This paper estimates the difference in compensation between company-owned and franchisee-owned fast food restaurants. The contrast is of interest because contractual arrangements give managers of company-owned outlets less of an incentive to monitor and supervise employees. Estimates based on...

Social distancing via shelter-in-place strategies has emerged as the most effective way to combat Covid-19. In the United States, choices about such policies are made by individual states. Here we show that the policy choice made by one state influences the incentives that other states face to...

Even though social preferences affect nearly every facet of life, there exist many open questions on the economics of social preferences in markets. We leverage a unique opportunity to generate a large data set to inform the who's, what's, where's, and when's of social preferences through the...

Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in stringency and accuracy, (2)...

In this article, we show that a small innovation in inspection technology can make substantial differences in inspection outcomes. For restaurant hygiene inspections, the state of Florida has introduced a handheld electronic device, the portable digital assistant (PDA), which reminds inspectors...

This study examines the relationship between child weight and fast food and fruit and vegetable prices and the availability of fast food restaurants, full-service restaurants, supermarkets, grocery stores and convenience stores. We estimate cross-sectional and individual-level fixed effects (FE)...

We demonstrate that data from digital platforms such as Yelp have the potential to improve our understanding of gentrification, both by providing data in close to real time (i.e. nowcasting and forecasting) and by providing additional context about how the local economy is changing. Combining...

We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry, exploiting recent changes in the minimum wage at the city level. We find that the impact of the minimum wage depends on whether a restaurant was already close to the margin of exit. Restaurants with lower ratings...

We examine an untested hypothesis that posits that null results in early studies examining the economic impacts of smoking bans were driven by sample selection. Early adopters could better absorb the shock of bans, but among worse selected late adopters bans would adversely impact bars and...

We present a structural model of firm growth, learning, and survival and consider its identification and estimation. In the model, entrepreneurs have private and possibly error-ridden observations of persistent and transitory shocks to profit. We demonstrate that the model's parameters can be...