The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are “coercive,” in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We...

We introduce the possibility of direct punishment by specialized enforcers into a model of community enforcement. Specialized enforcers need to be given incentives to carry out costly punishments. Our main result shows that, when the specialized enforcement technology is sufficiently effective,...

Data on sales of memory modules are used to explore several aspects of e-retail demand. There is a strong relationship between e-retail sales to a given state and sales tax rates that apply to purchases from offline retailers. This suggests that there is substantial substitution between online...