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...

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...

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...

I develop a tractable, two-country, real model of macroeconomic interdependence with a role for net foreign asset dynamics. Absence of Ricardian equivalence in an overlapping generations structure ensures existence of a well-defined, endogenously determined, steady-state, international...

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...

This paper is concerned with extending the familiar notion of fixed effects to nonlinear setups with infinite dimensional unobservables like preferences. The main result is that a generalized version of differencing identifies local average structural derivatives (LASDs) in very general...

This paper considers measurement error from a new perspective. In surveys, response errors are often caused by the fact that respondents recall past events and quantities imperfectly. We explore the consequences of recall errors for such key econometric issues as the identification of marginal...

We compare the performance of a currency board arrangement, inflation targeting, and dollarization in a small open, developing economy with liberalized capital account. We focus explicitly on the transmission of shocks to currency and country risk premia in international financial markets and on...

We investigate the impact of debt on a panel of U.S. manufacturing firms' capital investment behavior as the underlying firm-specific and macroeconomic uncertainty changes. Our estimates show that the influence of leverage on capital investment may be stimulating or mitigating depending on the...