We use personality traits to better understand the relationship between income and life satisfaction. Personality traits mediate the effect of income on life satisfaction. The effect of neuroticism, which measures sensitivity to threat and punishment, is strong in both the British Household...

Rational choice theories assume that voters accurately assess the outcomes of policies. However, many important policies—such as regulating prices and introducing Pigouvian taxation—yield outcomes through indirect or equilibrium effects that may differ from their direct effects. Citizens may...

Rational choice theories assume that voters accurately assess the outcomes of policies. However, many important policies—such as regulating prices and introducing Pigouvian taxation—yield outcomes through indirect or equilibrium effects that may differ from their direct effects. Citizens may...

We present a new and simple mechanism for repeated public good environments. In the Conditional Contribution Mechanism (CCM), agents send two message of the form, "I am willing to contribute x units to the public good if in total y units are contributed." This mechanism offers agents risk-free...

We test whether the binary lottery procedure makes subjects behave as if they are risk neutral in the Holt-Laury and Eckel-Grossman tasks. Depending on the task we find that at most a third of subjects behave as if risk neutral. In fact, when we compare the distribution of choices we find no...

Recent years have seen an emergence of decentralized cryptocurrencies that were initially devised as a payment system, but are increasingly being recognized as investment instruments.The price trajectories of cryptocurrencies have raised questions among economists and policy-makers, especially...

The massive price bubbles of decentralized cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have created a puzzle for economists. How can a non-revenue-generating asset exhibit such extreme price dynamics, forming multiple episodes of bubbles and crashes since its creation? The answer is not straightforward,...