Traditional economic interpretations have not been successful in explaining differences in saving rates across countries. One hypothesis is that savings respond to cultural specific social norms. A seminal paper in economics (1) however did not find any effect of culture on savings. We revisit...

We characterize a class of dynamic stochastic games that we call separable dynamic games with noisy transitions and establish that these widely used models are protocol invariant provided that periods are sufficiently short. Protocol invariance means that the set of Markov perfect equilibria is...

Despite a rich literature studying the impact of inequality on policy outcomes, there has been limited effort to bring these insights into the debates about comparative support for government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We fill in this gap by analyzing rich survey data from six countries...

Despite a rich literature studying the impact of inequality on policy outcomes, there has been limited effort to bring these insights into the debates about comparative support for government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We fill in this gap by analyzing rich survey data from six countries...

In the presence of (at least locally) increasing returns to scale tech- nologies, the paper asks the question: does there exist an economic system which implements Pareto efficient allocations and respects the voluntary participation principle? To answer this question, the paper formulates an...

Cryptocurrencies come with benefits, such as anonymity of payments and positive network effects of user adoption, and transaction risks including unconfirmed transactions, hacks, and frauds. They compete with central-bank-regulated money but consumers may prefer one currency over the other. In...

We examine the connection between discrete-time models of financial markets and the celebrated Black--Scholes--Merton (BSM) continuous-time model in which ''markets are complete." Suppose that (a) the probability law of a sequence of discrete-time models converges to the law of the BSM model and...

This paper examines how contextual and institutional factors are associated with individual subjective well-being, which is measured by individuals' happiness, during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data collected in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of Korea,...

We consider decision problems under complete ignorance and extend the minimax regret principle to situations where, after taking an action, the decision maker does not necessarily learn the state of the world. For example, if the decision maker only learns what the outcome is, then all she knows...

We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of catastrophic damages, which we jointly call threshold concerns, on international environmental agreements. We aim to understand whether a threshold for dangerous climate change is as an effective coordination device for countries to overcome...