This paper considers the costs of reducing consumption of a good by making its production illegal and punishing apprehended illegal producers. We use illegal drugs as a prominent example. We show that the more inelastic either demand for or supply of a good is, the greater the increase in social...

We analyze entry, pricing, and product design in a model with differentiated products. Market equilibrium can be "separating," with multiple sellers and a sorting of heterogeneous consumers across goods, or "exclusionary," with one seller serving all customer types. Entry into an initially...

We develop a framework for valuing improvements in health and apply it to past and prospective reductions in mortality in the United States. We calculate social values of (i) increased longevity over the twentieth century, (ii) progress against various diseases after 1970, and (iii) potential...

We present a theory of context-dependent choice in which a consumer’s attention is drawn to salient attributes of goods, such as quality or price. An attribute is salient for a good when it stands out among the good’s attributes relative to that attribute’s average level in the choice set...

In the presence of aggregate demand spillovers, an imperfectly competitive firm's profit is positively related to aggregate income, which in turn rises with profits of all firms in the economy. This pecuniary externality makes a dollar of a firm's profit raise aggrega te income by more than a...

Recent theories of economic growth, including those of P. Romer (1986, 1990), M. Porter (1990), and J. Jacobs (1969, 1984), have stressed the role of technological spillovers in generating growth. Because such knowledge spillovers are particularly effective in cities, where communication between...

We present a model of lawmaking by appellate courts in which judges influenced by policy preferences can distinguish precedents at some cost. We find a cost and a benefit of diversity of judicial views. Policy-motivated judges distort the law away from efficiency, but diversity of judicial views...