The endowment and attachment effect are empirically well-documented in bilateral trade situations. Yet, the theoretical literature has so far failed to formally identify these effects. We fill this gap by introducing expectations-based loss aversion, which can explain both effects, into the...

The recent literature on the endogenous formation of preferences has emphasized that while some preferences are more conducive to growth than others, economic growth also contributes to the formation of particular tastes (Becker, 1996). In this paper, we construct a neoclassical growth model...

We experimentally explore the role of collective incentives in sustaining cooperation in finitely repeated public goods games with imperfect monitoring. In our experiment players only observe noisy signals about individual contributions, while total output is perfectly observed. We consider...

When measuring inequality using conventional inequality measures, ethical assumptions about distributional preferences are often implicitly made. In this paper, we ask whether the ethical assumptions underlying the concentration index for income-related inequality in health and the Gini index...

The endowment and attachment effect are empirically well-documented in bilateral trade situations. Yet, the theoretical literature has so far failed to formally identify these effects. We fill this gap by introducing expectations-based loss aversion, which can explain both effects, into the...

Weitzman (2012, 2013) has suggested a method for calculating social discount rates for long-term investments when project returns are covariant with consumption or other macroeconomic variables, so called "tail-hedge discounting". This method relies on a parameter called "real project gamma"...

This paper analyzes a dynamic relational contract for employees with reciprocal preferences. I develop a tractable model to investigate how "direct" performance-pay (promising a bonus in exchange for effort) and generous upfront wages (which activate the norm of reciprocity) interact over the...

This paper studies the joint effect of economic and political inequalities on redistributive taxation and institutional quality. The theoretical model suggests that income inequality, coupled with political bias in favor of the rich, decreases redistribution and lowers institutional quality. The...

We propose a model of economic growth in which technological progress is modelled as an expanding random network of ideas. New ideas are created by combining successful old ideas. Old ideas are chosen according to their visibility as ideas, success as generators of innovations and age but the...

This paper is concerned with the theory of resilience pricing and sustainability measurement in the presence of risk for regime shift in a dynamic economy-environment system. Following Holling (1973),we consider resilience as the maximal perturbation that the system can absorb without flipping...