The central concern of this paper is to show that medical innovations have depended heavily on breaking down barriers that have long prevailed in the academic world, in the form of disciplinary boundaries that have coalesced into separate departments. In the longer run, this sharp distinction...

This paper examines the price response of wireless carriers to the introduction of number portability. My main empirical finding is that wireless prices decreased in response to number portability, but not uniformly across all plans. Average prices for the plans with the fewest minutes decreased...

This article studies optimal fines when an offender’s wealth is private information that can be obtained by the enforcement authority only after a costly audit. I derive the optimal fine for the underlying offense, the optimal fine for misrepresenting one’s wealth level, and the optimal...

This work presents a theoretical and empirical evaluation of the role of market belief in the structure of risk premia. Our main result is that fluctuations in market belief are large contributors to the time variability of risk premia. On average, the risk premium on holding Federal Funds...

We study reputation games where a long-lived player with a possible commitment faces a sequence of short-lived players who must pay to observe the long-lived player's past behavior. In this costly information model we show that equilibrium behavior is cyclical. The long-lived player builds her...

We present a graphical framework for analyzing both theoretical and empirical work on selection in insurance markets. We begin by using this framework to review the "textbook" adverse selection environment and its implications for insurance allocation, social welfare, and public policy. We then...

The implications of uncertainty for appropriate discounting in models of economic growth have been studied at some length, notably, Levhari and Srinivasan (1969), Gollier (2002). A detailed account has now appeared in Dasgupta (2008), sections 4 and 5 (pp. 160-166). One interesting, if perhaps...

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises to enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological...

The research reported here gives priority to understanding the inter-temporal resource allocation requirements of a program of technological changes that could halt global warming by completing the transition to a “green” (zero net CO2- emission) production regime within the possibly brief...

How and by how much do supervisors enhance worker productivity? Using a company-based data set on the productivity of technology-based services workers, supervisor effects are estimated and found to be large. Replacing a boss who is in the lower 10% of boss quality with one who is in the upper...