Economists have long been concerned that negative attitudes about relative income reduce social welfare. This paper investigates whether such attitudes can be mitigated by a simple information treatment. Toward this end, we conducted an original randomized online survey experiment in the US and...

Economists have long been concerned that negative attitudes about relative income reduce social welfare. This paper investigates whether such attitudes can be mitigated by a simple information treatment. Toward this end, we conducted an original randomized online survey experiment in the US and...

Martin Stuart ("Marty") Feldstein, currently George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. (NBER), is an American economist who has made important contributions to public finance, macroeconomics,...

We search for impartiality in the allocation of objects when monetary transfers are not possible. Our main focus is anonymity. The standard definition requires that if agents' names are permuted, their assignments should be permuted in the same way. Since no rule satisfies this definition in...

Based on Chinese city-level data from 1999 to 2012 and controlling for geological, environmental, and social diversity, this study suggests that credit plays a significant role in driving up house prices after the Great Recession, whereas property prices only influence bank lending before 2008....

It is well known that height is positively associated with earnings. Based on individual level data, this paper investigates the channels through which height influences income in China. Our first key finding is that taller people are more likely to become members of the Communist Party,...

This study analyzes one-leader and multiple-follower Stackelberg games with private information regarding demand uncertainty. In the equilibrium of the Stackelberg games, a leader's private information becomes public information among followers. This study demonstrates that the strategic...

Following Barbera, Sonnenschein, and Zhou (1991, Econometrica 59, 595-609), we study rules (or social choice functions) through which agents select a subset from a set of objects. We investigate domains on which there exist nontrivial strategy-proof rules. We establish that the set of separable...

Conflict can cause negative externalities to arise, and this can result in economic loss. Such externalities are also thought to influence individualsf perceptions about economic issues. Acemoglu and Robinson (2000) provide their hypothesis that the political elite extend the franchise to avoid...

This paper uses Japanese data which includes measures of self-declared satisfaction, reference-group income, and the direction and intensity of income comparisons. Relative to Europeans, the Japanese compare more to friends and less to colleagues, and compare their incomes more. The relationship...