In a broad psychological perspective, both economic incentives and social norms may be be regarded as giving rise to purposesful, or "rational" behavior. By this I simply mean that individuals act in accordaance with expected reward or punishment, even though the form these take differs...

Government budget balance forces the endogenous use of distortionary tax instruments when an exogenous reform is implemented. The aggregate efficiency of such reforms is based on comparisons of simple summary measures of the Marginal Cost of Funds of the various tariff or quota changes with the...

O'Connell and Zeldes (1993) have shown that the dynamic inefficiency result of a standard gift model is reversed if parents can undersave strategically. I impose an explicit non-negativity constraint on gifts, which - for all the numerical examples suggested by O'Connell and Zeldes - alters this...

This paper discusses how ICT and emerging electronic commerce in consumer products influence the relative efficiency in production of households and firms, resulting in changes in the division of tasks between these two types of agents.