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...

Firms adjust to differences in market size and demand uncertainty by changing the frequency and size of their export shipments. In our inventory model, transportation costs and optimal shipment frequency are determined on the basis of demand as well as inventory and per shipments costs. Using a...

We identify total factor productivity (TFP) news shocks using standard VAR methodology and document a new stylized fact: in response to news about future increases in TFP, inventories rise and comove positively with other major macroeconomic aggregates. We show that the standard theoretical...

The paper shows that taking inventory control out of the hands of competitive or exclusive retailers and assigning it to a manufacturer increases the value of a supply chain especially for goods whose demand is highly volatile. This is because doing so solves incentive distortions that arise...

This paper illustrates that the generalized propensity score method can easily be applied with multiple continuous endogenous treatment variables. Consistency proofs carry over straightforwardly to this general case, and the approach is shown to work well in finite samples with various...

Making use of restrictions imposed by equilibrium, theoretical progress has been made on the nonparametric and semiparametric estimation and identification of scalar additive hedonic models (Ekeland, Heckman, and Nesheim, 2002) and scalar nonadditive hedonic models (Heckman, Matzkin, and...

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...

Commonly used methods of production function estimation assume that a firm's output quantity can be observed as data, but typical datasets contain only revenue, not output quantity. We examine the nonparametric identification of production function from revenue data when a firm faces a general...