This paper analyzes the effects of network positions and individual risk attitudes on individuals' strategic decisions in an experiment where actions are strategic substitutes. The game theoretic basis for our experiment is the model of Bramoullé and Kranton (2007). In particular, we are...

Loss aversion is one of the most robust findings to have emerged from behavioral economics. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been devoted to nominal loss aversion, the interaction of loss aversion and money illusion. People tend to think of transactions in terms of their nominal...

There is a large body of literature documenting both a preference for immediacy and a tendency to procrastinate. O'Donoghue and Rabin (1999a,b, 2001) and Choi et al. (2005) model these behaviours as two faces of the same phenomenon. In this paper, we use a combination of lab, field, and survey...

This Paper is an exercise in dating the euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. We construct several monthly European real GDP series, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. Using this method we identify four business cycles. Studying further indicators of business activity, we...

We study the effects of German unification on macroeconomic variables in a model with capital accumulation, skill differences and a welfare state. The integration of two economies differing in capital holdings and skill distribution is similar to a mass migration of low-skilled agents holding no...

This paper examines the business cycle properties of a small set of real US macroeconomic time series using a variety of detrending methods. It is shown: (i) that both quantitatively and qualitatively `stylized facts' of US business cycles vary widely across detrending methods; (ii) that...

Economic theory is often abused in practical policy-making. There is frequently excessive focus on sophisticated theory at the expense of elementary theory; too much economic knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Too little attention is paid to the wider economic context, and to the...