Macroeconomic data indicate that the three American discretionary countercyclical stimulus packages of the 2000s had little if any direct impact on consumption or government purchases, and thus did not stimulate the economy as Keynesian models would predict. Households largely saved the...

Living arrangements have changed enormously over the last two centuries. While the average American today lives in a household of only three people, in 1850 household size was twice that figure. Further, both the number of children and the number of adults in a household have fallen...

Little is known about how wealth affects fertility decisions of the household. This paper fills this gap by investigating how changes in housing wealth affect fertility. We first conduct a state-level aggregate analysis to investigate how the birth rate is related to housing prices using...

Marital sorting along education, income and other salient dimensions is well-documented for many countries. The degree of marital sorting may influence income inequality, intergenerational mobility, and household labor supply, and other economic outcomes. Marital sorting is thought to arise from...

Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international differences-indifferences...

We establish some new interesting stylized facts on the changes in boy versus girl nutritional status in India during the nineties, a period of rapid economic growth. Our analysis is based on the comparison, over time and across genders, of the distribution of z-scores calculated for height and...

We describe factors that make bidding in large spectrum auctions complex including exposure and budget problems, the role of timing within an ascending auction, and the possibilities for price forecasting and how economic and game-theoretic analysis can assist bidders in overcoming these...

We define and explore the notion of a Dynamic Condorcet Winner (DCW), which extends the notion of a Condorcet winner to dynamic settings. We show that, for every DCW, every member of a large class of dynamic majoritarian games has an equivalent equilibrium, and that other equilibria are not...

We examine the extent to which an individual's actual insurance and investment choices display a stable ranking in willingness to bear risk, relative to his peers, across different contexts. We do so by examining the same individuals' decisions regarding their 401(k) asset allocations and their...

We analyze the extent to which simple markets can be used to aggregate disperse information into efficient forecasts of uncertain future events. Drawing together data from a range of prediction contexts, we show that market-generated forecasts are typically fairly accurate, and that they...