This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present...

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of inequalities and economic convergence on the efficient discount rate, in the absence of any risk-sharing scheme. We consider an economy in which the initial consumption level and the distribution of consumption growth are heterogeneous. The...

We analyze whether a redistributive government should provide ex ante insurance against unfortunate outcomes or whether it should instead rely on transfers for redistributing income ex post. To this end, we develop a model of education in which individuals face educational risk and wage...

Since governments can influence the demand for a new abatement technology through their environmental policy, they may be able to expropriate innovations in new abatement technology ex post. This suggests that incentives for environmental R&D may be lower than the incentives for market goods...

This article explores the use of workfare as part of an optimal tax mix when labor supply responses are along the extensive margin. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between workfare and an earned income tax credit, two policies that are designed to provide additional incentives...

We analyze the short and long run effects of demographic ageing - increased longevity and reduced fertility - on per-capita growth. The OLG model captures direct effects, working through adjustments in the savings rate, labor supply, and capital deepening, and indirect effects, working through...

Politicians may pander to public opinion and may renounce undertaking beneficial long-term projects. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a triple mechanism involving political information markets, reelection threshold contracts, and democratic elections. An information market is used to...

The characteristics of endogenously determined sharing rules and the group-size paradox are studied in a model of group contest with the following features: (i) The prize has mixed private-public good characteristics. (ii) Groups can differ in marginal cost of effort and their membership size....

The paper examines the optimal combination of central bank independence and conservatism in the presence of uncertain central bank preferences. We develop a model of endogenous monetary policy delegation in which government chooses the central bank's degree of inde-pendence and conservatism so...