Early research on the returns to higher education treated the postsecondary system as a monolith. In reality, postsecondary education in the United States and around the world is highly differentiated, with a variety of options that differ by credential (associates degree, bachelor's degree,...

Price surges often generate social disapproval and requests for regulation and price controls, but these interventions may cause inefficiencies and shortages. To study how individuals perceive and reason about sudden price increases for different products under different policy regimes, we...

We analyze a 1960-96 panel of OECD countries to explain why the US moved from relatively high to relatively low unemployment over the last three decades. We find that while macroeconomic and demographic shocks and changing labor market institutions explain a modest portion of this change, the...

The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) provides a unique window on the effects of trade liberalization. It was an unusually clean trade policy exercise in that it was not bundled into a larger package of macroeconomic or market reforms. This paper uses the 1989-96 Canadian FTA experience to...

The contracting practices of franchisors outside of theirdomestic markets have received limited attention in the empirical literature on franchising, mostly due to data limitations. We exploit a newly assembled data set that allows us not only to describe the contracting practices of US and...