A policy will be used more heavily in a particular time and place where its marginal cost is lower. The analyst who treats times and places as identical will overestimate the policy's net benefit, especially for policy intensities greater than exist in his sample. In regression analysis, the...

These are notes on the mechanics of doing research in economics. They are a series of short, unconnected tips that I think could be widely useful both to individuals and the profession. I also include samples of Latex tricks I find useful in my articles.

A convicted criminal suffers not only from public penalties, but from stigma, the reluctance of others to interact with him economically and socially. Conviction can convey useful information about a person, which makes stigmatization an important and legitimate function of the criminal justice...

Our one-page reply to Whinston and Siegal's forthcoming AER article correcting and elaborating our 1991 AER article.

The Klein-Leffler (1981) model of product quality does not explain why high-quality firms would dissipate the rents they earn from quality- assuring price premia, and it relies on consumers knowing the cost functions of firms. In the present paper, consumers do not know any firm's cost of...

Consider a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. This simple model has a mixed-strategy equilibrium in which industry profits are positive and decline with the number of firms, the same features which make the...

Bidders have to decide whether and when to incur the cost of estimating their own values in auctions. This can explain why people seem to get carried away, bidding higher than they had planned before the auction and then finding they had paid more than the object was worth to them. Even when...

A long-term relationship such as marriage will not operate efficiently without sanctions for misconduct, of which adultery is one example. Traditional legal sanctions can be seen as different combinations of various features, differing in who initiates punishment, whether punishment is just a...

If a potential tort plaintiff can predict that the court will overestimate damages he is more likely to bring suit, but if the court is aware of this, it will adjust its awards accordingly. In general, court error implies that the court should moderate extreme awards whether they are high or...

It is well known that risk increases the value of options. This paper makes that precise in a new way. The conventional theorem says that the value of an option does not fall if the underlying option becomes riskier in the conventional sense of the mean-preserving spread. This paper uses two new...