Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States experienced a substantial decline in undergraduate degrees in economics from 1992 through 1996, followed immediately by a modest recovery. This cycle does not conform to overall degree trends, shifts in the gender composition of undergraduate...

An overlapping-generations model where agents choose whether to become educated when young is presented. Education enhances productivity, but needs to be financed by borrowing. Because of the possibility of default, lenders may ration credit. We characterize the steady-state equilibrium with and...

Traditionally, a society's literacy has been measured by the 'literacy rate' or the percent of the adult population that is literate. The present paper maintains that the distribution on literates across households also matters, due to the external effects of literacy - the benefits that...

This paper establishes a growth model where firms and residents in polluted areas bargain cooperatively to settle environmental concerns. While economic development affects the extent of the negotiation outcomes, the bargaining results also influence firms' incentive to undertake R&D and thus...

We test two recent theories on the subject of charitable fundraising in capital campaigns. Andreoni (1998) predicts that publicly announced seed contributions can increase the total amount of charitable giving in a capital campaign. Bagnoli and Lipman (1989) predict that another technique for...

In empirical studies of simultaneous-move games, such as sealed-bid auctions, researchers frequently wish to estimate quantities which depend on interactions between the strategies of different players. Examples include the expected revenues of an auction, or the mean allocative efficiency in a...

Using 114 years of U.S. stock market data we try to relate movements in stock prices to changes in technology. We find measures of technological progress explain 37% of the 3.9% annual growth in the stock market over the 1885-1998 period, the "Jazz-Age" (1918-1934) entrants were not overvalued,...

This paper analyzes a simple and tractable model of occupational choice in the presence of credit market imperfections. We examine the relative roles of parameters governing technology and transaction costs, and history in terms of the initial wealth distribution in determinig the long term...

Sellers in eBay auctions have the opportunity to choose both a public minimum bid amount and a secret reserve price. We ask, empirically, whether the seller is made better or worse off by setting a secret reserve above a low minimum bid, versus the option of making the reserve public by using it...

We examine the impact of a desire for social approval on education and occupation choice and model the endogenous determination of perceptions that influence such approval. In a two-sector overlapping generations framework, agents born with ability endowments in both occupations must choose one...