In low-income countries, malnutrition is often most severe among infants of six to twenty-four months. They need higher-density foods than the family diet, but density is a credence attribute. We hypothesize that the premium now paid for heavily advertised brands reflects demand for quality assurance, which could be provided at lower cost to competing firms through third-party certification. We...

We characterize pension systems along three dimensions: 1) actuarial vs. nonactuarial, 2) funded vs. pay-as-you-go, 3) defined-contribution vs. defined-benefit. Increasing the degree of actuarial fairness, by strengthening the linkage between contributions and benefits, reduces labor market distortions and may increase welfare in a Pareto-efficiency sense. Increasing the degree of funding impli...

This paper argues that unemployment insurance increases labor productivity by encouraging workers to seek higher productivity jobs, and by encouraging firms to create those jobs. We use a quantitative model to investigate whether this effect is comparable in magnitude to the standard moral hazard effects of unemployment insurance. Our model economy captures the behavior of the U.S. labor market...