Many basic economic theories with perfectly functioning markets do not predict the existence of the vast number of microenterprises readily observed across the world. We put forward a model that illuminates why financial and managerial capital constraints may impede experimentation, and thus...

Many basic economic theories with perfectly functioning markets do not predict the existence of the vast number of microenterprises readily observed across the world. We put forward a model that illuminates why financial and managerial capital constraints may impede experimentation, and thus...

This paper studies the relationship between trade credit and innovation. While trade credit is well researched in the finance literature, its link to innovation has been neglected in prior research. We argue that innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are more likely to use trade...

Offering incentives to promote charitable giving (for example, to encourage donations to aid victims of natural disasters) is very popular among governments and private organizations. Many companies, for example, match their employees’ charitable contributions, hoping that this will foster a...

We propose a model of charity competition in which informed giving alone can explain quality heterogeneity across similar charities. It is this heterogeneity that also creates the demand for information. In equilibrium, too few donors pay to be informed; but interestingly, informed giving may...

In light of recent evidence, we develop a theory of charitable giving in which donors feel social pressure from a direct solicitation. We show that equilibrium donations are concentrated around a social norm: donors below the norm increase giving while those above the norm reduce it. Despite a...

We develop a model that accounts for the decay of the average contribution observed in experiments on voluntary contributions to a public good. The novel idea is that people's moral motivation is "weak." Their judgment about the right contribution depends on observed contributions by group...

Evidence suggests that donors have little demand for information before giving to charity. To understand this behavior and its policy implications, we present a model in which each individual can acquire costly information about her true value of charity. We observe that an individual who...

We run a modified dictator game experiment to investigate the determinants of donation choices to philanthropic organizations. We find experimentally that the adoption of a simple form of accountability such as the disclosure of information on the ranking of aggregate contributions received by...