Interpersonal preferences - preferences that depend on the characteristics of others - are typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior. As an alternative approach, this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences. The General Social Survey contains...

In this paper I explore the list as a tool for heritage preservation. My focus will be on extent to which a list is useful in and of itself, decoupled from any other forms of intervention. While considerable attention has been paid to the regulatory and incentive mechanisms that typically...

In this article we show that the quality of the vintage for red Bordeaux wines, as judged by the prices of mature wines, can be predicted by the weather during the growing season that produced the wines. Red Bordeaux wines have been produced in the same place and much the same way for hundreds...

We analyze the incentives for interest groups to lobby the legislature for favorable policy and compare two institutional frameworks, a U.S. Congress-style legislature and a European-style parliament. The results provide a rationale for why lobby groups are more active in the U.S. Congress. The...

Studies have shown that displaced workers’ can experience substantial long-term earnings losses. As these losses have become increasingly apparent, and the incidence of displacement has become more widely spread among industrial sectors, policy makers have significantly expanded resources for...

Two major problems exist in applying ideal point estimation techniques to state legislatures. First, there has been a scarcity of available longitudinal roll call data. Second, even where such data exists, scaling ideal points within a single state suffers from a basic defect. No comparisons can...

In an earlier paper, I addressed the problem of putting state legislatures on a cross- institutional common space with Congress. I relied on new roll call data from these legislatures, and a bridging technique involving state legislators who served in Congress later in their careers. This...

Food assistance programs are an integral component of the public assistance safety net for the working poor, but many families do not use these programs when eligible to do so. In this paper, we use linked administrative data from the Illinois Integrated Database (IDB) to examine the patterns of...

How can we reconcile recent theories predicting that the U.S. tax system should be sharply progressive [see for example Cukierman and Meltzer (1991)], with decades of empirical studies showing that the U.S. tax system is actually roughly proportional? I start by showing that cross-sectional data...

Using data from the NLSY97, we construct two measures of poverty using the official definition and The National Research Council (NRC) definition. We estimate the two poverty rates for 1996 for youths 12-16 as 17.9 (official) and 23.4 (NRC), and document the discrepancies between youths...