Patents are monopolies granted to inventors in order to promote innovation, but they have a limited term because they also impose social costs. There is little empirical research on what constitutes an optimal patent term, or whether patent term should vary across industry categories. We take a...

Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner’s dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...

In response to the Great Recession and sustained labor market downturn, the availability of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to new historical highs in the United States, up to 99 weeks as of late 2009 into 2012. We exploit variation in the timing and size of UI benet extensions...

Financial incentives are an important policy tool for encouraging prosocial behavior. However, evidence on the effect of very small financial incentives is mixed. Drawing on an original data set, I investigate the effect of a five-cent shopping bag tax imposed in the Washington Metropolitan...

The main objective of this paper is to propose a systematic approach to empirically analyse the relationship between sending remittances and the utility of migrants, as proxied by their subjective well-being (SWB). Using data from a new survey on China, we estimate models in which a SWB measure...

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual...

Recent empirical work suggests that how an individual responds to a tax depends at least in part on the tax's salience. The more salient a tax is, the more taxpayers adjust their demand in response to changes in the taxed good's after-tax price. If tax salience affects behavior, a natural...

I study the impact of immigration and ethnic diversity on political outcomes in immigrant receiving countries, focusing on the case of election outcomes and immigration in Danish municipalities 1981-2001. A rich set of control variables isolates ethnic diversity effects from that of other...