The Review of Economic Studies is one of the core journals in economics. It is essential reading for economists, consistently ranking among the top five journals.

We measure individual-level loss aversion using three incentivized, representative surveys of the U.S. population (combined N = 3,000). We find that around 50% of the U.S. population is loss tolerant – they are willing to accept negative-expected-value gambles that contain a loss. This is counter to expert predictions and earlier findings which mostly come from lab/student samples that 70-90% of participants are loss averse. Consistent with the different findings in our study versus the prior literature, loss aversion is more prevalent in people with high cognitive ability. Further, our measure of gain-loss attitudes exhibits similar temporal stability and better predictive power outside our survey than measures of risk aversion.

What sows the seeds of financial crises, and what policies can help avoid them? I model the interaction between the ex-ante production of assets and ex-post adverse selection in financial markets. Positive shocks that increase market prices exacerbate the production of low quality assets and can increase the likelihood of a financial market collapse. The interest rate and the liquidity premium are endogenous and depend on the functioning of financial markets as well as the total supply of assets (private and public).

We construct a novel panel dataset for interwar Soviet Union to study the causes of Ukrainian famine mortality (Holodomor) during 1932-33 and document several facts: i) Ukraine produced enough food in 1932 to avoid famine in Ukraine; ii) 1933 mortality in the Soviet Union was increasing in the pre-famine ethnic Ukrainian population share and iii) was unrelated to food productivity across regions; iv) this pattern exists even outside of Ukraine; v) migration restrictions exacerbated mortality; vi) actual and planned grain procurement were increasing and actual and planned grain retention (production minus procurement) were decreasing in the ethnic Ukrainian population share across regions.

We study how firms target and influence expert intermediaries. In our context, pharmaceutical manufacturers provide payments to physicians during promotional interactions. We develop an identification strategy based on plausibly exogenous variation in payments driven by differential exposure to spillovers from academic medical centers’ conflict-of-interest policies. Using a case study of an important class of cardiovascular drugs, we estimate heterogeneous effects of payments on prescribing, with firms targeting highly responsive physicians.

We establish that macroprudential controls limiting capital flows can curb risks arising from foreign currency borrowing by corporates in emerging markets. Firm-level data show that Indian firms tend to issue more foreign currency debt when the interest rate differential between India and the United States is higher. This “carry trade” relationship, however, breaks down once regulators institute more stringent interest rate caps on borrowing; in response, riskier borrowers cut issuance most.

Social interactions determine many economic behaviors, but information on social ties does not exist in most publicly available and widely used datasets. We present results on the identification of social networks from observational panel data that contains no information on social ties between agents. In the context of a canonical social interactions model, we provide sufficient conditions under which the social interactions matrix, endogenous and exogenous social effect parameters are globally identified if networks are constant over time. We also provide an extension of the method for time-varying networks.