This paper studies the adoption and diffusion of a product innovation in a duopoly market. Firms are asymmetric, and learning is endogenously determined by the volume of sales. In equilibrium, both high- and low-quality firms may lead adoption, and first-movers are often uniquely determined by...

We build an equilibrium model of a small open economy with labor market frictions and imperfectly enforced regulations. Heterogeneous firms sort into the formal or informal sector. We estimate the model using data from Brazil, and use counterfactual simulations to understand how trade affects...

Community-based accountability interventions have shown potential to improve delivery of public services, but there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of such interventions when implemented at scale by developing country governments. We study the effectiveness of social accountability...

As in many school districts around the world, prospective high-school students in Ghana are assigned to schools through a centralized system. Using administrative data on applications, we report that virtually all students adopt a weakly dominated strategy, and matching outcomes show that...

We develop a framework for natural resource valuation that directly addresses the fundamental collective action problem in environmental protection. Our framework uses the lessons of behavioral economics to create values that individual decision makers find credible and relatable, in addition to...

This paper solves the canonical dynamic rational inattention problem of Sims (2003) by formulating it in the frequency domain. The solution complements and extends existing results, which have been derived in the time domain. The paper provides a simple algorithm that quickly and accurately...

We propose a new decomposition of the traditional market beta into four semibetas depending on the signed covariation between the market and individual asset returns. Consistent with the pricing implications from a mean-semivariance framework, we show that higher semibetas defined by negative...

The concept of long-run causal order and its relationship to nonstationarity in time series data is explored using some ideas drawn from the literature on graphical causal modeling. Ordinary variables, which are nonstationary only because they are caused by a distinct nonstationary variable, are...

We study a dynamic model of fraud and trust-building featuring two parties: a principal, who has limited power of commitment and who wishes to accept real projects and reject fake ones, and an agent, who is either an ethical type that produces only a real project, or a strategic type that...

Unstable couple relationships and high rates of re-partnering have increased the share of U.S. families with stepkin. Yet data on stepfamily structure are from earlier time periods, include only coresident stepkin, or cover only older adults. This paper uses new data on family structure and...