We compare male and female behavior in Japan and Canada in the context of a threshold public goods game with both a strong free-riding equilibrium and many socially efficient threshold equilibria. Although higher rewards produce higher contributions, neither culture nor gender has any...

Recently, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reduced resale restrictions on Rule 144 private placements from 12 months to 6 months with the intention of lowering the cost of equity capital for issuing firms. In Canada, similar regulatory changes were adopted several years ago, providing...

To investigate the effects of gender and national culture on economic behavior, we compare all-male and all-female groups from Japan and Canada in the context of a threshold public goods game with a strong free-riding equilibrium and many socially efficient threshold equilibria. Females and...

We consider a differential game of a conflict between two factions who both have a desire to exact revenge. We show that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, the desire for revenge need not lead to escalation of conflicts. Surprisingly, in the open-loop equilibrium, the weaker faction exerts a...

Consider a world with two people, 1 and 2, where person 1 (the proposer) may offer to help person 2 (the responder). The proposer may be altruistic towards the responder either out of a genuine desire to make her happy or out of guilt. The responder derives disutility from apparent acts of...

In this paper we examine the effect of greenhouse pollution, as measured by CO2 emissions, on economic growth among a set of OECD countries during the period 1981-1998. We examine the relationship between total factor productivity (TFP) growth and pollution using a semiparametric smooth...

This paper presents an axiomatic framework for measuring life time poverty over multiple periods. For an individual, we argue that lifetime poverty is influenced by both the snapshot poverty of each period and the poverty level of the "permanent" lifetime consumption; it is also influenced by...

Using the popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, this paper makes a contribution to the literatures on the design of contests, the allocation of voting rights in committees, and the desirability of low-powered incentive schemes. In American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in...

Asymmetric information in the form of moral hazard and adverse selection can result in sizeable efficiency losses and program costs for government provided crop insurance plans. We present a methodology and illustrative simulations to show how these two types of information problems interact in...

This note provides an explanation for why tax rates on capital gains are usually lower than ordinary income tax rates based on manager's agency problem related to "empire-building" or the underinvestment problem.