Between 1940 and 1980, the rate of homeownership among African-American households increased by close to 40 percentage points. Most of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership was facilitated by the filtering of the urban housing stock as white households...

Gul and Pesendorfer [9] model the static behavior of an agent who ranks menus prior to the experience of temptation. This paper models the dy- namic behavior of an agent whose ranking of menus itself is subject to temptation. The representation for the agent?s dynamically inconsistent choice...

This paper uses recall data from a household survey to evaluate the roles of land reforms and demographic changes in explaining changes in land distribution in West Bengal between 1967-2004. The direct role of the land reforms was insignificant relative to household division, migration and land...

This survey discusses decision{theoretic models of agents who seek to constrain and regulate their own future behavior. The common theme is that the decision makers' future utility is affected by unwanted temptations. The wish to eliminate temptations from future option sets creates a preference...

This paper embeds an oligopolistic industry structure in a real options framework in which synergy gains of horizontal mergers a rise endogenouslya nd vary stochastically over time. We find that(i) mergers are more likely in more concentrated industries; (ii) mergers are more likely inindustries...

One goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in recessions is to increase UI coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells. Although it is a common concern that such extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations, it is not known how recessions would affect the...

For more than two decades a debate regarding the time-series properties of global and hemispheric temperatures has taken place on the climate change literature and it has hardly been settled at the present time. This paper analyzes the IPCC's AR4 20c3m simulations using modern econometric...

Roy, Falk and Fuller (2004) presented a procedure aimed at providing a test for the value of the slope of a trend function that has (nearly) controlled size in autoregressive models whether the noise component is stationary or has a unit root. In this note, we document errors in both their...

Written in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the American Economic Review, this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its members, one of which is the...

In this paper I develop a tractable extension of a Mortensen-Pissarides style matching model that allows for risk averse workers with limited ability to smooth consumption.1 I show that this leads to a form of equilibrium wage rigidity. This rigidity arises because the inability of workers to...