Can the presence of private information in a transaction yield a Pareto-improvement over complete information? In this paper we show that the combination of multi-agent simultaneous signaling of private information, and the nature of the strategic interaction, can result in non-cooperative...

To ask whether the best-informed consumers of higher education, the faculty, make different choices than other similarly endowed consumers, we compare the pattern of colleges chosen by 5,592 children of college and university faculty with the pattern chosen by the children of non-faculty...

Kalai (2002) demonstrates that in semi anonymous Bayesian games with sufficiently many players any Bayesian equilibrium is approximately ex-post Nash. In this paper we demonstrate that the existence of an approximate expost Nash property implies a purification result of the standard sort for the...

We report early career outcomes of economics Ph.D.s by tracking the U.S. class of 1996-97. We examine employment outcomes, work activities, salaries, and graduates' attitudes toward their jobs. By 2003, all of the respondents were employed, although almost half changed employers during the six...

We revisit a foundational theoretical paper in the menu cost literature, Sheshinski and Weiss (1983), one of the few to treat stochastic inflation with persistent deviations from trend. In contrast to the original finding, we find that optimal pricing in this environment entails using different...

In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to conform in their behavior to the behavior of similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such behavior can be consistent with self-interest. We propose that this consistency...

We show that, in a setting where tax competition promotes efficiency, variation in the extent to which firms can use public goods to reduce costs brings about a reduction in the intensity of tax competition. This in turn brings about a loss of efficiency. In this environment, a `minimum tax'...

Information about 586 individuals who matriculated into 27 economics Ph.D. programs in Fall 2002 is used to estimate first and second year attrition rates. After two years, 26.5 percent of the initial cohort had left, equally divided between the first and second years. Attrition varies widely...

The problem of monetary policy delegation is formulated as a two-stage game between the government and the central bank. In the first stage the government chooses the institutional design of the central bank. Monetary and fiscal policy are implemented in the second stage. When fiscal policy has...

We examine the long-run effects of micro-credit on development in an occupational choice model very similar to Banerjee and Newman (JPE, 1993). Micro-credit is modeled as a pure improvement in the credit market that opens up self-employment options to some agents who otherwise could only work...