How can consumers be assured that firms will endeavor to provide good quality when quality is unobservable prior to purchase? We test the hypothesis that reputational incentives are effective at causing restaurants to maintain good hygiene quality. We find that chain affiliation provides...

A common thread in the theory literature on price discrimination has been the ambiguous welfare effects for consumers and the rise in profit for firms, relative to uniform pricing. In this study I resolve the ambiguity for consumers and quantify the benefit for a firm. I describe a model of...

We analyze the differences between companies owned by private equity (PE) investors and similar public companies. We document that PE-owned companies use much stronger incentives for their top executives and have substantially higher debt levels. However, we find little evidence that PE-owned...

Cofinancing is a term used in the movie industry to describe films for which multiple firms share the cost of production and revenues. We find that one-third of movies produced by major studios between 1987 and 2000 are cofinanced. Anecdotal evidence strongly indicates that cofinancing is for...

We present a dynamic model of individuals' educational investments that allows us to explore alternative modeling strategies for forecasting future wage distributions. The key innovation we propose is an approach to forecasting that relies only on the information that would be available at the...