This paper argues that there is nothing anomalous about the flypaper effect. I develop a simple median voter model of government spending with costly tax collection that predicts the flypaper effect and provide a quantifiable measure of its magnitude. Using the model insights and previous...

The latest CEP Election Analysis gives an overview of the research evidence on education policy, one of the key battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election.

The paper discusses community enforcement in infinitely repeated two-action games with local monitoring. Each player interacts with and observes only a fixed set of partners, of whom he is privately informed. The main result shows that for generic beliefs efficiency can be sustained in a...

This paper analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of high-frequency repayment, a feature in nearly all microfinance contracts that has been largely overlooked by theorists. The pervasive belief among practitioners that frequent repayment is critical in achieving high repayment rates is puzzling....

During this election period many Americans are feeling angry towards the very rich, especially those working in the financial sector, who helped cause the Great Recession and yet were bailed out by the government. Increases in inequality might be tolerable at a time of growing consumption for...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justification for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption and find that, when...

We consider the impact of tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment,hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We analyze both the short run incentive effects and the longer run implications of such programs. By allowing for risk aversion and...

This paper introduces a novel analysis of the classic “persistence of leadership” question, and applies it to a newly constructed dataset for Japanese manufacturing. The analysis rests on an appeal to an empirical “scaling relationship” between current market share and the variance of...

I investigate in this paper partial equilibrium labor supply responses to unemployment insurance (UI) in the US. I use administrative data on the universe of unemployment spells in five states from 1976 to 1984, and non-parametrically identify the effect of both benefit level and potential...

Axelrod (The evolution of cooperation, 1984) and others explain how cooperation can emerge in repeated 2-person prisoner’s dilemmas. But in public good games with anonymous contributions, we expect a breakdown of cooperation because direct reciprocity fails. However, if agents are situated in...