This paper revisits the airline schedule-buffer choice problem analyzed by Brueckner, Czerny and Gaggero (2020) using a simpler model where the random shocks influencing flight times are discrete rather than continuous. The analysis yields closed-form solutions for the flight and ground buffers...

This paper presents an extensive theoretical and empirical analysis of the choice of schedule buffers by airlines. With airline delays a continuing problem around the world, such an undertaking is valuable, and its lessons extend to other passenger transportation sectors. One useful lesson from...

Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete choice that does not suffer from these...

Parsimony is a desirable feature of economic models but almost all human behaviors are characterized by vast individual variation that appears to defy parsimony. How much parsimony do we need to give up to capture the fundamental aspects of a population's distributional preferences and to...

This paper investigates strategic interaction among airlines in product-quality choices. Using an instrumental variables approach, the paper estimates flight-frequency reaction functions, which relate an airline's frequency on a route to its own characteristics and to the frequencies of...

There is a striking difference in income inequality and redistributive policies between the United States and Scandinavia. To study whether there is a corresponding cross-country difference in social preferences, we conducted the first large-scale international social preference experiment, with...

Evaluating the desirability of a reform typically involves weighing the gains of the winners against the losses of the losers using welfare weights. Welfare weights measure the value that citizens assigns to a $1 gain in consumption to individuals. They can capture various normative ideals like...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

We estimate growth rates of real incomes in the U.S. by quintiles using the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) post-tax, post-transfer data as basis for the period 1979-2011. We improve upon them by including only the present value of earnings that will accrue in retirement and excluding...

We propose a nonparametric method to test which characteristics provide independent information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...