People's beliefs about how well economic theory predicts outcomes may affect policy through democratic processes. Knowing what determines those beliefs is then important. We investigate how individual attitudes and characteristics correlate with those beliefs using a classroom Double Auction...

This paper empirically investigates how the level of authority delegation is related to the performance of an organization. Decentralized, horizontal organizational structure takes advantage of more effcient decision making, mainly due to more efficient use of "soft" information. The cost of...

For the biofuel markets and related commodities, we study their price transmission, which is in fact equivalent to studying price cross-elasticities. Importantly, we focus on the price dependence of the price transmission mechanism. Several methodological caveats are discussed. Specifically, we...

This paper studies the effciency of financial intermediation through securitization with asymmetric information about the quality of securitized loans. In this theoretical model, I show that, in general, by providing reputation-based implicit recourse, the issuer of a loan can credibly signal...

Inflation rates have traditionally been measured by the annualized percentage change in the price level of a market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households. The market basket represents the spending patterns of average household. However, households differ in their spending...

The current study assesses the effects of immigration control on the welfare of the current and future population of a host economy. A theoretical model of a small open economy populated with overlapping generations of heterogeneous agents is used to show that skillfavouring immigration policies...

This study is the first economic experiment that tests the economic significance of the theory of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966). For this purpose, I design an economic experiment in which subjects are asked to express their valuation of two-choice situations. In one case, subjects are...

Married couples file joint tax returns in many European countries. Nevertheless, research quantifying the effect of joint taxation on the work incentives of secondary earners is scarce thanks to a lack of recent policy changes. This study makes use of the introduction of joint taxation in the...

Promoting competition among electricity producers is primarily targeted at ensuring low electricity prices for consumers. Producers could, however, withhold part of production facilities (i.e., apply a capacity cutting strategy) and thereby push more expensive production facilities to satisfy...

The economic literature acknowledges that to avoid the resource curse, resource- rich countries should restrict fiscal expansion and save a significant part of resource revenues outside the domestic economy. However, in these countries governments tend to ineffectively spend a considerable part...