Many societies are divided into multiple smaller groups. The defining feature of these groups is that certain kinds of interaction are more likely to take place within a group than across groups. I build a model in which group divisions are enforced through a reputational penalty for interacting...

Objective - Although human aging is characterized by loss of fertility and progressive decline in physical abilities, later life is associated with better psychological health and well-being. Furthermore, there has been an unprecedented increase in average lifespan over the past century without...

This paper studies the effect of marginal distributions on a copula, in the case of mixed discrete-continuous random variables. The existing literature has proposed various methods to deal with mixed marginals: this paper is the rst to quantify their e ect in a uni ed Bayesian setting. Using...

We impose the axiom Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives on division rules for the conflicting claims problem. With the addition of Consistency and Resource Monotonicity, this characterizes a family of rules which can be described in three different but intuitive ways. First, a rule is...

This paper studies the optimal level of discretion in policymaking. We consider a fiscal policy model where the government has time-inconsistent preferences with a present-bias towards public spending. The government chooses a fiscal rule to trade off its desire to commit to not overspend...

The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with...

Empirical evidence suggests that online reviews are an important source of consumers information and a relevant determinant of the rms revenues. Little is known, however, about how prices and reviews a ect each other. This paper proposes a dynamic game to investigate this relationship. A...

In 2005, the Indian Government launched a conditional cash-incentive program to en- courage institutional delivery. This paper studies the eects of the program on neonatal mortality using district-level household survey data. We model mortality using survival analysis, paying special attention...

Cooperating behavior may be fostered by personality traits re ecting either favorable inclination to others or willingness to comply with norms and rules. We test the relative importance of these two factors in an experiment where subjects provide real mental effort in two treatments with...

An ‘efficiency wage’ model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted in the context of Stalin’s Russia, with imprisonment – not unemployment – acting as a ‘worker discipline device’. The threat of imprisonment allows the state to pay a lower wage outside the Gulag than...