We provide new empirical evidence concerning the contentious debate over the use of historical cost (HCA) versus mark-to-market (MTM) accounting in regulating financial institutions. These accounting rules, through their interactions with capital regulations, alter financial institutions’...

We present a dynamic OLG model of educational signaling, inequality and mobility with missing credit markets. Agents are characterized by two sources of unobserved heterogeneity: ability and parental income, consistent with empirical evidence on returns to schooling. Both quantity and quality of...

We consider a two-stage model where a leader, according to its risk-averse proneness, solves a MinSup problem with constraints corresponding to the reaction sets of a follower and defined by the solutions of a quasi-variational inequality (i.e. a variational inequality having constraint sets...

We analyze the reaction of the U.S. Treasury bond market to innovations in macroe-economic fundamentals. We identify these innovations based on macroeconomic news, which are defined as differences between the actual releases and market expectations. We find that that macroeconomic news explain...

We investigate the determinants of firms’ implicit employment and wage insurance to employees against industry-level and idiosyncratic shocks. We rely on differences between family and non-family firms to identify the supply of insurance, and between national public insurance programs to gauge...

This paper offers a new and robust model of the emergence and persistence of cooperation when interactions are anonymous, the population is well-mixed, and the evolutionary process selects strategies according to material payoffs. The model has a Prisoner’s Dilemma structure, but with an...

Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. This induces under-diversification: a risk-averse arbitrageur will optimally advertise only one of several mispriced assets, and overweigh it in his...

Exploiting three earthquakes in Italy as quasi-experiments, we analyze the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing repair and reconstruction. To the extent that funds are made available up-front, these transfers are akin to loans, mainly affecting the...

Through a field experiment in Sri Lanka I analyze the role of experimentally-induced memories of 2004 tsunami on behavior in a trust game in which personal notions of cheating are elicited. Microfinance borrowers were randomly assigned to a treatment (control) group consisting in watching a...

When are strategic appointments useful in curbing policy bias from ex-post negotiation between state agencies and special interest groups? Bertelli and Feldmann (Jnl. of Public Admin. Research and Theory, 2007) provide an insightful analysis of the issue within a full information model of...