Despite recent innovations that might have reduced banks' reliance on brick-and-mortar branches for distributing retail financial services, the number of U.S. bank branches has continued to increase steadily over time. Further, an increasing percentage of these branches are held by banks with...

Despite recent innovations that might have reduced banks' reliance on brick-and-mortar branches for distributing retail financial services, the number of U.S. bank branches has continued to increase steadily over time. Further, an increasing percentage of these branches are held by banks with...

Using the postal service as an example, this article highlights the critical role played by a series of “implicit” judgments when estimating the government earnings differential. Regression estimates demonstrate that alternative treatments of location, gender, industry, occupation and union...

I estimate demand for auto insurance in the presence of two types of market frictions: search and switching costs. I develop an integrated utility-maximizing model in which consumers decide over which and how many companies to search and from which company to purchase. My modeling approach...

Significant US house price appreciation in the last few years has greatly helped to enlarge the size and scope of secondary markets for securities backed by non-prime mortgage loans. But while many households now have access to loans which otherwise might not have been available, were housing...

The United States has long been a country of prohibitions, with the most memorable prohibition in American history being the ban on alcohol sales in 1920, which lasted until the ratification of the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. While the federal ban on alcohol has long since been...

In the late 1820s, when British Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel introduced legislation into the British parliament to create the very first police department, the phrase that the ‘police are the public, and the public are the police' was developed to allay public fears that the new institution...

I compare returns to scale in the U.S. and Canadian banking system from 1996 to 2015. I estimate a parametric trans-log cost function and, for robustness, an inputoriented distance function. I do this in a way that is commensurate with the limitations of these models. Among the ten largest...