Due to wealth effects, the price of a security may vary with the realization of an underlying risk factor even when the security's dividend is independent of that factor. This paper highlights a crucial component of these effects hitherto ignored by the literature: changes in wealth do not alter...

We investigate the effect of the volunteering of others on the likelihood that an individual will also engage in volunteering activities. The theoretical part of our analysis is based on a sequential signaling framework, in which the decisions of others to volunteer are informative as to the...

This paper revisits the problem of adverse selection in the insurance market of Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976). We propose a simple extension of the game-theoretic structure in Hellwig (1987) under which Nash-type strategic interaction between the informed customers and the uninformed firms...

I develop a model of endogenous bounded rationality due to search costs, arising implicitly from the decision problem's complexity. The decision maker is not required to know the entire structure of the problem when making choices. She can think ahead, through costly search, to reveal more of...

This paper studies the problem of treatment choice between a status quo treatment with a known outcome distribution and an innovation whose outcomes are observed only in a representative finite sample. I evaluate statistical decision rules, which are functions that map sample outcomes into the...

This paper explores the existence of network effects in migrants' remittance behavior. In this study, networks are defined as groups of immigrants from the same country that live in the same locality. Using the National Immigrant Survey, a unique database for Spain, immigrants are found to be...

It is well-known in the literature that income per capita is strongly correlated with the level of democracy across countries. In an influential paper, Acemoglu et al. (2008) find that this linear correlation disappears once they control for country-specific effects focusing on within-country...

This paper analyzes the impact of downward wage rigidity on the labor market. It shows that imposing downward wage rigidity in a matching model with cyclical fluctuations in productivity, endogenous match-destruction, and on-the-job search, quits are procyclical and layoffs countercyclical. It...

Observational learning is typically examined when agents have precise information about their position in the sequence of play. We present a model in which agents are uncertain about their positions. Agents are allowed to have arbitrary ex-ante beliefs about their positions: they may observe...

In models of first-price auctions, when bidders are ex ante heterogenous, deriving explicit equilibrium bid functions is typically impossible, so numerical methods (such as polynomial approximations) are often employed to find approximate solutions. Recent theoretical research concerning...