This paper studies why investors buy dividend-paying assets and how they time their consumption accordingly. We combine administrative bank data linking customers' consumption transactions and income to detailed portfolio data and survey responses on financial behavior. We find that private...

Real life applications of Yardstick Regulation frequently refer to historical cost data. While Yardstick Regulation cuts the link between firms own costs and prices firms may charge in a static setting, it does not in a dynamic setting where historical cost data is used. A firm can influence the...

Work requirements can make it easier to screen the poor from the non-poor.They can also affect future poverty by changing the poors' incentive to invest in their income capacity. The novelty of our study is the focus on long term poverty. We find that the argument for using work requirements as...

Real life applications of yardstick regulation frequently refer to historical cost data. While yardstick regulation cuts the link between firms own costs and prices firms may charge in a static setting, it does not do so in a dynamic setting where historical cost data is used. A firm can...

This paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long-run government spending: Wagner's Law and different variants of the ratchet effect. We analyze data spanning from the early 19th century until the present day in Sweden and the United Kingdom....