There are two possible reasons for unionized workers to have lower quit rates than otherwise comparable nonunion workers: unions could organize employees with innately lower propensities to quit or they could reduce propensities by offering disgruntled workers alternatives to quitting in the...

This paper develops an algorithm for analyzing discrete events, such as labor market transitions, when some of these transitions are spurious because of measurement errors. Our algorithm extends the standard multinomial logit model, although our basic approach could be used with other stochastic...

Network planning models, which forecast the profitability of airline schedules, support many critical decisions, including equipment purchase decisions. Network planning models include an itinerary choice model that is used to allocate air total demand in a city pair to different itineraries....

This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL). We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality risk and cost as they travel to and from the international airport in Sierra Leone (which is separated from the...

Airplanes are a fast but expensive means of shipping goods, a fact which has implications for comparative advantage. The paper develops a Ricardian model with a continuum of goods which vary by weight and hence transport cost. Comparative advantage depends on relative air and surface transport...

This paper posits that individuals can more easily form social connections with persons of the same race. If true, the greater the incidence among his neighbors of persons of his race, the more likely an individual is to make neighborhood social capital connections, and the more likely he is to...

The random coefficients, multinomial choice logit model has been widely used in empirical choice analysis for the last 30 years. We are the first to prove that the distribution of random coefficients in this model is nonparametrically identified. Our approach exploits the structure of the logit...

Using data from three waves of Add Health we find that being very attractive reduces a young adult's (ages 18-26) propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it for a number of crimes, ranging from burglary to selling drugs. A variety of tests demonstrate that this result...

Although typically overlooked, many purchase datasets exhibit a high incidence of products with zero sales. We propose a new estimator for the Random-Coefficients Logit demand system for purchase datasets with zero-valued market shares. The identification of the demand parameters is based on a...

How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? To shed new light on these questions, this paper uses archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by four predictions from a general...