We study the impact of diverse beliefs on conduct of monetary policy. We use a New Keynesian Model solved with a quadratic approximation. Aggregation renders the belief distribution an aggregate state variable. Diverse expectations change standard results about a smooth trade-off between...

We study the impact of political knowledge on the attitudes of European citizens towards the possible distribution of responsibilities between European level institutions and national governments in three policy areas: foreign policy, defence and immigration policy. The hypothesis tested is that...

This paper analyzes the dynamic incentives for technology adoption under a transferable permits system, which allows for strategic trading on the permit market. Initially, firms can invest both in low-emitting production technologies and trade permits. In the model, technology adoption and...

In this paper, we consider how the retirement age as well as a tax financed pension system ought to respond to a change in the standard deviation of the length of life. In a first best framework, where a benevolent government exercises perfect control over the individuals’ labor supply and...

Medical expenditure risk can pose a major threat to living standards. We derive decomposable measures of catastrophic medical expenditure risk from reference-dependent utility with loss aversion. We propose a quantile regression based method of estimating risk exposure from cross-section data...

This paper analyzes patent pools and their effects on innovation incentives. It is shown that the pro-competitive effects of patent pools for complementary patents naturally extend for dynamic innovation incentives. However, this simple conclusion may not hold if we entertain the possibility...

In a laboratory experiment, we measure subjects’ willingness to pay for a transparently useless decision right concerning the choice between two real effort tasks. We also elicit for each participant her change in beliefs about the likelihood of receiving her preferred task if she rather than...

How should we evaluate the welfare implications of improvements to safety technologies in the presence of offsetting behavior? We model this problem as a symmetric game in which each player’s payoff depends on his own action and the average action of the other players, and analyze under which...

This paper analyses the formation of international environmental agreements (IEAs) under uncertainty, focusing on the role of learning and risk aversion. It bridges two strands of literature: one focused on the role learning for the success of IEA formation when countries are risk neutral and...

We study the role of information exchange, leadership and coordination in team or partnership structures. For this purpose, we view individuals jointly engaging in productive processes—a ‘team’—as endowed with individual and privately held information on the joint production process....