The paper documents the group lending mechanism used by a typical microfinance lender in Haryana, India. The mechanism had three interesting features. Firstly, the groups were initially formed as Rotating, Saving and Credit Associations. This enabled the lender to screen the groups. Second,...

The human tendency to cooperate with nonkin even in short-run relationships remains a puzzle. Recently it has been hypothesized that altruism may be a byproduct of “mentalizing”, the process of understanding and predicting the mental states of others. Another idea is based on sexual...

We consider a common investment project that is vulnerable to a self-fulfilling coordination failure and hence is strategically risky. Based on their private information, agents { who have heterogeneous investment incentives - form expectations or "sentiments" about the project's outcome. We...

This paper provides estimates of the average returns to labour market experience and .rm-speci.c tenure for a sample of young Italian male workers. Using instrumental variables, I take into account endogeneity and selection problems generated by job matching and individual fixed effects. Results...

Standard economic analysis assumes the sets of public and private goods to be exogenously given. Yet societies very often choose the public-private mix, using resources to convert seemingly private goods into ones with public goods characteristics and vice versa. And, in practice, we see a...

This paper studies information transmission between multiple agents with different preferences and a welfare maximizing decision maker who chooses the quality or quantity of a public good (e.g. provision of public health service; carbon emissions policy; pace of lectures in a classroom) that is...

Recent stochastic evolutionary models have shown that the most likely convention when the probability of a mutation is sufficiently small is coordination on the risk-dominant strategy rather than the payoff-dominant one. This paper looks at the consequences of player movement between locations...

We analyze experimentally two sender-receiver games with conflictive preferences. In the first game, the sender can choose to tell the truth, to lie, or to remain silent. The latter strategy is costly and similar to an outside option. If sent, the receiver can either trust or distrust the...

We study the cross-section of expected corporate bond returns using an intertemporal CAPM with three factors; innovations in future excess bond returns, future real interest rates and future expected inflation. Our test assets are a broad range of bond market index portfolios of different...

In many countries, the collective sale of TV rights by sports leagues has been challenged by the antitrust authorities. In several cases, however, leagues won in court, on the ground that sport cannot be considered a standard good. In this paper, we investigate the conditions under which the...