This paper considers the observational implications of social influences on adoption decisions for an environment of perfect foresight adopters. We argue that social influences can produce two observable effects: 1) discontinuities in unconditional adoption curves and 2) pattern reversals in...

This paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioral outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects. We study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behavior of others in an...

This paper questions current empirical practice in the study of growth. We argue that much of the modern empirical growth literature is based on assumptions concerning regressors, residuals, and parameters which are implausible both from the perspective of economic theory as well as from the...

This paper develops a decision-theoretic approach to policy analysis. We argue that policy evaluation should be conducted on the basis of two factors: the policymaker's preferences, and the conditional distribution of the outcomes of interest given a policy and available information. From this...

This paper explores ways to integrate model uncertainty into policy evaluation. We first describe a general framework for the incorporation of model uncertainty into standard econometric calculations. This framework employs Bayesian model averaging methods that have begun to appear in a range of...

This paper develops a model of individual decisionmaking in the presence of social interactions when the number of available choices is finite. We show how a multinomial logit model framework may be used to model such decisions in a way that permits a tight integration of theory and...

This paper presents a framework for understanding the limits that exist in optimal policy design in dynamic contexts. We consider the design of policies in the context of dynamic linear models. Fundamental design limits exist for policy rules in such environments in the sense that any policy...

This paper describes a range of methods which have been proposed to study interactions in economic and social contexts. By interactions, we refer to interdependences between individual decisions which are not mediated by markets. These types of models have been employed to understand phenomena...

Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial equilibrium language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various...