This paper examines the investment allocation decisions of pension plans, endowments, foundations, and other institutional plan sponsors. The experience and education of plan sponsors and the environment (both regulatory and agency) of the institutional market suggests that institutional...

"Empirical exercises in economics frequently involve estimation of highly nonlinear models. The criterion function may not be globally concave or convex and exhibit many local extrema. Choosing among these local extrema is non-trivial for a variety of reasons. In this paper, we analyze the...

Understanding the sensitivity of gasoline demand to changes in prices and income has important implications for policies related to climate change, optimal taxation and national security, to name only a few. While the short-run price and income elasticities of gasoline demand in the United...

We test whether firms use incompatibility strategically, using data from ATM markets. High ATM fees degrade the value of competitors’ deposit accounts, and can in principle serve as a mechanism for siphoning depositors away from competitors or for creating deposit account differentiation. Our...

As with other commodities, electricity is often traded on both forward and spot markets. This was initially true in the restructured California electricity industry from 1998 to 2000. Though the power traded in the forward and spot markets was for delivery at the same times and locations, prices...

We analyze tacit collusion in an industry characterized by cyclical demand and long-run scale decisions; firms face deterministic demand cycles and choose capacity levels prior to competing in prices. Our focus is on the nature of prices. We find that two types of price wars may exist. In one,...

In the second-half of the 1990s, the positive impact of information technology on productivity growth for the United States became apparent. The measurement of this productivity improvement depends on hedonic procedures adopted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Bureau of Economic...