To better understand how list orderings affect choices of economic significance, we explore how ballot order affects election outcomes. Unlike previous work, we show that ballot order significantly affects the results of elections. In more than five percent of the elections in our dataset of...

The paper studies a new class of games, "All-Pay Contests", which capture general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying, competition for market power, labor-market tournaments, and R&D races. Players have continuous, non-decreasing cost functions and compete for...

This paper uses a novel data set of the trade mark activity of UK manufacturing and service sector firms to investigate whether applications for trade marks are suggestive of product innovation, improving the profitability and productivity of firms. Data on both trade (and service) marks sought...

To address the complex theme of the role of universities in research in newly emerging areas of science and engineering, and in the development and commercialization of faculty research findings as a basis for industrial renewal and economic growth is a challenge. To be assigned to attempt this...

This paper addresses the question of whether both goods and asset market frictions are necessary to explain the failure of consumption risk sharing across countries. I develop a test that uses bilateral import data to identify separately the role of trade costs and asset market frictions. I...

Research in the early 1980s found that the gains from international coordination of monetary policy were quantitatively small compared to simply getting domestic policy right. That prediction turned out to be a pretty good description of monetary policy in the 1980s, 1990s, and until recently....

As life expectancy increases, a larger proportion of older workers may desire to postpone full retirement by continuing to work either at their career jobs or by shifting to bridge jobs. This paper examines reasons why employers might adopt policies to facilitate the extension of work life or...

In most variants of the Hotelling-Downs model of election, it is assumed that voters have concave utility functions. This assumption is arguably justied in issues such as economic policies, but convex utilities are perhaps more appropriate in others such as moral or religious issues. In this...

We study the effect of different school choice mechanisms on schools' incentives for quality improvement. To do so, we introduce the following criterion: A mechanism respects improvements of school quality if each school becomes weakly better whenever that school improves and thereby becomes...

The FCC has taken three different competition policy approaches: the classic role of regulating terms and conditions of sale, the modern role of using various tools to create largely deregulated, multi-firm, competitive markets, and the laissez-faire approach of believing that unregulated...