In 2003 the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) proposed modest relaxation of its media ownership concentration rules; the proposal aroused heated political opposition and has been partially overturned by Congress and stayed pending appellate review. The purpose of this paper is quite narrow:...

This paper (a) provides a framework for quantifying any economy’s flexibility, and (b) reviews the evidence on New Zealand firms’ birth, growth and death. The data indicate that, by and large, the labour market and the financial market are doing their job.

This paper uses micro-data on cigarette consumption from four waves of the CPS Tobacco Supplement to estimate cigarette demand models that incorporate the decision of whether to smuggle cigarettes across a state or Native American Reservation border. I find demand elasticities with respect to...

This paper estimates a price elasticity using a flexible demand specification on survey data where prices are observed with error are correlated with household characteristics. The demand function is modelled as being a polynomial (and more generally also including trigonometric terms) in the...

Different from the well established markets such as the dollar-Euro market, recent CIP deviations observed in the onshore dollar-RMB forward market were caused by conversion restrictions in the spot market rather than changes in credit risk and/or liquidity constraint. This paper proposes a...

Employee stock options differ substantially from traded options. Most expire within 90 days of the termination of employment, and are forfeited if the employee leaves before vesting. The major accounting standards boards are in agreement that options should be expensed, but companies have...

We test the theory put forth by Compte and Postlewaite (2004) that overconfidence might persist because it is welfare improving. They argue that because confidence enhances performance, some overconfidence is optimal in spite of its negative effect on decision-making. One implication of their...

In this paper, we attempt to isolate the causal impact of enrolling in a community college upon educational attainment and labor market outcomes in the state of Texas. Using administrative data on all public high school graduates from the state, we use both matching and IV methods to investigate...

This paper compares the effects on corporate performance and managerial self-dealing in a situation in which a (privately informed) CEO reports to a single Board that is responsible for both monitoring management and establishing performance targets to an alternative in which the CEO reports to...

In January 2008, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research hosted a workshop on addressing recent legislation creating a “cap-and-trade” system. Four key issues: (1) linking the California market to other GHG markets and control policies, including those in other states, Europe, and...