Antitrust enforcement in the United States has declined since the 1960s. Building on several new datasets, we argue that this decline did not reflect a popular demand for weaker enforcement or any other kind of democratic sanction. The decline was engineered by unelected regulators and judges...

Entering a currency union without any political union European countries have taken a gamble: will the needs of the currency union force a political integration (as anticipated by Monnet) or will the tensions create a backlash, as suggested by Kaldor, Friedman and many others? We try to answer...

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture....

Academics' view of the benefits of finance vastly exceeds societal perception. This dissonance is at least partly explained by an under-appreciation by academia of how, without proper rules, finance can easily degenerate into a rent-seeking activity. I outline what finance academics can do, from...

The housing crisis threatens to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value by causing homeowners with negative equity to walk away from their houses. We advocate a legal reform that would allow homeowners to reduce principal while giving mortgage holders an equity interest. Such a plan...

Using an incentivized measure of individuals' taste for competition, this paper investigates whether this taste explains subsequent gender differences in earnings and industry choice in a sample of high-ability MBA graduates. We find that “competitive” individuals earn 9% more than their...

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture....

Academics' view of the benefits of finance vastly exceeds societal perception. This dissonance is at least partly explained by an under‐appreciation by academia of how, without proper rules, finance can easily degenerate into a rent‐seeking activity. I outline what finance academics can do,...

Life is replete with instances where two closely related parties forego mutually advantageous opportunities: peace treaties are not signed, inefficient regulations are not altered, and possibilities for investment are frittered away. Since the parties are in close contact, asymmetric information...

This paper reports a positive and statistically significant relation between short-term discount rates elicited with a monetary and a primary reward (chocolate). This finding suggests that high short-term discount rates are related to an underling individual trait