In the late 1970's, rates of undocumented immigration into the United States increased dra- matically. This increase led to pressure on the federal government to nd some way of dealing with the immigrants, culminating in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This paper seeks to...

A vast literature in labor economics has studied the relationship between local labor demand shifts and the outcomes of the working age population. This literature has ignored the impacts that these shocks have on older individuals, though there are reasons to believe that the effects are not...

We study the impact of diverse beliefs on conduct of monetary policy. Individual belief is modeled by a state variable that defines an individual's perceived laws of motion. We use a New Keynesian Model that is solved with a quadratic approximation hence individual decisions are quadratic...

The scientific legacy of Zvi Griliches' contribution to the economic analysis of the diffusion of technological innovations is the subject of this paper. It begins with an examination of the relationship between Griliches' pioneering empirical work on the introduction and adoption of hybrid corn...

That Congress is corrupt is no secret. Polls show that it is held in very low esteem by the public. Why is that? The effectiveness of voter control of public policy in a system of representative government depends on compatibility of representative incentives with voter preferences. Many...

We develop a dynamic network formation model that can explain the observed nestedness in real-world networks. Links are formed on the basis of agents’ centrality and have an exponentially distributed life time. We use stochastic stability to identify the networks to which the network formation...

In this paper I analyze the formation of networks in which each agent is assumed to possess some information of value to the other agents in the network. Agents derive payoff from having access to the information of others through communication or spillovers through the links between them....

Demand for wireless data communication has risen rapidly in the past few years, raising important policy questions about how to allocate radio spectrum for this purpose. Historically, the US government has designated some spectrum for licensed use and a smaller but significant amount for...

This paper analyzes the impacts of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which were amplified by a failure of coordination across the plant, corporate, industrial, and regulatory levels, resulting in a nuclear catastrophe comparable in cost to...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, dis- plays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...