type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Recent empirical research has identified a significant amount of volatility in stock prices that cannot easily be explained by changes in fundamentals; one interpretation is that asset prices respond not only to news but also to irrational “noise trading.”...</p>

The publication of Daniel Kahneman's book, <em>Thinking, Fast and Slow</em>, is a major intellectual event. The book summarizes, but also integrates, the research that Kahneman has done over the past forty years, beginning with his path-breaking work with the late Amos Tversky. The broad theme of this...

Government regulation is ubiquitous today in rich and middle-income countries--present in areas that range from workplace conditions to food processing to school curricula--although standard economic theories predict that it should be rather uncommon. In this book, Andrei Shleifer argues that...

We mailed letters to non-existent business addresses in 159 countries (10 per country), and measured whether they come back to the return address in the United States and how long it takes. About 60% of the letters were returned, taking over six months, on average. The results provide new...

We present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals “think coarselyâ€: they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category. Coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage of: (i)...

We mailed letters to non-existent business addresses in 159 countries (10 per country), and measured whether they come back to the return address in the United States and how long it takes. About 60% of the letters were returned, taking over six months, on average. The results provide new...

We establish five facts about the informal economy in developing countries. First, it is huge, reaching about half of the total in the poorest countries. Second, it has extremely low productivity compared to the formal economy: informal firms are typically small, inefficient, and run by poorly...