Increasing evidence indicates the importance of management in determining firms' productivity. Yet, causal evidence regarding the effectiveness of management practices is scarce, especially for high-skilled workers in the developed world. In an eight-month field experiment measuring the...

We examine peer effects in early education by estimating value added models with school fixed effects that control extensively for individual, family, peer, and teacher characteristics to account for the endogeneity of peer group formation. We find statistically significant and robust spillover...

This paper summarizes and extends our recent work using life satisfaction regressions to estimate the relative values of financial and non-financial job characteristics. The well-being results show strikingly large values for non-financial job characteristics, especially workplace trust and...

The sustained rise in German unemployment since 1973 poses a problem of critical importance for the world economy. Fewer than two decades ago, Germany boasted an average unemployment rate of under 1% and imported labor to relieve chronic labor shortages. By the mid-1980s, unemployment had risen...

This paper defines and analyzes a "sparse max" operator, which is a less than fully attentive and rational version of the traditional max operator. The agent builds (as economists do) a simplified model of the world which is sparse, considering only the variables of first-order importance. His...

This paper discusses and illustrates identification problems in personality psychology. The measures used by psychologists to infer traits are based on behaviors, broadly defined. These behaviors are produced from multiple traits interacting with incentives in situations. In general, measures...

We test empirically for evidence that government tariff-setting behavior depends on the degree of discretion with which policy-makers are endowed. We do this by studying government tariff choices under two distinct environments. One environment is that of tariffs set under the Escape Clause...

We present a model of endogenous firm growth with R&D investment and stochastic innovation as the engines of growth. The model for firm growth is a partial equilibrium model drawing on the quality ladder models in the macro growth literature, but also on the literature on patent races and the...

A vibrant literature has emerged that suggests willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures of value are quite different for inexperienced consumers but that value differences erode with market experience. One potential shortcoming of this literature is that market experience is...