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- 2022
- Working Paper
Social Protection and Social Distancing During the Pandemic: Mobile Money Transfers in Ghana
By: Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe, Robert Osei, Isaac Osei-Akoto, Benjamin N. Roth and Christopher Udry
We study the impact of mobile money transfers to a representative sample of low-income
Ghanaians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement of the upcoming transfers
affects neither consumption, well-being, nor social distancing. Once disbursed,...
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- 2022
- Chapter
Key Success Factors in Environmental Entrepreneurship: The Case of Wilderness Safaris
By: James E. Austin, Megan Epler Woods and Herman B. Leonard
This chapter analyzes the entrepreneurial conception and evolution of the Wilderness Safaris (WS) ecotourism enterprise operating in eight African countries. It illuminates a series of factors that contribute to positive environmental impact as well as financial...
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- Article
Making Seconds Count: When Valuing Time Promotes Subjective Well-being
By: Alice Lee-Yoon and A.V. Whillans
Time is a finite and precious resource, and the way that we value our time can critically shape happiness. In this article, we present a conceptual framework to explain when valuing time can enhance vs. undermine well-being. Specifically, we review the emotional...
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- December 2018
- Technical Note
The First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics and Market Failures
By: Matthew C. Weinzierl and Robert Scherf
- 2018
- Book
The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy
The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the 18th century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the 19th, they paradoxically sought to make the...
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Keywords:
Enlightenment;
Political Economy;
Italy;
Commercial Society;
Economic Systems;
Trade;
History;
Markets;
Society;
Italy
- 2018
- Working Paper
Alleviating Time Poverty among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment
By: Ashley V. Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we will conduct a longitudinal field experiment in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of working mothers, a...
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Keywords:
Time;
Money;
Subjective Well-being;
Administrative Costs;
Friction;
Poverty;
Welfare;
Perception
- 2018
- Chapter
Behavioral Household Finance
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
This chapter provides an overview of household finance. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing extensions of the...
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- Article
The Asymmetric Experience of Positive and Negative Economic Growth: Global Evidence Using Subjective Well-being Data
By: Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, George Ward, Femke De Keulenaer, Bert Van Landeghem, Georgios Kavetsos and Michael I. Norton
Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? We find that measures of subjective well-being are more than twice as sensitive to negative as compared to positive economic growth. We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries,...
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- February 2018 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
ArcelorMittal and the Ebola Outbreak in Liberia
By: Sophus A. Reinert, Sarah Nam, Sisi Pan and Eric Werker
During the summer of 2014, Alan Knight, general manager of corporate responsibility at the integrated steel and mining company ArcelorMittal, observed the unfolding of an Ebola epidemic in Liberia and other countries in West Africa with great concern. On the one hand...
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Keywords:
Ebola;
Epidemics;
Ebola Private Sector Mobalization Group;
EPSMG;
Civil War;
Sovereignty;
Change Management;
Judgments;
Development Economics;
Geopolitical Units;
Globalized Firms and Management;
Emerging Markets;
Business and Community Relations;
Business and Government Relations;
Safety;
War;
Wealth and Poverty;
Welfare;
Crisis Management;
Mining Industry;
Liberia
- Article
"Troll" Check? A Proposal for Administrative Review of Patent Litigation
By: Lauren Cohen, John Golden, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
The patent system is commonly justified as a way to promote social welfare and, more specifically, technological progress. For years, however, there has been concern that patent litigation is undermining, rather than furthering, these goals. Particularly in the United...
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- July 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
Propel
By: Mitchell Weiss and Sarah McAra
In 2014, Jimmy Chen, a former product manager at Facebook, founded the start-up Propel to build software for low-income Americans. After conducting in-depth behavioral research, Chen and his small team in New York City began to develop technology to address the...
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Keywords:
Public Entrepreneurship;
Govtech;
Food Stamps;
EBT;
Mobile App;
User Research;
Financial Services Referrals;
Grocery Marketing;
Customer Discovery;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Entrepreneurship;
Public Sector;
Business Model;
Research;
Social Enterprise;
Poverty;
Welfare;
Mobile and Wireless Technology;
Applications and Software;
Technology Industry;
United States
- May 2017 (Revised July 2017)
- Supplement
Aadhaar: From Voluntary to Mandatory
By: Tarun Khanna, Anjali Raina and Rachna Chawla
Approximately 1.1 billion residents of India (99% of the population) had a unique biometric identity—Aadhaar—by 2017. In six years, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had achieved an unprecedented milestone in emerging and developed markets. The...
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Keywords:
Entrepreneurship;
Business and Government Relations;
Emerging Markets;
Information;
Information Technology;
Organizational Design;
Infrastructure;
Identity;
Projects;
Information Management;
Government and Politics;
Digital Platforms;
Internet and the Web;
Transformation;
Society;
Welfare;
Social Issues;
Private Sector;
Public Sector;
Information Technology Industry;
Asia;
India;
New Delhi
- March 2017
- Article
Challenges for Empirical Research on RPM
By: Alexander MacKay and David A. Smith
This article discusses the empirical challenges that researchers face when demonstrating the existence and effects of resale price maintenance (RPM). We outline three approaches for finding price effects of RPM and the corresponding hurdles in data and methodology. We...
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- July 2016
- Article
Taxation, Corruption, and Growth
By: Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Julia Cagé and William R. Kerr
We build an endogenous growth model to analyze the relationships between taxation, corruption, and economic growth. Entrepreneurs lie at the center of the model and face disincentive effects from taxation but acquire positive benefits from public infrastructure....
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- 2016
- Working Paper
The Empirical Economics of Online Attention
By: Andre Boik, Shane Greenstein and Jeffrey Prince
In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but instead for consumer attention. We model and characterize how households allocate their scarce attention in arguably the largest market for attention: the Internet. Our characterization of household...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Fiscal Rules and Sovereign Default
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Recurrent concerns over debt sustainability in emerging and developed nations have prompted renewed debate on the role of fiscal rules. Their optimality, however, remains unclear. We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt...
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- Article
Optimal Taxation When Children's Abilities Depend on Parents' Resources
By: Alexander Gelber and Matthew Weinzierl
Empirical research suggests that parents' economic resources affect their children's future earnings abilities. Optimal tax policy therefore treats future ability distributions as endogenous to current taxes. We model this endogeneity, calibrate the model to match...
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- February 2016
- Article
Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a...
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- June 2015
- Case
1996 Welfare Reform in the United States
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Katrina Flanagan and Alastair Su
On August 22, 1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—a dramatic reform of the American system of economic assistance for the poor that, as its title suggested, attempted to...
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- April 2015 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
The German Export Engine
By: Gunnar Trumbull and Jonathan Schlefer
In fall of 2018, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel had logged significant successes. Germany was the largest exporter in the world, had maintained low unemployment through the 2008 financial crisis, and was gradually reforming its welfare state to meet future pension...
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