The Phillips Curve, the Persistence of Inflation, and the Lucas Critique: Evidence from Exchange-Rate Regimes: Comment by Clemens J. M. Kool and Alex Lammertsma. Published in volume 90, issue 1, pages 312-315 of American Economic Review, March 2000

Why do individuals participate in charitable gambling activities? We conduct a laboratory investigation of a model that predicts risk-neutral expected utility maximizers will participate in lotteries when they recognize that lotteries are being used to finance public goods. As predicted by the model, we find that public goods provision is higher when financed by lottery proceeds than when financed by voluntary contributions. We also find support for other comparative static predictions of the model. In particular we find that ticket purchases vary with the size of the fixed prize and with the return from the public good: lotteries with large prizes are more effective, and ticket purchases drop dramatically when the public good is not valued by subjects.

We present a simple put option pricing procedure within an asset–liability valuation model that can be used to estimate the incentives facing stock-based life insurance firms to voluntarily sell their businesses under various operating and regulatory conditions. Estimates are derived for samples of 11 sold firms and 24 continuing Australian life insurance companies over a period of industry consolidation. The put option values interact with other actuarial and accounting components of the fair value of these life insurance firms and are used to assess the effectiveness of accounting and actuarial measures of capital, under static or dynamic based solvency testing models.

This paper considers the interpretation of evidence from social experiments when persons randomized out of a program being evaluated have good substitutes for it, and when persons randomized into a program drop out to pursue better alternatives. Using data from an experimental evaluation of a classroom training program, we document the empirical importance of control group substitution and treatment group dropping out. Evidence that one program is ineffective relative to close substitutes is not evidence that the type of service provided by all of the programs is ineffective, although that is the way experimental evidence is often interpreted.