Böcker i Elements in Behavioural and Ex-serien

Recent developments in behavioural economics have deeply influenced the way governments design public policies. They give citizens access to online simulators to cope with tax and benefits systems and increasingly rely on nudges to guide individual decisions. The recent surge of interest in Behavioural Public Finance is grounded on the conviction that a better understanding of individual behaviours could improve predictions of tax revenue and help design better-suited incentives to save for retirement, search for a new job, go to school or seek medical attention. Through a presentation of the most recent developments in Behavioural Public Finance, this Element discusses the way Behavioural Economics has improved our understanding of fiscal policies.

Behavioral economics provides a rich set of explicit models of non-classical preferences and belief formation which can be used to estimate structural models of decision making. At the same time, experimental approaches allow the researcher to exogenously vary components of the decision making environment. The synergies between behavioral and experimental economics provide a natural setting for the estimation of structural models. This Element will cover examples supporting the following arguments 1) Experimental data allows the researcher to estimate structural models under weaker assumptions and can simplify their estimation, 2) many popular models in behavioral economics can be estimated without any programming skills using existing software, 3) experimental methods are useful to validate structural models. This Element aims to facilitate adoption of structural modelling by providing Stata codes to replicate some of the empirical illustrations that are presented. Examples covered include estimation of outcome-based preferences, belief-dependent preferences and risk preferences.