This paper develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...

We conduct an artefactual field experiment to study whether the individual preferences and propensity to cooperate of temporary workers differ from permanent contract workers. We find that temporary and permanent contract workers have different other-regarding preferences, but display similar...

Policy interventions aimed at affecting a specific behavior may also indirectly affect individual choices in other domains. In this paper we study the direct effect of tobacco excise taxes and smoking bans on smoking behavior, and the indirect effect on eating behavior and body weight. Using...

We model a dynamic monopoly with environmental externalities,investigating the adoption of a tax levied on the firm's instantaneous contribution to the accumulation of pollution. The latter process is subject to a shock, which is i.i.d. across instants. We prove the existence of an optimal tax...