Stochastic models with economy-wide shocks imply that the welfare costs of aggregate volatility are negligible. In reality idiosyncratic shocks are important, and empirical evidence suggests that their volatility is several times that of aggregate shocks. This paper introduces both types of...

Customary international law is an enigma. It is produced by the decentralized actions of states, and it generally lacks centralized enforcement mechanisms. Political science realists and some rationalist legal scholars argue that customary international law cannot affect state behavior: that it...

Despite the considerable research work, there are still conflicting views about the efficacy of the estimated relationship between religiosity and deviance. Some analysts contend that the relationship is spurious and is the by-product of left-out variables that alter both religiosity and...

There is considerable disagreement about the effects of informal contacts on earnings. Some researchers report higher earnings for those who found their jobs through such contacts, some report lower earnings, and some report no effects. This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey...

Reflecting on his experience as a central banker, Alan Blinder (1998) observed that “while I never saw a single case of a central banker succumbing to the temptation that so worried Kydland and Prescott, I often witnessed central bankers sorely tempted to deliver the policy that the markets...

We develop a model of public-private hospital competition un- der regulated prices, recognizing that hospitals are multi-service Þrms and that equilibria depend on the interactions of patients, hospital administrators, and physicians. We then use data from China to calibrate a simulation model...

Payment incentives have significant consequences for the equity and efficiency of a health care system, and have recently come to the fore in health policy reforms. This paper first discusses the economic rationale for apparent international convergence toward payment systems with mixed demand...

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American Housing Survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale...

This paper shows that communities with larger fractions of Catholics and Conservative Protestants have lower rates of teen childbearing ceteris paribus. The pattern of results does not appear to result from spurious correlation with unobservables but rather can be explained by a modified version...

This paper contends that there is an alternative explanation of the positive relationship between using informal contacts and job tenure for some young men. Lower wages, wage growth, and expected job tenure may characterize those using contacts with little clout in the market. In such cases, the...