We study stabilization targets: common environmental policy recommendations that specify a maximum probability of an environmental variable exceeding a fixed target (e.g. limit climate change to at most 2°C above preindustrial). Previous work generally considers stabilization targets under...

The average quality of spouse an individual marries varies significantly with age at marriage, peaking in the mid-twenties, then declining through the mid-forties, as does the hazard rate of marriage. Using a non-stationary sequential search model, we identify the search frictions that generate...

We show that informative political campaigns can increase political extremism and decrease voter welfare. We present a model of elections in which candidate ideology is strategically selected prior to a campaign which reveals information about candidate quality. Documented means by which...

This paper is concerned with growth patterns of US health care expenditures. Within a representative sample of OECD countries, we lay out a growth accounting exercise for health care expenditures to assess the influence of several explanatory variables. Our analysis demonstrates that the...

This paper challenges the prevailing view in the literature that informational lobbying is socially beneficial. Key to our analysis is the fact that policymakers are constrained on the number of issues they can address, which forces them to prioritize issues. Under reasonable conditions,...

The role of structural breaks in long spans of ex-post real interest rates for ten industrialized countries is studied. First, the persistence of the real interest is assessed with newly proposed low-frequency tests of Muller and Watson (2008). Second, the test of Leybourne et al. (2007) for a...

Vampires are a prominent feature of modern culture. Past research identifies the ecological and economic relationship between vampires and living humans under the assumption that 'representative agents' are capable of characterising entire communities. Whether populations of individuals can...

The relative standard deviation of win percentages, the most widely used measure of within-season competitive balance, has an upper bound which is very sensitive to variation in the numbers of teams and games played. Taking into account this upper bound provides additional insight into...

The New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries constrains the incidental capture of HookerÕs sea lions in trawl nets of the southern squid fishery by closing the season once an upper limit on sea lion deaths is reached. The regulatory measure is in fact a limit on effort since the number of sea lion...