The constraint on informal finance is commonly taken to be high costs and limited supply. But the majority of informal investors - family and friends - is often willing to supply funds at negative returns, and yet many borrowers tap family and friends only as a last resort. We explain this...

We study human trafficking in a marriage market model of prostitution. When trafficking is based on coercion, trafficking victims constitute a non-zero share of supply in any unregulated prostitution market. We ask if regulation can eradicate trafficking and restore the outcome that would arise...

Open source projects produce goods or standards that do not allow for the appropriation of private returns by those who contribute to their production. In this paper we analyze why programmers will nevertheless invest their time and effort to code open source software. We argue that the...

We derive the effects of credit risk transfer (CRT) markets on real sector productivity and on the volume of financial intermediation in a model where banks choose their optimal degree of CRT and monitoring. We find that CRT increases productivity in the up-market real sector but decreases it in...

We use linked administrative data on the universe of California births to provide novel evidence on economic inequality in infant and maternal health. Infants and mothers at the top of the income distribution have worse birth and morbidity outcomes than their lowest-income counterparts, but are...

Menopause is a major biological shock to women, marking the end of their reproductive years. Despite its relevance, scant research has studied how menopause impacts social dynamics, labor market outcomes, or health care demand. Using high-quality linked national register administrative data from...

When a decision-maker's attention is limited, her decisions depend on what she focuses on. This gives interested parties an incentive to manipulate not only the substance of communication but also the decision-maker's attention allocation. This paper models such attention manipulation. In its...

The high and rapidly increasing prevalence of mental illnesses underscores the importance of understanding their causal origins. This paper analyzes one factor at a critical stage of human development: exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures during the fetal period. We find that in...

Social insurance is often linked to marriage. I model how such linkage affects the marriage market, and exploit Sweden's elimination of survivors insurance to demonstrate economically important responses along several behavioral margins in this market. Entry into marriage reflects a demand for...

While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers' demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives. This paper examines these issues in the context of a critical period in family...