Should rights of access to local broadband facilities be reassigned from investors and, if so, to whom: users, ISPs and content providers, a collective, or no one? A prominent reason for considering such a policy would be a barrier that prevented the voluntary transfer of such rights in response...

A Monetary Union is modeled as a technology that makes a surprise policy deviation impossible and requires voluntarily participating countries to follow the same monetary policy. Within a fully dynamic context, we identify conditions under which such arrangement may dominate a coordinated system...

A simplified mechanism is a direct mechanism modified by restricting the set of reports or bids. An example is the auction used to place ads on Internet search pages, in which each advertiser bids a single price to determine the allocation of eight or more ad positions on a page. If a simplified...

This paper proposes an approach to the roles of social norm dealing with economic externalities. Traditionally social norms are treated by economists as external constraints or endogenous outcomes of repeated economic transactions. In contrast, this paper formulates a game of social exchanges...

Ex-ante cost of aggregate fluctuations consist of all individual and social cost expanded by optimizing agents aiming to prevent or reduce fluctuations of consumption. These are measured by the cost of resources used to attain the level of consumption volatility currently observed. This paper...

Much of education policy focuses on improving teacher quality, but most policies lack strong research support. We use student achievement gains to estimate teacher value-added, our measure of teacher quality. The analysis reveals substantial variation in the quality of instruction, most of which...

A country that leads the world in the development of the technologies that have revolutionized communications services should not have a second-rate system for regulating those services. Our communication policy is an embarrassment to the United States and a bad example to other countries....

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...