In an e¤ort to reduce energy use, governments in the United States and many other countries subsidize energy e¢ cient lightbulbs or ban traditional incandescent bulbs. We evaluate one important rationale for these policies: that imperfect information or attentional biases cause consumers to purchase more incandescents than they would in their private optima. We formalize a model of consumer cho...

For the uropathogenic Escherichia coli strain 536 (O6:K15:H31), the DNA sequences of three pathogenicity islands (PAIs) (PAI I(536) to PAI III(536)) and their flanking regions (about 270 kb) were determined to further characterize the virulence potential of this strain. PAI I(536) to PAI III(536) exhibit features typical of PAIs, such as (i) association with tRNA-encoding genes; (ii) G+C conten...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation – like Canada’s – couples with the same household income can face different effective tax rates on capital income when labor income is distributed di...

We develop a framework for non-parametrically identifying optimization frictions and structural elasticities using notches–discontinuities in the choice sets of agents–introduced by for example tax and transfer policies. Notches create excess bunching on the low-tax side and missing mass on the high-tax side of a cutoff, and they are often associated with a region of strictly dominated choice t...

Behavioural plasticity allows animals to adjust rapidly to local environmental conditions, but at the risk of erroneously changing behaviour in response to irrelevant events. Adaptive biases or predispositions constrain learning and reduce such potential costs. Preferential learning about complex biologicallymeaningful stimuli, such as predators, has been investigated in only a few systems and ...

Designing Optimal Taxes with a Microeconometric Model of Household Labour Supply The purpose of this paper is to present an exercise where we identify optimal income tax rules under the constraint of fixed tax revenue. To this end, we estimate a microeconomic model with 78 parameters that capture heterogeneity in consumption-leisure preferences for singles and couples as well as in job opportun...

We examine the e ect of shocks to teacher inputs on child performance in school. We start with a household optimization framework where parents spend optimally in response to teacher and other school inputs. This helps to isolate the impact of teachers from other inputs. As a proxy measure for these shocks, we use teacher absenteeism during a 30 day period. Shocks to teacher inputs have a signi...

Can public income insurance through progressive income taxation improve the allocation of risk in an economy where private risk sharing is incomplete? The answer depends crucially on the fundamental friction that limits private risk sharing in the first place. If risk sharing is limited because insurance markets are missing for model-exogenous reasons (as in Bewley, 1986) publicly provided risk...

Calcium- and integrin-binding protein 1 (CIB1) is involved in the process of platelet aggregation by binding the cytoplasmic tail of the alpha(IIb) subunit of the platelet-specific integrin alpha(Iib)beta(3). Although poorly understood, it is widely believed that CIB1 acts as a global signaling regulator because it is expressed in many tissues that do not express integrin alpha(Iib)beta(3). We ...

Most studies fail to find an impact of school inputs on outcomes such as test scores. We argue that this might be a consequence of ignoring the possibility that households respond optimally to changes in school inputs and thus obscure the real e ect of such provision on cognitive achievement. To incorporate the forward-looking behavior of households, we present a household optimization model re...