Individuals who are likely to realize the largest benefits from improvements in air quality often depend on other members of their households to make time or monetary contributions to their care. The presence of these dependency relationships among household members poses challenges for benefit...

This paper reports estimates for the ex ante tradeoffs for three specific homeland security policies that all address a terrorist attack on commercial aircraft with shoulder mounted missiles. Our analysis focuses on the willingness to pay for anti-missile laser jamming countermeasures mounted on...

This paper reports the first comprehensive approach for measuring the general equilibrium willingness to pay for large changes in air quality. It is based on a well defined locational equilibrium model. The approach allows estimation of households' indirect utility function and the underlying...

This paper proposes the use of consumers' preferences in formulating policies for keeping secret information about terrorist activities and threats that might compromise future security. We report the results from two surveys indicating that people have clear preferences for full disclosure of...

Households "sort" across neighborhoods according to their wealth and their preferences for public goods, social characteristics, and commuting opportunities. The aggregation of these individual choices in markets and in other institutions influences the supply of amenities and local public...

We study a dynamic economy where credit is limited by insufficient collateral and, as a result, investment and output are too low. In this environment, changes in investor sentiment or market expectations can give rise to credit bubbles, that is, expansions in credit that are backed not by...

We develop a stylized model of economic growth with bubbles. In this model, financial frictions lead to equilibrium dispersion in the rates of return to investment. During bubbly episodes, unproductive investors demand bubbles while productive investors supply them. Because of this, bubbly...

We show that even in the absence of diminishing returns in production and techno-logical spillovers, international trade leads to a stable world income distribution. This is because specialization and trade introduce de facto diminishing returns: countries that accumulate capital faster than...

We explore a view of the crisis as a shock to investor sentiment that led to the collapse of a bubble or pyramid scheme in financial markets. We embed this view in a standard model of the financial accelerator and explore its empirical and policy implications. In particular, we show how the...

We live in a new world economy characterized by financial globalization and historically low interest rates. This environment is conducive to countries experiencing credit bubbles that have large macroeconomic effects at home and are quickly propagated abroad. In previous work, we built on the...