We uncover a hidden illegal fishing practice: the use of fishing nets with illegally small mesh size. The small mesh prevents nearly all fish of saleable size from escaping the net, but also traps a large number of fish which are too small to be sold on the market and are therefore discarded at...

Production of commodities based on open-access renewable natural resources (NR) has usually been examined under "low" congestion (LC) – where MC AC and both increase with output. I identify two additional congestion categories, "high" (HC) and "super" (SC) congestion – where AC is...

Numerous developing economies depend vitally on renewable natural-resource (NR)-based commodities. This study develops a general equilibrium model to examine the steady-state impact of changes in a small economy's NR congestion under open access and optimal regulation. This issue has often been...

Many developing countries depend crucially on open-access renewable natural resources (NR). Trade is generally viewed as hurting the long-term health of NR in commodity-exporting countries. I examine whether trade might be beneficial in the case of population growth. Dynamic general equilibrium...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a general proposition of the relationship between altruism and risk taking. As explained in the body of the paper, we diverge from a result reported in Stark et al. (2022) and provide an expansion and a generalization of a preliminary result reported in...

Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide and a critical public health concern. We examine the hypothesis of suicide contagion within in the workplace, investigating whether exposure to a coworker's suicide increases an individual's suicide risk. Using high-quality administrative data from...

In a controlled field setting, in which the majority of people in our sample lose more than £90,000 ($120,000), we examine how human beings respond to major financial losses. University ethics boards would not allow this kind of huge-loss phenomenon to be studied with normal social-science...

This paper analyzes the stability and distribution of ambiguity attitudes using a broad population sample. Using high-powered incentives, we collected six waves of data on ambiguity attitudes about financial markets – our main application – and climate change. Estimating a structural...

In this paper, we provide an explanation for why risk taking is related to optimism. Using a laboratory experiment, we show that the degree of optimism predicts whether people tend to focus on the positive or negative outcomes of risky decisions. While optimists tend to focus on the good...

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality and risk taking. Increased income inequality is likely to enlarge the scope for upward comparisons and, in the presence of reference-dependent preferences, to increase willingness to take risks. Using a globally representative dataset...