This article calls into question the Pigovian justifications for higher taxes on goods and services that generate negative externalities. Insisting on a Pigovian tax as a precautionary measure only makes sense if it replaces all preexisting subsidies, taxes, and regulations rather than being...

We study which Big Five personality traits are associated with academic performance among a sample of Russian university students using results from the Unified State Examination (for university admissions) and their current grade point averages as measures of academic performance. We find that...

We study why China suddenly exhibited a large surge in births -- a 50% increase in 2000 relative to 1999 -- in the 2000 Year of the Dragon by disaggregating birth rates at the city level. We define the dragon effect as a relative jump in birth rates compared to the trend. Prior to 2000, Asian...

The literature on British economic history presumes that Britain was a free trader after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Thus her tariff levels were below those which were optimal for maximizing utility. Presumably, if the optimal British tariff was positive and greater than the levels established...

We expand the set of outcomes considered by the tournament literature to include draws and use games from post-war chess tournaments to see whether strategic behavior is important in such scenarios. In particular, we examine whether players from the former Soviet Union acted as a cartel in...

This paper re-examines Blanchard and Quah's (1989) aggregate supply/demand model interpretation of output shocks using data from ten countries. Although postwar data support their interpretation, the model is not supported by nineteenth century data. In the postwar period, permanent output...

With corruption, prohibition is better at curtailing consumption than taxation. Prohibition enforcers are incentivized to enforce against illegal producers to extract bribes from them, while the latter willingly pay the bribes to keep supplying the market. In equilibrium, total quantity is...

Why do seemingly irrational superstitions persist? We analyze the widely held belief among Asians that children born in the Year of the dragon are superior. We use pooled cross section data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to show that Asian immigrants to the United States born in the...

To what extent do politicians reward voters who are members of their own ethnic or racial group? Using data from large cities in the United States, we study how black employment outcomes are affected by changes in the race of the cities' mayors between 1971 and 2003. We find that black...