Social insurance is often linked to marriage. I model how such linkage affects the marriage market, and exploit Sweden’s elimination of survivors insurance to demonstrate economically important responses along several behavioral margins in this market. Entry into marriage reflects a demand for...

The high and rapidly increasing prevalence of mental illnesses underscores the importance of understanding their causal origins. This paper analyzes one factor at a critical stage of human development: exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures during the fetal period. We find that in...

We study sex trafficking in a marriage market model of prostitution. When traffickers can coerce women to sell sex, trafficked prostitutes constitute a non-zero share of supply in any unregulated market for sex. We ask if regulation can eradicate trafficking and restore the equilibrium that...

When a decision-maker’s attention is limited, her decisions depend on what she focuses on. This gives interested parties an incentive to manipulate not only the substance of communication but also the decision-maker’s attention allocation. This paper models such attention manipulation. In...

Performance-based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on their career backgrounds. Provincial party secretaries who rose from low to high positions within...

The constraint on informal finance is commonly taken to be high costs and limited supply. But the majority of informal investors – family and friends – is often willing to supply funds at negative returns, and yet many borrowers tap family and friends only as a last resort. We explain this...

The role of social ties in governance is controversial. We theorize that this ambivalence is natural: Social ties transmit incentives between individuals, so how they affect governance hinges on the specific incentives transmitted. We show this in a principal-supervisor-agent model where the...