We study the impact of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the quality of entrepreneurship in China. Using long series of firm registration and performance data, we document that the massive SOE downsizing in the late 1990s significantly improved the quality of entrepreneur- ship. Compared with...

A large empirical literature found that the correlation between insurance purchase and ex post realization of risk is often statistically insignificant or negative. This is inconsistent with the predictions from the classic models of insurance a la Akerlof (1970), Pauly (1974) and Rothschild and...

We analyze how the life settlement market - the secondary market for life insurance - may affect consumer welfare in a dynamic equilibrium model of life insurance with one-sided commitment and overconfident policyholders. As in Daily et al. (2008) and Fang and Kung (2010), policyholders may...

An incumbent employee competes against a new hire for bonus or promotion. The incumbent's ability is commonly known, while that of the new hire is private information. The incumbent is subject to a perceptional bias: His prior about the new hire's type differs from the true underlying...

A wealth of evidence shows that individuals are biased and firms can often exploit consumers' behavioral biases in their contract designs. In this paper, we study how vulnerable biased individuals are to their own behavioral biases in market equilibrium, and focus on the role of risk aversion...

We argue that inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians' incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city. We develop a tournament model of project selection that captures the driving...

Two potentially asymmetric players compete for a prize of common value, which is initially unknown, by exerting efforts. A designer has two instruments for contest design. First, she decides whether and how to disclose an informative signal of the prize value to players. Second, she sets the...