We use data from a sample of day care centers to estimate the relationships between cost and the quality of the child care service provided, and between revenue and quality. We use a measure of child care quality derived from an instrument designed by developmental psychologists. This measure of...

Young firms' contribution to aggregate employment has been underwhelming. However, a similar trend is not apparent in their contribution to aggregate sales or aggregate stock market capitalization. We study the implications of the arrival of "low marginal - high average" revenue-product-of-labor...

We investigate rewards to R&D in a model where substitute ideas for innovation arrive to random recipients at random times. By foregoing investment in a current idea, society as a whole preserves an option to invest in a better idea for the same market niche, but with delay. Because successive...

In 1994 the state of Michigan implemented one of the most comprehensive school finance reforms undertaken to date in any of the states. Understanding the effects of the reform is thus of value in informing other potential reform initiatives. In addition, the reform and associated changes in the...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the salience of a tax system affects equilibrium tax rates. To do this, I analyze how toll rates change after toll facilities adopt electronic toll collection. Unlike manual toll collection, in which the driver must hand over cash at the toll collection...

Using linked employer-employee data for the U.S., we examine whether shocks to firm revenues are transmitted to the earnings of continuing employees. While full insurance is rejected, the elasticity of worker earnings with respect to persistent shocks in firm revenues is small and consistent...

This paper formulates and estimates a household-level, billing-cycle water demand model under increasing block prices that accounts for the impact of monthly weather variation, the amount of vegetation on the household's property, and customer-level heterogeneity in demand due to household...

Hourly plant-level wind and solar generation output and real-time price data for one year from the California ISO control area is used to estimate the vector of means and the contemporaneous covariance matrix of hourly output and revenues across all wind and solar locations in the state. Annual...

The 2011 America Invents Act was the most significant reform to the United States patent system in over fifty years. However, the AIA did not address a number of major problems associated with patent litigation in the United States. In this paper, we provide an economic analysis of post-AIA...