Whereas most of the world has experienced decreasing fertility during the past half century, Israel has experienced a puzzling mix of trends. Completed fertility has decreased sharply in some ethnic-religious groups (Mizrahi Jews and non-Bedouin Arabs) and increased moderately in other groups...

Retirement savings decisions should depend on expectations of Social Security retirement income. Persons may be uncertain of their future Social Security benefits for several reasons, including uncertainty about their future labor earnings, the formula now determining social security benefits,...

Despite dozens of studies, research on crime in the United States has struggled to reach consensus about the impact of right-to-carry (RTC) gun laws. Empirical results are highly sensitive to seemingly minor variations in the data and model. How then should research proceed? We think that policy...

Researchers have long used repeated cross sectional observations of homicide rates and sanctions to examine the deterrent effect of the adoption and implementation of death penalty statutes. The empirical literature, however, has failed to achieve consensus. A fundamental problem is that the...

Should a social planner treat observationally identical persons identically? This paper shows that uniform treatment is not necessarily desirable when a planner has only partial knowledge of treatment response. Then there may be reason to implement a fractional treatment rule, with positive...

We analyze probabilistic expectations of equity returns elicited in the Survey of Economic Expectations in 1999 %uF8182001 and in the Michigan Survey of Consumers in 2002 %uF8182004. Our empirical findings suggest that individuals use interpersonally variable but intrapersonally stable processes...

Retirement savings decisions should depend on expectations of Social Security retirement income. Persons may be uncertain of their future Social Security benefits for several reasons, including uncertainty about their future labor earnings, the formula now determining social security benefits,...

When data on actual choices are not available, researchers studying preferences sometimes pose choice scenarios and ask respondents to state the actions they would choose if they were to face these scenarios. The data on stated choices are then used to estimate random utility models, as if they...

COVID-19 antibody tests have imperfect accuracy. There has been lack of clarity on the meaning of reported rates of false positives and false negatives. For risk assessment and clinical decision making, the rates of interest are the positive and negative predictive values of a test. Positive...