Since 1941, six Executive Orders have been issued forbidding Federal government contractors from discriminating against minority workers. In principle, all prospective contractors are required to demonstrate compliance with the law before a contract is let. The potential penalties are severe:...

One of the best documented relationships in economics is the link between education and income: higher educated people have higher incomes. Advocates argue that education provides skills, or human capital, that raises an individual's productivity. Critics argue that the documented relationship...

In this paper we use data on brothers, and fathers and sons, to estimate the economic returns to schooling. Our goal is to determine whether the correlation between earnings and schooling is due, in part, to the correlation between family backgrounds and schooling. The basic idea is to contrast...

A special exemption from the 1986 Age Discrimination Act allowed colleges and universities to enforce mandatory retirement of faculty at age 70 until 1994. We compare faculty turnover rates at a large sample of institutions before and after the federal law change, and at a set of institutions...

In this paper we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. horizontal merger policy and apply it to the study of five recent consumer product mergers. We selected the mergers from those that, from the public record, seemed to be most problematic for the antitrust agencies. Thus we...

The challenge of effective merger enforcement is tremendous. U.S. antitrust agencies must, by statute, quickly forecast the competitive effects of mergers that occur in virtually every sector of the economy to determine if mergers can proceed. Surprisingly, given the complexity of the regulators...

In this paper we provide a simple, credible method for assessing the effects of climate change on the quality of agricultural land and then apply this method using a rich set of data on the vineyards of the Mosel Valley in Germany. The basic idea is to use a simple model of solar radiation to...

This paper reports on the current status of the microeconomic research on labor supply behavior. The purpose is to direct attention to microeconomic research that may be helpful in the continuing evaluation of aggregate models designed to explain the dynamic behavior of wages, employment and...

This paper reports the results of a systematic experimental comparison of the effect of alternative arbitration systems on dispute rates. The key to our experimental design is the use of a common underlying distribution of arbitrator "fair" awards in the different arbitration systems. This...

The Sotheby's/Christie's price-fixing scandal that ended in the public trial of Alfred Taubman provides a unique window on a number of key economic and antitrust policy issues related to the use of the auction system. The trial provided detailed evidence as to how the price fixing worked, and...