In Geng, Weiss, and Wol (2011), we pointed to the possibility that a voting mechanism may create or strengthen an entitlement e ect in political-power holders relative to a random-appointment mechanism. This comment documents that such an e ect, if it exists, is not robust.

Objectives Estimates of occupation-specific tinnitus prevalence may help identify high-risk occupations where interventions are warranted. The authors studied the effect of occupation on prevalence of bothersome tinnitus and estimated the attributable fraction due to occupation. The authors also studied how much of the effect remained after adjusting for noise exposure, education income, hearin...

Econometric Causality This paper presents the econometric approach to causal modeling. It is motivated by policy problems. New causal parameters are defined and identified to address specific policy problems. Economists embrace a scientific approach to causality and model the preferences and choices of agents to infer subjective (agent) evaluations as well as objective outcomes. Anticipated and...

This paper studies a principal–agent relation in which the principal’s private information about the agent’s effort choice is more accurate than a noisy public performance measure. For some contingencies the optimal contract has to specify ex post inefficiencies in the form of inefficient termination (firing the agent) or third–party payments (money burning). We show that money burning is the l...