College GPAs in the United States rose substantially between the 1960’s and the 2000’s. Over the same period, study time declined by almost a half. This paper uses a 12-quarter panel of course evaluations from the University of California, San Diego to discern whether a link...

Billions of dollars are now spent annually in the United States and Europe for spatially delineated environmental services such as agricultural landscape management and river restoration programs, yet little is known about the spatial distribution of the benefits from these policies. This paper...

We show that harmonizing emissions policy may be bad for the environment and/or global welfare, even when pollution is transboundary and countries are identical in every way. Harmonization effectively internalizes the transboundary aspects of pollution. But it also hampers producers’...

There is some evidence that people have biased perceptions of risks, such as lethal or environmental risks. Hence their behavior is based on beliefs which may di¤er from the ’objective’ beliefs used by a regulator. The optimal regulation then depends on this di¤erence in...

Several entry-exit models under price uncertainty are discussed by a new markup approach to investment, starting with the classical model by Dixit (1989). The markup approach, introduced by Dixit et al. (1999), enables us to state the expected value of the firm in the entry-exit model as a...

In this paper we propose a mechanism to resolve King Solomon’s dilemma about allocating an indivisible good at no cost to the participating agents. A distinctive feature of our mechanism is the design of a two-part contest that makes the agents guess each other’s bids in a...

There is some evidence that people have biased perceptions of risks, such as lethal or environmental risks. Hence their behavior is based on beliefs which may di¤er from the ’objective’ beliefs used by a regulator. The opti-mal regulation then depends on this difference in...

When second-price auctions have been conducted in the laboratory, most of the observed bids have been “overbids†(bids that exceed the bidder’s value) and there are very few underbids. Few if any of the subjects in those experiments had any prior experience bidding in auctions....

The gift-exchange game is a form of sequential prisoner’s dilemma, developed by Fehr, Kirchsteiger, and Riedl (1993), and popularized in a series of papers by Ernst Fehr and co-authors. While the European studies typically feature a high degree of gift exchange, the few U.S. studies...