Abstract: Economics seems largely based on the assumption that monetary incentives improve performance. By contrast, a large literature in psychology, including a rich tradition of experimental work, claims just the opposite. In this paper we present and discuss a set of experiments designed to...

We shed light on the Hartwick rule for capital accumulation and resource depletion by providing semantic clarifications and investigating the implications and relevance of this rule.We extend earlier results by establishing that the Hartwick rule does not indicate sustainability and does not...

The paper extends and replicates part of the analysis by Barsky, Juster, Kimball, and Shapiro (1997), which exploits hypothetical choices among different consumption streams to infer intertemporal substitution elasticities and rates of time preference.We use a new and much larger dataset than...

Abstract: We examine the dynamic feedback effects of fiscal policies on the government budget and economy activity in a calibrated general equilibrium framework featuring endogenous growth through creative destruction. For several European countries, we find that making tax incentives with...

A variety of public policies aim to influence workers’ disposition of preretirement lump-sum distributions (LSDs) from pensions. We use the implementation of several policy changes as natural experiments to test for rational and behavioral motives for saving behavior. Using data from the HRS...

The Stability and Growth Pact has been under fire ever since it was born.But is the Pact a flawed fiscal rule?Against established criteria for an ideal fiscal rule, its design and compliance mechanisms show strengths and weaknesses. The latter tend to reflect tradeoffs typical of supra-national...

Laws consist of two components: the 'obligations' they express and the 'incentives' designed to enforce them.In this paper we run a public good experiment to test whether or not obligations have any independent effect on cooperation in social dilemmas.The results show that, for given marginal...

Informality is a wide-spread phenomenon across the globe. We show that firms in countries with better information sharing systems and greater financial sector outreach evade taxes to a lesser degree, an effect that is stronger for smaller firms, firms in smaller cities and towns, and firms in...