Debit cards are overtaking credit cards as the most prevalent form of electronic payment at the point of sale, yet the determinants of a ubiquitous consumer choice - "debit or credit?" - have received relatively little scrutiny. Several stylized facts suggest that debit-card use is driven by...

"This paper uses a game-theoretic model to analyze the disincentive effects of low-tuition policies on student effort. The model of parent and student responses to tuition subsidies is then calibrated using information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the High School and...

"This paper examines the causes of the observed increase in the average duration of unemployment over the past thirty years. First we analyze whether changes in the demographic composition of the U.S. labor force, particularly the age and gender composition, can explain this increase. We then...

"This paper develops a new approach to change-point modeling that allows for an unknown number of change points in the observed sample. Our model assumes that regime durations have a Poisson distribution. The model approximately nests the two most common approaches: the time-varying parameter...

We use daily data on bank reserves and overnight interest rates to document a striking pattern in the high-frequency behavior of the U.S. market for federal funds: depository institutions tend to hold more reserves during the last few days of each "reserve maintenance period", when the...