We document the behavior of trade prices during the Great Trade Collapse of 2008- 2009 using transaction-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we find that differentiated manufactures exhibited marked stability in their trade prices during the large decline in their trade...

We explore steady-state inequality in an intergenerational model with altruistically linked individuals who experience privately observed taste shocks. When the welfare function depends only on the initial generation, efficiency requires immiseration: inequality grows without bound and...

In an experiment, players’ ability to learn to cooperate in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma was substantially diminished when the payoffs were noisy, even though players could monitor one another's past actions perfectly. In contrast, in one-time play against a succession of...

Preferences are fundamental building blocks in all models of economic and political behavior. We study a new sample of comprehensively genotyped subjects with data on economic and political preferences and educational attainment. We use dense single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data to estimate...

We present a Northâ€South model of international trade in which differentiated products are developed in the North. Sectors are populated by finalâ€good producers who differ in productivity levels. On the basis of productivity and sectoral characteristics, firms decide whether to integrate...

Background: Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is the most common infectious cause of death in the United States. To understand the impact of efforts to improve quality and efficiency of care in CAP, we examined trends in mortality and costs among hospitalized CAP patients. Methods: Using the...

This paper studies the link between volatility, labor market flexibility, and international trade. International differences in labor market regulations affect how firms can adjust to idiosyncratic shocks. These institutional differences interact with sector specific differences in volatility...

Housing is a major component of wealth. Since house prices fluctuate considerably over time, it is important to understand how these fluctuations affect households’ consumption decisions. Rising house prices may stimulate consumption by increasing households’ perceived wealth, or...

This paper studies the relationship between international conflict and the size distribution of countries in a model in which both peaceful bargaining and nonpeaceful confrontations are possible. We show how the size distribution of countries depends on the likelihood, benefits, and costs of...

In this paper we present a study of the problem of approximating the expectations of functions of statistics in independent and dependent random variables in terms of the expectations of functions of the component random variables. We present results providing sharp analogues of the...