We examine the effect of speculation using credit derivatives on the cost of debt and the likelihood of default. The availability of credit default swaps induces investors who are optimistic about borrower revenues to sell protection instead of buying bonds. This benefits borrowers if protection...

This book presents a set of studies on contemporary discrimination in Latin America that takes advantage of these new tools by focusing on social interactions that range from cooperation, group formation, and the impact of migration in poor families to specific markets such as housing and labor....

This paper reconsiders evidence from experimental common pool resource games from the perspective of a dynamic model of sampling. Despite being parameter-free, the model is able to replicate some striking features of the data: monotonic frequency distributions, the persistent use of strictly...

We explore a model of the interaction between banks and outside investors in which the ability of banks to issue inside money (short-term liabilities believed to be convertible into currency at par) can generate a collapse in asset prices and widespread bank insolvency. The banks and investors...

This book presents a set of studies on contemporary discrimination in Latin America that takes advantage of these new tools by focusing on social interactions that range from cooperation, group formation, and the impact of migration in poor families to specific markets such as housing and labor....

This paper uses an experimental field approach to investigate the pro-social preferences and behavior of social services providers and the behavior of potential beneficiaries in Bogota, Colombia. Field experiments were conducted using games including a newly designed Distributive Dictator Game...

Witness intimidation involves strategic complexity and two-sided uncertainty: criminals cannot know whether threats will deter witnesses, and witnesses cannot know whether threats will be carried out. We model this interaction and explore how rates of intimidation, testimony, and conviction...

African-Americans are six times as likely as white Americans to die at the hands of a murderer, and roughly seven times as likely to murder someone. Young black men are 15 times as likely to be murdered as young white men. This disparity is historic and pervasive, and cannot be accounted for by...

We develop a model of deliberation under heterogeneous beliefs and incomplete information, and use it to explore questions concerning the aggregation of distributed information and the consequences of social integration. We show that when priors are correlated, all private information is...