Does taxation for public goods generally involve a distortionary cost? Are Pigouvian taxes desirable because they raise revenue without having to resort to distortionary taxes? Should decisions concerning public goods or Pigouvian taxes depend on whether their incidence is regressive? The answer...

The tontine, which is an interesting mixture of group annuity, group life insurance, and lottery, has a peculiar place in economic history. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it played a major role in raising funds to finance public goods in Europe, but today it is rarely encountered...

We analyze the democratic politics of a rule that separates capital and ordinary account budgets and allows the government to issue debt to finance capital items only. Many national governments followed this rule in the 18th and 19th centuries and most U.S. states do today. This simple 1800s...

The efficiency of resource allocation is often analyzed in static frameworks with a focus on the cross-sectional heterogeneity in the willingness to pay among users. When the resource is durable in nature, the temporal heterogeneity could be important in assessing the efficiency properties of...

This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery in assigning students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City. The main result of the paper is that a single and multiple lottery mechanism are...

This paper investigates competition between jurisdictions in the context of cross-border shopping for state lottery tickets. We first develop a simple theoretical model in which consumers choose between state lotteries and face a trade-off between travel costs and the price of a fair gamble,...

We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision-making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and major league baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is...