Friedman (1962) suggested that in general, unfettered markets ensure the efficient provision of goods and services. Applying this logic to Education, he recommended that students be provided with vouchers and allowed to purchase schooling services in a free market ((Friedman (1955, 1962)). Hoxby...

The productivity paradox has sparked a great deal of research during the past three decades. Unfortunately, neither the results of empirical research nor the theoretical explanations for the paradox provide a convincing answer to whether investments in information and communication technology...

In most developing countries non-irrigation status often dominates adoption of traditional and modern irrigation technology. In this paper, we study the effect of production risk on irrigation technology choice among small-scale farmers in Chile, applying sample selection and discrete choice...

Uncertainty faced by individual firms appears to be heterogeneous. In this paper, I construct new empirical measures of firm-level uncertainty using data from the I/B/E/S and Compustat. These new measures reveal persistent differences in the degree of uncertainty facing individual firms not...

After offering a brief historical overview, this article presents a broad set of hypotheses in an effort to connect information to productivity. There are three contributions from this work. First, it distills observations from a diverse literature as prelude to exploring these theories...

Friedman (1962) suggested that in general, unfettered markets ensure the efficient provision of goods and services. Applying this logic to Education, he recommended that students be provided with vouchers and allowed to purchase schooling services in a free market ((Friedman (1955, 1962)). Hoxby...

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and - potentially - shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the...

We study a signal-jamming model of product review manipulation in which rational consumers consult product reviews and price to better estimate a product's quality, and a firm, whose quality is either high or low, chooses its price and how much bias to insert into product reviews. We show that...

We consider infinitely repeated vertical relations when a retailer can sell an established product and a new product that is initially inferior but can improve over time. We find that the retailer has an incentive to sell the new product more than what maximizes industry profits. The...