By providing incentives for sellers to act in a trustworthy manner, reputation mechanisms in many online environments can mitigate moral-hazard problems when particular buyers and sellers interact infrequently. However, these mechanisms rely on buyers sharing their private information about...

In this paper, we develop a measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per person in retirement. We use this measure, which we call "annualized comprehensive wealth," to investigate spend-down...

We investigate the role of cosigners as collateral using data from a South Indian financial institution. Using an exogenous change in the cosigner requirement, we establish a negative causal effect of cosigners on defaults: an increase in the number of cosigners reduces defaults all these equal....

Nonmarital childbearing has increased dramatically in the United States in recent decades. A great deal of attention has been paid by both academics and policy makers to this increase, in part because of concerns that having a single mother negatively affects child outcomes. We use the Early...

Microfinance institutions and other lenders in developing countries rely on the promise of future loans to induce repayment. However, if borrowers expect that others will default, and so loans will no longer be available in the future, then they will default as well. We refer to such contagion...

The intensity of recent turbulence in financial markets has surprised nearly everyone. This paper searches out the root causes of the crisis, distinguishing them from scapegoating explanations that have been used in policy circles to divert attention from the underlying breakdown of incentives....

The history of banking around the world has been punctuated by frequent systemic crises. As with Tolstoy's unhappy families, not all crises are the same; distinct roles have been played at different times by mismanagement, government interference and macroeconomic shocks. This review identifies...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a signi.cant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...

Mass adult male circumcision campaigns for HIV prevention are underway across much of Sub-Saharan Africa. However, concern remains about risk compensation associated with the reduction in the probability of HIV transmission per risky act. This paper examines the be- havioral response to male...