This paper analyzes the adoption behavior of small holder farmers using comparable plot-level duration data for Kenya and The Philippines and is robust to the inclusion of unobserved village, household, plot and time effects.  While previous studies on adoption using duration or panel data have...

This paper is a first attempt to garner the theory and evidence on the political economy of the first wave of financial liberalisation during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and of its demise after World War I.  Not everyone gained from the process of globalisation (of trade,...

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household of education with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas.  In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to...

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy?  To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking...

We propose a simple payoff-based learning rule that is completely decentralized, and that leads to an efficient configuaration of actions in any n-person finite strategic-form game with generic payoffs.  The algorithm follows the theme of exploration versus exploitation and is hence stochastic...

Criminals who wear gang colors are acting in a surprisingly brazen way which must increase the probability of being caught and punished by the police.  In our model this brazen behavior is a solution to an enforcement problem.  The central idea is that less able criminals see lower gains from...

Jewish emancipation in nineteenth century Europe produced drastically different responses.  In Germany, a liberal variant known as Reform developed, while ultra-Orthodox Judaism emerged in eastern Europe.  We develop a model of religious organization which explains this polarization.  In...

Part of a long-run project to put together a systematic database of prices and wages for the American contingents, this paper takes a first look at standards of living in a series of North American and Latin American cities.  From secondary sources we collected price data that - with diverse...

Teams are becoming increasingly important in work settings.  We develop a framework to study the strategic implications of a meritocratic notion of desert under which team members care about receiving what they feel they deserve.  Team members find it painful to receive less than their...

We develop a framework in which: (i) a firm can have a new product tested publicly before launch; and (ii) tests vary in toughness, holding expertise fixed.  Price flexibility boosts the strong positive impact on consumer beliefs of passing a tough test and mitigates the strong negative impact...