A policy will be used more heavily in a particular time and place where its marginal cost is lower. The analyst who treats times and places as identical will overestimate the policy's net benefit, especially for policy intensities greater than exist in his sample. In regression analysis, the...

These are notes on the mechanics of doing research in economics. They are a series of short, unconnected tips that I think could be widely useful both to individuals and the profession. I also include samples of Latex tricks I find useful in my articles.

A convicted criminal suffers not only from public penalties, but from stigma, the reluctance of others to interact with him economically and socially. Conviction can convey useful information about a person, which makes stigmatization an important and legitimate function of the criminal justice...

Consider a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. This activity level can be endogenized in several ways ---whether to incur a fixed cost of activity, for example, or what level of output to choose. Our model has a...

Bargaining models ask how a surplus is split between two parties in bilateral monopoly. Much of real-world negotiation involves complications to the original split which may or may not increase the welfare of both parties. The parties must decide which complications to propose, how closely to...

I am putting together a collection of clippings, journal articles, and original material to accompany my game theory book. It is due at the publisher's September 1, 1999. This is the preface, in which I explain my choice of items to include.

I am putting together a collection of clippings, journal articles, and original material to accompany my game theory book. It is due at the publisher's September 1, 1999. This is the table of contents.

Our one-page reply to Whinston and Siegal's forthcoming AER article correcting and elaborating our 1991 AER article.

The Klein-Leffler (1981) model of product quality does not explain why high-quality firms would dissipate the rents they earn from quality- assuring price premia, and it relies on consumers knowing the cost functions of firms. In the present paper, consumers do not know any firm's cost of...

Consider a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. This simple model has a mixed-strategy equilibrium in which industry profits are positive and decline with the number of firms, the same features which make the...