Assigning a third party at the 75th percentile of the centrality distribution (as compared to the 25th) increases efficiency by 21% relative to the mean: we attribute 2/5 of the effect to monitoring and 3/5 to enforcement. The largest efficiency increase occurs when senders and receivers are...

"We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies...

This paper treats taxation in kind (IKT) as an example of price regulation, emphasizing IKT-avoidance behavior, and its interactions with the other costs of price controls. This emphasis fundamentally changes efficiency conclusions, and adds new ones. IKTs do not in fact randomly sample...

Health insurance markets face two forms of adverse selection problems. On the demand side, adverse selection leads to plan price distortions and inefficient sorting of consumers across health plans. On the supply side, adverse selection creates incentives for plans to inefficiently distort...

We study a model in which corporate social responsibility (CSR) arises as a response to inefficient regulation. In our model, firms, governments, and workers interact. Firms generate profits but create negative spillovers that can be attenuated through government regulation, which is set...

Flexibility in environmental regulations can lead to reduced costs if it allows additional abatement from lower cost sources or if policy tailoring and experimentation across states increases regulatory efficiency. The EPA's 2014 Clean Power Plan, which implements greenhouse gas regulation of...

Intertemporal conflicts occur when a group of agents with heterogeneous time preferences must make a collective decision about how to manage a common asset. How should this be done? We examine two methods: an 'Economics' approach that seeks to implement efficient allocations, and a 'Politics'...

This paper develops an index of allocative efficiency that depends upon the distribution of mark-ups across goods. It determines how changes in trade frictions affect allocative efficiency in an oligopoly model of international trade, decomposing the effect into the cost-change channel and the...