Recent evidence suggests that individuals do not always take notice of tax attributes when making their choices. This paper focuses on the case of tax relief for charitable contributions. Although a fully rational donor should view a matched payment to the receiving charity and a tax rebate of...

This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks in general, on an 11-point...

We develop a model of common agency with complete information and general preferences with non-transferable utility, and prove that the principals’ Nash equilibrium in truthful strategies implements an efficient action. We apply this theory to construct a positive model of public finance,...

Globalization – improved access to integrated, anonymous markets – is claimed to crowd out cooperative relations: from reciprocal exchange to lifetime employment, from relational governance to corruption/collusion. We study how agents’ intertemporal preferences and their access to markets...

This paper develops a model of individual adjustment subject to mistakes. In this case when mistakes are assumed i.i.d., this process produces a probability distribution of agents decision whose evolution is determined by Fokker-Planck equation. This distribution converges to the unique,...

This paper estimates the causal e ect of perceived job insecurity - i.e. the fear of involuntary job loss - on health in a sample of 22 European countries. We rely on an original instrumental variable approach based on the idea that workers perceive greater job security in countries where...

Our paper examines the importance of office suites for the evolution of the PC office software market in the 1990s. We develop a discrete choice model of product differentiation that enables us to estimate correlation in consumer preferences across spreadsheets and word processors. Estimation...

Most post-communist economies are characterized by an initial collapse in aggregate output. Blanchard and Kremer (1997) and Roland and Verdier (1997) have recently modelled supply side distortions (disorganization in the links of production) that can lead to a short-term output contraction after...

Prominent economic theories have emphasized the role of commonly held perceptions and expectations for determining macroeconomic outcomes. A key empirical question is how such collectively held beliefs are formed. We use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a natural experiment. We provide direct evidence...