The most important financial source for behavioral economics is the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF). The most prominent behavioral economists among the RSF’s twenty-six member Behavioral Economics Roundtable (BER) are Kahneman, Tversky, Thaler, Camerer, Loewenstein, Rabin, and Laibson. The...

We introduce the notion of a stone age equilibrium to study societies in which property rights are absent, bilateral exchange is either coercive or voluntary, and relative strength governs power relations in coercive exchange. We stress the importance of free disposal of goods which allows for...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in 'Economic Development and Cultural Change', 2011, 60, 121-154. <P> In this paper we focus on the timing of marriages of women, whose marriages are associated with bride wealth payments, which are transfers from (the family of) the groom to the bride's...</p>

Disentangling age, period, and cohort effects in explaining health trends is crucial to assess future prevalences of health disorders. The identification problem -- age, period, and cohort effects are perfectly linearly related -- is tackled by modeling cohort and period effects using lifetime...

This paper describes the origins of the logistic function, its adoption in bio-assay, and its wider acceptance in statistics. Its roots spread far back to the early 19th century; the survival of the term logistic and the wide application of the device have been determined decisively by the...

A simple auction-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown to the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case....

In criminal cases the task of the judge is to transform the uncertainty about the facts into the certainty of the verdict. In this experiment we examine the relationship between evidence of which the strength is known, subjective probability of guilt and verdict for abstract cases. We look at...

Contemporary migration studies witness an increasing interest in the socio-economicrole of networks of migrants. Such networks are sometimes even regarded as the mostimportant attraction and location factors for migration, and may even exceed purelyeconomic factors like unemployment and wage...

In the Netherlands, the USA and Australia public funding has promoted parental choice by introducing a voucher for child care, where parents are free to choose the provider. The policy experiments in these three countries and the outcomes provide useful information about the consequences of...

This paper analyzes optimal linear taxes on capital and labor incomes in a life-cyclemodel of human capital investment, financial savings, and labor supply with heteroge-nous individuals. A dual income tax with a positive marginal tax rate on not onlylabor income but also capital income is...