In many groups heterogeneous incentives induce people to make unequal contributions to a common pool. This paper studies whether people consider the random assignment of such unequal incentives as unequal opportunities and demand more egalitarian distributions of the pool. The aggregate...

We develop and analyze a labor market model in which heterogeneous firms operate under decreasing returns and compete for labor by posting long-term contracts. Firms achieve faster growth by offering higher lifetime wages, which allows them to fill vacancies with higher probability, consistent...

We provide new evidence on the role of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in aggregate real economic activity in the US using a multiple-horizon Granger causality framework, while allowing for infrequent shifts in mean levels and growth rates of the system variables. Our empirical investigation...

In U.S. data 1981–2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable...

This paper develops a stochastic dynamic politico-economic model of sovereign debt to analyze the interaction of sovereign default risk and political turnover. Two parties differ in their preferred size of public spending which is financed by taxes and external debt. Electoral outcomes are...

We study whether early tracking of students based on ability increases migrant-native achievement gaps. To eliminate confounding impacts of unobserved country traits, we employ a differences-in-differences strategy that exploits international variation in the age of tracking as well as student...

Several RCT studies have shown that prevention of type 2 diabetes is feasible via lifestyle interventions. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence for economic effectiveness of prevention in real-world settings is scarce. We analyze costs and effectiveness of a specific type 2 diabetes prevention...

Many experts claim that the incidence of suicide attacks is driven by religious cleavages. To test this hypothesis, we investigate whether the total number of suicide attacks per violent conflict or the annual number of suicide attacks per country is associated with simmering religious...

Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated. Additionally, positive assortative mating has risen. Income inequality among households has also widened. A...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...