This paper considers a Ramsey model of linear capital and labor income taxation in which the government cannot commit ex-ante to a sequence of policies for the future. In this setup, if the government is more impatient than the government, the capital income tax will always be positive in steady state. Thus, impatience and lack of commitment are able to generate positive capital taxes in the lo...

An increasing number of environmental protection programs offers financial compensation to farmers in exchange for conservation services. Incentive-compatible contracts can be designed to mitigate excess compensation, but the extant literature suggests that outcomes are always second-best so that other instruments (such as conservation auctions) may be preferred. We argue that the claim regardi...

Statistical hypothesis tests are a cornerstone of scientific research. The informative when their size is properly controlled, so the frequency rejecting true null hypotheses (type I error) stays below prespecified nominal level. Publication bias exaggerates test sizes, however. Since scientists can typically only publish results that reject hypothesis, they have incentive to continue conductin...

Credible and optimal monetary policies are considered in environments in which the government observes a signal that is correlated with the state of the economy. When the signal is public information it is optimal for monetary policy to be conditioned upon it. The extent to which such conditioning should occur when the signal is the private information of the government depends upon the governm...

We initiate the study of incentive-compatible forecasting competitions in which multiple forecasters make predictions about one or more events and compete for a single prize. have two objectives: (1) to incentivize report truthfully (2) award prize most accurate forecaster. Proper scoring rules truthful reporting if all are paid according their scores. However, incentives become distorted only ...