How does the anticipated connectedness between one’s current and future identity help explain impatience in intertemporal preferences? The less consumers are closely connected psychologically to their future selves, the less willing they will be to forgo immediate benefits in order to ensure larger deferred benefits to be received by that future self. When consumers’ measured or manipulated sen...

Dan Thornton has written a very interesting paper on estimating the liquidity effect at the daily frequency. The paper starts with a nice discussion of the historical origins of the term “liquidity effect” (tracing it back to Milton Friedman, but somewhat surprisingly, no farther). The paper then discusses ways to identify the liquidity effect in daily data, and applies this discussion to criti...

Money collection presents particular problems in terms of effective vehicle routing. Planning the collection or distribution of money for ATMs or parking meters gives rise to two problems: while the total collecting time should be minimized, tours on successive days should be different to prevent robberies. The combination of these two problems is named as the Dissimilar Routing Problem. When t...

In this paper, I replicate Erikson and Palfrey (2000) who propose that the simultaneity problem in measuring the effects of candidate spending can be resolved by restricting the sample to close elections. Vote-on-spending effects, which vary with the expected closeness of the election outcome in a systematic way, determine the extent of simultaneity bias. The simultaneity bias becomes progressi...