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Behavioral Public Finance, Edward J. Mccaffery
Behavioral Public Finance, Edward J. Mccaffery
Edward J McCaffery
These are slides from a presentation to the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, Squaw Valley Conference, May, 2008 (at which event Michael Jensen got me to agree to post these slides as a pdf on SSRN . . . ). The task is to give an overview of what I hope to be an emerging field of behavioral public finance. Behavioral finance, as per Barberis and Thaler 2003 (and others), consists of two parts: (1) individual level heuristics and biases, which can lead to sub-optimal (inconsistent) judgment and decision-making, and (2) institutional arbitrage mechanisms. In private finance and …
Comments On Liebman And Zeckhauser, Simple Humans, Complex Insurance, Subtle Subsidies, Edward J. Mccaffery
Comments On Liebman And Zeckhauser, Simple Humans, Complex Insurance, Subtle Subsidies, Edward J. Mccaffery
Edward J McCaffery
These are brief comments on an excellent paper by Jeffrey Liebman and Richard Zeckhauser, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Urban Institute and Brookings on tax and health care policy. Liebman and Zeckhauser summarize the complexities involved in making optimal health insurance decisions, and offer generally cautionary notes about conflating these with tax law (a theme of the conference). Most importantly, Liebman and Zeckhauser suggest a positive role for employers in health care and insurance decisions, as better setters or framers of choice sets—witness 401(k) plans. In this Commentary, I applaud Leibman and Zeckhauser’s general work and particular observation, …
Toward An Agenda For Behavioral Public Finance, Edward J. Mccaffery, Joel Slemrod
Toward An Agenda For Behavioral Public Finance, Edward J. Mccaffery, Joel Slemrod
Edward J McCaffery
This essay is about the intersection -- or possible intersection -- between the fields of behavioral economics and public finance, which we call behavioral public finance.
Masking Redistribution (Or Its Absence), Jonathan Baron, Edward J. Mccaffery
Masking Redistribution (Or Its Absence), Jonathan Baron, Edward J. Mccaffery
Edward J McCaffery
Research has shown that people vary widely in their support or opposition to progressive taxation. We argue here that the perception of progressiveness itself is affected by the nature of the tax system and by the way it is framed, or presented. Experiments conducted over the World-Wide Web and using within-subject design demonstrate that subjects suffer from a range of heuristics and biases in understanding and supporting progressive or redistributive taxation. After reviewing some prior results, we report three new studies. Two of them indicate that people do not sufficiently appreciate the reduction of progressiveness that results from the use …