Entering a currency union without any political union European countries have taken a gamble: will the needs of the currency union force a political integration (as anticipated by Monnet) or will the tensions create a backlash, as suggested by Kaldor, Friedman and many others? We try to answer...

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 present a model that characterizes the relationship between optimal dynamic cash management and the choice of the means of payment. The novel feature of the model is the sequential nature of the payments choice. In each instant the agent can choose to pay with either cash or credit. This...

We illustrate an intuitive channel through which price stickiness limits the ability of a central bank to improve welfare through stabilization policy. If the central bank uses infl ation to obtain information about nominal spending, sticky prices impair the learning ability of the central bank...

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...

This paper studies the importance of social interactions for the adoption of financial products. We exploit a unique dataset of friendships among United States students and a novel estimation strategy that accounts for possibly endogenous network formation. We find that not all social contacts...

We investigate the determinants of firms’ implicit employment and wage insurance to employees against industry-level and idiosyncratic shocks. We rely on differences between family and nonfamily firms to identify the supply of insurance, and between national public insurance programs to gauge...

Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. This induces under-diversification: a risk-averse arbitrageur will optimally advertise only one of several mispriced assets, and overweigh it in his...

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return human capital. So unemployment insurance is...