Consumption of addictive goods is subject to habit formation. Forward-looking individuals must, therefore, be concerned about future prices when making current consumption decisions. We study prices for tobacco products based on a unique data set provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our...

The goal of this paper is to analyze consumer demand in markets with large price uncertainty. We develop a demand model for goods that are subject to habit formation. We show that consumption plans of forward looking individuals depend not only on preferences and current period prices, but also...

This paper analyses how the properties of locational equilibrium models can be used to evaluate approaches for constructing price indexes for heterogeneous houses. Housing markets play a key role in locational equilibrium models. Prices for houses determine that implicit costs that households...

We develop and estimate a dynamic model to study the impact of student debt on education, career, and marriage market choices of young female lawyers. Our model accounts for several important institutional features of the labor market for lawyers, including differences in the work hours across...

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate an equilibrium model of private and public school competition that can generate realistic pricing patterns for private universities in the U.S. We show that the parameters of the model are identified and can be estimated using a semi-parametric...

Municipal governments commonly confront the problem of tardy or delinquent property tax payments. We implement an experiment in property tax collection for tardy taxpayers in the City of Philadelphia for the calendar year, 2015. The experiment sent one of seven reminder letters to the tardy...

This paper analyzes the determinants of underfunding of local government's pension funds using a politico-economic overlapping generations model. We show that a binding downpayment constraint in the housing market dampens capitalization of future taxes into current land prices. Thus, a local...

For decades, colleges and universities have struggled to increase participation of minority and disadvantaged students. Urban school districts confront a parallel challenge; minority and disadvantaged students are underrepresented in selective programs that use merit-based admission. In their...

We develop a new dynamic equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that captures the most important frictions that arise in housing rental markets and explains the political popularity of affordable housing policies. We estimate the model using data collected by the New York Housing...

Few empirical strategies have been developed that investigate public provision under majority rule while taking explicit account of the constraints implied by mobility of households. The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of voting in local communities when neighborhood quality...