This paper studies the aggregate and distributional implications of Markov-perfect taxspending policy in a neoclassical growth model with capitalists and workers. Focusing on the long run, our main findings are: (i) it is optimal for a benevolent government, which cares equally about its...

We combined a natural experiment (the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020) with the tools of laboratory experiments to study whether and how an unprecedented shock on social interactions (the introduction and abrogation of a nationwide lockdown) affected the evolution of individuals’...

One central method of ethics is narrow reflective equilibrium, relating to the conflict between intuitions about general moral principles and intuitions about concrete cases. In these conflicts, general principles are refined, or judgements in concrete chases change to accommodate the until no...

We study a voting model with partial information in which the evaluation of social welfare must be based on information about agents' top choices plus qualitative background conditions on preferences. The former is elicited individually, while the latter is not. The social evaluator is modeled...

We combined a natural experiment (the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020) with the tools of laboratory experiments to study whether and how an unprecedented shock on social interactions (the introduction and abrogation of a nationwide lockdown) affected the evolution of individuals'...

We present a theoretical framework to study risk and other-regarding preferences. The model can explain the main behavioral patterns in the combined domain and is the first to disentangle elementary attitudes on risk, altruism, social substitution, ex-ante inequality, and ex-post inequality. We...

A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...

Many personally risky decisions, such as innovation and entrepreneurship, have the potential to increase overall welfare by creating positive externalities for society. Rewarding such prosocial risk-taking may be an important strategy in addressing societal challenges like, for example, the...