Most contributions to optimal tax theory have assumed that all prices, including that of leisure, are known with certainty. The purpose of this paper is to analyze optimal taxation when workers have imperfect information about their wages at the time they choose their labor supplies. Both...

Economists have been paying increasing attention to the study of situations in which consumers face a discrete rather than a continuous set of choices. Such models are potentially very important in evaluating the impact of government programs upon consumer welfare. But very little has been said...

Our main findings are: 1) Individuals who took out student loans are less likely to make a gift, other things being the same. We conjecture that this phenomenon is caused by an "annoyance effect" -- alumni resent the fact that they are burdened with loans. 2) Scholarship aid reduces the size of...

One justification offered for legacy admissions policies at universities is that that they bind entire families to the university. Proponents maintain that these policies have a number of benefits, including increased donations from members of these families. We use a rich set of data from an...

A substantial experimental literature suggests that a personal solicitation is an effective way to induce people to make charitable donations. We examine whether this result generalizes to a non-experimental setting. Specifically, we estimate the effect of a marginal personal solicitation using...

An ongoing controversy in the literature on the economics of higher education centers on whether the success of a school's athletic program affects alumni donations. This paper uses a unique data set to investigate this issue. The data contain detailed information about donations made by alumni...

This paper uses a unique data set to assess whether donors' contributions to a nonprofit institution are affected by the perception that the institution might confer a reciprocal benefit. We study alumni contributions to an anonymous research university. Inter alia, the data include information...

The U.S. mortgage market has experienced phenomenal change over the last 35 years. This paper develops and implements a technique for assessing the impact of changes in the mortgage market on households. Our framework, which is based on the permanent income hypothesis, that allows us to gauge...

Most data sets indicate a positive correlation between having health insurance and utilizing health care services. Yet the direction of causality is not at all clear. If we ob-serve a positive correlation between the utilization of health care services and insurance status, we do not know if...

The casual links between health and economic resources have long concerned social scientists. We use four waves of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyze the impact of wealth upon an individual's health status. The difficulty in approaching this task that has bedeviled previous...