Individuals are prone to significant errors when making value judgements through the use of heuristics (cognitive short cuts) to simplify decision making. This paper uses an economic experiment to investigate the strength of arbitrary anchors in judgements over house prices among a student...

It is firmly established that human judgement and decision making can fall short of the standard required in the Behavioral Decision Theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern (1947). Consumers in particular seem vulnerable to systematic errors of judgement which affect their choice behaviour,...

We develop and estimate an equilibrium model of geographic variation in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE). The theory extends the Becker-Tomes model, introducing a production sector in which workers' human capital inputs are complements. In this setting the return to parental...

The extent of taxation and redistribution Policy is generally determined as a political-economy equilibrium by a balance between those who gain from higher taxes/transfers and those who lose. In a stylized model of migration and human capital formation, we show - somewhat against the...

Incentive provision is a central question in modern economic theory. During the run up to the financial crisis, many banks attempted to encourage loan underwriting by giving out incentive packages to loan officers. Using a unique data set on small business loan officer compensation from a major...

Significant departures from log normality are observed in income data, in violation of Gibrat’s law. We identify a new empirical regularity, which is that the distribution of consumption expenditures across households is, within cohorts, closer to log normal than the distribution of income. We...

This paper presents a general equilibrium assignment model of workers to tasks with endogenous supply of skills. The model has 2 key features. First, skills are endogenous and multidimensional. Second, two types of assignment occur; workers self-select the type of skills to supply and firms...

This paper provides a computable general equilibrium analysis of the medium to long-run impact of FDI inflows on poverty and income distribution in Bolivia. The simulation results suggest that FDI inflows enhance economic growth and reduce poverty. However, the income distribution typically...

This paper investigates the impact of tax simplification on various indicators of the efficiency of the tax system and on the distribution of income. The analysis is based on a simulation model (FiFoSiM) using German income tax and household survey microdata. We model tax simplification as the...