Convergent evidence for detrimental effects of punishment on cooperation has been obtained in a wide variety of environments, ranging from American students facing punishment in laboratory experiments, to Israeli parents facing fines for arriving late to their child’s day care. We show here...

Research in economics and psychology has established that informal non-monetary sanctions, particularly expressions of negative emotion or disapproval, can enforce fair economic exchange. However, scholars are only beginning to understand the reasons non-monetary sanctions affect economic...

Since firms in an emissions trading program are linked together through a permit market, so too are their compliance choices. Thus, enforcement strategies for trading programs must account for not only the direct effects of enforcement on compliance and emissions decisions, but also the indirect...

The essays of this dissertation examine the determinants of cross-border flows, in the form of immigrants and foreign aid, as well as the impact of those flows on receiving markets. The first essay finds that the composition of immigrant inflows into local markets is a significant determinant of...

In the U.S., households participate in two very different types of credit markets. Personal lending is characterized by continuous risk-based pricing in which lenders offer households a continuous distribution of borrowing possibilities based on estimates of their creditworthiness. This...

Neoclassical analysis of the labor market and its institutions. A systematic development of the theory of labor supply, labor demand, and human capital. Topics discussed also include wage and employment determination, turnover, search, immigration, unemployment, equalizing differences, and...

Experimental evidence stresses the importance of so-called social preferences for understanding economic behavior. Social preferences are defined over the entire allocation in a given economic environment, and not just over one's own consumption as is traditionally presumed. We study the...

This paper addresses the issues of whether the linking of core labor standards withmultilateral or bilateral trade agreements is an effective way of promoting the improvement of labor standards. We review the determinants of core labor standards overtime and conclude that efforts to improve...

Frequent criticism in dynamic decision making research pertains to the overly complex nature of the decision tasks used in experimentation. To address such concerns we study dynamic decision making with respect to the simple race game Hog, which has a computable optimal decision strategy. In the...

In a four-treatment experiment, we test some of the hypotheses inGarcia-Gallego et al.(2004) concerning competition among a number offirms of which some (or all) are indexed by a price-comparison enginefacilitating buyers' search process. In this paper, we isolateindividual behavior from noise...