I examine the impact of prenatal suspended particulate pollution on educational outcomes, using ambient total suspended particulates (TSPs) as a measure of particulate exposure and standardized test scores of exposed individuals as a measure of educational achievement. I focus on individuals...

Medicare administers a traditional public fee-for-service (FFS) plan while also allowing enrolles to join government-funded private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans.We model how selection and differential payments - the value of the capitation payments the firm receives to insure an individual...

The internet has facilitated the creation of new markets characterized by large scale, increased customization, rapid innovation and the collection and use of detailed consumer and market data. I describe these changes and some of the economic theory that has been useful for thinking about...

The Boston mechanism and deferred acceptance (DA) are two competing mechanisms widely used in school choice problems across the United States. Recent work has highlighted welfare gains from the use of the Boston mechanism, in particular finding that when cardinal utility is taken into account,...

There are three analytically distinct layers of the phenomenon that has been labeled “the anticommons” and indicted as a potential impediment to innovation resulting from patenting and enforcement of IPR obtained on academic research results. This paper distinguishes among “search...

This paper asseses of the role of economic growth in achieving the first target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The analysis is composed of two parts. First, we address economic growth as the most effective instrument for achieving poverty reduction. In evaluating feasibility we...

Fourteen U.S. states recently pledged to adopt limits on greenhouse gases (GHGs) per mile of light-duty automobiles. Previous analyses predicted that these limits will yield significant reductions in GHGs. However, these studies did not consider critical factors that imply different results....

We explore the business cycle implications of expectation shocks and of two well-known psychological biases, optimism and overconfidence. The expectations of optimistic agents are biased toward good outcomes, while overconfident agents overestimate the precision of the signals that they receive....

I examine the relationship between retail market competition and wholesale contracting patterns, by analyzing subcontracting behavior of funeral homes (retailers) and crematories (wholesalers) in the Minnesota funeral industry. Exploiting detailed data on wholesale and retail quantities,...

This study evaluates the effect of the “Lifeline” and “Linkup” subsidy programs on telephone penetration rates of low-income households. It is the first to estimate low-income telephone demand across demographic groups using location-specific Lifeline and Linkup prices. The demand...