By April 2013, the FCC's recent bill-shock agreement with cellular carriers requires consumers be notified when exceeding usage allowances. Will the agreement help or hurt consumers? To answer this question, we estimate a model of consumer plan choice, usage, and learning using a panel of...

To encourage diversity, branches may vary contracts' priorities across slots. The agents who match to branches, however, have preferences only over match partners and contractual terms. Ad hoc approaches to resolving agents' indifferences across slots in the Chicago and Boston school choice...

We show that an ambiguity in setting the primitives of the matching with contracts model by Hatfield and Milgrom (2005) has serious implications for the model. Of the two ways to clear the ambiguity, the first (and what we consider more "clean") remedy renders several of the results of the paper...

We show that Hatfield and Kojima (2010) inherits a critical ambiguity from its predecessor Hatfield and Milgrom (2005), and clearing this ambiguity has strong implications for the paper. Of the two potential remedies, the first one results in the failure of all theorems except one in the absence...

We discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of four types of convenient estimators of binary choice models when regressors may be endogenous or mismeasured, or when errors are likely to be heteroskedastic. For example, such models arise when treatment is not randomly assigned and...

Motivated by historically low retention rates of graduates at USMA and ROTC, the Army recently introduced branch-for-service incentives programs where cadets could bid an additional three years of active duty service obligation to obtain higher priority for their desired career specialties. The...

Branch selection is a key decision in a cadet's military career. Cadets at USMA can increase their branch priorities at a fraction of slots by extending their service agreement. This real-life matching problem fills an important gap in market design literature. Although priorities fail a key...

The paper is based on a talk given in April 2010. It traces the roots of the recent financial crisis from development of the limited liability corporation, to separation of ownership from control, tax incentives for debt financing, investment bankers moving to the corporate form, government...

I characterize cyclical fluctuations in the cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Using the estimated dispersion, or "risk," stochastic process as an input to a baseline DSGE financial accelerator model, I assess how well the model reproduces...

Consumption is partly a social activity, yet most studies of consumer behavior treat households in isolation. We investigate familial relationships in consumption patterns using a sample of parents and their children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find a positive and statistically...