Households systematically overvalue or undervalue their houses. We compute house value misperception as the difference between self-reported and market house values. Misperception is sizable, countercyclical, and persistent. We find that a 1 percent increase in house overvaluation results, on...

Information costs and regulatory barriers are the main distinguishing features of international financial markets as compared to national financial markets. This paper presents a simple model of the impact of these factors on banks' cross-border activities and provides empirical evidence. Our...

Policymakers and scholars — both lawyers and economists — have long been pondering the optimal design of default rules. From the classic works on “mimicking” defaults for contracts and corporations to the modern rush to set “sticky” default rules to promote policies as diverse as...

This paper explores the reception of Ronald Coase's article, "The Problem of Social Cost," over the period 1961-1965. Though this article came to be most closely identified with the idea now known as the 'Coase theorem,' the focus of the early reactions to, and use made of, Coase's analysis was...

This paper proposes an extension of the Coase theorem to explain how political systems and jurisdictions change. This model suggests that it is the relative imposition of transaction cost over different modes of jurisdictional change as well as wealth effects that enable or prevent variously...

We examine the formation of multilateral, hub-and-spoke and bilateral international R&D strategic alliances (overlapping climate clubs) to reduce CO2 emissions. R&D provision in clubs produces two types of positive externalities: a global public good (i.e., reduction of CO2 emissions) and...

We examine the formation of multilateral, hub-and-spoke and bilateral international R&D strategic alliances (overlapping climate clubs) to reduce CO2 emissions. R&D provision in clubs produces two types of positive externalities: a global public good (i.e., reduction of CO2 emissions) and...

We estimate the costs of occupational mobility and quantify the relative importance of task content as a component of total mobility costs. We use a novel approach based on a model of occupational choice which delivers a gravity equation linking worker flows to occupation characteristics and...