The argument that policy risk, i.e. uncertainty about monetary and fiscal policy, has been holding back the economic recovery in the U.S. during the Great Recession has a large popular appeal. We analyze the role of policy risk in explaining business cycle fluctuations by using an estimated New...

This paper addresses optimal taxation, when the relationship between consumption and environmental damage is uncertain and treated as a random variable by policy makers. The main purpose is to analyze how additional uncertainty about this relationship affects the optimal unit tax on the...

We show in a two-period world with endogenous savings and two assets, one of them exhibiting a stochastic return that an interest adjusted income tax is optimal. This tax leaves a safe component of interest income tax free and taxes the excess return with a special tax rate. There is no trade...

The behaviour of future policy-makers substantially influences future greenhouse gas emissions. Uncertainty about the motives of future policy-makers may thus strongly influence the climate policy strategies of current policy-makers. Analytical and numerical analyses in this paper confirm this...

In a dynamic model of a risk-neutral competitive firm which can lower its pollution emissions per unit of output by building up abatement capital stock, we examine the effect of a higher pollution tax rate on abatement investment both under full certainty and when the timing or the size of the...

When two or more agents compete for a bonus and the agents' productivity in each of several possible occurrences depends stochastically on (constant) effort, the number of times that are checked to assign the bonus affects the level of un-certainty in the selection process. Uncertainty, in turn,...

As firms implement tournament bonus reward schemes, mainly the idea is to introduce competition amongst their agents in the order to promote their performance. Tournaments in which agents compete for a bonus by investing effort, are frequently applied, e.g., in development races, political...

We specify a structural life-cycle model of consumption, labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects. The sources of risk are shocks to productivity, job destruction, the process...

Sacrifices to deities occur in nearly all known religions. In this paper, we report on our attempts to elicit this type of religious behaviour towards Theoi in the laboratory. The theory we test is that, when faced with uncertainty, individuals attempt to engage in a reciprocal contract with the...