Little is known about whether people make good choices when facing important decisions. This article reports on a large-scale randomized field experiment in which research subjects having difficulty making a decision flipped a coin to help determine their choice. For important decisions (e.g. quitting a job or ending a relationship), individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are more likely to make a change, more satisfied with their decisions, and happier six months later than those whose coin toss instructed maintaining the status quo. This finding suggests that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.

In this article, we ask how bankruptcy law affects the financial decisions of corporations and its implications for firm dynamics. According to current U.S. law, firms have two bankruptcy options: Chapter 7 liquidation and Chapter 11 reorganization. Using Compustat data, we first document capital structure and investment decisions of non-bankrupt, Chapter 11, and Chapter 7 firms. Using those data moments, we then estimate parameters of a general equilibrium firm dynamics model with endogenous entry and exit to include both bankruptcy options. Finally, we evaluate a bankruptcy policy change similar to one recommended by the American Bankruptcy Institute that amounts to a “fresh start” for bankrupt firms. We find that changes to the law can have sizable consequences for borrowing costs and capital structure which via selection affects productivity, as well as long run welfare.

This article develops a tractable theoretical framework for the Top Trading Cycles (TTC) mechanism for school choice that allows quantifying welfare and optimizing policy decisions. We compute welfare for TTC and Deferred Acceptance (DA) under different priority structures and find that the choice of priorities can have larger welfare implications than the choice of mechanism. We solve for the welfare-maximizing distributions of school quality for parametrized economies and find that optimal investment decisions can be very different under TTC and DA. Our framework relies on a novel characterization of the TTC assignment in terms of a cutoff for each pair of schools. These cutoffs parallel prices in competitive equilibrium, with students’ priorities serving the role of endowments. We show that these cutoffs can be computed directly from the distribution of preferences and priorities in a continuum model and derive closed-form solutions and comparative statics for parameterized settings. The TTC cutoffs not only clarify the role of priorities in determining the TTC assignment but also demonstrate that TTC is more complicated than DA.

Bitcoin provides its users with transaction-processing services which are similar to those of traditional payment systems. This article models the novel economic structure implied by Bitcoin’s innovative decentralized design, which allows the payment system to be reliably operated by unrelated parties called miners. We find that this decentralized design protects users from monopoly pricing. Competition among service providers within the platform and free entry imply no entity can profitably affect the level of fees paid by users. Instead, a market for transaction-processing determines the fees users pay to gain priority and avoid transaction-processing delays. The article (i) derives closed-form formulas of the fees and waiting times and studies their properties, (ii) compares pricing under the Bitcoin Payment System to that under a traditional payment system operated by a profit-maximizing firm, and (iii) suggests protocol design modifications to enhance the platform’s efficiency. The Appendix describes and explains the main attributes of Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain technology.