Natural-resource taxation and investment exhibit cycles in a vast number of countries, driving political turmoil and power shifts. Using a rational-expectations model, we show cycles result from governments' inability to commit to future taxes and firms' inability to credibly exit a country...

The invention of new applications based on information and communications technologies (ICTs) has had two economic effects up to now. These applications have transformed production, creating value for applications-inventing companies and their customers and increasing economic growth through...

A growing number of surveys elicit respondents' expectations for future events on a 0-100 scale of percent chance. These data reveal substantial heaping at multiples of 10 and 5 percent, suggesting that respondents round their reports. This paper studies the nature of rounding by analyzing...

Online advertising offers unprecedented opportunities for measurement. A host of new metrics, clicks being the leading example, have become widespread in advertising science. New data and experimentation platforms open the door for firms and researchers to measure true causal effects of...

We combine national administrative data on earnings and participation in subsidized housing to study how the demolition of 160 public housing projects—funded by the HOPE VI program—affected the adult labor market outcomes for 18,500 children. Our empirical strategy compares children exposed...

Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes...

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences ("values"), material or other explicit incentives ("laws") and social sanctions or rewards ("norms"). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals'...

How much are people willing to forego to be honest, to follow the rules? When people do break the rules, what can standard data sources tell us about their behavior? Standard economic models of crime typically assume that individuals are indifferent to dishonesty, so that they will cheat or lie...

Regulation consists of rulemaking and enforcement. Economic theory offers two complementary rationales for regulating financial institutions. Altruistic public-benefits theories treat rules as governmental instruments for increas- ing fairness and efficiency across society as a whole....

Across the social sciences, a key question is how societies manage to enforce cooperative behavior in social dilemmas such as public goods provision or bilateral trade. According to an influential body of theories in psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, the answer is that humans...