Macroeconomic analyses of capital controls face a number of imposing challenges and have yielded mixed results to date. This paper takes a different approach and surveys an emerging literature that evaluates various microeconomic effects of capital controls and capital account liberalization. Several key themes emerge. First, capital controls tend to reduce the supply of capital, raise the cost...

We extend the discussion of redistributive politics across electoral systems to allow for taxation to be distortionary. We allow politicians to choose any tax rate between zero and unity and then redistribute the money collected. We build on the model put forward by Myerson (1993) and Lizzeri and Persico (2001 and 2005) to show that the use of distortionnary taxation can be understood as an ana...

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby improving its bargaining position. On the other hand, a tariff can prompt inefficient organizational c...

We study the welfare effects of an increase in firms’ information about consumer naivete in a simple reduced-form model in which competitive firms can introduce distortionary fees that naive consumers ignore when making purchase decisions. We establish that our model captures many markets—including those for credit, banking, hotels, gambling, and mobile phones—in which consumer naivete has been...

We propose a notion of continuous path for locally finite metric spaces, taking inspiration from the recent development of A-theory for locally finite connected graphs. We use this notion of continuity to derive an analogue in Z of the Jordan curve theorem and to extend to a quite large class of locally finite metric spaces (containing all finite metric spaces) an inequality for the l-distortio...

Poincare inequalities are a simple way to obtain lower bounds on the distortion of mappings X into Y. These are shown below to be sharp when we consider the Lp spaces. A Poincare inequality is one of the following type: suppose Ψ : [0, ∞) → [0, ∞) is a nondecreasing function and that au,v, bu,v are finite arrays of real numbers (for u, v ∈ X, and not all of the numbers 0). We say that functions...

INTRODUCTION: REFRAMING THE ISSUE OF RACE AND IMPRISONMENT .............. 1272 A. The Distinctive Features of African American Mass Incarceration .......... 1274 1. Total numbers incarcerated. . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . ...... .... . . . . . . .. ... . . .. . . . .......... 1274 2. Rate of incarceration . . ... ......... . . . . . ..... . . ............. . . ...... ....

Personality measures were predicted to be susceptible to response distortion above and beyond volitional strategies of impression management. A 2 (Instruction Set) x 2 (Personality Feedback) x 2 (Mortality Salience) factorial design addressed social desirability biases in responding to personality measures. There were significant changes in all measures due to volitional (Fake Good) strategies....

The theoretical guarantees provided by voting have distinguished it as a prominent method of preference aggregation among autonomous agents. However, unlike humans, agents usually assign each candidate an exact utility, whereas an election is resolved based solely on each voter’s linear ordering of candidates. In essence, the agents’ cardinal (utility-based) preferences are embedded into the sp...

In a recent study, more than half of the participants were led to create a partial or complete false memory for an emotional childhood event (e.g., serious animal attack). Using a subsample from that study, we examined the hypothesis that memory distortion is related to characteristics of interviewers and rememberers. The relations between susceptibility to memory distortion and (a) dissociatio...