This paper contains a review of the early history of program evaluation research at the US Department of Labor. Some broad lessons for successful evaluation research are summarized.

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual...

In this article we provide an overview of the extensive literature on the impact of weather and climate on grapes and wine with the goal of describing how climate change is likely to affect their production. We start by discussing the physical impact of weather on vine phenology, berry...

Expert agents, such as lawyers, play a prominent role in conflict resolution, yet little is known about how they affect outcomes. We construct a model that permits us to estimate the influence of agents and test whether the parties in a dispute face prisoner's dilemma incentives. Using eighteen...

In this essay, I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, <em>Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius</em>. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how...

In The Antitrust Paradox, Robert Bork viewed most mergers as either competitively neutral or efficiency enhancing. In his view, only mergers creating a dominant firm or monopoly were likely to harm consumers. Bork was especially skeptical of oligopoly concerns resulting from mergers. In this...

Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner's dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...