This paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

This paper presents a new model of interest groups and policy formation in the legislature. In our setting, the already given party ideological predispositions and power distribution determine the expected policy outcome. Our analysis applies to the case of un-enforced or enforced party...

We estimate whether risk preferences are affected by traumatic events by using a unique survey of Sri Lankan twins which contains information on individual's exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, participation as a combatant in the civil war, validated measures of mental health and risk...

The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution, and extends existing results in two directions. First, it identifies circumstances in which a constitution is renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

Instrumental variable estimation requires untestable exclusion restrictions. With policy effects on individual outcomes, there is typically a time interval between the moment the agent realizes that he may be exposed to the policy and the actual exposure or the announcement of the actual...

This paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

This paper adds to the current literature on incomplete contracting that argues that deviating from a complete information, transaction-cost free environment may be may generate valuable insights. We achieve this by assuming bargaining with asymmetric information. We consider the consequences of...

This paper explores whether the experience of a severe recession during early adulthood shapes individuals' prosocial attitudes. The analysis uses survey responses to experimentally validated questions that measure prosocial attitudes for approximately 65,000 respondents in 75 countries. The...

We survey samples of German firms and households to document novel stylized facts about the extent of information frictions among the two groups. First, firms' expectations about macroeconomic variables are closer to expert forecasts and less dispersed than households', consistent with higher...