We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in Eu and OECD countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency, 13 % of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 percent via transfers, 5 % via subsidies, while taxes provide no...

I consider two seemingly unrelated puzzles; 1. Why is relative performance evaluation (RPE) used less in CEo compensation than agency theory suggests? 2. Why is sometimes, e.g., for fund managers, a mediocre performance more highly rewarded than excellence? I consider a simple tournament model,...

Maximizing the probability of bypassing an aspiration level, and taking increasing risks to recover previous losses are well-documented behavioral tendencies. They are compatible with individual utility functions that are S-shaped, as suggested in Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). We...