The paper reconsiders the nature of mining districts and property rights during the California gold rush. According to a widely accepted view advanced by Umbeck (1977, 1981), in the absence of effective legal authority, district codes established secure property rights in mining claims. Such...

An important element in considering school finance policies is that households are not passive but instead respond to policies. Household behavior is especially important in considering how households affect the spatial structure of metropolitan areas where different jurisdictions incorporate...

Many individuals who are eligible for welfare choose not to participate. This well-documented fact suggests that there is a utility cost associated with welfare participation. Previous studies have produced estimates of how large this cost would have to be to explain the observed degree of...

Government policies that are based on age do not adjust to changes in remaining life expectancy and lower mortality risk relative to earlier time periods due to improvements in mortality. We examine four possible methods for adjusting the eligibility ages for Social Security, Medicare, and...

In the 1988-2004 micro data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the CPI, price changes are frequent (every 4-7 months, depending on the treatment of sale prices) and large in absolute value (on the order of 10%). The size and timing of price changes varies considerably for a...

This paper suggests that the interaction between firms’ entry and exit decisions and variation in the degree of competition gives rise to endogenous procyclical movements in measured total factor productivity (TFP). Based on this result, the paper suggests a simple structural method for the...

Knowing whether time spent in formal schooling increases student achievement, and by how much, is important for policymakers interested in determining efficient use of resources. Using the ECLS-K, we exploit quasi-randomness in the timing of assessment dates to examine this question....

Uncertainty varies strongly over time, rising by 50% to 100% in recessions and by up to 200% after major economic and political shocks. This paper shows that higher uncertainty reduces the responsiveness of R&D to changes in business conditions - a "caution-effect" - making it more persistent...

We propose a group robust stability notion which requires robustness against a combined manipulation, first misreporting of preferences and then rematching, by any group of students in a school choice type of matching markets. Our first result shows that there is no group robustly stable...

As part of the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) National Broadband Report to Congress, we have been asked to conduct a survey to help determine consumer valuations of different aspects of broadband Internet service. Our empirical results show that reliability and speed are important...