A new perspective is provided on a puzzle that has emerged from the empirical lit- erature suggesting that government-independent central banks provide a `free lunch': lower in°ation is apparently achieved at no cost in terms of greater output variance. We assess the various explanations...

Excludable and congestible shared goods - club goods (e.g., internet access facilities) - are more prevalent than Samuelsonian public goods. Our example shows that, unlike the usual presumption with pure public goods, the optimal second-best supply of a club good might exceed its first-best...

With nondistortionary user charges, the first best and second best of a single-club-exogenous-income economy with identical individuals coincide. They differ if incomes differ. Overprovision of a superior club good then occurs in the Second Best.

This paper sets out to investigate the role of additive uncertainty under plausible non-standard central bank loss functions over future inflation. Building on a substantial body of evidence in the economic psychology literature, this paper postulates (i) period-by-period loss functions that are...

We consider firms' choices between a clean technology that benefits, and a dirty technology that harms, the environment. Green firms are more suited to the clean, and brown firms are more suited to the dirty technology. We use a model derived from complexity theory that takes account of true...

The evidence shows source-dependent entitlement to income sources and individuals are reluctant to part with income they feel more entitled to, e.g., earned labor income. Taxpayers may also be more reluctant to part with tax payments (evade more) from income sources they feel more entitled to- a...

We use the trust and the dictator games to explore the effects of religious identity on trust, trustworthiness, prosociality, and conditional reciprocity within a beliefs-based model. We provide a novel and rigorous theoretical model to derive the relevant predictions, which are then tested in...