This essay describes methodological approaches and pitfalls common to studies of the economic impact of colleges and universities. Such studies often claim local benefits that imply annualized rates of return on local investment exceeding 100 percent. We address problems in these studies...

Human capital accumulation has long been recognized as critical to economic growth and development. In recent years focus on the intra-household distribution of human capital has intensified both theoretically and empirically. However, connecting the theoretical and empirical literature has been...

This paper investigates the effects of consistent and inconsistent long-run variance estimation on a unit root test based on the generalization of the von Neumann ratio. The results from the Monte Carlo experiments suggest that the tests based on an inconsistent estimator have less size...

We introduce a no-risky-arbitrage price (NRAP) condition for asset market models allowing both unbounded short sales and externalities such as trading volume. We then demonstrate that the NRAP condition is sufficient for the existence of competitive equilibrium in the presence of externalities....

Sections 8(a)(3) and 8(a)(5) of the National Labor Relations Act prohibit a firm from unilaterally increasing the wage it pays the union during the negotiation of a new wage contract. To understand this regulation, we study a counterfactual model where the firm can unilaterally increase wages...

We use large unpublished data set about the prices by store of 381 products collected by the Israeli bureau of statistics during 1991-92 in the process of computing the CPI. On average 24% of the stores changed their price where the average is over products and months. Using the standard...

Optimal nonlinear taxation of income and savings is considered in a two-period model with two individuals who have additively separable preferences and who only differ in their skill levels. When the government can commit to its second period policy, taxes on savings do not form part of the...

Simon Rottenberg long ago noted that the nature of sports is such that competitors must be of approximately equal ability if any are to be financially successful. In recent years, sports commentators and fans, Major League Baseball itself, and even some economists have expressed growing concern...

Social welfare dominance criteria based on critical-level generalized utilitarian social welfare functions are investigated. An analogue of a generalized Lorenz curve called a generalized concentration curve is introduced. For a fixed critical utility level c, a partial order of utility...

When data contain errors, parameters of interest typically are not identified without imposing strong assumptions. However, in many cases, bounds on these parameters can be constructed under relatively weak assumptions. This paper addresses under what conditions variables in addition to the one...