We analyze the welfare e¤ect of governmental regulation for individuals who consider anticipated regret in their decision making process. While governmental policies by directing choice distort individual decisions in the private market they can alleviate individuals’pain associated with the feeling of regret. We specify a general model to highlight this trade-o¤ and investigate two policies mo...

p eople’s business credit program (kur) has been launched to alleviate poverty through provision of micro financing to micro entrepreneurs in indonesia this study aims to estimate the impact of kur program using cross-sectional data and propensity score matching technique (psm). the survey was conducted on 332 household entrepreneurs, consisting of 155 kur receivers and 177 non-kur receivers. r...

I develop a quantitative, dynamic general equilibrium model of life cycle behavior to study the effects of several policy reforms on assets composition over the life cycle, wealth distribution and aggregate saving. Privatizing social security increases aggregate saving, decreases overall wealth inequality, and generates large welfare gain, especially for agents with high initial productivity. L...

This paper investigates the responsiveness of household portfolios to tax incentives by exploiting a substantial tax reform that altered after-tax returns and cost of debt for a large number of households. An extraordinary panel data set that covers two years before and after the reform is used for the analysis. Our empirical findings suggest that households reshuffle their balance sheets in th...

This paper asks whether targeting welfare benefits to women can be effective at changing household spending. We provide empirical evidence on this question by using a reform to the UK tax-credit system in 2003 as a quasi-experiment. We find that the reform caused low-income households to reallocate spending towards children’s goods. The results further demonstrate that the effects of directing ...

This article surveyed recipients of one-off government transfers in Singapore to investigate to what extent different behavioral motives might have affected their consumption response. It also investigates how the recipients’ personal characteristics might have affected their consumption response and the appeal of different motives. In the sample surveyed, savers were mostly motivated by precau...

In this paper, we analyze family labor supply in urban China using discretized neo-classical labor supply model, where we take into account the unobserved heterogeneity of each spouse and their correlation, unobservability and measurement errors of the wage rates, and the correlation of the wage and preferences. The correlation of preference between spouses is also taken into account. Elasticit...

This article studies reproductive externalities within rural communities in poor countries. It is shown that such externalities create a link between household poverty, household size, and the local natural-resource base, each of which is viewed as being endogenous. The models presented here o!er an explanation for the fact that in recent decades large groups of people in various parts of the w...

We analyze positive theories of redistribution, social insurance and public good provision in a dynamic macroeconomic framework. Political outcomes are determined via repeated voting and driven by a conflict of interests between agents. Voters and politicians rationally forecast the impact of current political choices on future political and economic outcomes. The theory is consistent with larg...

This paper studies how a politician’s preferences and abilities to influence public and private sector productivity affect her choices over economic policies. Extremism between policies of leftand right-wing incumbents increases with ability, because voters are more willing to re-elect competent politicians. Positive correlations between certain ability dimensions and preferences amplify politi...