: We report the results of two laboratory experiments that study how university student and staff participants chose retirement savings investment options using ‘user-friendly’ information prescribed by regulators. We demonstrate that choices of more than 20% of participants cannot be...

The present paper reviews key issues in pension design and pension reform encountered all across the world. The paper heavily refers to the recent U.S. Social Security reform debate in general and to the Personal Retirement Accounts proposal in particular. A particular emphasis is put on...

Public firms provide a large amount of information through their disclosures. In addition, information intermediaries publicly analyze, discuss, and disseminate these disclosures. Thus, greater public firm presence in an industry should reduce uncertainty in that industry. Following the...

<p>Mark Hyde and John Dixon review Shapiro's (2007) <em>Is the Welfare State Justified?</em>, assessing its merits as well as its flaws.</p>

Pension reform is high on the policy agenda of many advanced and emerging market economies. In advanced economies the challenge is generally to contain future increases in public pension spending as the population ages. In emerging market economies, the challenges are often different. Where...

This paper addresses the issue of price signaling in a model of vertical relationship between a manufacturer and a retailer who share the same information about quality, unlike consumers who do not observe it a priori. We show that delegating the price setting task to a retailer and controlling...

We examine changes in lending behavior in response to the Federal Reserve’s requirement for disclosure of loan pricing information implemented in 2004 for two broad types of lenders, depository and nondepository institutions. We find that although subprime approval rates generally increased...

In this paper, we address two questions: (i) how should a government pursuing both environmental and redistributive objectives design domestic taxes when redistribution is costly, and (ii) how does trade liberalization affect this optimal tax system, and modify the economy's levels of pollution...

Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This paper uses Japanese prefecture-level data for the period 1998–2004 to examine how this enactment affected the rate of...

The weak enforcement and monitoring systems employed in China (e.g., insufficient inspection resources and negligible fines for noncompliance) are widely blamed for the growing unrest over food safety in the country. Given this development, we consider a model where quality inspection performed...