We capture the impression that high types may send lower signals than low types in order not to appear too desperate. In contrast to the counter-signaling literature, we require only a noisy one-dimensional signal, where very low signal manifestations force types to execute their outside option....

When a firm is able to recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their purchase histories to price discriminate. We analyze a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers are able to maintain their anonymity and avoid being identified...

Carbon allowance auctions are a component of existing and proposed regional cap-and-trade programs in the U.S. and are also included in recent bills in the U.S. Congress that would establish a national cap-and-trade program in the U.S. to regulate greenhouse gases (“carbon”). We discuss and...

In remote areas of developing countries, people's health and livelihoods are closely intertwined with the condition of the natural environment. Unfortunately, claims regarding the role of ecosystem degradation on disease outcomes rest on a short list of rigorous empirical studies that consider...

This paper investigates whether oil price shocks have a reliable and stable out-of-sample relationship with the Canadian/U.S Dollar nominal exchange rate. Despite state-of-the-art methodologies and clean data, we find paradoxically little systematic relation between oil prices and the exchange...

This paper proposes new methodologies for evaluating out-of-sample forecasting performance that are robust to the choice of the estimation window size. The methodologies involve evaluating the predictive ability of forecasting models over a wide range of window sizes. We show that the tests...

We randomized 43 villages in Bangladesh to receive information on well-water arsenic that emphasized water safety relative to the national standard (bright-line message) or provided additional information on how risks from exposure increase with arsenic levels (gradient message). The gradient...

This paper studies a collective decision problem in which a group of individuals with interdependent preferences vote whether or not to implement a public project of unknown value. A utilitarian social planner aggregates these votes according to a majority rule; but, unlike what is commonly...

Medical practitioners typically utilize the following protocol when advising pregnant women about testing for the possibility of genetic disorders: Pregnant women over the age of 35 should be tested for Down syndrome and other genetic disorders; for younger women, such tests are discouraged...

In this paper we show that bank competition has an intrinsically ambiguous impact on capital accumulation. We further show that it is also responsible for the emergence of development traps in economies that otherwise would be characterized by unique equilibria. These results explain the...