Michael Kremer

TL;DR: The authors argue that markets are most advantageous in areas where high-powered incentives are desirable, but in areas with highpowered incentives stimulate unproductive signalling effort, firms, or even government, may have a comparative advantage.

TL;DR: The blazar J1924-2914 is a very compact flat-spectrum radio source with strong optical variability and polarization as mentioned in this paper , which is a primary Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) calibrator for the Galactic center's black hole Sagittarius A*.

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of reduced transaction costs in the international trading of assets on the ability of governments to issue debt. We examine a model in which governments care about the welfare of their citizens, and thus are more inclined to default if a large proportion of their debt is held by foreigners. Reductions in transaction costs make it easier for domestic citizens to share risk by selling debt to foreigners. This may increase tendencies for governments to default, and thus raise their cost of credit and reduce welfare. We find that even in the absence of transaction costs, home bias in placement of government debt may persist, because in the presence of default risk the return on government debt is correlated with the tax burden required to pay the debt. Asset inequality may reduce this home bias, and by increasing foreign ownership, increase incentives for default. Finally, if foreign creditors are less risk averse than domestic creditors, there may be one equilibrium in which domestic creditors hold the asset and default risk is low, and another in which foreign creditors hold the asset and default risk is high.

TL;DR: The authors assess evidence from randomized control trials (RCTs) on long-run economic productivity and living standards in poor countries and conclude that the rise of development economics RCTs since roughly 2000 provides a novel opportunity to generate high-quality evidence on the long run drivers of living standards.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined a natural experiment in which students at a large state university were randomly assigned roommates through a lottery system and found that on average, males assigned to roommates who reported drinking in the year prior to entering college had one quarter-point lower GPA than those assigned to non-drinking roommates.