This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General...

Optimal policy rules--including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities--are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and...

What impact do social preferences have in market-type settings where individuals can sort in response to relative prices? We show that sorting behavior can distinguish between individuals who like to share and those who share but prefer to avoid the sharing environment altogether. In four...

When investing in research and development (R&D), institutions must decide whether to take a top-down approach -- soliciting a particular technology -- or a bottom-up approach in which innovators suggest ideas. This paper examines a reform to the U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research...

U.S. manufacturing firms that make sophisticated weapons systems for the Pentagon are subject to an unusual regulatory regime that obligates them to volunteer' information on their business practices to the government and to prime contractors as a condition of their special relationship with the...

We quantify the real implications of trade-offs between firm information disclosure and long-term investment efficiency. We estimate a dynamic equilibrium model in which firm managers confront realistic incentives to misreport earnings and distort their real investment choices. The model implies...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to make difficult ethical choices, e.g., how to balance public health and socioeconomic activity and whom to prioritize in allocating vaccines or other scarce medical resources. We discuss the implications of benefit-cost analysis, utilitarianism, and...

The presence of a westward-moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the Frontier Thesis and identify its long-run implications for culture and...

The public at large, many policymakers, and some economists hold views of social welfare that attach some importance to factors other than individuals' utilities. This note shows that any such non-individualistic notion of social welfare conflicts with the Pareto principle