Climate skeptics argue that the possibility that global warming is exogenous implies that we should not take additional action towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions until we know more. However this paper shows that even climate skeptics have an incentive to reduce emissions: such a change of...

Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: there are many examples of reforms that started off successfully but nevertheless lost public support, and vice versa. We show that learning dynamics can rationalize this apparent paradox, the reason being that the process of...

Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents...

Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: many reforms that began successfully lost public support. This paper shows that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of sampling without replacement. This...