We study how experts influence consumer behavior and welfare by focusing on the Booker Prize. Leveraging the discontinuity created by the attribution of the prize, we show that readers receive the signal sent by the jury of the Booker and are persuaded to buy the awarded book but experience...

This paper studies the effect of Finnish tax reforms in the mid 1990s on the economic activity and tax avoidance decisions of the owners of small businesses. The reforms reduced income tax rates and increased tax planning incentives for small business owners. They applied only to unincorporated...

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To this end we estimate the model's posterior density using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods. Within this framework we...