This paper describes Gary Becker's theoretical models of marriage. At the micro-level, these are all rational choice models. At the market level, Becker offers two major types of models: partial equilibrium models based on Price Theory as taught by Marshall and Friedman and optimal sorting...

Social preference research has fundamentally changed the way economists think about many important economic and social phenomena. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self-selected students as participants. This is potentially...

To discuss experimental results without discussing how they came about makes sense when the results are robust to the way experiments are conducted. Experimental results, however, are - arguably more often than not - sensitive to numerous design and implementation characteristics such as the use...

Economists are increasingly turning to the experimental method as a means to estimate causal effects. By using randomization to identify key treatment effects, theories previously viewed as untestable are now scrutinized, efficacy of public policies are now more easily verified, and stakeholders...

Ranking methods are fundamental tools in many areas. Popular methods aggregate the statements of 'experts' in different ways. As such, there are various reasonable ranking methods, each one of them more or less adapted to the environment under consideration. This paper introduces a new method,...

Recent large-scale replications of social science experiments provide important information on the reliability of experimental research. Unfortunately, there exist no mechanisms to ensure replications are done. We propose such a mechanism: journal-based replication, in which the publishing...

Establishing causal relationships is a core aspect of empirical economics. Borrowing ideas from the medical sciences, we propose tentative guidelines for reliable causal inferences that cover aspects related to both the study itself and its fit with the existing background knowledge. Moreover,...

Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period...