Recently economists have begun to consider the causes and consequences of religious participation. An unanswered question in this literature is the effect upon individuals of changes in the opportunity cost of religious participation. In this paper we identify a policy-driven change in the...

We consider retail leases with landlord overages options, with tenant renewal options, with both and with neither. We illustrate how the ratio of initial expected sales to the sales threshold can be manipulated to equate the value of the landlord overage options to that of the tenant renewal...

We review major changes in the economics of the US retail sector over the past 15-20 years and discuss what these portend for the future evolution of retail. The sector has been shrinking in relative size over the long term, though this stopped around the onset of the Great Recession. Retail has...

A recent literature has developed that combines two prominent empirical approaches to ex ante policy evaluation: randomized controlled trials (RCT) and structural estimation. The RCT provides a "gold-standard'' estimate of a particular treatment, but only of that treatment. Structural estimation...

Structural econometric methods are often criticized for being sensitive to functional form assumptions. We study parametric estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE) derived from a widely used class of latent threshold crossing models and show they yield LATE estimates...

We propose a way to formalize the relationship between descriptive analysis and structural estimation. A researcher reports an estimate ĉ of a structural quantity of interest c that is exactly or asymptotically unbiased under some base model. The researcher also reports descriptive statistics...

This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer's (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in specification or functional form. Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but...

This paper compares the economic questions addressed by instrumental variables estimators with those addressed by structural approaches. We discuss Marschak's Maxim: estimators should be selected on the basis of their ability to answer well-posed economic problems with minimal assumptions. A key...

This paper uses a field experiment to estimate behavioral parameters from a structural model of residential adoption of technology. As our model includes both economic and psychological factors, we are able to identify the role of prices, social norms, social pressure, and curiosity on 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...