Money doesn’t seem to make us happy for reasons of social comparison and habituation. But does that necessarily mean that we would be better off doing something else instead? This paper suggests that the phenomena of comparison and habituation are actually found in a variety of economic and social activities, rendering policy conclusions more difficult. JEL Classification Codes: D01, D31, H00, ...

This paper uses data from the largest tax preparer in the United States to estimate the impact of the “saver’s credit,” a US federal program providing financial incentives to encourage retirement savings, on the decision to contribute to an IRA. It finds significant, but very modest, effects. This is contrasted with results from a field experiment showing much larger impacts of clearly presente...

We investigate whether a rare event (like the default of the annuity provider) can explain the annuity market participation puzzle. High risk aversion is needed to change behavior in the presence of such a disastrous shock but higher risk aversion also makes annuities more valuable. Therefore, these rare events are unlikely candidates to explain the low take-up of voluntary annuities. JEL Class...

Economists have long observed that crowding out of government grants to private charities is incomplete. The accepted belief is that givers treat the grants as imperfect substitutes for private giving. We theoretically and empirically investigate a second reason: the strategic response of a charity will be to reduce fund-raising efforts after receiving a grant. Employing panel data from arts an...

Evidence suggests little informed giving. To understand this behavior, we examine a model of charitable giving with costly information. We find that an individual who considers a smaller contribution is less likely to seek information, and thus the percentage of informed giving diminishes as the population grows. We also find that a direct grant to the charity exacerbates crowding-out by discou...

Within a …eld experiment, I present a treatment group with reductions in information, administrative, stigma and procrastination costs associated with the Advance EITC. The treatment only increases Advance participation from 0.3 to 1.2 percent. Another treatment simultaneously encourages 401(k) savings, increasing 401(k) participation from 46 to 50 percent. However, there is no additional incre...

Theoretical models and empirical studies exploring the relationship between income inequality and growth reach a disappointing inconclusive answer. We postulate in this paper that one reason for this inconclusive result is that income inequality consist at least in two different sorts of inequality, inequality of opportunity and effort. These two types of inequality would affect growth through ...

The precipitation behavior in an Al– Cu alloy isothermally annealed at 463 K was studied using Vickers microhardness tests, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). An additional endothermic peak found in the DSC measurements may be attributed to the h00-phase, independent of the dissolution of the G. P. (II) and the h00-phase at the aging temperatures...

The internet contains billions of documents. We study if there is useful information in the frequency with which different topics are written about. Based on the premise that the occurrence of an event increases its textual frequency, we assess whether internet document-frequency can capture cross-sectional variation in the occurrence-frequency of social phenomena. We characterize the condition...