In “The Myth of the Rational Voter” Brian Caplan shows that voters entertain systematically biased beliefs on a number of essential issues of economic policy and concludes that this leads democracies to choose bad policies. We introduce the psychological concept of mental models to address...

Behavioral (e.g. consumption) patterns of boundedly rational agents can lead these agents into learning dynamics that appear to be “wasteful” in terms of well-being or welfare. Within settings displaying preference endogeneity, it is however still unclear how to conceptualize well-being....

The emergence of novelty is a driving agent for economic change. New technologies, new products and services, new institutional arrangements, to mention a few examples, are the backbone of development and growth. Important though it is, the emergence of novelty is not well understood. What seems...

We demonstrate that one should not expect convergence of the proposals to the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium offer in standard ultimatum games. First, imposing strict experimental control of the behavior of the receiving players and focusing on the behavior of the proposers, we show...

49 pages

This paper empirically studies the voting outcomes of Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success in the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist vs. secular voting. We identify three dimensions that affect voting outcomes at...

Municipal boundary reform (municipal amalgamation) has been done in many countries in recent years as the result of a push to enlarge the size and coverage of local government units, which in turn is driven mainly by the prospect of economies of scale. However, in a notable body of previous...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

In this paper we investigate the twofold effect of demographics on international factor flows in a model with endogenous policy constraints on both foreign direct investment and migration. Factor price differences between industrialized and developing countries create economic incentives for...

This paper analyzes how population aging affects immigration policy in rich industrialized countries. It sets up a two-period model of a representative democracy with two overlapping generations. The government’s preferred immigration rate increases with the share of retirees in the...