We study entry and bidding patterns in sealed bid and open auctions with heterogeneous bidders. Using data from U.S. Forest Service timber auctions, we document a set of systematic effects of auction format: sealed bid auctions attract more small bidders, shift the allocation towards these...

This paper shows that poor people (Oportunidades beneficiaries) do save money in a bank account when the government provides them one. It also presents statistics of the use of ATM cards by the same population. The paper gives a glimpse of the huge bancarization potential of paying cash transfer...

How did small exporters fare relative to large exporters during the 2008-09 crisis? Examining the performance of Mexican exporters reveals that crisis did not make smaller exporters more likely to exit, grow less, or expand their product line less. Workhorse models of trade, in response to an...

Consumer protection in financial markets in the form of information disclosure is high on government agendas, despite the fact that the empirical evidence on its effectiveness is limited. To measure the impact of Truth-in-Lending-Act- type disclosures on default and indebtedness, as well as of...

In many contemporary democracies, political polarization increasingly involves deep-seated intolerance of opposing partisans. The decades-old contact hypothesis suggests that cross-partisan interactions might reduce intolerance if individuals interact with equal social status. We test this idea...

Governments spend considerable resources providing goods directly. We show that such behavior may increase welfare when private suppliers have market power. We do this by studying the staggered rollout of hundreds of government milk “ration stores” in Mexico using a proprietary panel of...

Consumer protection in financial markets in the form of information disclosure is high on governments agendas, despite the fact that the empirical evidence on its effectiveness is scarce. To measure the impact of Truth-in-Lending-Act-type disclosures on default and indebtedness, as well as of...

How did small exporters fare relative to large exporters during the 2008-09 crisis? Examining the performance of Mexican exporters reveals that the crisis did not make smaller exporters more likely to exit, grow less, or expand less their product line relative to larger exporters. Workhorse...

We study how consumers allocate debt across credit cards they already hold using new data on credit card activity for a representative sample of consumers with two homogeneous cards in Mexico. We find that relative prices are a very weak predictor of the allocation of debt, purchases, and...