This paper investigates how increases in concentration can be interrupted or reversed by changes in how firms compete on quality. We examine the U.S. hotel industry during the past half century. We document that starting in the early 1980s, quality competition came more in the form of costs that...

Labor market regulation can have harmful unintended consequences. In many markets, especially for public sector workers, pay is regulated to be the same for individuals across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. We would predict that this will mean labor supply problems and potential falls...

This chapter uses happiness data to assess the quality of government. Our happiness data are drawn from the Gallup World Poll, starting in 2005 and extending to 2017 or 2018. In our analysis of the panel of more than 150 countries and generally over 1,500 national-level observations, we show...

In response to unsustainable growth in health care spending, there is enormous interest in reforming the payment system to “pay for quality instead of quantity.” While quality measures are crucial to such reforms, they face major criticisms largely over the potential failure of risk...

There are three primary measures of teaching performance: student test-based measures (i.e., value added), classroom observations, and student surveys. Although all three types of measures could be biased by unmeasured traits of the students in teachers' classrooms, prior research has largely...

The purposes of this paper are to describe some conceptual and empirical foundations of "healthy-time" measures of health outcomes or healthcare quality, and to explore how to expand the empirical opportunities for measuring such outcomes using U.S. national survey data. To these ends, the paper...

Unlike demand studies in other industries, models of provider demand in health care often must omit a price or any other factor that equilibrates the market. Estimates of the consumer response to quality may consequently be attenuated, if the limited capacity of individual providers prevents...

We calculate equilibria of dynamic double-auction markets in which agents are distinguished by their preferences and information. Over time, agents are privately informed by bids and offers. Investors are segmented into groups that differ with respect to characteristics determining information...

Differences in real interest rates across developed economies are puzzlingly large and persistent. I propose a simple explanation: Bonds issued in the currencies of larger economies are expensive because they insure against shocks that affect a larger fraction of the world economy. I show that...

This paper develops a consumption-based asset pricing model to explain and quantify the aggregate implications of a frictional financial system, comprised of many financial markets partially integrated with one-another. Each of our micro financial markets is inhabited by traders who are...