Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner's dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...

Economics ignores the possibility of hedonic adaptation (the idea that people bounce back from utility shocks). This paper argues that economists are wrong to do so. It provides longitudinal evidence that individuals who become disabled go on to exhibit recovery in mental wellbeing. Adaptation...

A number of researchers point to the anticipation of early death, or a sense of futurelessness, as a contributing factor to youth crime and violence. Young people who perceive a high probability of early death, it is argued, may have little reason to delay gratification for the promise of future...

Previous studies have suggested that more liberal abortion laws should lead to a decrease in marriage rates among young women as 'shotgun weddings' are no longer necessary. Empirical evidence from the United States lends support to that hypothesis. This paper presents an alternative theory of...

We show that task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs. Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of...

We document that trust in public institutions and particularly trust in banks, business and government has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear legacy of...

Is wellbeing higher if the same number of negative events is spread out rather than bunched in time? Should positive events be spread out or bunched? We answer these questions exploiting quarterly data on six positive and twelve negative life events in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics...

We study the labor market impacts of retroactively reducing felonies to misdemeanors in San Joaquin County, CA, where criminal justice agencies implemented Proposition 47 reductions in a quasi-random order, without requiring input or action from affected individuals. Linking records of...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...