Credit default swaps (CDS) played an important role in the financial crisis of 2008. While CDS can be used to hedge risks, they can also be used for speculative purposes (as occurred during the financial crisis) and regulations have been proposed to limit such speculative use. Here, we provide...

An important feature of bond markets is the relationship between the IPO price and the probability that the issuer defaults. On the one hand, the default probability affects the IPO price. On the other hand, IPO prices affect the default probability. It is a priori unclear whether agents can...

How do norms of trust and reciprocity arise? We investigate this question by examining behavior in an experiment where subjects play a series of indefinitely repeated trust games. Players are randomly and anonymously matched each period. The parameters of the game are chosen so as to support...

We model and experimentally evaluate the trade-off between innovation and imitation commonly faced by firms and individuals. Innovation involves searching for a high payoff opportunity, but paying a cost to do so. Imitation involves avoiding the search cost and copying the most successful payoff...

We explore the celebrated Friedman rule for optimal monetary policy in the context of a laboratory economy based on the Lagos-Wright model. The rule that Friedman proposed can be shown to be optimal in a wide variety of different monetary models, including the Lagos-Wright model. However, we are...

We propose a model of how social norms change in response to the evolution of privately held preferences. Our aim is to rationalize the tendency for individuals who hold minority preferences to take actions favored by the majority. We do this using a game involving a tension between a desire to...

We design and report on the first laboratory experiment exploring the role of interbank network structure and premature liquidation costs for the likelihood of a financial contagion. The laboratory provides the control necessary to understand the role played by interbank network configurations...

We implement a dynamic asset pricing experiment in the spirit of Lucas (1978) with storable assets and non-storable cash. In the first treatment, we impose diminishing marginal returns to cash to incentivize consumption smoothing across periods. We find that subjects use the asset to smooth...

We explore whether natural human competitiveness can be exploited to stimulate charitable giving in a controlled laboratory experiment involving three different treatments of a sequential dictator game. Without disclosing the actual amounts given and kept, in each period players are publicly...

The paper analyzes dollarization in the sense of asset substitution, where a foreign currency competes with local assets, especially domestic capital, as a store of value, the impact of dollarization on capital accumulation and output, and why economies remain dollarized long after a successful...