We examine the effect of race on market outcomes by selling iPods through local online classified advertisements throughout the United States in a year-long field experiment. Each ad features a photograph of the product being held by a dark- or light-skinned (“black” or “white”) hand....

Time until completion of a baccalaureate degree has increased markedly over the last three decades. Between 1972 and 1992, average time to degree increased by more than one-quarter of a year, the completion rate among college attendees dropped from 51.1% to 45.3% and, among those receiving...

We consider the many-to-many two-sided matching problem under a stringent domain restriction on preferences called the max-min criterion. We show that, even under this restriction, there is no stable mechanism that is weakly Pareto efficient, strategy-proof, or monotonic (i.e. respects...

This essay considers whether the organizational arrangements established by the Constitution of the United States remain effective in promoting “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which are the purposes of government according to Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. I conclude...

The recent episode of rising consumer bankruptcy and increasing foreclosure rates has sparked a lively debate about how to best tackle the crisis in the U.S. housing market. This paper contributes to the debate by providing an explicit model of the interactions of households' decisions to...

This article proposes a simple framework for understanding diversity of linkages between corporate governance (CG) and organizational architecture (OA). It distinguishes discreet modes of their linkage by different combinatorial patterns between three basic assets: managers’ human assets...

This paper analyzes how the indeterminacy of competitive equilibrium in one-sector growth models depends on the magnitude of the households' income effect on the demand for leisure. The paper first establishes that the presence of income effect is necessary for the existence of an indeterminate...

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...