We sent nearly 9,000 fictitious resumes to advertisements for job openings in seven major cities in the United States across six occupational categories. We randomly assigned names to the resumes that convey race and gender but for which a strong socioeconomic connotation is not implicated. We...

We use hurricane Katrina's damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a capital-destruction shock. We find very high exit rates for businesses that incurred physical damage, particularly for small firms and less-productive...

Despite their declining presence in the private sector, defined benefit (DB) pension plans still cover most public-sector workers. A distinguishing feature of these plans is that they impose severe penalties on worker mobility. We use administrative panel data from the largest public-sector...

The advance selling strategy is implemented when a firm offers consumers the opportunity to order its product in advance of the regular selling season. Advance selling reduces uncertainty for both the firm and the buyer and enables the firm to update its forecast of future demand. The...

We examine agreeability between mothers and caregivers in their assessments of children’s non-cognitive development. We extend the standard agreeability framework and carefully consider systematic directional differences between mothers and caregivers across maternal subgroups. Minority...

We analyze a duopoly game in which products are initially differentiated in variety and quality. Each consumer has a most preferred variety and a quality valuation. Customization provides ideal varieties but has no effect on product qualities. The firms first choose whether to customize their...

This paper follows a cohort of initially high performing Missouri students from grade-3 through grade-9 and examines which school factors influence their academic success. Three key findings emerge. First, in terms of performance on standardized tests, schools that are effective in promoting...

Adolescents face daily trade-offs between human capital investment, labor, and leisure. This paper exploits state variation in the repeal of Sunday closing laws to examine the impact of a distinct and plausibly exogenous rise in the quantity of competing diversions available to youth on their...

We examine the efficiency implications of imposing proportionality in teacher evaluation systems. Proportional evaluations force comparisons to be between equally-circumstanced teachers. We contrast proportional evaluations with global evaluations, which compare teachers to each other regardless...

Online review aggregators, such as TripAdvisor, HotelClub and OpenTable help consumers identify the products and services that best match their preferences. The goal of this study is to understand the impact of online review aggregators on firms and consumers. We adopt Salop's circular city...