This article reviews the current debate about sick pay mandates and medical leave in the United States. The United States is one of three industrialized countries that do not guarantee access to paid sick leave for all employees. We first provide a categorization of the different paid leave...

This paper introduces the matched-bet mechanism. The matched bet is an easily applicable and strictly budget-balanced mechanism that aims to help people overcome time-inconsistent behavior. I show theoretically that offering a matched bet helps both sophisticated and naive procrastinators to...

Is there a way of matching donations that avoids crowding out? And, more generally, what is the best way to utilize a bigger lead gift for raising smaller contribu-tions in a fundraising campaign? To answer these questions, we present a novel matching method, some simple theoretical...

We measure consumers’ use of cash by harmonizing payment diary surveys from seven countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States (conducted 2009 through 2012). Our paper finds important cross-country differences, for example, the level of cash...

This paper investigates empirically the consumer demand of environmentally relevant goods for Germany, as well as their relationship to the demand for leisure. Higher prices for energy goods like gas, electricity or fuel oil due to higher indirect taxation amongst others may have serious welfare...

This paper investigates the impact of peer observation on the consumption decisions of rural households in Thailand using a lab-in-the-field experiment. We find that those groups that observe each other show lower within group standard deviation in their decisions. Thus, we find evidence for...

Is there a way of matching donations that avoids crowding out? We introduce a novel matching method where the matched amount is allocated to a different project, present some simple theoretical considerations that predict reduced crowding out or more crowding in (depending on the degree of...

While increasingly popular in many domains crowdfunding remains largely un-derresearched and little is known about the best way to encourage participation. In a field experiment we vary suggested amounts and test different wordings for a campaign to finance a club good - an institute's summer...

Multiple sources of funding are becoming increasingly important for charitable organizations. Donations from corporate donors for example account for 25-35% of charitable income for the largest US charities, across charitable sectors. This note presents some tentative first evidence from a...

We follow Fuhrer (2000) in estimating via Maximum Likelihood a log-linear consumption function on UK data. In doing so we consider various habit formation assumptions. We show that a model of purely external habits as in Fuhrer (2000) fits the UK data remarkably well, and possibly in a superior...