An influential literature on the effects of marginal tax rates on the behavior of the rich has claimed that the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net of tax share is very high possibly exceeding one. These high estimated elasticities imply that cutting taxes on the rich does not...

This paper shows that accounting for variation in mistakes can be crucial for welfare analysis. Focusing on consumer underreaction to not-fully-salient sales taxes, we show theoretically that the efficiency costs of taxation are amplified by differences in underreaction across individuals and...

This paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees' decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account (TDA) retirement plan within a large university. The experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of...

We conduct a field experiment designed to test theories of time-inconsistency, namely a "Beta-Delta" model of present bias. The experiment takes place in the context of a saving decision made by low-income tax filers who can deposit their income tax refund into an illiquid account. We find...

Framing remains one of the pillars of behavioral economics. While framing effects have been found to be quite important in the lab, what is less clear is how well evidence drawn from naturally-occurring settings conforms to received laboratory insights. We use debt obligation to the UK...

Some public goods are provided entirely with private contributions, others with a mixture of public and private funding, and still others are entirely publicly funded. To explain this variation, a model of dual provision is developed that endogenizes public and private funding. Members of the...

In this chapter, we discuss field experiments in surveys that are conducted with the purpose of learning about expectation formation and the link between expectations and behavior. We begin by reviewing the rationale for conducting experiments within surveys, rather than just relying on...

This paper explores methods for inferring the causal effects of treatments on choices by combining data on real choices with hypothetical evaluations. We propose a class of estimators, identify conditions under which they yield consistent estimates, and derive their asymptotic distributions. The...

The goal of the paper is to set forth general guidelines that we believe would enhance the usefulness of future social experiments and to suggest ways of correcting for inherent limitations of them. Although the major motivation for an experiment is to overcome the inherent limitations of...

What was once broadly viewed as an impossibility - learning from experimental data in economics - has now become commonplace. Governmental bodies, think tanks, and corporations around the world employ teams of experimental researchers to answer their most pressing questions. For their part, in...