While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture....

We use quasi-random variation in the fraction of time served in the Italian “open-cell prison” of Bollate to estimate the effect of rehabilitation efforts on recidivism. We deal with the endogeneity of rehabilitation assignments by focussing on those sources of variability in the length of...

It has long been recognized that variations in expected future cash flows are not enough to account for variations in asset prices. Variation in willingness to bear risk is also needed. Asset pricing theories have accordingly focused on models characterized by preferences that allow for time...