This paper studies the assignment of people to projects over time in a model with private information. The combination of risk neutrality with incomplete contracts that restrict the ability of an agent to report on interim states is a force for long-term assignments. More generally, however,...

We propose a coherent unified approach to the study of the linkages among economic growth, financial structure, and inequality, bringing together disparate theoretical and empirical literature. That is, we show how to conduct model-based quantitative research on transitional paths. With...

Economists and other social scientists have long tried to understand the nature of poverty and how poor people make decisions. For example, T.W. Schultz, a Nobel Laureate, former professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and former president of the American Economic Association, spent...

Return on assets (ROA) of household enterprise is crucial for understanding the productivity of households in developing economies. Yet the definition and measurement of household enterprise ROA remain inconsistent or unclear. We illustrate potential measurement problems with examples from...

We show how to use panel data on household consumption to directly estimate households' risk preferences. Specifically, we measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk‐sharing model, which we then test allowing for this heterogeneity. There is...

We formulate and solve a range of dynamic models of constrained credit/insurance that allow for moral hazard and limited commitment. We compare them to full insurance and exogenously incomplete financial regimes (autarky, saving only, borrowing and lending in a single asset). We develop...

Trades in today's financial system are inherently subject to settlement uncertainty. This paper explores tokenization as a potential technological solution. A token system, by enabling programmability of assets, can be designed to eradicate settlement uncertainty. We study the allocations...

How might modern settlement systems with distributed ledger technology achieve zero settlement risk? We consider the design of settlement systems that satisfies two integral features: information-leakage proof and zero settlement risk. Legacy settlement systems partition private information but...