Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to fathers) increases expenditures on children. From this, should we infer that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? In this paper, we develop a non-cooperative model of household decision making to...

We develop some asymptotic theory for applications of block bootstrap resampling schemes to multivariate integrated and cointegrated time series. It is proved that a multivariate, continuous-path block bootstrap scheme applied to a full rank integrated process, succeeds in estimating...

In most laboratory experiments concerning prosocial behavior subjects are fully informed how their decision influences the payoff of other players. Outside the laboratory, however, individuals typically have to decide without such detailed knowledge. To asses the effect of information...

We document the presence of sizable distributional effects from unexpected price level movements in the Euro Area (EA) using sectoral accounts and newly available data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The EA as a whole is a net winner of unexpected price level increases, with...

This paper analyzes Pareto optimal taxation of labor and capital income in a lifecycle framework with private information and idiosyncratic risk. We focus on historyindependent tax systems. We thereby complement the Mirrlees taxation literature, which has so far typically either characterized...

Does stiffer electoral competition reduce political rent-seeking behavior? For a micro-analysis of this question, I construct a new data set spanning the years 2005 to 2012 covering biographical and political information of German members of parliament (MPs), election results, and attendance...

In this paper we investigate bootstrap-based methods for bias-correcting the first-stage parameter estimates used in some recently developed bootstrap implementations of the co-integration rank tests of Johansen (1996). In order to do so we adapt the framework of Kilian (1998) which estimates...

We study a standard consumption based asset pricing model with rational investors who entertain subjective prior beliefs about price behavior. Optimal behavior then dictates that investors learn about price behavior from past price observations. We show that this imparts momentum and mean...

Since the 1980s, the U.S. income distribution has become considerably more concentrated toward the top while the wealth distribution has not. I argue that this can be accounted for by occupational shifts caused by the decline in tax progressivity. To show this, I construct a dynamic general...

Shared-frailty survival models specify that systematic unobserved determinants of duration outcomes are identical within groups of individuals. We consider random-effects likelihood-based statistical inference if the duration data are subject to left-truncation. Such inference with...