Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of "nudge" interventions that governments are now adopting alter people's decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as ...

How public pension plan assets should be invested is an important but unsettled question. Alicia H. Munnell and Mauricio Soto (2007) find that the share of state and local (S&L) plan assets held in equities has grown over time, largely in parallel with private sector practices, from an average of about 40 percent in the late 1980s to about 70 percent in 2007. This exposure led to a loss of an e...

1 Department of Dermatology, University of Luebeck, D-23538 Luebeck, Germany; 2 Department of Dermatology, Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Centre, Jerusalem, Israel; 3 Laboratory of Cutaneous Physiopathology and Integrated Centre of Metabolomics Research, San Gallicano Dermatologic Institute (IRCCS), Rome, Italy; 4 DE-MTA “Lendület” Cellular Physiology Research Group, Department of Physiolog...

We extend McDonald and Siegel’s (1986) model to the case where the expected rate of return of a project cannot be observed but is known to be either low or high. Waiting and observing the realizations of the value of the project provides information to the investor who can update her beliefs about the true value of the expected return. Moreover, the investor can purchase some additional informa...

We study experimentally whether employers or workers should invest in firm specific training. Only workers are assumed to have an alternative trading opportunity. Both the turnover costs case where this alternative takes the form of an outside option and the no-friction case where it serves as a threat point are considered. Theory predicts that in the turnover costs case employers have better i...