This paper formulates a simple, regenerative, optimal-stopping model of bus-eng ine replacement to describe the behavior of Harold Zurcher, superinte ndent of maintenance at the Madison (Wisconsin) Metropolitan Bus Comp any. Admittedly, few people are likely to take particular interest in Harold...

The stock of durable goods can be represented by its holdings distribution, defined as the joint distribution of age and physical condition of the population of durable goods. This paper derives the holdings distribution which arises under stationary conditions when durable goods deteriorate...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of price discrimination and inventory investment under incomplete information. The model is motivated from an empirical analysis of operations of daily observations on inventories, sales, and purchases of over 2,300 individual products by a U.S. steel...

We examine crop choice as a dynamic optimization problem over an infinite time horizon, taking into account the effects over time that corn-soybean rotations have on soil quality, which manifest in yield and therefore profit impacts. We show how the efficient decision rule depends on model...

A number of problems studied in the transportation literature, such as automobile choice, motorist route choice, and transportation mode choice, involve an agent who makes a series of discrete choices over time. This paper presents statistical models and estimation methods for such discrete...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the joint labor/leisure and consumption/saving decision over the life cycle. Such a dynamic model provides a framework for considering the important policy experiments related to the reforms in Social Security. We address the role of labor supply in a life...

We provide an empirical analysis of the Social Security disability application, award, and appeal process using the Health and Retirement Survey. We show that the appeal option increases the award probability from 46\% to 73\%. However, this comes at the cost of significant delays: the duration...