We use data from a natural experiment in which retirement benefits were reduced by congressional legislation and later restored to estimate the effect of future retirement benefit eligibility upon the decision of whether to remain in the U.S. military. We find that the generosity of retirement...

We present evidence from a randomized trial of the impact of matching workers to jobs using the deferred acceptance (DA) algorithm. Our setting is the U.S. Army's annual many-to-one marketplace that matches 10,000 officers to units. Officers and jobs are partitioned into over 100 distinct...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

I provide a theoretically-guided discussion of the dynamics of human behavior, focusing on the importance of culture (socially-learned information) and tradition (transmission of culture across generations). Decision-making that relies on tradition can be an effective strategy and arises in...

Regulation of economic activity is ubiquitous around the world, yet standard theories predict it should be rather uncommon. I argue that the ubiquity of regulation is explained not so much by the failure of markets, or by asymmetric information, as by the failure of courts to solve contract and...

The paper provides an integrated analysis of globalization effects on the inflation-output tradeoff and monetary policy in the New-Keynesian framework. The prediction of the analysis is threefold. First, labor, goods, and capital mobility flatten the Phillips curve, the tradeoff between...