Societies prohibit many transactions considered morally repugnant, although potentially efficiency-enhancing. We conducted an online choice experiment to characterize preferences for the morality and efficiency of payments to kidney donors. Preferences were heterogeneous, ranging from...

In an attempt to alleviate the shortfall in organs and bone marrow available for transplants, many U.S. states passed legislation providing leave to organ and bone marrow donors and/or tax benefits for live and deceased organ and bone marrow donations and to employers of donors. We exploit...

In this paper we perform inference on the effect of a treatment on survival times in studies where the treatment assignment is not randomized and the assignment time is not known in advance. Two such studies are discussed: a heart transplant program and a study of Swedish unemployed eligible for...

This paper proposes a causal decomposition framework for settings in which an initial regime randomization influences the timing of a treatment duration. The initial randomization and treatment affect in turn a duration outcome of interest. Our empirical application considers the survival of...

Iran has the world's only government-regulated kidney market. We report the results of the first field study of donor behaviour in this unusual market. Participants have lower risk tolerance and higher patience levels than the Iranian average but display no difference in rationality from...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit of...

When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...

Acknowledging that individuals dislike having low relative income renders trade less attractive when seen as a technology that integrates two economies by merging separate social spheres into one. We define a "trembling trade" as a situation in which gains from trade are less than losses in...

We use queuing-related behavior as an instrument for assessing the social appeal of alternative cultural norms. Specifically, we study the behavior of rational and sophisticated individuals who stand in a given queue waiting to be served, and who, in order to speed up the process, consider...

This paper analyzes the effects of introducing a graduated minimum wage in a model with optimal in-come taxation in which a government seeks to maximize social welfare. It shows that the optimal graduated minimum wage increases social welfare by increasing the lowproductivity workers'...