This paper provides a comparative statics analysis of punishment in public-good experiments. We vary systematically the effectiveness of punishment, that is, the factor by which punishment reduces the punished player’s income, and we find that contributions to the public good increase...

Although a workfare scheme is potentially a cost-effective poverty alleviation scheme as it attracts only the poor who have an incentive to do unskilled manual works, an investigation of the ICRISAT data in India clarifies that the Employment Guarantee Scheme was mistargeted, i.e., a substantial...

Recent public goods experiments have shown that free riding can be curtailed through mutual monitoring and sanctioning between members of a group. However, often we can not allow for punishment and exclude the possibility of counter-punishment occurring. We design a public goods experiment,...

Recent models of monetary policy can have indeterminacy of equilibria, which is often viewed as a di±culty of these models. We consider the significance of indeterminacy using the learning approach to expectations formation. We employ expectational stability as a selection criterion for...

The decision to request a preliminary injunction-a court order that bans a party from certain behavior until its lawfulness is ascertained in a final court ruling at trial-is an important litigation instrument in many areas of the law including antitrust, copyright, patents, trademarks,...

Empirical Mode Decomposition, an adaptive data-driven technique which can be used to extract non-stationary signals buried in noise, seldom admits theoretical calculation of the statistical properties of the extracted signals. Instead, numerical experiments are required. In this paper we use...

In a pro-male biased society, brothers may reduce the parental investment received by female siblings, if parents face time or financial constraints. But brothers may also cause positive externalities. Using more than 12,000 firstborn twins from a highly sex-imbalanced economy, Taiwan, we test...

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about...

Since Akerlof's (1970) seminal paper the existence of adverse selection due to asymmetric information about quality is well-understood. Yet two questions remain. First, given the negative implications for trading and welfare, how do such markets come into existence? And second, why have many...

Although households are responsible for many important decisions, they have rarely been the subject of economics experiments. We conduct a series of linked and incentivized experiments on decision-making, designed to see if the anomalies typically found in individual choice experiments are found...