School entrance examinations are both an incentive system to motivate students and a screening device to identify students with the most potential. To maximize incentives to acquire knowledge, exams should only reward achievement. But to identify the most able students, exams should also reward...

Which strategies generate value in e-commerce environments? In a step towards answering this question, this paper estimates the impacts of several competitive strategies on the values of the well-known Internet retailer Amazon.com and three of its early competitors, BarnesandNoble.com, CDNOW,...

We introduce a racing model with multiple product generations, product innovation, spin-outs, and licensing. Industry conditions and innovation characteristics affect who wins the race and who markets the resulting product. Small firms market their innovations when they pioneer a new generation...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherein a state's representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversity his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

There is longstanding evidence that children raised by single parents are more likely to perform poorly in school and partake in 'deviant' behaviors such as smoking, sex, substance use and crime at young ages. However, as of yet there is not widespread evidence or agreement as to whether or not...

It is generally agreed that boards are endogenously determined institutions that serve both an oversight and advisory role in a firm. While oversight role of boards has been extensively studied relatively few studies have examined the advisory role of corporate boards. In this study we examine...

Few issues are more contentious for local communities than industrial pollution. When local industries pollute, lawmakers and regulators must balance two primary concerns: economic prosperity and the environment. The role of political pressure is well-documented in environmental policy. What is...

We investigate the impact of the race and income of the jury pool on trial awards. We find that the average tort award increases as black and Hispanic county population rates increase and especially as black and Hispanic county poverty rates increase. An increase in the black countypoverty rate...

Previous studies, using data from the 1980s, found that racial composition of NBA teams is positively correlated with racial composition of the metropolitan markets in which the teams are located. Researchers have interpreted this evidence as consistent with a "customer discrimination"...

We find differential rates of cohabitation with adult relatives as well as differential impacts of that cohabitation on the probability of employment for married female immigrants across regions of origin. This suggests that traditions and/or cultural determinants of family structure influence...