This paper utilizes a Swedish alcohol policy experiment conducted in the late 1960s to identify the impact of prenatal alcohol exposure on educational attainments and labor market outcomes. The experiment started in November 1967 and was prematurely discontinued in July 1968 due to a sharp...

Using unique survey data that allows us to observe both voters' and politicians' preferences for local public spending as well as voting decisions, this paper tests if voters typically support parties in which the politicians' preferences are closest to their own. Doing so would be rational for...

This paper investigates how information affect voting behaviour. There exist a large literature suggesting that uninformed voters can use informational shortcuts or cues to vote as if they were informed. This paper tests this hypothesis using unique Swedish individual survey data on the...

This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is...

This paper considers rent-seeking games in which a small percentage change in a player's bid has a large percentage impact on her odds of winning, i.e., on the ratio of her respective probabilities of winning and losing. An example is the Tullock contest with a high R. The analysis provides a...

When the asset market is incomplete, competitive equilibria are constrained suboptimal, and there is scope for Pareto improving interventions. Price regulation, which operates anonymously, on market variables, can be such a Pareto improving policy, even when the welfare effects of rationing are...

At arbitrary prices of commodities and assets, fix-price equilibria exist under weak assumptions: endowments need not satisfy an interiority condition, utility functions need only satisfy a very weak monotonicity requirement, and the asset return matrix allows for redundant assets. Prices of...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocation reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

The spectrum for third generation (3G) mobile communications for the German market was alloted to operators by means of an auction. This resulted in a highly competitive outcome: six operators were given rights to provide 3G services. Government revenues from this auction were a staggering EUR...