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...

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms' leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of...

The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify, because consumption is measured at the household level, and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify how total household resources are divided...

This paper tests for the motives for private income transfers. We consider two motives: altruism and exchange. The question of private-transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income. Using a household...

Can Eastern European families most severely impoverished during the transition to capitalism rely on private family safety nets? This question is likely critical for the transition's success, but little is known about family networks in Eastern Europe. We analyze newly available Polish household...

This chapter uses data from the 1992/93 and 1997/98 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys (VLSS) to describe patterns of money transfers between households. Rapid economic growth during the 1990's did little to diminish the importance of private transfers in Vietnam. Private transfers are large and...

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...