Suppose individuals get utilities from the total amount of wealth they hold and from their wealth relative to those immediately below them. This paper studies the distribution of wealth that maximizes an additive welfare function made up of these utilities. It interprets wealth distribution in a...

In his presidential address to the American Economic Association, Robert Lucas claimed that the welfare costs of the business cycle in the United States equaled .05 percent of consumption. His calculation compared the utility of a representative consumer receiving actual per-capita consumption...

A perennial debate worldwide over housing aid policy focuses on whether the government should provide housing vouchers or subsidized public housing units. To complement the empirically- dominated literature, this paper builds a general equilibrium model that merges urban land use (monocentric...

Response times contain information about economically relevant but unobserved variables like willingness to pay, preference intensity, quality, or happiness. Here, we provide a general characterization of the properties of latent variables that can be detected using response time data. Our...

The choices of a dynamically inconsistent individual depend on whether she commits to consumption ahead of time or chooses consumption in the moment. In individual-choice settings, it is normatively ambiguous whether such an individual's choices with commitment or in the moment are "better"....

We extend the swaps index of rationality, introduced by Apesteguia and Ballester (2015) for a finite set of alternatives, to the standard consumer choice setting with infinite commodity spaces. Applications include consumer demand from competitive budget sets and the state-space approach to...

We perform a controlled experiment to study the welfare effects of competition in a strategic communication environment. Two equally informed senders with conflicting interests can misreport information at a cost. We compare a treatment where only one sender communicates to a treatment where...

Surveys that measure subjective states like happiness or preferences often generate discrete ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are commonly used to analyze such data, suffer from a fundamental identification problem. Their conclusions depend on unjustified assumptions about the...

We consider an analytic formulation/parametrization of the class of efficient, linear, and symmetric values for TU games that, in contrast to previous approaches, which rely on the standard basis, rests on the linear representation of TU games by unanimity games. Unlike most of the other...

We provide new characterizations of the equal surplus division value and the equal division value as well as of the class of their convex mixtures. This way, the difference between the Shapley value, the equal division value, and the equal surplus division value is pinpointed to one axiom....