...