We study experimentally the effect on individual behavior of comparative, but payoff-irrelevant, information in a near-minimal group setting. Specifically, in each round, group members see the groups' cumulative payoffs, which consist of an aggregation of the earnings of each member of the group...

In this note, we present a novel computerized real effort task based on moving sliders across a screen which overcomes many of the drawbacks of existing real effort tasks. The task was first developed and used by us in Gill and Prowse (forthcoming). We outline the design of our \slider task",...

The UK, with its relatively liberal immigration policies following recent enlargements, has been one of the main recipients of migrants from new EU member states. This paper poses the questions: what is the effect of immigration on a receiving economy such as the UK? Is the effect beneficial or...

We study a simple dynamic model of social learning with local informational exter-nalities. There is a large population of agents, who repeatedly have to choose one, out of two, reversible actions, each of which is optimal in one, out of two, unknown states of the world. Each agent chooses...

This paper considers a multi-unit ascending auction with two players and common values. A large set of equilibria in this model is not robust to a small reputational perturbation. In particular, if there is a positive probability that there is a type who always demands many units, regardless of...

This paper investigates how mass media provide information to readers or viewers who have diverse interests. The problem of a mass medium comes from the fact that there is a constraint on how much information can be delivered. It is shown that the mass medium optimally provides information that...

While earning processes are commonly unobservable income flows which evolve in continuous time, observable income data are usually discrete, having been aggregated over time. We consider continuous-time earning processes, specifically (non-linearly) transformed Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, and...

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? We propose and analyze a particular market failure that leads to inefficiently low fertility in equilibrium. The friction is caused by the lack of ownership of children: if parents have no claim on their children’s income, the...

Import tariff receipts represent an important share of government revenues in many developing countries and there has recently been a surge in empirical studies showing how evasion in this field is a pervasive phenomenon. In the case of import tariffs, the tax base is the product of quantity and...