Projection bias is the tendency to overpredict the degree to which one's future tastes will resemble one's current tastes. We test for evidence of projection bias in two of the largest and most important consumer markets - the car and housing markets. Using data for more than forty million...

Walmart often faces strong local opposition when trying to build a new store. Opponents often claim that Walmart lowers nearby housing prices. In this study we use over one million housing transactions located near 159 Walmarts that opened between 2000 and 2006 to test if the opening of a...

Using a unique, national dataset that indicates where students choose to send their SAT scores, we find that college sports success has a large impact on student application decisions. For example, a school that has a stellar year in basketball or football on average receives up to 10% more SAT...

Megan's Law requires public dissemination of information from sex offender registries. Opponents to this controversial law have questioned whether households misinterpret or even use this information. One concern was that the information might simply induce a "fear of crime." This study finds...

Empirical studies have produced mixed results on the relationship between a school's sports success and the quantity and quality of students that apply to the school. This study uses two unique datasets to shed additional light on the indirect benefits that sports success provides to NCAA...

The hedonic method is widely used to infer the value of environmental amenities that are bundled with real property. The interpretation of hedonic prices as marginal values requires that households are "fully informed." Yet, there is evidence that buyers are often less informed than sellers. A...

Revealed preference methods like the hedonic model generally assume economic agents have access to publicly available information and use it effectively. In the housing market, the recent proliferation of seller disclosure laws suggests that policymakers perceive buyers to be less than "fully...