We compare the performance of liability rules for managing environmental disasters when third parties are harmed and cannot always be compensated. A firm can invest in safety to reduce the likelihood of accidents. The firm’s investment is unobservable to authorities. The presence of...

To conduct monetary policy, central banks around the world increasingly rely on measures of public inflation expectations. In this article, we review findings from an ongoing initiative at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York aimed at improving the measurement and our understanding of household...

We compare the inflation expectations reported by consumers in a survey with their behavior in a financially incentivized investment experiment designed such that future inflation affects payoffs. The inflation expectations survey is found to be informative in the sense that the beliefs reported...

During the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve implemented several novel programs to address adverse conditions in financial markets. Three of these temporary programs relied on an auction mechanism: the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, and the disposition of the...

The proposed 2008 TARP auction was intended to remove "toxic" assets from portfolios of financially stressed banks. The Treasury selected a design whereby bids to sell different securities would be normalized by "reference prices" that reflect relative value estimates. We conduct a series of...

While incentive framing has been shown to promote workers’ effort, little is known about how it affects other dimensions of the employer-employee relationship. This paper examines whether incentive framing can also influence workers propensity to engage in an activity disloyal to their...

Treasury auctions around the world have been typically conducted under either the uniform-price or discriminatory format. We propose alternative payment mechanisms including the uniform-price and discriminatory formats as special cases. We compare the properties of these alternative formats in...

Economists and policy makers increasingly consult national household surveys asking individuals about their economic circumstances, financial decisions, and expectations for the future. For decades, the Reuters/Michigan Survey of Consumers and other national surveys have asked about expectations...