We test the hypothesis that the effect of foreign aid on economic growth is positive in ethnically homogenous countries, but decreasing in ethnic fractionalization. Using panel data covering 114 aid recipient countries over the period 1962 to 2001, and employing two-stage least squares and GMM...

This paper re-examines the VAR analysis of the price puzzle with regard to the issues of measurement, identification and misspecification. In an empirical analysis conducted for the US economy, we consider alternative measures of economic activity and inflation, alternative assumptions to...

This paper discusses two ways to amend the optimal lending contract under asymmetric information studied in Clementi and Hopenhayn (2006) to change its long-run implications so that firm growth and exit driven by borrowing constraints exist in the long run. One way assumes that the entrepreneur...

The growing literature on financial literacy suggests people in many countries are poorly prepared for making major financial decisions. One important sub-population rarely examined by financial literacy studies is immigrants, who have specialized financial needs related to remittances. This...

This paper studies a complete-information bargaining game with one buyer and multiple sellers of di¤erent ?sizes? or bargaining strengths. The bargaining order is determined by the buyer. If the buyer can commit to a bargaining order, there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome where...

We develop a general approach to estimation and inference for income distributions using grouped or aggregate data that are typically available in the form of population shares and class mean incomes, with unknown group bounds. Generic moment conditions and an optimal weight matrix that can be...

We use cumulative reaction functions to compare long-run market structures in aggregative oligopoly games. We fi?rst compile an IO toolkit for aggregative games. We show strong neutrality properties across market structures. The aggregator stays the same, despite changes in the number of ?rooms...

Information programs that leverage peer comparisons are used to encourage pro-social behavior in many contexts. We document how imperfect information generates heterogenous responses to treatments involving personalized feedback and peer comparisons. In our field experiment in retail...

This paper estimates the cost of using simple percentage fees rather than the broker optimal Bayesian mechanism, using data for real estate transactions in Boston in the mid-1990s. This counterfactual analysis shows that interme-diaries using the best percentage fee mechanisms with fees ranging...

We show how the generalized method of moments (GMM) framework developed in Hajargasht et al. (2012) for estimating income distributions from grouped data can be adapted for estimating mixtures. This approach can be used to estimate a mixture of any distributions where the moments and moment...