We analyze the impact of a Web-based trading channel on the trading activity in two corporate 401(k) plans. Using detailed data on about 100,000 participants, we compare trading growth in these firms to growth for a sample of firms without a Web channel. After 18 months of access, the inferred...

There is a large body of literature documenting both a preference for immediacy and a tendency to procrastinate. O'Donoghue and Rabin (1999a,b, 2001) and Choi et al. (2005) model these behaviors as the two faces of the same phenomenon. In this paper, we use a combination of lab, field, and...

We propose an economic theory of addiction based on the premise that cognitive mechanisms such as attention affect behavior independently of preferences. We argue that the theory is consistent with foundational evidence (e.g. from neurosciencee and psychology) concerning the nature of...

Achievement gaps may reflect the cognitive impairment thought to occur in evaluative settings (e.g., classrooms) where a stereotyped identity is salient (i.e., stereotype threat). This study presents an economic model of stereotype threat that reconciles prior evidence on how student effort and...

To identify the determinants of social capital formation, it is necessary to understand the social capital investment decision of individuals. Individual social capital should then be aggregated to measure the social capital of a community. This paper assembles the evidence that supports the...

We test for whether, once "basic needs" are satisfied, there is happiness adaptation to further gains in income using three data sets. Individual German Panel Data from 1985-2000, and data on the well-being of over 600,000 people in a panel of European countries from 1975-2002, shows different...

This paper has two goals. First, we discuss several emerging approaches to applied welfare analysis under non-standard ("behavioral") assumptions concerning consumer choice. This provides a foundation for Behavioral Public Economics. Second, we illustrate applications of these approaches by...

We study the identification and estimation of Gorman-Lancaster style hedonic models of demand for differentiated products for the case when one product characteristic is not observed. Our identification and estimation strategy is a two-step approach in the spirit of Rosen (1974). Relative to...

Intellectual property (IP) protection involves a trade-off between the undesirability of monopoly and the desirable encouragement of creation and innovation. Optimal policy depends on the quantitative strength of these two forces. We give a quantitative assessment of current IP policies. We...

In this short paper we analyze the impact of tourist demand in hotel rooms on the investment of hotels on environmental quality. We show that when income of the tourists increases, then to maintain the demand for rooms, the hotels must in-crease the investment on the environmental quality of the...