I consider how online postsecondary education, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), might fit into economically sustainable models of postsecondary education. I contrast nonselective postsecondary education (NSPE) in which institutions sell fairly standardized educational services in...

This paper investigates whether mutual fund families acting as trustees of 401(k) plans display favoritism toward their own funds. Using a hand-collected dataset on retirement investment options, we show that poorly-performing funds are less likely to be removed from and more likely to be added...

Observations on munition workers, most of them women, are organized to examine the relationship between their output and their working hours. The relationship is nonlinear: below an hours threshold, output is proportional to hours; above a threshold, output rises at a decreasing rate as hours...

What would be the impact on the federal budget of a rise in the average U.S. retirement age, assuming that delayed retirement occurs without any change in current program eligibility requirements or benefit formulas? This paper offers estimates of the impact based on analysis of tax and...

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. The ACA includes a wide-reaching set of reforms to ensure more universal and comprehensive health insurance benefits. The bill has the potential to impact U.S. firms across all industries...

As incomes rise in the developing world and as governments and lending agencies invest in energy infrastructure, households are gaining access to commercial energy sources, such as electricity, natural gas and oil. Economists have noted for some time, however, that households do not consume...

This paper examines two explanations for the recent spate of complaints about crossborder monetary policy spillovers and calls for international monetary policy coordination, a development that contrasts sharply with the monetary system in the 1980s, 1990s and until recently. The first...

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 report's key finding is that new nuclear capacity in NEMS-RFF from 2015 to 2020 under the current levels of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) loan guarantees is similar to the marginal increase in new capacity from lowering the nominal return-on-equity (ROE) in NEMS-RFF for new nuclear power...

We develop a tractable dynamic model of productivity growth and technology spillovers that is consistent with the emergence of real world empirical productivity distributions. Firms can improve productivity by engaging in in-house R&D, or alternatively, by trying to imitate other firms’...