Insiders can artificially deflect the market prices of financial instruments from their full-information or inside value' by issuing deceptive accounting reports. Incentive support for disinformational activity comes through forms of compensation that allow corporate insiders to profit...

This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

Against a background of projections of sharply increasing elderly dependency rates, workers in the major industrial economies are apprehensive that their social security benefit entitlements will be cut before or after they retire, leaving them with inadequate retirement income. This paper looks...

We study the optimal lockdown policy for a planner who wants to control the fatalities of a pandemic while minimizing the output costs of the lockdown. We use the SIR epidemiology model and a linear economy to formalize the planner's dynamic control problem. The optimal policy depends on the...

This paper studies optimal lockdown policies in a dynamic economy without government commitment. A lockdown imposes a cap on labor supply, which lowers economic output but improves health prospects. A government would like to commit to limit the extent of future lockdowns in order to increase...

We present a model of the creation of social networks, such as political parties, trade unions, religious coalitions, or political action committees, through discussion and mutual persuasion among their members. The key idea is that people are influenced by those inside their network, but not by...

The importance of seignorage relative to other sources of government revenue differs markedly across countries. The main theoretical implication of this paper is that countries with more unstable and polarized political systems rely more heavily on seignorage. This result is obtained within the...

A growing body of evidence documents that policies can affect household behaviors persistently, even if they are no longer in place. This paper studies the importance of such "hysteresis" - the failure of an effect to reverse itself as its underlying cause is reversed - for the welfare...