In this paper, we use two samples of Latin American MFIs (41 MFIs from 2005-2014 and 102 MFIs from 2010-2014) to show that there is no relation between the percentage of female borrowers in an MFI portfolio and MFI economic outcomes. We verified the return on equity for companies focused on...

Economic analysis often faces challenges in the valuation of non-market goods and services. The traditional set of non-market valuation tools for measuring Marshallian economic surplus has limitations related to potential bias in stated preferences and endogeneity of non-market amenity placement...

The socio-economic impact of Reaganomics and its long-run deleterious legacy is documented. The preponderance of data indicate that economic growth was not particularly impressive in the wake of the tax cuts of 1981 or 1986. GDP did snap back to potential but failed to accelerate beyond the...

The Behavioral Life-Cycle hypothesis (Thaler & Shefrin, 1981) models consumers as having both impatient “doer” preferences, representing their desire to spend now, and patient “planner” preferences, representing long-run welfare considerations. The Behavioral Life-Cycle hypothesis...

A society that believes wealth to be determined by random "luck", rather than by merit, demands more redistribution. We present evidence of this behavior by exploiting a natural experiment provided by the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009, which hit a large area of Central Italy through a series of...

What is the role of intuitive versus deliberative cognitive processing in human cooperation? The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) stipulates that (i) intuition favors behaviors that are typically advantageous (i.e. long-run payoff-maximizing), and that for most people cooperation is typically...

Two separate bodies of work have examined whether culture affects cooperation in economic games and whether cooperative or non-cooperative decisions occur more quickly. Here, we connect this work by exploring the relationship between decision time and cooperation in American versus Indian...

This paper investigates the role of the presence of foreign firms in a sector in influencing the privatization policy for domestic firms in that sector in China. We consider several variables to proxy for such presence, from the perspective of relative production scale, research and development...

This paper investigates the role of foreign competition and cost asymmetry in influencing privatization policy for domestic firms. With a mixed oligopoly model, we characterize and compare optimal privatization policy, and find that cost asymmetry and foreign competition interact in an...

We examine a previously unexplored relationship between local happiness and firm investment. We looked at investment in general and R&D intensity in particular, as the relatively intangible nature of the latter may make it more subject to the effects of sentiment and affect. We find that average...