We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest - which we call a 'tax lottery' - can...

This paper analyses the interdependence of policy uncertainty from 1985 to 2017 across six different categories of US economic policy: Monetary, fiscal, healthcare, national security, regulatory, and trade policy. To this end, we apply the Diebold and Yilmaz (2012, 2014) connectedness index...

In early 2004, the Presidential study group, - a bipartisan commission of statesmen, diplomats, legislators, scholars, and experts - was conveyed to examine the state of the Middle East and the effectiveness of U.S. policy in advancing U.S. interests in that region. According to the report it...

Threshold models have been widely used to analyze interdependent behavior, yet empirical research identifying people's thresholds is nonexistent. We introduce an incentivized method for eliciting thresholds and use it to study support for affirmative action in a large, stratified sample of the...

Whether water systems should be owned and operated by governments or private firms is intensely controversial, and little empirical research sheds light on the issue. In this paper we use a panel dataset that includes every community water system in the U.S. from 1997-2003 to test the effects of...