Good Country People

Country Size and Public Good Provision

This paper studies the equilibrium size of countries. Individuals in small countries have greater influence over the nature of political decision making while individuals in large countries have the advantage of more public goods and lower tax rates. The model implies that (i) there exists excessive incentives to separate, though this need not be the case for all sets of secession rules studied...

Do people ask good questions?

People ask questions in order to efficiently learn about the world. But do people ask good questions? In this work, we designed an intuitive, gamebased task that allowed people to ask natural language questions to resolve their uncertainty. Question quality was measured through Bayesian idealobserver models that considered large spaces of possible game states. During free-form question generati...

Sustainable medicine: good for the environment, good for people.

Are Recessions Good for Young People

We construct a stochastic overlapping generations model in which households of di¤erent ages are subject to aggregate shocks that a¤ect both wages and asset prices. We use a realistically calibrated version of the model to assess the distributional consequences of severe recessions. More speci…cally, within the context of this model we ask whether young people can be better o¤ if they become ec...

Are Good-Looking People More Employable?

Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly imbed a headshot of themselves in the top corner of their CVs. We sent 5312 CVs in pairs to 2656 advertised job openings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female. Employer callbacks to attractive men are sig...