We show that o®shore outsourcing can occur even when there are no economies of scale or cost advantages for the foreign firms. What drives the phenomenon is that domestic firms, by accepting orders for intermediate goods, incur the disadvantage of becoming Stackelberg followers in the ensuing...

In this paper I calibrate unobserved labor-generated knowledge spillovers within and between six large macroeconomic sectors covering the U.S. civilian economy from 1948 to 1991. Using quality-adjusted data I show that manufacturing and trade & transportation are the main source of knowledge...

In multilingual labor markets agents with high proficiency in more than one language may be selected into occupations that require high levels of skill in communicating with customers or writing reports in more than one language. In this paper we measure this effect in Catalonia, where two...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of health insurance coverage, health expenditures, and health status in the decade expanding from 1992 to 2002, for a cohort of older Americans. We follow 13,594 individuals interviewed in Waves 1 to 6 of the Health and Retirement Study, most of whom were born...

This paper presents an .audit. of the multistage application and appeal process that the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) uses to determine eligibility for disability benefits from the Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs. We use a subset of...

We study simultaneous ascending auctions of identical objects when bidders are financially constrained and their valuations exhibit complementarities. We assume the budget constraints are known but the values for individual objects are private information, and characterize noncollusive...

This paper presents an .audit. of the multistage application and appeal process that the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) uses to determine eligibility for disability benefits from the Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs. We use a subset of...

This paper explores the implications of urban poverty for children’s educational attainment, a central measure of human capital that has a well-documented and pervasive influence on later-life demographic and labor force behavior. We compare levels of children’s schooling in Cairo and urban...

The number of automobile recalls in the U.S. has sharply increased in the last decade and a half, and the number of units involved in these recalls are often counted in the millions. In 2006 alone, over 10.6 million vehicles were recalled in the United States. However, there is no quantitative...