The No Child Left Behind law mandated the institution of adequate yearly progress (AYP) objectives, on which schools are assigned a pass or fail. Fail status is associated with negative publicity and often sanctions. In this paper, I study the incentives and responses of schools that failed AYP...

This paper examines the effects of constraints in a Tiebout framework applied to school finance reforms. We use data from Michigan, which enacted a comprehensive school finance reform in 1994 that, in effect, ended local discretion over school spending. This scenario affords us a unique...

Remarks at the Clearing House's Second Annual Business Meeting and Conference, New York City.

The authors extend the standard public goods game in a variety of ways, in particular by allowing for endogenous preference over institutions and by studying the relationship between individual types, their preferences, and later behavior within the various institutional environments. They...

This paper explores the advantages of a new financial charter for large, complex, internationally active financial institutions that would address the corporate governance challenges of such organizations, including incentive problems in risk decisions and the complicated corporate and...

We conduct a laboratory experiment in which we expose participants to situational social norms of approval or disapproval of lying. While participants on average conform to the situational pressure, the results highlight important differences in individual reactions. Situational norms crowd out...

We develop, and experimentally test, models of informal agreements. Agents are assumed to be honest but suffer costs of overcoming temptations. We extend two classical bargaining solutions -- split-the-difference and deal-me-out -- to this informal agreement setting. For each solution there are...

When looked at individually there is little reason to think that economists lack integrity and are dishonest. Yet, when we look at academic papers written by economists we can see biases. This paper tries to reconcile these two observations by arguing that the constraints the profession sets on...

How much are people willing to forego to be honest, to follow the rules? When people do break the rules, what can standard data sources tell us about their behavior? Standard economic models of crime typically assume that individuals are indifferent to dishonesty, so that they will cheat or lie...

The Earned Income Tax Credit generates large average tax refunds for low-income parents, and these refunds are distributed in a narrow time frame. I rely on this plausibly exogenous source of variation in liquidity to investigate the effect of cash-on-hand on unemployment duration. Among...