Does holding schools accountable for student performance cause good teachers to leave low-performing schools? Using data from New York City, which assigns accountability grades to schools based on student achievement, I perform a regression discontinuity analysis and find evidence of the...

According to our analysis, pre-invasion views about the likely course of the Iraq intervention imply present value costs for the United States in the range of $100 to $870 billion. Our estimated present value cost for the containment policy is nearly $300 billion and ranges upward to $700...

Rules often are complex in order to distinguish different types of behavior that may have different consequences. Greater complexity thus allows better control of behavior. But individuals may need to incur costs ex ante to determine how more complex rules apply to their contemplated conduct....

The purpose of this paper is to report on a comparison of several alternative numerical solution techniques for nonlinear rational expectations models. The comparison was made by asking individual researchers to apply their different solution techniques to a simple representative agent, optimal,...

This paper formulates a model of retirement behavior based on the solution to a stochastic dynamic programming problem. The workers objective is to maximize expected discounted utility over his remaining lifetime. At each time period the worker chooses how much to consume and whether to work...

The goal of this paper is to study the problem of optimal dynamic policy formulation with competing political parties. We study a general class of problems, in which the two competing political parties have quadratic intertemporal objective functions, and in which the economy has a linear...

We study the optimal pattern of outlays for a single firm pursuing an R&D program over time. In the deterministic case, (a) the amount of progress required to complete the project is known, and (b) the relationship between outlays and progress is known. In this case, it is optimal to increase...

A new algorithm for the group minimization problem (GP) is proposed. The algorithm can be broadly described as follows. A suitable relaxation of(GP) is defined, in which any feasible point satisfies the group equation but may have negative components. The feasible points of the relaxation are...

Several econometric models for the analysis of relationships with limited dependent variables have been proposed, including the probit, Tobit, two-limit probit, ordered discrete, and friction models. Widespread application of these methods has been hampered by the lack of suitable computer...