The recent episode of rising consumer bankruptcy and increasing foreclosure rates has sparked a lively debate about how to best tackle the crisis in the U.S. housing market. This paper contributes to the debate by providing an explicit model of the interactions of households' decisions to...

How does competition affect higher education? This paper explores this question for public and private universities. Theory indicates that competition can push higher education policy in one of two different directions. On the one hand, competition may increase spending. For states, this would...

An environmental policy approach gaining increasing acceptance among regulators, industry, and environmental groups is the use of market-based instruments. The growth of such programs results in an important research need to understand how organizations respond to these tools. <P>Our managerial and...</p>

The conventional view of private campaign contributions is that they distort policy to the detriment of society. Formal models consistent with such views, however, are based on restrictive assumptions about the nature of campaigns, interest groups and policy dimensionality. This paper relaxes...

A major challenge in testing spatial, interinstitutional models is placing different sets of actors on a common preference scale. We address this challenge by presenting a random effects, panel probit method which we use to estimate the ideal points of presidents, senators, and Supreme Court...

Can randomized experiments at the individual level help assess the persuasive effects of campaign tactics? In the contemporary U.S., vote choice is not observable, so one promising research design involves randomizing appeals and then using a survey to measure vote intentions. Here, we analyze...

We examine the quantitative impact of the Federal Reserve's mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchase program. We focus on how much of the recent decline in mortgage interest rate spreads can be attributed to these purchases. The question is more difficult than frequently perceived because of...