It is a common assumption that regions within the same country converge to approximately the same steady-state income levels. The so-called absolute convergence hypothesis focuses on initial income levels to account for the variability in income growth among regions. Empirical data seem to...

We investigate the existence of wage premium due to cultural diversity across US cities. Using census data from 1970 to 1990, we find that at the urban level richer diversity is systematically associated with higher average nominal wages for white US-born males. We measure cultural diversity in...

The use of environmental policy instruments such as eco-labelling and pesticide taxes should preferably be based on disaggregate estimates of the individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for pesticide risk reductions. We review the empirical valuation literature dealing with pesticide risk exposure...

We study entry and bidding patterns in sealed bid and open auctions with heterogeneous bidders. Using data from U.S. Forest Service timber auctions, we document a set of systematic effects of auction format: sealed bid auctions attract more small bidders, shift the allocation towards these...

This paper provides evidence of bounded rationality by large dealers in U.S. Treasury auctions. I argue that these dealers use a heuristic of yield-space bidding which leads to biases manifested in three ways: they submit dominated bids, i.e., those that could be improved without raising the...

This paper uses data on juvenile offenders released from correctional facilities in Florida to explore the effects of facility management type (private for-profit, private nonprofit, public state-operated, and public county-operated) on recidivism outcomes and costs. The data provide detailed...

This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in...

In most western societies, marital fertility began to decline in the nineteenth century. But in Ireland, fertility in marriage remained stubbornly high into the twentieth century. Explanations of Ireland's late entry to the fertility transition focus on the influence of the Roman Catholic Church...

In most instances, the dynamic response of monetary and other policies to shocks is infrequent and lumpy. The same holds for the microeconomic response of some of the most important economic variables, such as investment, labor demand, and prices. We show that the standard practice of estimating...

In this paper we estimate an encompassing Macro-Finance model allowing for time variation in the equilibrium real rate, mispricing and learning dynamics. The encompassing model specification incorporates (i) a small-scale (semi-) structural New-Keynesian model, (ii) flexible price of risk...