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...

This paper extends the forestry maximum principle of Heaps (1984) to allow the benefits of harvesting to be the utility of the volume of wood harvested as in Mitra - Wan (1985, 1986). Unlike those authors, however, time is treated as a continuous rather than as a discrete variable. Existence of...

This paper develops a dynamic asset pricing model with persistent heterogeneous beliefs. The model features competitive traders who receive idiosyncratic signals about an underlying fundamentals process. We adapt Futia’s (1981) frequency domain methods to derive conditions on the fundamentals...

This paper explores the importance of accessible and focal information in influencing beliefs and attention in a learning-to-forecast laboratory experiment where subjects are incentivized to form accurate expectations about inflation and the output gap. We consider the effects of salient and...

Rules are thought to persist to the extent that the direct benefits of having them (e.g. reduced transactions costs) exceed the costs of enforcement and of occasional misapplications. We argue that a second crucial role of rules is as screening mechanisms for identifying cooperative types. Thus...