We find that lottery tax windfalls finance higher state-government expenditures on supplemental security income that increase consumption, but only during bust periods. Wealth transfers from lottery winners to low income households enable fiscal policy to stabilize consumption during bust periods.

We show that to account for the cross-sectional divergence in debt-to-income ratios in US data a DSGE model must assume a tax reallocation across the top- and bottom-income quantile of the population, rather than differential productivity growth, and low cost of access to financial intermediation.

Consumption falls counter-factually on impact for investment-specific technology shocks, which, recent literature suggests, are important drivers of business cycles. Introducing financial frictions and variable capacity utilization to the standard New-Keynesian setup can overturn this...

Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2011) show that some naive participants may be better off under the Boston mechanism than under deferred acceptance. Here we show that under the veil of ignorance all naive students may prefer the Boston mechanism.

Experimental studies have compared cooperation across different nonmarket social dilemma settings, but the experimental literature has largely overlooked comparing cooperation across market and nonmarket settings. This paper reports the results from an experiment that compares behavior in...

The incentive effect of a handicap in a tournament competition is studied. A handicap may decrease the effort levels of the advantaged group or the disadvantaged group. However, the average effort level will always increase as long as the performance measure is informative of effort in a...

I study the institution of avoiding hiring one’s own Ph.D. graduates for assistant professorships. I argue that this institution is necessary to create better incentives for researchers to incorporate new information in studies, facilitating the convergence to asymptotic learning of the...

This paper investigates the relationship between financial optimism and non-participation in pension schemes in the UK. We show that financial optimism reduces the probability of employees joining employer run pension schemes and also the probability of the self-employed subscribing to private...

We adjust current account surpluses and deficits of 57 countries in the period 2005–2009 for differences in the age structure of their populations and find that these differences can account for a significant part of the variation in the data. Among the large countries we find that the...

We study the neoclassical growth model with non-constant discounting. We do not assume specific functional forms for discounting and demonstrate that the competitive economy always performs better than the planning economy.