In this paper we offer the first large sample evidence on the availability and usage of credit lines in U.S. public corporations and use it to re-examine the existing findings on corporate liquidity. We show that the availability of credit lines is widespread and that average undrawn credit is...

We survey a number of papers that have focused on the construction of cross-country data sets on average years of schooling. We discuss the construction of the different series, compare their profiles and construct indicators of their information content. The discussion focuses on a sample of...

Human capital accumulation may negatively affect economic growth by increasing tax avoidance and reducing effective tax rates and productive public investment. This paper analyzes how the endogenous feedback between human capital accumulation and tax avoidance affects economic growth and...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on human capital and productivity and summarizes the results of my own work on the subject. On balance, the available evidence suggests that investment in education has a positive, significant and sizable effect on productivity growth. According to my...

We analyze the use of discrete choice models for the estimation of risk aversion and show a fundamental flaw in the standard random utility model which is commonly used in the literature. Specifically, we find that given two gambles, the probability of selecting the riskier gamble may be larger...

In contrast to the simplifying assumption of selfishness, social incentives have been shown to play a role in economic interactions. Before incorporating social incentives into models and policies, however, one needs to know their efficiency relative to standard pay-for-performance incentives....

We compare behavior in modified dictator games with and without role uncertainty. Subjects choose between a selfish action, a costly surplus creating action (altruistic behavior) and a costly surplus destroying action (spiteful behavior). While costly surplus creating actions are most frequent...

We present a theory of context-dependent choice in which a consumer's attention is drawn to salient attributes of goods, such as quality or price. An attribute is salient for a good when it stands out among the good's attributes, relative to that attribute's average level in the choice set (or...

In many areas of economics there is a growing interest in how expertise and preferences drive individual and group decision making under uncertainty. Increasingly, we wish to estimate such models to quantify which of these drive decision making. In this paper we propose a new channel through...