n this paper we argue that very high marginal labor income tax rates are an effective tool for social insurance even when households have preferences with high labor supply elasticity, make dynamic savings decisions, and policies have general equilibrium effects. To make this point we construct...

We establish conditions under which an English auction for an indivisible risky asset has an efficient ex post equilibrium when the bidders are heterogeneous in both their exposures to, and their attitudes toward, the ensuing risk the asset will generate for the winning bidder. Each bidder's...

“Buy local” arrangements encourage members of a community or group to patronize one another rather than the external economy. They range from formal mechanisms such as local currencies to informal “I’ll buy from you if you buy from me” arrangements, and are often championed on social...

This paper studies infinite-horizon stochastic games in which players observe noisy public information about a hidden state each period. We find that if the game is connected, the limit feasible payoff set exists and is invariant to the initial prior about the state. Building on this invariance...

We develop a search-theoretic model of the product market that generates price dispersion across and within stores. Buyers differ with respect to their ability to shop around, both at different stores and at different times. The fact that some buyers can shop from only one seller while others...

People often consume non-durable goods in a way that seems inconsistent with preferences for smoothing consumption over time. We suggest that such patterns of consumption can be better explained if one takes into account the memories that consumption generates. A memorable good, such as a...

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on”superstar" inventors, those with the most and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over...

We study the attitude of decision makers to skewed noise. For a binary lottery that yields the better outcome with probability $p$, we identify noise around $p$, with a compound lottery that induces a distribution over the exact value of the probability and has an average value p. We propose and...

We consider a two-period model in which the success of the firm depends on the effort of a first-period manager (the incumbent) and the ability of a second-period manager. At the end of the first period, the board receives a noisy signal of the incumbent manager's ability and decides whether to...

We showed in McLean and Postlewaite (2014) that when agents are informationally small, there exist small modifications to VCG mechanisms in interdependent value problems that restore incentive compatibility. This paper presents a two-stage mechanism that similarly restores incentive...