Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others could bargain, but find it undesirable, because their right to bargain has induced a sufficiently favorable offer, which they accept. Yet others perceive that they cannot bargain over pay; they regard the posted wage...

We study strike durations and outcomes for some 2000 disputes that occurred between 1881 and 1886. Most post-strike bargaining settlements in the 1880s fell into one of two categories: either a union "victory", characterized by a significant wage gain or hours cut, or a union "defeat",...

When explaining the declining labor income share in advanced economies, the macro literature finds that the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is greater than one. However, the vast majority of micro-level estimates shows that capital and labor are complements (elasticity less...

We propose that a person's desire to consume an object or possess an attribute increases in how much others want but cannot have it. We term this motive superiority-seeking, and show that it generates preferences for exclusion that help explain a host of market anomalies and make novel...

Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks. However, this procedure can still lead to potential attacks...

Subsidies and in-kind transfers give rise to negative fiscal externalities. However, internalizing negative fiscal externalities through taxation would undo the subsidy or in-kind transfer that caused them. Similarly, positive fiscal externalities cannot be internalized though government...

College admissions in many countries are based on a centrally administered test. Applicants invest a great deal of resources to improve their performance on the test, and there is growing concern about the large costs associated with these activities. We consider modifying such tests by...

We propose a political economy mechanism that explains the presence of fiscal regimes punctuated by crisis periods. Our model focuses on the interaction between successive deficit-biased governments subject to i.i.d. fiscal shocks. We show that the economy transitions between a fiscally...

Persistence of sharecropping tenancy and increases in farm productivity following regulations protecting tenant rights have been observed in many developing countries. This paper examines if these can be explained by alternative models of sharecropping with two sided efforts/investments, namely,...

Generators applying to connect to the U.S. power grid go through an interconnection queue. Most wind and solar generators that begin the process do not complete it. Using new data, we find that a long queue increases the average waiting time, and high interconnection costs are a key factor in a...