The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is the international agreement that regulates international trade in wildlife to prevent its decline. Little is known about the effectiveness of its trade restrictions and bans. Combining the largest...

Within a general equilibrium model, this paper identifies a novel animal welfare externality that occurs if the private animal friendliness in a market economy falls short of the social animal friendliness used by the social planner when determining the efficient allocation. The animal welfare...

We propose a new measure of deviations from expected utility, given data on economic choices under risk and uncertainty. In a revealed preference setup, and given a positive number e, we provide a characterization of the datasets whose deviation (in beliefs, utility, or perceived prices) is...

Blockchains, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies, face large fluctuations in user demand and marginal costs. These fluctuations make effective fee policies necessary to manage transaction service allocation. This paper models the conflict between the blockchain designer and validators...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

We identify a natural counterpart of the standard GARP for demand data in which goods are all indivisible. We show that the new axiom (DARP, for “discrete axiom of revealed preference”) is necessary and sufficient for the rationalization of the data by a well-behaved utility function. Our...

A nudge is a non-coercive paternalistic intervention that attempts to improve choices by manipulating the framing of a decision problem. As any paternalism, it faces the difficulty of determining the appropriate welfare criterion. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in...

Airport noise is costly. Airport location is typically associated with lower property prices. Airport expansion often sparks protests by local residents. In this paper, I provide new evidence on the costs of airport-related noise (and other disamenities of airports) for individuals. In contrast...

We study a large economy model in which individuals have private information about their productive abilities and their preferences. Moreover, there is aggregate uncertainty so that the social benefits from taxation and public goods provision are a priori unknown. The analysis is based on a...