We provide evidence on whether providing university students with feedback on their past exam performance affects their future exam performance. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment in a leading UK university where different departments have historically different rules on...

I examine the role of third-party debt collectors in consumer credit markets. Using law enforcement as an instrument for the number of debt collectors, I find that higher density of debt collectors increases the supply of unsecured credit. The estimated elasticity of the average credit card...

In this paper, we show that secondary buyouts (SBOs) do not generate a signifi?cant improvement in the operating performance of target companies. We collect deal-level infor mation on 2,911 buyouts between 1998 and 2008 and gather detailed fi?rm-level ?financial and accounting information on 163...

This paper investigates the differential response of male and female voters to competitive persuasion in political campaigns. During the 2011 municipal elections in Milan, a sample of eligible voters was randomly divided into three groups. Two were exposed to the same incumbent’s campaign but...

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...