I estimate the effects of an education policy (Triple Science) in England aimed at increasing the take-up and attainment of young people in science subjects. I identify the effect of the policy by comparing two adjacent cohorts of pupils in schools that offer Triple Science to one cohort, but...

We contrast a standard deterministic signaling game with one where the signal-generating mechanism is stochastic. With stochastic signals a unique equilibrium emerges that involves separation and has intuitive comparative-static properties as the degree of signaling depends on the prior type...

We analyze the relationship between senate malapportionment and the allocation of the US federal budget to the states during the period 1978-2002. A substantial literature originating from the influential paper by Atlas et al. (1995) finds that small and overrepresented states get significantly...

The decision to request a preliminary injunction-a court order that bans a party from certain behavior until its lawfulness is ascertained in a final court ruling at trial-is an important litigation instrument in many areas of the law including antitrust, copyright, patents, trademarks,...

Empirical Mode Decomposition, an adaptive data-driven technique which can be used to extract non-stationary signals buried in noise, seldom admits theoretical calculation of the statistical properties of the extracted signals. Instead, numerical experiments are required. In this paper we use...

In a pro-male biased society, brothers may reduce the parental investment received by female siblings, if parents face time or financial constraints. But brothers may also cause positive externalities. Using more than 12,000 firstborn twins from a highly sex-imbalanced economy, Taiwan, we test...

Since Akerlof's (1970) seminal paper the existence of adverse selection due to asymmetric information about quality is well-understood. Yet two questions remain. First, given the negative implications for trading and welfare, how do such markets come into existence? And second, why have many...

Although households are responsible for many important decisions, they have rarely been the subject of economics experiments. We conduct a series of linked and incentivized experiments on decision-making, designed to see if the anomalies typically found in individual choice experiments are found...

The war in Iraq initiated in March 2003 triggered a wave of violence and turmoil in the country, exposing households to insecurity and to instability in daily life. The level of violence has varied across provinces, the south and centre areas being the most affected. Using the different...

Son-preferring parents tend to continue to have babies until a son's birth. After deciding the set of children, the parents with resource constraints may divert family sources from daughters to a son. Thus, the presence of a son, relative to a daughter, have 2 distinct effects on his sister's...