Until recently, most policy debates on pensions — especially in Europe — focused on public responsibilities and the difficulties that many publicly funded schemes have in meeting their obligations. However, recent events, not least declines in stock markets, have increased the salience of...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

What are the equilibrium features of a financial market where a sizeable proportion of traders face reputational concerns? This question is central to our understanding of financial markets, which are increasingly dominated by institutional investors. We construct a model of delegated portfolio...

We study the information flows that arise among a set of agents with local knowledge and directed payoff interactions, which differ among pairs of agents. First, we study the equilibrium of a game where, before making decisions, agents can invest in pairwise active communication (speaking) and...

This paper explores the link between trust in government, policy-making, and compliance. It focuses on a specific channel whereby citizens who are convinced that a policy is worthwhile are more motivated to comply with it. This in turn reduces the government's cost of implementing a policy and...

Governments in liberal democracies pursue social welfare, but in many different ways. The wellbeing approach instead asks: Why not focus directly on increasing measured human happiness? Why not try to improve people's overall quality of life, as it is subjectively seen by citizens themselves?...

This paper estimates the size of the media multiplier, a model-based measure of how far media coverage magnifies the economic response to shocks. We combine monthly aggregated and anonymized credit card activity data from 114 card issuing countries in 5 destination countries with a large corpus...

This paper develops a new approach to studying how electoral bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of districting affects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of bias to the theory of party compe- tition and show how this affects policy choice. The usefulness of the approach is...

How and whether judges should be held accountable is a key issue in the design of a legal system. Thirty-seven of the forty-eight continental states use some method of judicial selection which involves a direct role for citizens in selecting or re-appointing the judiciary. We identify two...