Firms make investments in technology to increase productivity. But in emerging markets, where a culture of informality is widespread, information technology (IT) investments leading to greater transparency can impose a cost through higher taxes and need for regulatory compliance. This tendency...

This paper studies the design of a recommender system for organizing social learning on a product. To improve incentives for early experimentation, the optimal design trades off fully transparent social learning by over-recommending a product (or “spamming”) to a fraction of agents in the...

We consider inference on optimal treatment assignments. Our methods allow for inference on the treatment assignment rule that would be optimal given knowledge of the population treatment effect in a general setting. The procedure uses multiple hypothesis testing methods to determine a subset of...

We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment we show that exogenous variation of second-order expectations (promisors' expectations about promisees' expectations that the promise...

A game of incomplete information can be decomposed into a basic game and an information structure. The basic game defines the set of actions, the set of payoff states the payoff functions and the common prior over the payoff states. The information structure refers to the signals that the...

We calibrate a sequence of four nested models to study the dynamics of wealth accumulation. Individuals maximize a utility function whose arguments are consumption and investment. They desire to accumulate wealth for its own sake — this is not a life-cycle model. A competitive firm produces a...

In models defined by unconditional moment restrictions, specification tests are possible and estimators can be ranked in terms of efficiency whenever the number of moment restrictions exceeds the number of parameters. We show that a similar relationship between potential refutability of a model...

We examine a repeated interaction between an agent, who undertakes experiments, and a principal who provides the requisite funding for these experiments. The repeated interaction gives rise to a dynamic agency cost—the more lucrative is the agent’s stream of future rents following a failure,...

This paper estimates, using stochastic simulation and a multicountry macroeconometric model, the fraction of the forecast-error variance of output changes and the fraction of the forecast-error variance of inflation that are due to unpredictable asset-price changes. The results suggest that...

Countries' military expenditures differ greatly across both space and time. This study examines the determinants of military spending, with particular reference to the importance of the external security environment. Using the liberal-realist model of international relations, we first estimate...