Behavioral decision research has profoundly changed our understanding of decision-making. Recent research has begun to explore how behavioral insights can influence behavior in the world, at scale. This work often involves field experiments studying outcomes over short time windows. We study a...

For children in foster care who cannot be reunified with their families of origin, there is no question that adoption is preferable to “aging outâ€. Moreover, every dollar spent on adoption for a child from foster care yields three dollars in benefits. Yet, 27,854 youth aged out of...

In the past, various great powers have taken the stage as models of economic and social development. Examples such as Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States have had their time in the spotlight that has come and gone as flaws were exposed; and other countries have learned...

The dilemma is real and profound: most countries have a property tax, but few of their citizens like the tax. The property tax is the tax everyone loves to hate. Countries can seldom live with the tax as initially designed, yet neither can they live without the tax at all. Thus, this chapter...

This article addresses the challenge of managing uncertainty when producing estimative intelligence. Much of the theory and practice of estimative intelligence aims to eliminate or reduce uncertainty, but this is often impossible or infeasible. This article instead argues that the goal of...

We present a standard model of financial innovation, in which intermediaries engineer securities with cash flows that investors seek, but modify two assumptions. First, investors (and possibly intermediaries) neglect certain unlikely risks. Second, investors demand securities with safe cash...

We present a simple model in which rational but uninformed traders occasionally chase noise as if it were information, thereby amplifying sentiment shocks and moving prices away from fundamental values. In the model, noise traders can have an impact on market equilibrium disproportionate to...

We provide a novel account of experimental evidence for the endowment effect using the salience mechanism (Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer, 2011). The two-stage procedure implemented in experiments implies that the endowed good and other goods are evaluated in different contexts. We describe...

Extending Barro (1999) and Luttmer & Mariotti (2003), we introduce a new model of time preferences: the instantaneous-gratiï¬cation model. This model applies tractably to a much wider range of settings than existing models. It applies to both complete- and incomplete-market settings and it...

We derive the ï¬rst closed-form optimal reï¬nancing rule: Reï¬nance when the current mortgage interest rate falls below the original rate by at least \(\frac{1}{ψ}\)[φ + W (− exp (−φ))]. In this formula W(.) is the Lambert W-function, ψ = \(\frac{2 (Ï +...