This paper studies the political budget cycles of provincial governments in China and explores the channels that drive such cycles. It finds that in addition to good economic performance, being clean (or staying away from corruption) is an important factor in provincial leaders' chances of...

The author analyzes the optimal investment in environmental protection in a model of non-overlapping hyperbolically discounting agents. He shows that, in the long run and in the absence of a commitment device, society is stuck in a situation where all agents prefer further investments, yet no...

The author analyzes the optimal investment in environmental protection in a model of an infinite series of non-overlapping hyperbolically discounting agents. He shows that without a commitment mechanism society is eventually stuck in a situation where all agents prefer further investment in the...

We employ the convex time budget approach in a laboratory experiment to measure individual discount rates for time horizons that are longer (5, 10, and 20 years) than what is typically explored in previous literature. We reject hyperbolic discounting in favor of constant discount rates and...

In this paper, the problem of inconsistent dynamic choice is discussed, as considered in the literature, both under certainty in the context of changing preferences, and under risk and uncertainty in the case of preference orderings which violate expected utility theory. The problem of...

The author analyzes the optimal investment in environmental protection in a model of non-overlapping hyperbolically discounting agents. He shows that, in the long run and in the absence of a commitment device, society is stuck in a situation where all agents prefer further investments, yet no...

In this paper, we extend the well known result that hyperbolically discounting agents tend to postpone costs into the future. In a simple model we show that, without commitment to the ex ante optimal plan, no investment in environmental protection is undertaken over the whole time horizon, no...

One reason to call an activity a vice and suppress it is that it reduces a person's future happiness more than it increases his present happiness. Gruber & Koszegi (2001) show how a vice tax can increase a person's welfare in a model of multiple selves with hyperbolic preferences across time. An...

Most evidence of hyperbolic discounting is based on violations of either stationarity or time consistency as observed in choice experiments. These choice reversals may however also result from time-varying discount rates. Hyperbolic discounting is a plausible explanation for choice reversals...

In their model of addiction, O´Donoghue and Rabin obtain a counterintuitive result: a person that is fully aware of his self-control problems (sophisticate) is more prone to become addicted than one who is fully naware (na¨ıf). In this paper we show that this result arises from their...