During times of economic crises, the public policy response is to abandon basic economic thinking and engage in ‘emergency economic’ policies. We explore how the current financial crisis was in part caused by previous emergency economic measures. We then investigate the theoretical...

We offer a tractable model of broadcast media as a three-sided platform, serving entertainment and news to viewers, commercial opportunities to advertisers, and electoral influence to politicians. We characterize the profit-maximization decision of a media firm, and study the effect on social...

We explore the importance of appearance in the endogenous formation of groups using a series of experiments. Participants get to choose who they want in their group, and we manipulate the amount of payoff-relevant information on behavior, thereby making it costly to discriminate based on...

Strategic communication occurs in committee decision environments. Theory suggests that small differences in monetary incentives between committee members explains why deception may be strategically optimal (Crawford and Sobel, 1982; Galeotti et al, 2012). In natural environments, however, social...

Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economics approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different contexts. We conduct an...

Widespread agreement that a political reform is necessary is no guarantee that it is actually undertaken in a timely manner. There is often a delay before action is taken and reform packages that would be most efficient to implement all at once are often done only gradually. We propose a...

Economists often model national defense as a pure public good optimally provided by a benevolent and omnipotent "defense brain" to maximize social welfare. I critically consider five assumptions associated with this view: (1) that defense and security is a pure public good that must be provided...

Quantitative Easing programs between 2008 and 2015 dramatically transformed the Fed's balance sheet in size, in liability composition, and in asset composition. While the QE programs accelerated the monetary base (M0) at an unprecedented rate, they did not accelerate the quantity of money held...

It is common to think of federalism as a governmental arrangement that entails competition among governments. Thinking this way, however, is problematic. A competitive system is generally associated with the notion of polycentricity, as illustrated by a market system of free and open...

We use a database generated by a policy intervention that incentivized learning as measured by standardized exams to investigate empirically the relationship between cheating by students and cash incentives to students and teachers. We adapt methods from the education measurement literature to...