For centuries, Jews in Europe have specialized in financial services. At the same time, they have been the victims of historical antisemitism on the part of the Christian majority. We find that present-day financial development is lower in German counties where historical antisemitism was...

We study how individuals repay their debt using linked data on multiple credit cards. Repayments are not allocated to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing. Moreover, the degree of misallocation is invariant to the economic stakes, which is inconsistent with...

In this paper, I develop an integrated approach to collective models and matching models of the marriage market. In the collective framework, both household formation and the intra-household allocation of bargaining power are taken as given. This is no longer the case in the present...

A growing number of policies and programs aim to increase investment in energy efficiency, because conventional wisdom suggests that people fail to take-up these investments even though they have positive private returns and generate environmental benefits. Many explanations for this energy...

Many developing countries have high pollution despite strict environmental standards, suggesting gaps in regulatory enforcement. In collaboration with the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB), in India, we increased the rate of inspection for a random group of polluting industrial plants and...

The conceptual innovations of brash and transgressive young geniuses, from Pablo Picasso and T.S. Eliot to Jean-Luc Godard and Bob Dylan, often arrive suddenly and conspicuously, and are immediately recognized and celebrated. In contrast, the experimental innovations of cautious old masters...

Drawing on classical insights from mechanism design, we show that ex post efficient mechanisms induce agents to make efficient ex ante investment choices if and only if they are strategy-proof. For mechanisms that fail to be exactly strategy-proof and/or efficient, we derive a correspondence...

Exploiting the exogenous and regional nature of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, this paper provides a systematic quantification of the role of input-output linkages as a mechanism for the propagation and amplification of shocks. We document that the disruption caused by the earthquake...

The U.S. regulatory system has grown increasingly expansive, intrusive and complex in recent decades, its tax system has become ridiculously complicated, and its economic policies have become less predictable. I present several pieces of evidence related to these developments and discuss some of...

We consider the welfare consequences of nudges to encourage exercise habit formation. We analyze a randomized trial of nudged exercise commitment contracts using a time-inconsistent intertemporal utility maximization model of the demand for exercise. Our empirical analysis shows that people who...