In a public goods experiment with the opportunity to vote to expel members of a group, we found that contributions rose to nearly 100% of endowments with significantly higher efficiency compared with a noexpulsion baseline. Expulsions were strictly of the lowest contributors, and there was an...

We find a limited parallel between lump-sum taxes and environmental taxes. Corollary 2, which extends Sandmo’s observation, shows that appropriated corrective revenues have the same non-distortionary effects as lump-sum taxes, the result reducing to the original observation when the...

This paper analyzes a class of stochastic endogenous growth models with uninsurable idiosyncratic income risk. The model economy is populated by infinitely-lived households who own and operate their own business, work for a stock company, and participate in stock and bond markets. Households...

Previous experiments on public goods dilemmas have found that the opportunity to punish leads to higher contributions and reduces the free rider problem; however, a substantial amount of punishment is targeted on high contributors. In the experiment reported here, subjects are given the...

This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of reversal and origin independence as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show how that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal fluctuations, and aversion to future risk. We...

This paper uses a tractable macroeconomic model with idiosyncratic human capital risk and incomplete markets to analyze the growth and welfare effects of business cycles. The analysis is based on the assumption that the elimination of business cycles eliminates the variation in idiosyncratic...

It is well known that a social choice function is truthfully implementable in Bayesian Nash equilibrium if and only if it is incentive compatible. However, in general it is not possible to rule out other equilibrium outcomes, and additional conditions, e.g., Bayesian monotonicity, are needed to...

We compare two devices previously found to increase contributions to public goods in laboratory experiments: communication, and punishment (allowing subjects to engage in costly reductions of one another’s earnings after learning of their contribution decisions). We find that communication...

This paper argues that an external monitor can be less effective when there is uncertainty regarding the quality of the management and the business environment. In a two-period model, an outside monitor, who initially does not know managerial quality, can have the manager fired. The manager...