Political leaders make policy choices which are often hard to explain via institutions. We use the behavior of Colombian paramilitary groups as an environment to study non-institutional sources of variation in how public good provision and violence are combined to control populations. We...

In the standard analysis of an overlapping generations economy with gifts from children to parents, each generation takes the actions of all other generations as given. The resulting "simultaneous moves" equilibrium is dynamically inefficient. In reality, however, parents precede children in...

Recent work demonstrates that dynastic assumptions guarantee the irrelevance of all redistributional polices, distortionary taxes, and prices--the neutrality of fiscal policy (Ricardian equivalence) is only the "tip of the iceberg." In this paper, we investigate the possibility of reinstating...

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a theoretical and empirical analysis of the nexus between long-term care insurance (LTCI), formal care, informal (family) care, and bequests. In our empirical analysis, we use micro data from the Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and...

Happiness data--survey respondents' self-reported well-being (SWB)--have become increasingly common in economics research, with recent calls to use them in policymaking. Researchers have used SWB data in novel ways, for example to learn about welfare or preferences when choice data are...

Firms frequently fail to adopt profitable business opportunities even when they do not face informational or liquidity constraints. We explore three behavioral frictions that explain inertia among individuals--present bias, limited memory, and distrust--in a managerial setting. In partnership...

How do the employer and the worker interact during a dismissal? This paper tests whether they cooperate to minimize costs, or instead engage in conflict--i.e., deliberately amplify costs. We leverage a unique feature of the French labor market: an employer and a worker can jointly opt to replace...

We propose that a person's desire to consume an object or possess an attribute increases in how much others want but cannot have it. We term this motive superiority-seeking, and show that it generates preferences for exclusion that help explain a host of market anomalies and make novel...