About three-quarters of secondary schools are reluctant to vigorously enforce smoking bans due to various social pressures; ten percent of these schools do not have bans at all. Empirically, school-based smoking regulations appear, at best, ineffective at reducing teenage smoking and, more...

Why do establishments exhibit wide variation in their productivity and profitability? Can variation in returns to advertising help answer this question? We present results from a large field experiment on Facebook and Instagram that documents variance in advertisers' ability to generate returns...

We present several empirical facts about trends in marketing investment in the US. We also present estimates of the private value of brands to firms and aggregate intangible brand capital stocks created by these investments. These investments include the creation and maintenance of a brand name...

This paper shows that product design shapes search frictions and that intermediaries leverage this channel to increase their rents in the context of the U.S. municipal bond market. The majority of bonds are designed via negotiations between a local government and its underwriter. They are then...

Using nationally representative data on consumption, we show that Blacks and Hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. We demonstrate that these differences exist among virtually all sub-populations, that...

We study the redistributive effects of inflation combining administrative bank data with an information provision experiment during an episode of historic inflation. On average, households are well-informed about prevailing inflation and are concerned about its impact on their wealth; yet, while...

Consumption is the largest component of GDP. Since the 1950s, the life cycle and the permanent income models have constituted the main analytical tools to the study of consumption behavior, both at the micro and at the aggregate levels. Since the late 1970s the literature has focused on versions...

This paper develops and tests a new set of stochastic implications of optimal consumption behavior in the presence of borrowing constraints. In a departure from previous models, the theory shows that liquidity constraints imply a distinctive intertemporal relationship between durable and...

The marginal propensity to consume out of wealth is important for evaluating the effects of taxation on consumption, assessing the possibility of multiple equilibria due to aggregate demand spillovers, and explaining observed variations in consumption. It is also a component of the interest...

After a discussion of cigarette smoking in the context of the Becker-Murphy (1988) model of rational addictive behavior, demand equations are derived accounting for the tolerance, reinforcement, and withdrawal characteristic of addictive consumption. These are contrasted to equations developed...