Workers respond to the output choices of their peers. What explains this well documented phenomenon of peer effects? Do workers value equity, fear punishment from equity-minded peers, or does output from peers teach them about employers' expectations? We test these alternative explanations in a...

Recent medical literature suggests that vitamin D supplementation protects against acute respiratory tract infection. Humans exposed to sunlight produce vitamin D directly. This paper investigates how differences in sunlight, as measured over several years across states and during the same...

Ordeals are burdens placed on individuals that yield no direct benefits to others. They represent a dead-weight loss. Ordeals – the most common being waiting time – play a prominent role in health care. Their goal is to direct scarce resources to recipients receiving greater value from them,...

Ordeals are burdens placed on individuals that yield no direct benefits to others. They represent a dead-weight loss. Ordeals – the most common being waiting time – play a prominent role in health care. Their goal is to direct scarce resources to recipients receiving greater value from them,...

This paper argues that historical analysis, necessarily written with hindsight, often underestimates the uncertainties of the past. We call this tendency explanation bias. This bias leads individuals – including professional historians – to imply greater certainty in causal analyses than the...

Over 250 respondents - graduate students in law and public policy - assessed the risks of climate change and valued climate-change mitigation policies. Many aspects of their behavior were consistent with rational behavior. For example, respondents successfully estimated distributions of...

Ordeals are burdens placed on individuals that yield no direct benefits to others. They represent a dead-weight loss. Ordeals - the most common being waiting time - play a prominent role in health care. Their goal is to direct scarce resources to recipients receiving greater value from them,...

We consider the mechanism design problem when agents' types are multidimensional and continuous, and their valuations are interdependent. If there are at least three agents whose types satisfy a weak correlation condition, then for any decision rule there exist balanced transfers that render...

Thomas Schelling, winner of the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, was a Founding Father of the Kennedy School of Government. He served the School warmly and well for many years. Schelling always served as an inspiration for his creativity, and as an exemplar for his ability to make his...

This paper identifies a novel function for permits: they can be used by the government as an instrument to elicit information about the intentions of private investors to put capital into an area. Such information is a crucial input for the government's decision on how much infrastructure to...