During the past two decades, the performance of the Mexican telecommunications sector has improved substantially. Privatization of the former state-owned monopoly carrier led to a substantial increase in its efficiency, and the introduction of competition into all segments of the industry has...

Real wage index numbers have been used to measure movements in the standard of living of the typical worker. This paper describes some of these indicators for the United States and England. A new real wage index is proposed that resembles the sliding scale used to adjust wages in certain...

I present a stochastic version of Tirole's (1996) collective reputation model. In equilibrium, group behavior is persistent due to a complementarity between the group's reputation, which depends on the past behavior of group members, and current incentives. A group can maintain a strong...

In the three-year period following stock market liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm’s capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by an average of 4.1 percentage points. Cross-sectional changes in investment are significantly correlated with the signals about...

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...