Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes...

We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...

We document that corporate directors' past experience with abnormally severe climatic natural disasters shape their prosocial preferences and influence firm climate policies. Using detailed data on director career histories and county-level natural disasters, we identify Directors with Abnormal...

Several important empirical studies (e.g., Altonji, Hayashi, and Kotlikoff, 1992, 1996, 1997) find that households are not altruistically-linked in a way consistent with the standard Ricardian model, as put forward by Barro (1974). We build a two-sided altruistic-linkage model in which private...

We consider four models of consumption that differ with respect to efficient risk-sharing and altruism. They range from complete markets with altruism to family risk-sharing. We use a matched sample of parents and independent children available from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to...

This paper develops a theoretical foundation for the social cost of carbon (SCC). The model highlights the source of debate over whether countries should use the global or domestic SCC for regulatory impact analysis. I identify conditions under which a country's decision to internalize the...

This paper considers the factors responsible for differences with age in estimates of the wage compensation an individual requires to accept increased occupational fatality risk. We derive a relationship between the value of a statistical life (VSL) and the degree of complementarity between...

In a world of certainty, the design of environmental policy is relatively straightforward, and boils down to maximizing the present value of the flow of social benefits minus costs. But the real world is one of considerable uncertainty -- over the physical and ecological impact of pollution,...

In what follows we provide a conceptually correct procedure for determining whether a risky project passes the "potential Pareto improvement" welfare criterion which forms the normative basis of cost-benefit analysis. In this approach the role of secondary markets in providing opportunities for...