Microfinance institutions face a double bottom-line. They perform financial tasks by giving microcredits to their customers and support projects aiming at reducing poverty. In doing so, they have to be financially self-sufficient and to target poor people excluded from the traditional financial...

We test a mechanism whereby groups are formed voluntarily, through the use of voting. These groups play a public-goods game, where efficiency increases with group size (up to a limit, in one treatment). It is feasible to exclude group members, to exit one's group, or to form larger groups...

DellaVigna and Paserman (2005) and Paserman (2008) have shown that imposing job search requirements on sophisticated unemployed benefit claimants with hyperbolic time preferences is Pareto improving in that it raises welfare for the unemployed, by limiting harmful procrastination, and for...

This paper examines the causes and consequences of the current global financial crisis. It largely relies on the work of Hyman Minsky, although analyses by John Kenneth Galbraith and Thorstein Veblen of the causes of the 1930s collapse are used to show similarities between the two crises. K.W....

Pricing models for social efficiency focuses on assessing the quality, namely the comparison of the desired product to the consumer and the product received, the level of consumer satisfaction on the products and / or services will be therefore a very important component in measuring the...

We test a mechanism whereby groups are formed endogenously, through the use of voting. Once formed, groups play a public-goods game, where there are economies of scale: in two treatments the social value of an incremental contribution to the group account increases with the size of the group,...

This paper develops a partial equilibrium job search model to study the behavioral and welfare implications of an Unemployment Insurance (UI) scheme in which job search requirements are imposed on UI recipients with hyperbolic preferences. We show that, if the search requirements are well...

Searching for greater inter efficiency has been used as a reason to modify the Spanish banking system since 2009. This paper aims to contribute to quantify the magnitude of efficiency, but not only the economic one, but also social and overall efficiency from 2000 to 2011. The case of Spain –...

The possibility of forward trading has been shown to restore social efficiency in Cournot oligopolies if marginal costs are constant. The paper analyzes the more general case that marginal costs are non-decreasing. I show that increasing marginal costs diminish the “strategic...