We compare the returns to education between graduates of post secondary institutions who delayed their tertiary education for some time and those that proceeded with no delays. Using a unique survey that collects information on a representative cohort of graduates, we are able to estimate the...

Electoral systems promote strategic voting and aect party systems. Duverger (1951) proposed that plurality rule leads to bi-partyism and proportional representation leads to multi-partyism. We show that in a dynamic setting, these static eects also lead to a higher option value for existing...

The development of the welfare state in the Western economies between 1930 and 1990 coincided with a puzzling pattern in the taxation of top incomes. Effective tax rates at the top increased sharply but then gradually decreased, even as social transfers continued rising. We propose a new theory...

We illustrate the contrast between two sources of intergenerational disagreement when generations are overlapping and governments aggregate preferences in a utilitarian manner. Social preferences tend to exhibit a present-bias because generations are imperfectly altruistic about future...

In standard models of experimentation, the costs of project development consist of (a) the direct cost of running trials as well as (b)the implicit opportunity cost of leaving alternative projects idle. Another natural type of experimentation cost, the cost of holding on to the option of...

I model the dynamic agency relationship underlying prevention. In each period, a principal can transfer resources to an agent that has private information about a problem, which the agent can direct to solving the problem or divert into rents. Problems are persistent and rectifiable: they...

The paper addresses two broad research questions: 1. How do internal uncertainty associated with the task environment and external uncertainty arising from market volatility impact organization design? 2. What are the relationships among various elements of organization design: delegation of...

This paper examines the impact of ramping rate restrictions imposed on hydro operations to protect aquatic ecosystems. A dynamic optimization model of the profit maximizing decisions of a hydro operator is solved for various restrictions on water flow, using data for a representative hydro...

This paper investigates whether a regime switching model of stochastic lumber prices is better for the analysis of optimal harvesting problems in forestry than a more traditional single regime model. Prices of lumber derivatives are used to calibrate a regime switching model, with each of two...

We compare literacy skills and relative wage and employment outcomes of Australian, Canadian, and U.S. immigrants. We find substantially higher immigrant skill levels at the lower end of the distribution in Australia, especially among recent arrivals, but little difference at the top. In...