Real estate agents typically receive commissions based on a fixed percentage of home price purchases. Because housing prices vary across markets, one might expect that realtors have higher earnings in high-priced markets. Prior work by Hsieh and Moretti (2003) suggests that entry among realtors...

We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient. Although brokers contributed substantial amounts, nurses contributed significantly more, on average 76 percent of their endowment. In a...

Many economists suspect that downward nominal wage rigidities in ongoing labor contracts are an important source of employment fluctuations over the business cycle but there is little direct empirical evidence on this conjecture. This paper compares three occupations in the housing sector with...

In this paper we empirically explore the "make-or-buy" decisions of peripheral services in manufacturing plants using detailed information on a data set from a new plant-level survey from 926 plants distributed in all manufacturing industries in Spain. In particular, survey respondents are asked...

The home market effect (HME) is a distinguishing feature of the newʺ theory of international trade, but it is uncertain whether this effect survives if one moves beyond the simplifying setup with only two countries. We present a three-country version of the seminal model by Krugman (1980) and...

Law enforcement officers are allowed to exercise a significant amount of street-level discretion in a variety of ways. In this paper, we focus on a particular prominent kind of discretionary behavior by traffic officers when issuing speeding tickets, speed discounting. Officers partially forgive...

Informal school fees - for uniforms, books, and other supplies - are substantial in developing countries, often several times formal tuition. We evaluate a scholarship program that alleviated informal fees for girls in a subset of Gambian secondary schools. The program is unique because it...

We discuss how a schooling system's structure may imply that private school enrolment leads to worse subsequent performance in further education or in the labour market, and we seek evidence of such phenomena in Italian data. If students differ not only in terms of their families' ability to pay...

Is there a local economic impact of immigration? Immigration pushes up rents and housing values in US destination cities. The positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas. I use instrumental variables based on a "shift-share" of...

This paper examines the effect of neighborhood diversity on the nativity gap in home-value appreciation in Australia. Specifically, immigrant homeowners experienced a 41.7 percent increase in median home values between 2001 and 2006, while the median value of housing owned by the native-born...