Prediction markets now cover many important political events. The 2004 presidential election featured an active online prediction market at Intrade.com, where securities addressing many different election-related outcomes were traded. Using the 2004 data from this market, we examined three...

We study the effect of legal constraints in an environment in which agents face demand shocks they would like to smooth but also have weakness of will: agents' long and short run preferences are misaligned. Some agents are sophisticated--they know they will make inconsistent intertemporal...

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that the languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of...

Recent literature finds that women earn significantly lower returns to professional degrees. Does this render these degrees poor investments for women? We compare physicians to physician assistants, a similar profession with lower wages and training costs, mitigating some selection issues. The...

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species? We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys and recovering their...

We develop a simple methodology to estimate the returns to education despite heterogeneous labor/leisure preferences. The labor supply behavior of doctors and physician assistants is consistent with people choosing between the two careers based on differing tastes for leisure.