Evidence on adverse selection in slave markets remains inconclusive. We study this question through notarial acts on public slave auctions in Mauritius between 1825 and 1835, involving 4,286 slaves. In addition to slave characteristics, the acts document the identities of buyers and sellers. We...

Protecting society’s most vulnerable members and avoiding medical triage decisions arguments were often used to warrant the substantial COVID-19 reallocation of economic and health care resources, raising the arbitrage between the value of lives saved vs (i) the opportunity cost of resources...

The twin arguments of (i) protecting society's most vulnerable members (e.g. agents with pre-existing medical conditions, elders) from life-threatening complications and (ii) avoiding delicate medical triage decisions were often used to warrant the substantial reallocation of economic and health...

Annuities, long-term care insurance and reverse mortgages remain unpopular to manage longevity, medical and housing price risks after retirement. We analyze low demand using a life-cycle model structurally estimated with a unique stated-preference survey experiment of Canadian households. Low...

We construct a unique data set from succession and bankruptcy sales in Mauritius to investigate the determinants of slave prices between 1825 and 1827. We find that males, females sold with children, skilled slaves and slaves sold during the peak sugar cane harvest season all fetched higher...

According to standard theory, wealth should have no intrinsic value. Yet, conventional wisdom, recent theories, and data suggest it might. We verify whether or not households have direct preferences over wealth in selecting assets. The fully structural econometric model focuses on a multivariate...

We propose a continuous-time consumption-based capital asset pricing model in which the representative agent's preferences display state-dependent risk aversion. Since fluctuations in marginal utility can be ascribed to variations in levels of risk aversion as well as in levels of consumption,...

This paper studies the informational content of elective teams in a dynamic principal/multiple-agents framework with adverse selection. Two agents with different employment histories are paid their conditional expected marginal product. They observe their types (good or bad), and choose between...