This paper investigates the factors that have shaped the evolution of property rights institutions. Using a regression discontinuity design, I show that the divergent state laws of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire have had little effect on de facto property rights institutions. In contrast, the data...

Credit score cutoff rules result in very similar potential borrowers being treated differently by mortgage lenders. Recent research has used variation induced by these rules to investigate the connection between securitization and lender moral hazard in the recent financial crisis. However, the...

In a model of a competitive industry selling base goods and add-ons, we investigate the conditions under which citizen-consumers will support policies that eliminate behavioral inefficiencies induced by naïve consumers. Unregulated competitive markets have two effects: they produce deadweight...

A growing literature exploits credit score cutoff rules as a natural experiment to estimate the moral hazard effect of securitization on lender screening. However, these cutoff rules can be traced to underwriting guidelines for originators, not for securitizers. Moreover, loan-level data reveal...

type="main" <p>This article estimates the causal effect of retirement-induced workload spikes on the selection of procurement terms. In a sample of 150,000 contracts from 85 procurement offices over 11 years, increases in workload decrease reliance on competitive acquisition procedures, decrease...</p>

For-profit hospitals in California contract out services much more intensely than either public hospitals or private nonprofit hospitals. To explain why, we build a model in which the outsourcing decision is a trade-off between net revenues and some nonmonetary benefit to the manager, which we...