We present new evidence on the effect of grants on charities' incomes. We employ a novel identification strategy, focusing on charities that applied for lottery grant funding and comparing outcomes for successful and unsuccessful applicants. Overall, grants do not crowd out other income but the...

Political future markets, in which investors bet on election outcomes, are often thought a recent invention. Such markets in fact have a long history in many Western countries. This paper traces the operation of political futures markets back to 16th Century Italy, 18th Century Britain, and 19th...

For over three centuries and throughout the globe, people have enthusiastically bought savings products that incorporate lottery elements. In lieu of paying traditional interest to all investors proportional to their balances, these Prize Linked Savings (PLS) accounts distribute periodic...

This paper investigates competition between jurisdictions in the context of cross-border shopping for state lottery tickets. We first develop a simple theoretical model in which consumers choose between state lotteries and face a trade-off between travel costs and the price of a fair gamble,...

The -gambler's fallacy- is the belief that the probability of an event is lowered when that event has recently occurred, even though the probability of the event is objectively known to be independent from one trial to the next. This paper provides evidence on the time pattern of lottery...

We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision-making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and major league baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is...