Die Präzision ökonomischer Prognosen und die Qualität politischer Handlungsempfehlungen hängen in entscheidendem Ausmaß von der Qualität des zugrunde liegenden Verhaltensmodells ab. Nur ein empirisch gut fundiertes Modell ökonomischen Handelns erlaubt es, die Konsequenzen politischer...

This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems as a means to finance unemployment benefits: a...

Development of human societies requires cooperation among unrelated individuals and obedience to social norms. Although punishment is widely agreed to be potentially useful in fostering cooperation, many recent results in psychology and economics highlight punishments' failures in this regard....

The public finance literature demonstrates the equivalence between consumption and labor-income (wage) taxes. We introduce an experimental paradigm in which individuals make real labor-leisure choices and spend their earned income on real goods. We use this paradigm to test whether a...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

We conduct a framed field experiment with 245 employed persons (no students) as subjects and a real tax, which is levied on the subjects' income from working in our real effort task. In our first three treatments, the net wage is constant but gross wages are subject to different constant...

This paper reviews the problems and potential benefits of integrating personality psychology into economics. Economists have much to learn from and contribute to personality psychology.

I develop a model of conspicuous consumption to empirically measure the importance of peer beliefs to Americans and Chinese. In the model, a consumer cares not only about the direct utility she receives from consumption, but also about the way her consumption pattern affects her peer group's...

Offenders are more likely than non-offenders to be victims, and victims are more likely than non-victims to be offenders. The overlap between offenders and victims is not well understood in criminology, and in the economics of crime the stylized empirical fact is even widely ignored. The paper...

Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this 'crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...