This paper uses a novel experimental design to test for the role of experience and information in insurance take-up in rural China, where weather insurance was a new and highly subsidized product. We randomly select a group of poor households to play insurance games and find that it improves the...

Credit constraints are central to development economics theory. However, there is scant direct evidence that supports the existence of such constraints. Traditional tests observe how consumption changes after an unexpected income shock. Such changes can also result from myopic behavior or...

Using a unique panel data set of private German firms over the period 2002 to 2013 we analyze the relation between managerial overconfidence and investment policy in small and medium-sized firms. We construct direct estimates of managerial overconfidence that are based on sales forecasts. We...

This paper reports a study on decision-making by borrowers regarding take-up of different loan types in a laboratory microfinance experiment. I show that when prospective borrowers are offered a flexible choice of different loan types (here, individual liability (IL) and joint liability (JL)),...

We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in Western Uganda. The treatments contrast “active learning” with “traditional lecturing” within standardized lesson-plans. We find that active learning...

This paper examines the relationship between product innovation and the success of price collusion using novel laboratory experiments. Average market prices in low innovation experiments are significantly higher than those in high innovation, but otherwise identical experiments. This price...

The mobile payment technology has converted many of our face-to-face transactions virtual. With the advance of smart devices and financial technologies in place and the shock of COVID-19, economic transactions involving mobile payments are becoming increasingly preferred globally. For instance,...

The objective of this research is piloting and evaluating the introduction of teaching innovations for better learning in a general microeconomics course for undergraduate students. The assessment is based on the Self Determination Theory and student-centered methodologies (SDT)(Deci and Ryan, 1985;...

Existing learning models attribute failures to learn to a lack of data. We model a different barrier. Given the large number of dimensions one could focus on when using a technology, people may fail to learn because they failed to notice important features of the data they possess. We conduct a...

In this paper, we examine an innovative postal export regime that involves both a streamlining of export procedures and provision of intermediation services to investigate how firms' react to changing trade costs and whether and how these firms learn. In so doing, we use a unique dataset that...