A model of ’harassment bribes,’ paid for services one is entitled to, is developed to analyze the proposal to legalize paying these bribes while increasing fines on accepting them. We explore performance as regards corruption deterrence and public service provision. Costs of verifying...

Land conflicts in developing countries are costly. An important policy goal is to create respect for borders. This often involves mandatory, expensive interventions. We propose a new policy design, which in theory promotes neighborly relations at low cost. A salient feature is the option to...

We conduct a geographically and temporally disaggregated empirical analysis of civil conflict at the sub-national level in Africa over the period 1997-2011. Our units of observation are cells of 1 degree of latitude by 1 degree of longitude. We exploit within-year variation in the timing of...

In an economy with financial imperfections, Ricardian equivalence holds when prices are flexible and the steady-state distribution of consumption is uniform, or labor is inelastic. With different steady-state consumption levels, Ricardian equivalence fails, but tax cuts, somewhat paradoxically,...

Maccheroni, Marinacci, and Rustichini [17], in an Anscombe-Aumann framework, axiomatically characterize preferences that are represented by the variational utility functional V (f) = min p2 Z u (f) dp + c (p) 8f 2 F; where u is a utility function on outcomes and c is an index of uncertainty...

We examine a number of unexplored factors that affect the ex-post adoption rates of newly listed stock options. We show that a variety of measures of information asymmetries for underlying stocks predict option adoption rates. This occurs even when we control for factors that have been found to...

Many violations of the Independence axiom of Expected Utility can be traced to subjects' attraction to risk-free prospects. Negative Certainty Independence, the key axiom in this paper, formalizes this tendency. Our main result is a utility representation of all preferences over monetary...

Unstability in the comovement among bond spreads in the euro area is an important feature for dynamic econometric modelling and forecasting. This paper proposes a non-linear GVAR approach to spreads in the euro area where the changing interdepence among these variables is modelled by making each...

Trading venues often impose a minimum trade unit constraint (MTUC) to facilitate order execution. This paper examines the effects of a natural experiment at Borsa Italiana where the exchange reduced the MTUC to one share for all stocks. After the removal of the MTUC, we observe a substantial...

The problemof choosing an optimal toolkit day after day,when there is uncertainty concerning the value of different tools that can only be resolved by carrying the tools, is a multi-armed bandit problem with nonindependent arms. Accordingly, except for very simple specifications, this...