Donald Trump’s 2016 election and his nomination of climate skeptic Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency drastically downshifted expectations about U.S. policy toward climate change. Joseph Biden’s 2020 election shifted them dramatically upward. We study firms’ stock-price movements in reaction to these changes. As expected, the 2016 election boosted carbon-intensive firms. Surprisingly, firms with climate-responsible strategies also gained, especially those firms held by long-run investors. Such investors appear to have bet on a “boomerang” in climate policy. Harbingers of a boomerang appeared during Trump’s term. The 2020 election marked its arrival.

Willingness to pay (WTP), most economists believe, is an appropriate benefits metric for government expenditure and regulatory policies that reduce risks to human life. It depends, however, on the distribution of risk and wealth. Currently, society's expenditures overemphasize concentrated risks, say after-the-fact treatment as opposed to prevention. A "dead-anyway" effect complements excess attention to intense interests in explaining this. Our normative criterion for spending on risk reduction is what a rational, albeit uninsured, individual confronting lotteries on future risks to life and wealth would choose for himself. This requires correcting WTP to eliminate the dead-anyway effect but continues to reflect that wealth enhances the utility of living.

Individuals with finite private information independently choose acts and messages. Their utilities may depend on all acts and information, including the center's. Incentive payments are separable and fully transferable. Implementable incentives making specified behavior a Bayesian equilibrium are derived whenever the center's information depends stochastically, however slightly, on all relevant private information, and also whenever individuals' relative valuations of acts, however divergent, are not too dissimilarly affected by different states of nature. Feasibility is resolved whenever the desired strategies reveal the agents' beliefs about the center's information. Key concepts of agent similarity are developed for nonresponsive and budget-balancing cases.

We study approximately 5.0 million stock picks submitted by individual users to the “CAPS” website run by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). These picks prove to be surprisingly informative about future stock prices. Shorting stocks with a disproportionate number of negative picks and buying stocks with a disproportionate number of positive picks yields a return of over 12% per annum over the sample period. Negative picks mostly drive these results; they strongly predict future stock price declines. Returns to positive picks are statistically indistinguishable from the market. A Fama–French decomposition suggests that stock-picking rather than style factors largely produced these results.

Contests are situations in which an individual's reward depends on his performance relative to others. Students are graded on a curve; the candidate with the most votes gets the political office; the underling who performs best is promoted to the executive position. Contests are useful in dealing with indivisible rewards, reducing monitoring costs, and minimizing risks from common uncertainties. They are employed to sort potential participants and, once they have entered, to induce appropriate effort from them. With monitoring precision and prize spreads as potential choice variables, optimal contest structures are derived for fair and unfair contests among equal and unequal participants. The converse problems of climbing-low-ability individuals enter the contest designed for high-ability candidates-and slumming are shown to be manageable.

We examine the effects of reference income on the behavior of young male physicians. Using a unique panel of data, we relate physicians' reference and actual incomes to their subsequent income growth. Reference income has a strong positive effect on subsequent income for physicians who are below their reference points, but not for physicians who are at or above their reference points. Loss aversion, which posits a kink in utility at the reference point, explains this puzzling pattern. Physicians respond strongly to shortfalls from the reference point—they take unappealing actions to boost earnings—because the marginal utility of income is steep in that range. Competing prominent theories, tested here, fail to explain these relationships.

Donald Trump's surprise election shifted expectations: corporate taxes would be lower and trade policies more restrictive. Relative stock prices responded appropriately. High-tax firms and those with large deferred tax liabilities (DTLs) gained; those with significant deferred tax assets from net operating loss carryforwards (NOL DTAs) lost. Domestically focused companies fared better than internationally oriented firms. A price contribution analysis shows that easily assessed consequences (DTLs, NOL DTAs, tax rates) were priced faster than more complex issues (net DTLs, foreign exposure). In sum, the analysis demonstrates that expectations about tax rates greatly impact firm values.

This paper examines the entry implications of physician advertising. Evidence suggests that advertising inhibits entry into this market. Nevertheless. experienced physicians (incumbents), to whom advertising would offer the greatest financial benefit, in fact advertise less--a paradox that may be explained by nonfinancial concerns, such as unwillingness to break well-internalized professional norms against advertising. Physician advertising has risen sharply in recent years, and it appears that this trend will continue. If incumbents increasingly resort to advertising, there could be a substantial redistribution of income from less-well-established physicians to better-established ones.

I. Optimality of competitive markets with increasing marginal extraction costs—a correction and elaboration, 338.—II. Cases where extraction rights or extraction technologies must be traded, 341.—III. Conclusion, 343.