This paper considers the scientific legacy of Zvi Griliches’ contribution to the economic analysis of the diffusion of technological innovations. It first examines the relationship between Griliches’ pioneering empirical work on the introduction and adoption of hybrid corn and the subsequent...

We re-present and re-examine the analysis from the famous RAND Health Insurance Experiment from the 1970s on the impact of consumer cost sharing in health insurance on medical spending. We begin by summarizing the experiment and its core findings in a manner that would be standard in the current...

Monetary policy analysts often rely on rules-of-thumb, such as the Taylor rule, to describe historical monetary policy decisions and to compare current policy to historical norms. Analysis along these lines also permits evaluation of episodes where policy may have deviated from a simple rule and...

The research reported here gives priority to understanding the inter-temporal resource allocation requirements of a program of technological changes that could halt global warming by completing the transition to a "green" (zero net CO2- emission) production regime within the possibly brief...

The mobile applications (apps) industry has exhibited rapid entry and growth in the midst of a recession. Using unique data from the iPhone application ecosystem, we examine how the development of “killer apps” (apps appearing in the top grossing rank) varies by market and app...

Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. I use a randomized controlled trial of the Mexican government's Food Assistance Program ('PAL') to test whether this form of paternalism is necessary, comparing precisely measured...

I discuss a proposal to legislate a rule for monetary policy. The proposal modernizes laws first passed in the late 1970s, but largely discarded in 2000. It would thereby restore reporting and accountability requirements for the instruments of monetary policy. It would limit but not eliminate...

Using alternative measures of term lending rates and counterparty risk and a wide variety of econometric specifications, we find that counterparty risk has a robust significant effect on interest rate spreads in the term inter-bank loan markets. In contrast, we do not find comparably robust...

This article studies the optimal use of fines and imprisonment when an offender’s level of wealth is private information that cannot be observed by the enforcement authority. In a model in which there are two levels of wealth, I derive the optimal mix of sanctions, including the imprisonment...

This paper studies the long-term effect of business cycle, employment rate and employment growth rate on later wages and promotions. Using Swedish employer-employee match data, we find that workers who enter the labor market during a recovery phase of a business cycle (when the employment rate...