In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of exclusive dealing, and we explore the motivations for and effects of its use. For a broad class of models, we characterize the outcome of a contracting game in which manufacturers may employ exclusive dealing...

In recent years, the United States has witnessed significant growth in programs of financial and retirement education in the workplace. This phenomenon provides an opportunity to assess the effects of targeted education programs on financial choices. This paper uses a novel household survey to...

Using the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances and an elaborate life-cycle model, we quantify the potential financial impact of each individual's death on his or her survivors, and we measure the degree to which life insurance moderates these consequences. Life insurance is essentially uncorrelated...

Household survey data consistently depict large variations in saving and wealth among households with similar socio-economic characteristics. Within the context of the lifequot; cycle hypothesis, families with identical lifetime resources might choose to accumulatequot; different levels of...

We explore signaling behavior in settings with a discriminating signal and several costly nondiscriminating ( money burning ) activities. In settings where informed parties have many options for burning money, existing theory provides no basis for selecting one nondiscriminating activity over...

This paper offers a new explanation of the dividend puzzle, based upon a model in which firms attempt to signal profitability by distrubuting cash to shareholders. I assume that dividends and repurchases are identical, except that dividends are taxed more heavily. Nevertheless, I demonstrate...

Revealed preferences are tastes that rationalize an economic agent's observed actions. Normative preferences represent the agent's actual interests. It sometimes makes sense to assume that revealed preferences are identical to normative preferences. But there are many cases where this assumption...

Experimental subjects allocate $10,000 across four Samp;P 500 index funds. Subject rewards depend on the chosen portfolio's subsequent return. Because the investments are not actually intermediated by the fund companies, portfolio returns are unbundled from non-portfolio services. The optimal...

We document a flypaper effect in asset allocation: securities received in kind quot;stick where they hit.quot; We study a firm that twice changed the rules governing the securities in which its 401(k) matching contributions were initially invested. Both of these rule changes were economically...

An unexpected wealth windfall should increase consumption shortly after the windfall is received. We test this prediction using administrative records on over 40,000 401(k) accounts. Contrary to theory, we estimate a negative short-run marginal propensity to consume out of idiosyncratic 401(k)...