This paper examines the effects of remedial mathematics on performance in university-level economics courses using a natural experiment. We study exam results prior and subsequent to the implementation of a remedial mathematics course that was compulsory for a sub-set of students and unavailable...

I study the constrained efficient allocations of a simple model of risk sharing and capital flows across countries assuming that each country cannot commit to fully repay its contract obligations. In the model, the degree of risk sharing and the amount of investment are interdependent. It is...

The most fundamental solution concepts in Game Theory – Nash equilibrium, backward induction, and iterated elimination of dominated strategies – are based on the assumption that people are capable of predicting others' actions. These concepts require people to be able to view the game from...

After fifty years of catching up to the US level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity to fall...

This paper analyzes the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics, addressing the following questions: Are there major productivity differences between graduates from American and European institutions? If so, how relevant is the quality of the training received (i.e....

Loss aversion is one of the most robust findings to have emerged from behavioral economics. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been devoted to nominal loss aversion, the interaction of loss aversion and money illusion. People tend to think of transactions in terms of their nominal...

China was the largest economy in the world before the end of the 19th century; then became one of the poorest countries in the world in a few decades. Now China is returning to its historical past. To understand China’s development, and to understand where and how far China will move forward,...

We analyse the Pareto optimal contracts between lenders and borrowers in a model with asymmetric information. The model is a generalization of the Rothschild-Stiglitz pure adverse selection problem to include moral hazard with limited liability contracts. Entrepreneurs with unequal ``abilities"...

Economists have been reluctant to rely on culture as a possible determinant of economic phenomena. The notion of culture is so broad and the channels through which it can enter the economic discourse so vague that it is difficult to design testable hypotheses. In this paper we show this does...