This paper presents the first attempt to estimate the benefits of reducing crime using the contingent-valuation (CV) method. We focus on gun violence, a crime of growing policy concern in America. Our data come from a national survey in which we ask respondents referendum-type questions that...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic model of politicians who can engage in corruption. The model offers important insights into what determines corruption and how to design policy to combat it. We estimate the model using data from Brazil to measure voters' willingness to pay for various...

This paper tests whether mothers and fathers differ in their spending on their daughters relative to their sons. We compare mothers' and fathers' willingness to pay (WTP) for specific goods for their children, diverging from the previous literature's approach of comparing the expenditure effects...

Asset prices reflect investors' subjective beliefs about future cash flows and prices. In this chapter, we review recent research on the formation of these beliefs and their role in asset pricing. Return expectations of individual and professional investors in surveys differ markedly from those...

We propose and validate a simple way to augment the standard Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method that researchers use to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for a good. The augmentation is to measure WTP for another good ("benchmark good"), one unrelated to both the good the researcher is interested in...

In a model with cheap talk, employers can send messages about their willingness to pay for higher ability workers, which job-seekers can use to direct their search and tailor their wage bid. Introducing such messages leads--under certain conditions--to an informative separating equilibrium which...

We propose an approach to modeling and estimating discrete choice demand that allows for a large number of zero sale observations, rich unobserved heterogeneity, and endogenous prices. We do so by modeling small market sizes through Poisson arrivals. Each of these arriving consumers then solves...

This paper explores methods for inferring the causal effects of treatments on choices by combining data on real choices with hypothetical evaluations. We propose a class of estimators, identify conditions under which they yield consistent estimates, and derive their asymptotic distributions. The...

We explore workers' valuation of job flexibility, using a field experiment conducted on a Chinese job board, as well as survey and observational data for the same job seekers. Our experimental job ads differ randomly in offering jobs that are flexible regarding when one works (time flexibility)...

Legislation and public policies are often the result of competition and compromise between different views and interests. In several cases, strongly held moral beliefs voiced by societal groups lead lawmakers to prohibit certain transactions or to prevent them from occurring through markets....