This paper studies the long-term effect of business cycle, employment rate and employment growth rate on later wages and promotions. Using Swedish employer-employee match data, we find that workers who enter the labor market during a recovery phase of a business cycle (when the employment rate...

The United States currently has a communications policy in place that does not state clearly its own goals, yet applies regulations that greatly affect outcomes. A better communications policy would substitute markets for regulation as a way to determine both what is sold and what price is paid...

The Brazilian government has been pushing for changes to the United States’ extensive barriers to ethanol imports. However, removing these barriers would have uncertain consequences for the environment and regional development in Brazil. Expansion in sugarcane production required to produce...

Can conventional economic analysis help in defining and measuring the success of labor unions? In this paper, a general indicator of union welfare is proposed and particular expressions for the wage and employment objectives of unions are rearranged to derive measures of union success or...

“Assignment messages” are messages that parameterize substitutable preferences using a particular linear program. An “assignment exchange” is a simplified Walrasian exchange in which participants are restricted to report only assignment messages. Any pure Nash or e-Nash equilibrium of...

This paper provides an analysis of the role of prices in determining food purchases and nutrition using very detailed transaction-level observations for a large, nationally-representative sample of US consumers over the period 2002-2007. Using product-specific nutritional information, we develop...

We review different empirical approaches that researchers take to estimate how consumption responds to income changes. We critically evaluate the empirical evidence on the sensitivity of consumption to predicted income changes, distinguishing between the traditional excess sensitivity tests, and...

California’s initiative to create the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which sponsors human embryonic stem cell research within the state, has been significantly delayed by a series of political and legal battles over the structure, procedures and policies of CIRM,...

This paper analyzes how the interaction between firms’ entry-and-exit decisions and variations in competition gives rise to self-fulfilling, expectation-driven fluctuations in aggregate economic activity and in measured total factor productivity (TFP). The analysis is based on a dynamic...

Patents award innovators a fixed period of market exclusivity, e.g., 20 years in the United States. Yet, since in many industries firms file patents at the time of discovery ("invention") rather than first sale ("commercialization"), effective patent terms vary: inventions that commercialize at...