We describe the evolution of selective aspects of punishment in the US over the period 1980-2004. We note that imprisonment increased around 1980, a period that coincides with the "Reagan revolution" in economic matters. We build an economic model where beliefs about economic opportunities and...

We provide an example that shows that in the Alesina and Angeletos (2005) model one can obtain multiplicity even if luck plays no role in the economy. Thus, it is not critical that the noise to signal ratio be increasing in taxes, or that desired taxes are increasing in the noise to signal ratio.

We conduct two experiments of the claim that people are overconfident, using new tests of overplacement that are based on a formal Bayesian model. Our two experi- ments, on easy quizzes, find overplacement. More precisely, we find apparently over- confident data that cannot be accounted for by a...