One of the most neglected issues in modern economics concerns the consequences of technological change that is ubiquitous and endogenous. To address these we need to model technology as more than a scalar value in an aggregate production function, dealing with technological change in its messy...

We develop a unifying explanation for prosocial behavior. We argue that people care not about others’ payoffs per se, but whether their own behavior accords with social norms. Individuals who are sensitive to norms will adhere to them so long as they observe others doing the same. A model...

In the last two decades, there has been a lot of empirical evidence suggesting that many macroeconometric and financial models (e.g. for inflation, interest rates, or exchange rates) are subject to both parameter instability and identification problems. In this paper, we address both issues in a...

This paper studies the problem of an agent who wants to prevent the state from exceeding a critical threshold. Even though the agent is presumed to know the model, the optimal policy is computed by solving a conventional robust control problem. That is, robustness is induced here by objectives...

This paper provides revealed preference foundations for a model of expectations based reference-dependence a la Koszegi and Rabin (2006). Novel axioms provide distinguishing features of expectations-based reference-dependence under risk. The analysis completely characterizes the model’s...

We consider models defined by a set of moment restrictions that may be subject to weak identification. Following the recent literature, the identification of the structural parameters is characterized by the Jacobian of the moment conditions. We unify several definitions of identification that...

We develop a model to study the choice between formal and informal sources of credit in a setting with strategic default due to limited enforcement. Informal loans (e.g., from friends or relatives) are enforced by the threat of both parties losing the friendship relation. In contrast, formal...

Donations and volunteerism can be conceived as market transactions with zero explicit price. However, evidence suggests people may not view zero as just another price when it comes to pro-­social behavior. Thus, while markets might be expected to increase the supply of assets available to those...

The history of the world is strewn with the remains of societies whose institutions failed to adapt to ecological change, but the determinants of institutional fragility are difficult to identify in the historical record. We report a laboratory experiment that explores the impact of an exogenous...

This paper examines the hypothesis that genealogical closeness to populations that are at the frontier of technological innovations facilitates the diffusion of development (e.g., Spolaore and Wacziarg, 2009). Proponents of this hypothesis argue that it is supported by a strong negative...