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An Experimental Study of the Effects of Inequality and Relative Deprivation on Trusting Behavior
(Department of Economics, 2005)
Several non-experimental studies report that income inequality and other forms of population-based heterogeneity reduce levels of trust in society. However, recent work by Glaeser et al. (2000) calls into question the reliability of widely used...
Did the Devil Make Them Do It? The Effects of Religion in Public Goods and Trust Games*
(Department of Economics, 2008)
We test whether religious affiliation and participation in religious services are associated with behavior in public goods and trust games. Overall, religious affiliation is unrelated to individual behavior. However, we ...
Customization with Vertically Differentiated Products
(Department of Economics, 2009)
We study an asymmetric duopoly market in which the firms' products are initially differentiated in both variety and quality. Each consumer has a most preferred variety and a quality valuation. Customization provides ideal ...
Do Liberals Play Nice? The Effects of Party and Political Ideology in Public Goods and Trust Games
(Department of Economics, 2004)
We test the conventional wisdom that political ideology is associated with generosity or compassion by comparing the behavior of experimental subjects in public goods or trust games. We find that self-described liberals ...
How Do States Formulate Medicaid and SCHIP Policy? Economic and Political Determinants of State Eligibility Levels
(Department of Economics, 2009)
We exploit the existence of substantial variation in state policies toward public health insurance for children between 1990 and 2002 to estimate the economic and political determinants of state eligibility levels. Controlling for state and year...
Estate and Capital Gains Taxation: Efficiency and Political Economy Considerations
(Department of Economics, 2004)
In this paper a simple dynastic overlapping-generations model with homogeneous agents is used to analyze the optimal use of capital income tax, labor income tax and estate tax. The results of this analysis add to the conventional wisdom about...
The Effect of Monetary Policy on Economic Output
(Department of Economics, 2003)
There is substantial research effort devoted to identifying a sufficient statistic for monetary policy. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the scope of the on-going investigation along three dimensions. First, we follow up the Rudebusch...
Customization in an Endogenous-Timing Game with Vertical Differentiation
(Department of Economics, 2008)
We study customization in a duopoly game in which the firms' products have different qualities. Whether customization choices are made simultaneously or sequentially is endogenously determined. Specifically, the customization ...
Asymmetric Information and Bank Runs
(Department of Economics, 2007)
. In this paper, I extend the analysis of panic-based runs to include an asymmetric-information, extrinsic randomizing device. Depositors observe different, but correlated, signals on the stability of the bank. I find that if the signals that depositors obtain...
Optimal Commodity Taxation When Land and Structures Must Be Taxed at the Same Rate
(Department of Economics, 2005)
We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California's high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing ...
State Social Capital and Individual Health Status
(Department of Economics, 2004)
Recent studies have found that two state-level measures of social capital, average levels of civic participation and trust, are associated with improvements in individual health status. In this study we employ these measures, ...
An Information Theoretic Approach to Flexible Stochastic Frontier Models
(Department of Economics, 2007)
Parametric stochastic frontier models have a long history in applied production economics, but the class of tractible parametric models is relatively small. Consequently, researchers have recently considered non-parametric alternatives...
The Effects of Campaign Finance Laws on Turnout, 1950-2000
(Department of Economics, 2006)
Scholars have proposed many routes by which campaign finance laws may impact turnout. For instance, laws restricting campaign spending may decrease mobilization, resulting in lower turnout. Alternatively, such laws might ...
High Corruption Income in Ming and Qing China
(Department of Economics, 2005)
We develop an economic model that explains historical data on government corruption in Ming and Qing China. In our model, officials' extensive powers result in corrupt income matching land's share in output. We estimate corrupt income to be between...
The Welfare Caseload, Economics Growth and Welfare-to-Work Policies: An Analysis of Five Urban Areas
(Department of Economics, 2000)
This paper uses quarterly data on AFDC (later TANF) recipients in five major urban areas to examine the relative importance of policy reform and economic conditions in explaining the dynamics of the welfare caseload and the employment experiences...
Race, Bureaucratic Discretion, and the Implementation of Welfare Reform
(Department of Economics, 2003)
This paper explores the impact of the race of individual clients and of the local racial context on the implementation of sanctions for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in a Midwestern state. We find that although...
Incentive Schemes in Peer-to-Peer Networks
(Department of Economics, 2008)
In this paper we use mechanism design approach to find the optimal file-sharing mechanism in a peer-to-peer network. This mechanism improves upon existing incentive schemes. In particular, we show that peer-approved scheme is never optimal...
Campaign Finance Laws and Political Efficacy: Evidence From the States
(Department of Economics, 2005)
The decline of political efficacy and trust in the United States is often linked to the rise of money in politics. Both the courts and reform advocates justify restrictions on campaign donations and spending as necessary ...
Explaining Public Attitudes on State Legislative Professionalism
(Department of Economics, 2008)
Scholars have long argued that state legislative professionalism, or the provision of staff, legislator salary, and session length, has behavioral incentives for legislators and implications for legislative capacity. Scant ...
Bayesian Estimator of Vector-Autoregressive Model Under the Entropy Loss
(Department of Economics, 2002)
it difficult to compute the Bayesian estimates via standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedures. The second contribution of the paper concerns MCMC simulation of the Bayesian estimator without using the closed-form expression of the frequentist...