We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration,...

This study estimates the effect of compulsory schooling on earnings. For identification, I exploit a German reform that extended the duration of secondary schooling in the 1960s. I find that hourly wages increase by 6%-8% per additional year of schooling. This result challenges prior findings...

This paper studies the effect of longer school days - induced by voluntary all-day programs in German primary schools - on school performance. We combine data from the National Educational Panel Study covering 5771 primary school students with municipality-level information on all-day school...

We examine “agglomeration shadows” that emerge around large cities, which discourage some economic activities in nearby areas. Identifying agglomeration shadows is complicated, however, by endogenous city formation and \wave interference" that we show in simulations. We use the locations of...

Although there is much interest in the future retail price of gasoline among consumers, industry analysts, and policymakers, it is widely believed that changes in the price of gasoline are essentially unforecastable given publicly available information. We explore several new forecasting...

A persistent criticism of general equilibrium models of monetary policy which incorporate nominal inertia in the form of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) is that they fail to capture the extent of inflation inertia in the data. In this paper we derive a general equilibrium model based on...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision-makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. Reduced-form and structural estimates of the central...

A wide class of models with On-the-Job Search (OJS) predicts that workers gradually select into better-paying jobs. We develop a simple methodology to test predictions implied by OJS using two sources of identification: (i) time-variation in job-finding rates and (ii) the time since the last...

Empirical studies show that years of schooling are positively correlated with good health. The implication may go from education to health, from health to education, or from factors that influence both variables. We formalize a model that determines an individual's demand for knowledge and...