Emerging equity markets witness occasional surges in prices (frenzies) and crossmarket price dispersion (herds), accompanied by abundant media coverage. An information market complementarity can explain these anomalies. Because information has high fixed costs, high volume makes it inexpensive....

Theories based on information costs or frictions have become increasing popular in macroeconomics and macro-finance. The literature has used various types of information choices, such as rational inattention, inattentiveness, information markets and costly precision. Using a unified framework,...

Applying the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from consent to unilateral divorce laws will not affect divorce rates. I show that existing evidence suggesting large effects of divorce laws on divorce rates reflect a failure to explicitly model the dynamic response of...

We document that trust in public institutions--and particularly trust in banks, business and government--has declined over recent years. US time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear legacy of...

Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, further rises in income are not associated with further increases in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country....