In this paper I attempt to investigate the role of governance - as measured by government effectiveness, control of corruption, and rule of law - on the HIV prevalence. Thus, the paper argues that countries whose governments are highly ranked according to these various indices of the quality of...

Intervention policies for HIV/AIDS differ in their approaches, and acceptability to control the spread of the epidemics. We introduce a theoretical model to depict how several factors may determine an individual's maximum willingness to pay for any HIV/AIDS policy. Heterogeneous baseline risks,...

There is evidence that tax rates have varied considerably through time. In the postwar years, changes in business taxation in the U.S. have occurred at a pace of approximately every three years. The purpose of this research is to examine the implications of tax risk and persistence on...

I present a simple model that formalizes Kahneman's (1973) ideas and experimental work on attention limitations. In addition, I extend his framework to account for the interaction between attention and memory deficits. In particular, I propose that individuals optimally allocate their divisible,...

People are generally reluctant to accept risk. In particular, people overvalue sure gains, relative to outcomes which are merely probable. At the same time, people are also more willing to accept bets when payoffs involve losses rather than gains. I consider how far adaptive learning can go in...

A contest model is constructed to examine the existence of conference bias in college basketball's Ratings Percentage Index (RPI). Though a general RPI bias has been identified in previous literature, this is the first study to address whether the bias is random or systematic in nature. Within...

This paper examines how the incumbency advantage is related to ideological voting or legislative shirking that causes the incumbents to diverge from the preference of the median voter using aggregate data for the U.S. House of Representatives between 1948 and 2000. I find that a rise in the...

Pooled forecasts frequently outperform individual forecasts of economic time series. This paper shows that the introduction of model uncertainty into the formation of expectations can account for the regularity. We conjecture that agents learn in a Bayesian way, using an optimally designed...

Dependent background risks which have functional forms are introduced into Lucas economies. This paper determines the conditions on preferences to guarantee the monotonicity of asset prices, when dependent background risks satisfy the monotonicity and the single crossing conditions.