This paper defends the use of asymmetric norms which grant gre- ater privileges to minorities than to majorities. The norms we discuss include norms facilitating the establishment or prohibition of minority- only or majority-only institutions, neighborhoods, or associations. While traditionally...

We show that efficient anonymous incentive compatible (dominant strategy) mechanisms for public goods eliminate externalities, i.e., each individual is unable to change the welfare of anyone else. The characterization is used to derive existence and non-existence results for models with a finite...

This paper asks the question, "How should the level of mass transit service be adjusted when road pricing is introduced for a substitute auto mode?" The reference point for the introduction of road pricing is second-best optimization in transit. Because this involves below- marginal-cost pricing...

This paper uses a New Keynesian model with banks and deposits, calibrated to match the US economy, to study the macroeconomic effects of policies that pay interest on reserves. While their effects on output and inflation are small, these policies require important adjustments in the way that the...

We show that non-trivial aggregate fluctuations may originate with vanishingly- small common shocks to either information or fundamentals. These "sentiment" fluctuations can be driven by self-fulfilling variation in either first-order beliefs (as in Benhabib et al., 2015) or higher-order beliefs...

This paper argues that individuals may rationally weight price increases for food and energy products differently from their expenditure shares when forming expectations about price inflation. We develop a simple dynamic model of the economy with gradual price adjustment in the "core" (non-food,...

A large literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements. In order to explain these differences, we define the intrinsic value of a macroeconomic announcement as its ability to nowcast GDP growth, inflation and the federal funds target rate. We then...

Distortions in the elicitation of economic variables arise frequently. A common problem in household surveys is that reported values exhibit a significant degree of rounding. We interpret rounding as a filter that allows limited information about the relationship of interest to pass. We argue...

Within the last decade kidney exchange has become a mainstream paradigm to increase the number of kidney transplants. However, compatible pairs do not participate, and the full benefit from exchange can be realized only if they do. In this paper, we propose a new incentive scheme that relies on...

The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps case workers representing children in state custody by recommending prospective families for adoption. We describe PAE's operational challenges using case worker surveys and a regression analysis of data on child outcomes over multiple years. Using...