Most states now fund merit-based ?nancial aid programs, the effects of which depend on how strongly students react to changes in college costs. I estimate such reactions using quasiexperimental aspects of a recent Massachusetts merit scholarship program intended to attract talented students to...

Efficient legal rules are central to efficient resource allocation in a market economy. But the question whether the common law actually converges to efficiency in commercial areas has remained empirically untested. We create a data set of 461 state court appellate decisions involving the...

This paper considers the estimation of approximate dynamic factor models when there is temporal instability in the factor loadings. We characterize the type and magnitude of instabilities under which the principal components estimator of the factors is consistent and find that these...

BACKGROUND: The PURE study was established to investigate associations between social, behavioural, genetic, and environmental factors and cardiovascular diseases in 17 countries. In this analysis we compare the age, sex, urban/rural, mortality, and educational profiles of the PURE participants...

Monetary policy affects the real economy in part through its effects on financial institutions. High frequency event studies show the introduction of unconventional monetary policy in the winter of 2008-09 had a strong, beneficial impact on banks and especially on life insurance companies. I...

We study the e¢ ciency properties of a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium, macroeco- nomic model with monopolistic competition and …rm entry subject to sunk costs, a time-to-build lag, and exogenous risk of …rm destruction. Under inelastic labor supply and linearity of produc- tion in...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across eighteen advanced economies over the past forty years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To...