Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a society's oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine...

We explore the mechanics of empathy. In a controlled immersive virtual reality experiment, we show that neutral information on unauthorized immigration magnifies the empathetic response of subjects when they witness the struggles of unauthorized migrants. We conjecture that perceiving others as...

We propose and initiate the study of privacy elasticity--the responsiveness of economic variables to small changes in the level of privacy given to participants in an economic system. Individuals rarely experience either full privacy or a complete lack of privacy; we propose to use differential...

Privacy considerations and their effects on behavior are becoming increasingly important. Yet the extremes of full and no privacy are rarely an option. How much does behavior change with small changes in privacy? Dekel et al. (2023) introduce the concept of privacy elasticity, the responsiveness...

Research on privacy enhancing approaches for sharing data has grown significantly over the past two decades. This increased interest has led to extensive theoretical and methodological research, but the number of practical applications of privacy enhancing technologies has lagged far behind....

This paper demonstrates how three important results in environmental economics, true under mild conditions in closed economies, are false or need serious amendment in a world with international trade in goods. Since the three results we highlight have framed much of the ongoing discussion and...

Climate modelers have recognized the possibility of abrupt climate changes caused by a reorganization of the North Atlantic's current pattern (technically known as a thermohaline circulation collapse). This circulation system now warms north-western Europe and transports carbon dioxide to the...

Integrated assessment models have become the primary tools for comparing climate policies that seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Policy comparisons have often been performed by considering a planner who seeks to make optimal trade-offs between the costs of carbon abatement and the...

The paper develops a general methodology for analyzing policies with path-dependency (hysteresis) in stochastic models with forward looking optimizing agents. Our main application is a macro-climate model with a path-dependent climate externality. We derive in closed form the dynamics of the...

We survey 861 finance academics, professionals, and public sector regulators and policy economists about climate finance topics. They identify regulatory risk as the top climate risk to businesses and investors over the next five years, but they view physical risks as the top risk over the next...