The recent banking crisis highlights the challenges faced in credit intermediation. New online peer-to-peer lending markets offer opportunities to examine lending models that primarily cater to small borrowers and that generate more types of information on which to screen. This paper evaluates...

Requiring agents with private information to select from a menu of incentive schedules can yield efficiency gains. It will do so if, and only if, agents will receive further private information after selecting the incentive schedule but before taking the action that determines where on the...

This paper investigates whether individuals feel worse off when others around them earn more. In other words, do people care about relative position and does lagging behind the Joneses' diminish well-being? To answer this question, I match individual-level panel data containing a number of...

In this paper, we exploit a cohort discontinuity in the stringency of the 1993 Dutch disability reforms to obtain causal estimates of the effects of decreased generosity of disability insurance (DI) on behavior of existing DI recipients. We find evidence of substantial "social support...

Standard economic models of tax compliance have focused on enforcement-driven compliance. Notably, tax administrators also tend to place a great deal of emphasis on the importance of improving "tax morale" by encouraging voluntary compliance, creating a culture of compliance, and changing social...

In this paper we provide econometric tools for the evaluation of intertemporal asset pricing models using specification-error and volatility bounds. We formulate analog estimators of these bounds, give conditions for consistency and derive the limiting distribution of these estimators. The...

We present a dictator game experiment where the recipients are local charities that serve the poor. Donors consist of approximately 1000 participants from a nationally representative respondent panel that is maintained by a private survey research firm, Knowledge Networks. We randomly manipulate...

We study the effect of public health insurance eligibility on labor supply by exploiting the largest public health insurance disenrollment in the history of the United States. In 2005, approximately 170,000 Tennessee residents abruptly lost public health insurance coverage. Using both across-...

This paper estimates the extent to which legal fees prevent liquidity-constrained households from declaring bankruptcy. To do so, it studies how the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates affected consumer bankruptcy filings. We exploit the randomized timing of the rebate checks and estimate that the rebates...

We assess the extent to which manufacturing decline and housing booms contributed to changes in U.S. non-employment during the 2000s. Using a local labor market design, we estimate that manufacturing decline significantly increased non-employment during 2000-2007, while local housing booms...