Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modelling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used to evaluate fiscal policy stimulus proposals...

Prices in government and employer-sponsored health insurance markets only partially reflect insurers' expected costs of coverage for different enrollees. This can create inefficient distortions when consumers self-select into plans. We develop a simple model to study this problem and estimate it...

Since the early 1990s, California has experienced a recurring budget crisis. This article examines the combined budgets of state and local governments and the institutions for creating these budgets to ascertain the source of the problem. The facts are that California collects more taxes and...

I evaluate the effects on student achievement of the Teacher AdvancementProgram (TAP), a school-level intervention that offers teachers professional development resources and performance-based compensation. Because TAP typically targets low-performing schools, assignment to the intervention is...

This paper examines how regulators set local prices in response to the changes brought on by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (“Telecom Act”). We are particularly interested in the extent to which state regulators set prices that promoted efficiency or were influenced by private-interest...

This paper presents a stochastic simulation model to study implications of the mechanisms by which individual software developers’ efforts are allocated within large and complex open source software projects. It illuminates the role of different forms of “motivations-at-the-margin” in the...

This entry for the forthcoming The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Second Edition) surveys the economic analysis of five primary fields of law: property law; liability for accidents; contract law; litigation; and public enforcement and criminal law. It also briefly considers some...

A significant challenge to empirically testing theories of discrimination has been the difficulty of identifying taste-based discrimination and of distinguishing it clearly from statistical discrimination. This paper identifies taste-based discrimination through a two-part empirical test. First,...

This paper reflects on the relevance of systems thinking about the interdependent policy issues bearing on the dynamics of science, technology and innovation in their relationship to economic growth. Considering the approach that characterizes much of the current economics literatures treatment...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...