We report the results of two sets of experiments comparing decisions made as individuals to those made in groups under majority and unanimity rule. The first setup posed a purely statistical problem devoid of any economic content: Subjects were asked to guess the composition of an (electronic)...

In this chapter we inspect economic mechanisms through which technological progress shapes the degree of inequality among workers in the labor market. A key focus is on the rise of U.S. wage inequality over the past 30 years. However, we also pay attention to how Europe did not experience...

This paper surveys the literature on the price effects of horizontal mergers. The majority of mergers that have been examined in the nine studies conducted over the past 22 years resulted in increased prices for both the merging parties and rival firms, at least in the short run. There is some...

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of optimal minimum wage policy in a perfectly competitive labor market. We show that a binding minimum wage—while leading to unemployment—is nevertheless desirable if the government values redistribution toward low wage workers and if unemployment...

In this paper, we establish three new facts about price-setting by multi-product firms and contribute a model that can match our findings. On the empirical side, using micro-data on U.S. producer prices, we first show that firms selling more goods adjust their prices more frequently but on...

Among the most notable, but least discussed, hallmarks of what I have called the quiet revolution in central banking practice (Blinder, 2004a) has been the movement toward making monetary policy decisions by committee. Until about a decade ago, most central banks had a single governor, who might...

Lojack is a stolen vehicle tracking technology that achieves extremely high recovery rates. Ayres and Levitt (1998) show that introduction of the system produced large reductions in vehicle thefts in areas where it was implemented in the United States. The reduced theft risk was shared by all...

This paper posits a notion of the value of an individual's human capital and the associated return on human capital. These concepts are examined using U.S. data on male earnings and financial asset returns. We find that (1) the value of human capital is far below the value implied by discounting...

Alan Greenspan was sworn in as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System almost exactly 18 years ago. At the time, the Reagan administration was being rocked by the Iran-contra scandal. The Berlin Wall was standing tall while, in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev had...

This paper uses a number of identification approaches (using instrumental variables, assumptions about heteroscedasticity and panel fixed effects) to estimate the effect of inflation targeting on inflation. Generally, it finds the effect is small and insignificant.