We examine the effect of undiagnosed memory disorders on credit outcomes using individually-matched nationally representative credit reporting and Medicare data. We find effects of early stage disease, years before diagnosis, on a wide range of financial outcomes, including credit card account payment delinquency and amount of delinquent balance, credit utilization among credit card account holders, mortgage delinquency and delinquent balance amount, and credit scores. Effects are pervasive, affecting seniors in single and coupled households, racial/ethnic minorities and non-minorities, and older adults living in areas with higher and lower education levels. Early stage effects are greater among singles and Black individuals.

We use linked administrative data on the universe of California births to provide novel evidence on economic inequality in infant and maternal health. Infants and mothers at the top of the income distribution have worse birth and morbidity outcomes than their lowest-income counterparts, but are nevertheless the least likely to die in the year following birth. Racial disparities swamp these income disparities, with no racial convergence in health outcomes as income rises. A comparison with Sweden shows that infant and maternal health is worse in California at virtually all income levels.

Using GPS location data from customers’ mobile devices, we develop measures of customer shopping behavior intended to capture the likelihood that customers will shop again in the future, and we examine their associations with firms’ financial decisions and outcomes. We measure customers’ propensity to return using the frequency, distance, duration, and timing of their past visits to a firm’s retail locations. We find a positive association between customers’ propensity to return and the persistence of the firm’s revenues and earnings. We also find a positive association between customers’ propensity to return and the efficiency of investing and operating decisions among firms likely to incorporate customer data into their internal information systems. Our results illustrate conditions under which revenues and earnings are sustainable and when managerial decisions are consistent with insights provided by customer information. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

This paper develops a framework to extend the strategic form analysis of cursed equilibrium (CE) developed by Eyster and Rabin (2005) to multistage games. The approach uses behavioral strategies rather than normal form mixed strategies and imposes sequential rationality. We define and characterize properties of cursed sequential equilibrium (CSE) and apply it to four canonical economic applications: signaling games, reputation building, durable goods monopoly, and the dirty faces game. These applications illustrate various implications of CSE, show how and why it differs from sequential equilibrium and CE, and provide evidence from laboratory experiments that support the empirical relevance of CSE.

The Supplemental Security Income program uses a birth weight cutoff at 1,200 grams to determine eligibility. Using birth certificates linked to administrative records, we find low-income families of infants born just below the cutoff receive higher monthly cash benefits (equal to 27 percent of family income) at ages 0–2 with smaller benefits continuing through age 10. Yet we detect no improvements in health care use and mortality in infancy, nor in health and human capital outcomes as observed through young adulthood for these infants. We also find no improvements for their older siblings.

German long-term health insurance (GLTHI) represents the largest market for private long-term health insurance contracts in the world. We show that GLTHI’s contract design coincides with the optimal dynamic contract for individuals with constant lifetime income profiles. After estimating the key ingredients of a life-cycle model, we find that, under a variety of assumptions, GLTHI achieves welfare that is at most 4% lower than for the optimal contract. Relative to the gains of replacing short-term contracts with either of the two long-term contracts, this welfare gap is smallest when reclassification risk is high.

Despite private access to managers, issuer-paid credit rating agencies (CRAs) are often criticized for failing to promptly reflect material negative private information in their ratings and being ineffective corporate watchdogs. We utilize a novel dataset of private SEC investigations to examine the timeliness and informativeness of CRAs’ rating adjustments in response to material negative private information. Our evidence suggests that CRAs adjust ratings downward within a quarter following the opening of an SEC investigation. Moreover, these adjustments are over three times larger for those investigations that ultimately yield an enforcement action than for those that do not, suggesting that CRAs quickly form sophisticated expectations about the materiality of the private information. Additionally, rating downgrades during the investigations are more informative to the stock market than other rating downgrades. Overall, our evidence suggests that CRAs reduce information asymmetry in the capital markets by timely incorporating material private information in their ratings. Data Availability: All data are available from the sources cited in the text.