We compute new measures of religious diversity and intolerance and study their effects on civil conflict. Using a religion tree that describes the relationship between different religions, we compute measures of religious diversity at three different levels of aggregation. We find that religious...

Using the daily trade of futures from the prediction markets site Intrade, we pin down the effect of printed newspapers endorsements (announcement of an explicit support for a political candidate) on the candidates' likelihood of winning. It is established that unexpected endorsements have a...

This paper investigates the role of energy on U.S. agricultural productivity using panel data at the state level for the period 1960-2004. We first provide a historical account of energy use in U.S. agriculture. To do this we rely on the Bennet cost indicator to study how the price and volume...

Contrary to a recent literature that questions whether price caps are effective, and even sensitive, under demand uncertainty, we show that in the absence of quantity precommitment the effects of a price cap are the same whether the demand is uncertain or deterministic. Next we study the...

Inspired by the empirical work of Holmes (2011), which suggests the economic importance of distribution costs in the firm's optimal location decision, this paper introduces endogenous distribution costs in the model of Hotelling (1929). The proposed model shows an interesting trade-off between...

We show that monitoring by individuals with preferences regarding the outcome of the supervised task interferes with the task's process: the monitors bias the results in favor of their own preferences. In particular, using an original dataset from the 2011 national elections in Argentina, we...

In a market in which sellers compete by posting mechanisms, we allow for a general meeting technology and show that its properties crucially affect the mechanism that sellers select in equilibrium. In general, it is optimal for sellers to post an auction without a reserve price but with a fee,...

Recently, economists have established that culture—defined as a common set of preferences and beliefs —affects economic outcomes, including the levels of female labor force participation. Although this literature has argued that culture is transmitted from parents to children, it has also...

This paper studies the impact of financial constraints on the persistency of high markups in a class of markets, including most of public procurement, known by practitioners as bidding markets. We develop an infinite horizon model in which two firms optimally reinvest working capital and bid for...

This paper studies peer group effects on marital decisions. We use data from Waves I and III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). This database contains detailed information on adolescents’ high school friends as well as their marital behavior later in life. We...