Using data across countries and over time we show that women are unhappier than men in unhappiness and negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used - anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger - and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless...

We examine the effect of the 1996 Tax Reform Act on the labor supply of affluent men. The Act reduced marginal tax rates for the affluent more than for other taxpayers. Using instrumental-variables methods with a variety of identifying variables, we find essentially no responsiveness of the...

Large savings and current account surpluses by China and other countries are said to be a contributor to the global current account imbalances and possibly to the recent global financial crisis. This paper proposes a theory of excess savings based on a major, albeit insufficiently recognized by...

We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using both an error components model as well as simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the...

Goods and services---public housing, medical appointments, schools---are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual preferences are known and when they are not. Several insights...

A choice-theoretic model of household decision-making with respect to care-giving time allocations and the use of publicly and privately financed home care services is proposed. Predictions concerning the effect of increased availability of publicly financed home care services on home care...

This paper investigates whether peer effects play an important role in retirement savings decisions. We use individual data from the staff of a university to study whether individual decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account plan sponsored by the university (and the choice of the mutual fund...

This paper studies the consequences of physician authority on pharmaceutical prescribing. Physicians engage in a costly process of particular conditions and characteristics. The relative efficiency of this matching process results from the diagnostic skill of the physician along with the...

This paper provides a unified framework for interpreting a wide range of interactions models which have appeared in the economics literature. A formalization taken from the statistical mechanics literature is shown to encompass a number of socioeconomic phenomena ranging from out of wedlock...

In its attempt to model financial markets and the behavior of firms, modern finance theory starts from a set of normatively appealing axioms about individual behavior. Specifically, people are said to be risk-averse expected utility maximizers and unbiased Bayesian forecasters, i.e., agents make...