According to Kim and Lee (1997), property taxes as opposed to capital gain taxes and taxes on rent endanger dynamic efficiency. The present paper shows that the choice of the tax base is immaterial. What counts is whether the taxes eliminate the after-tax rent. Empirical evidence suggests that...

Since Thaler (1981), we have lived with the uncomfortable stylized fact that many humans choose strictly dominated actions in intertemporal choice experiments. We designed an experiment to probe the reasons for the apparently suboptimal behavior, and we find that the classic Fisher (1930)...

We use a multiple price list approach with real payments to elicit long-term time preferences on a sample of French farmers. Elicited individual discount rates vary with the time delay, which supports the existence of a reversal effect in long-term time preferences, and increase with rewards,...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and a fully funded social security system in an overlapping generations model with family altruism. It is shown that funded social security may harm growth if there are operative bequests within the family.

We consider procedures that use randomness to make a decision that involves several individuals. We asked subjects to compare the fairness of six pairs of seemingly equivalent procedures. We propose a classification of subjects into two categories: those who are “emotional” in the sense...

We study exchanges between three overlapping generations with non-dynastic altruism. The middleaged choose informal care provided to their parents and education expenditures for their children. The young enjoy their education, while the old may leave a bequest to their children. Within each...

We add social norms into Laffont’s mechanism designed for environmental risk. We find with endogenous social norms and asymmetric information about personal norms, the optimal contract induces more (less) effort from the “green” (“brown”) firm.

Behavioral economists have argued that incentives can backfire. In a field experiment, we distribute “no junk mail” stickers to more than 800 households. We introduce information, monitoring, and rewards in treatments. We do not find evidence of motivation crowding out.

We investigate social norms for dictator game giving using a recently proposed norm-elicitation procedure (Krupka and Weber, 2013). We elicit norms separately from dictator, recipient, and disinterested third party respondents and find that elicited norms are stable and insensitive to the role...

How do people react to a mix of good deeds to a third party and bad deeds against them? A modified ultimatum game shows that previous good deeds make responders substantially more tolerant to unfair proposals.