China’s reform worked and produced some of the most impressive growth in the largest developing and transition economy in the world in the past twenty-two years. That China has managed to grow so rapidly despite the absence of many conventional institutions such as rule of law and secure...

This paper analyzes financial institutions' capital allocation decisions when their required equity capital depends on the risk of their projects chosen. We discuss the relevance of strict position limits against discretionary trading through the use of an optimal compensation function. We show...

In 1983, 81 percent of white male full-time workers participated in employer-supported health plans and 54 percent in employer-supported pension plans. White full-time females, in contrast, participated at the rates of 71 percent and 43 percent. This study measures the unexplained portion of...

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many...

This paper proposes a test of racial bias in capital sentencing based upon patterns of judicial errors in lower courts. We model the behavior of the trial court as minimizing a weighted sum of the probability of sentencing an innocent and that of letting a guilty defendant free. We define racial...

This paper demonstrates the effects of ethnic and religious diversity on the quality of public spaces. Its identification strategy relies on the exogeneity of public housing allocations in France, and thereby eliminates the bias from endogenous sorting. The paper uses micro evidence of social...