Some two million Americans are currently incarcerated, with roughly six hundred thousand to be released this year. Despite this, little is known about the effects of confinement conditions on the post-release lives of inmates. Focusing on post-release criminal activity, we identify the causal...

We compare laboratory general equilibrium economies in which maintenance of a depreciating public facility is financed either by anonymous voluntary contributions or taxes. Agents individually allocate their private goods between consumption and investment in production. The experimental...

This paper experimentally investigates cooperative game theory from a normative perspective. Subjects designated as Decision Makers express their view on what is fair for others, by recommending a payoff allocation for three subjects (Recipients) whose substitutabilities and complementarities...

Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intra household...

In this paper we develop an approach to measuring inequality and poverty that recognizes the fact that individuals within households may have both different preferences and differential access to resources. We argue that a measure based on estimates of the sharing rule is inadequate as an...

This paper studies the role of bundling in the efficient provision of excludable public goods. We show that bundling in the provision of unrelated public goods can enhance social welfare. With a large number of goods and agents, first best can be approximated with pure bundling. For a parametric...

This paper studies the optimal provision mechanism for multiple excludable public goods when agents' valuations are private information. For a parametric class of problems with binary valuations, we characterize the optimal mechanism, and show that it involves bundling. Bundling alleviates the...

In incomplete information environments with transferable utility, efficient outcomes are generally implementable unless interim or ex post participation constraints are imposed on the problem. In this paper we show that linking a sufficiently large number of independent but possibly unrelated...

The monetary and fiscal control of a simple economy without outside randomness is studied here from the micro-economic basis of a strategic market game. The government's bureaucracy is treated as a public good that provides services at a cost. A conventional public good is also considered.

This paper shows that linking a sufficiently large number of independent but unrelated social decisions can achieve approximate efficiency. We provide regularity conditions under which a Groves mechanism amended with a veto game implements an efficient outcome with probability arbitrarily close...