This paper shows that models where preferences of individuals depend not only on their allocations, but also on the well-being of other persons, can produce both large and testable effects. We study the allocation of workers with heterogeneous productivities to firms. We show that even small...

We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine private health insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider a purely private system or a system in which private insurance supplements a public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately funded health...

Much of empirical economics involves regression analysis. However, does the presentation of results affect economists ability to make inferences for decision making purposes? In a survey, 257 academic economists were asked to make probabilistic inferences on the basis of the outputs of a...

This paper investigates the role of learning by private agents and the central bank (two-sided learning) in a New Keynesian framework in which both sides of the economy have asymmetric and imperfect knowledge about the true data generating process. We assume that all agents employ the data that...

This paper studies a model of announcements by a privately informed government about the future state of the economic activity in an economy subject to recurrent shocks and with distortions due to income taxation. Although transparent communication would ex ante be desirable, we find that even a...

We study the determinants of political myopia in a rational model of electoral accountability where political ability is ex-ante unknown and policy choices are not perfectly observable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep well-performing incumbents. On the other,...

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politicians perceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters. To do so, it proposes a model of elections where...

We study the optimal mechanism for downsizing the public sector which takes into account different informational constraints (complete versus asymmetric information on each workers efficiency) and political constraints (mandatory versus voluntary downsizing). Under complete information, the...

Obtaining information about changes in market conditions is vital for the survival of the firms operating in a changing environment. In this paper, we offer a theory of information flows in a setting in which the principal faces a project choice and needs to induce the agent, who is responsible...

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence consistent with models of signaling through unemployment and to uncover a new stylized fact using the 1988-2006 DWS, namely that, among white-collar workers, post-displacement earnings fall less rapidly with unemployment spells for layoffs...