How do exogenous increases in resources to a government affect its expenditure decisions? Economic theory typically predicts that a lump-sum grant will have the same impact on government expenditures as an increase in income. However, empirical studies consistently find that government spending...

Departures from "economic man" behavior in many games in which fairness is a salient characteristic are now well documented in the experimental economics literature. These data have inspired development of models of social preferences that assume agents have preferences for equity and efficiency...

This paper reports three experiments with triadic or dyadic designs. The experiments include the moonlighting game in which first-mover actions can elicit positively or negatively reciprocal reactions from second movers. First movers can be motivated by trust in positive reciprocity or fear of...

This paper develops a nonparametric theory of preferences over one's own and others' monetary payoffs. We introduce more altruistic than (MAT), a partial ordering over preferences, and interpret it with known parametric models. We also introduce and illustrate more generous than (MGT),a partial...

Theories of decision under risk that assume decreasing marginal utility of money have been critiqued with concavity calibration arguments. Since that critique uses varying payoffs and fixed probabilities, it cannot have implications for calibration of nonlinear probability transformation, which...

In a recent paper in this Journal, Dynarski (2008) used data from the 1-percent 2000 Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files to demonstrate that merit scholarship programs in Georgia and Arkansas increased the stock of college-educated individuals in those states. This paper replicates...

We explore the effect of various factors on interstate differences in weekly unemployment insurance claims, focusing specifically on the determinants over the initial period of the pandemic in the U.S. We consider the effects of COVID-19 cases, state policies enacted in response to COVID-19,...

In this paper we examine one of the fundamental beliefs underlying education policy - that the majority of teacher attrition is caused by the attractiveness of higher-paying alternative occupations. Using unique data from the state of Georgia that are created by merging administrative data from...

This paper provides information about the importance of non-pecuniary school characteristics, such as race and poverty, on teacher turnover in Georgia. Simple descriptive statistics indicate that new teachers are more likely to leave schools with lower test scores, lower income, or higher...

We estimate the causal effects of job creation tax credits on employment using the exogenous spatial and time variations in the value of the credits across Georgia’s 159 counties over a 15-year period. We employ three empirical approaches: regression discontinuity design models making use of...