An econometric model that explores the effect of personal characteristics and attitudes of clients on their demand for prostitution is estimated on data from a survey of clients of street sex workers in the US. The results reveal that clients of street sex workers in our sample have two...

In recent years, consumer choice has become an important element of public policy. One reason is that consumers differ in their tastes and needs, which they can express most easily through their own choices. Elements that strengthen consumer choice feature prominently in the design of public...

In recent years, consumer choice has become an important element of public policy. One reason is that consumers differ in their tastes and needs, which they can express most easily through their own choices. Elements that strengthen consumer choice feature prominently in the design of public...

We investigate the association between age and medical spending in the U.S. using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). We estimate a partially linear seminonparametric model and construct "pure" life-cycle profiles of health spending simultaneously controlling for time effects...

In this paper we construct life-cycle profiles of U.S. health care spending using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). We separate pure age effects on health expenditure from time effects (i.e. productivity effects, business cycle effects, etc.) and cohort effects (i.e. initial...

This paper studies the voluntary provision of public goods that is partially driven by a desire to offset for individual polluting activities. We first extend existing theory and show that offsets allow a reduction in effective environmental pollution levels while not necessarily extending the...

This paper provides a joint analysis of household stockholding participation, stock location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers, using data from the US Survey of Consumer Finances. Our multivariate choice model matches observed participation rates, conditional and...

We investigate US households' direct investment in stocks, bonds and liquid accounts and their foreign counterparts, in order to identify the different participation hurdles affecting asset investment domestically and overseas. To this end, we estimate a trivariate probit model with three...

This paper examines the role of peer effects in smoking behavior using data of middle and high school students in the United States. I present a random utility model that explicitly incorporates complementarity between individual and peer smokings. A Markov process model of smoking interactions...

This paper studies the attitude of non-professional investors towards financial losses and their decisions concerning wealth allocation among consumption, risky, and risk-free financial assets. We employ a two-dimensional utility setting in which both consumption and financial wealth...