This article develops two points. First, insurance against the risk of legal change is largely unavailable, primarily because of the correlated nature of the losses that legal change generates. Second, given the absence of insurance against legal change, it is generally desirable for legal...

Prospect theory, loss aversion, mental accounts, hyperbolic discounting, cues, and the endowment effect can all be seen as examples of situationalism -- the view that people isolate decisions and overweight immediate aspects of the situation relative to longer term concerns. But outside of the...

Economists studying public policy have generally assumed that the relevant social planner knows how policy affects population behavior. Planners typically do not possess all of this knowledge, so there is reason to consider policy formation with partial knowledge of policy impacts. Here I...

We study the effect of incorporating heterogeneity into default rules by examining the choice between retirement plans at a firm which transitioned from a defined benefit (DB) to a defined contribution (DC) plan. The default plan for existing employees varied discontinuously depending on their...

Germany still has a very generous public pay-as-you-go pension system. It is characterized by early effective retirement ages and very high effective replacement rates. Most workers receive virtually all of their retirement income from this public retirement insurance. Costs are almost 12...

We examine the impact of publicly funded biomedical research on the in-house research of the for-profit pharmaceutical industry. Qualitative analysis of the history of the discovery and development of a sample of 21 significant drugs, and a program of interviews with senior managers and...

There is a large body of literature in both psychology and economics documenting mistaken perceptions of randomness. In this paper we demonstrate that people appear to believe that "lightning will strike twice" when it comes to lottery jackpots. First, we show that in the week following the sale...

I offer theoretical and empirical observations on the oversight of public sector employees. I argue that it is unreasonable to expect that the solutions typically considered in the literature will be effective with public sector employees, because bureaucrats are especially difficult to monitor....

This paper surveys recent literature examining the relationship between environmental amenities and urban growth. In this survey, we focus on the role of both exogenous attributes such as climate and coastal access as well as endogenous attributes such as local air pollution and green space. A...

This paper presents a downtown parking model that integrates traffic congestion and saturated on-street parking. We assume that the stock of cars cruising for parking adds to traffic congestion. Two major results come out from the model, one of which is robust. The robust one is that, whether or...