In this paper we explore a serious eating disorder, bulimia nervosa (BN), which afflicts a surprising number of girls in the US. We challenge the long-held belief that BN primarily affects high income White teenagers, using a unique data set on adolescent females evaluated regarding their...

Conventional methods for mediation analysis generate biased results when the mediator-outcome relationship depends on the treatment condition. This article introduces a new technique, ratio-of-mediator-probability weighting (RMPW), for decomposing total effects into direct and indirect effects...

We develop a theory of intergenerational preference transmission that rationalizes the choice between parenting styles. Parents maximize an objective function that combines Beckerian altruism and paternalism towards children. They can affect their children's choices via two channels: either by...

We seek to understand how Laffer curves differ across countries in the US and the EU-14, thereby providing insights into fiscal limits for government spending and the service of sovereign debt. As an application, we analyze the consequences for the permanent sustainability of current debt...

Many national accounts of economic output and prosperity, such as gross domestic product (GDP) or net domestic product (NDP), offer an incomplete picture by ignoring, for example, the value of leisure, home production, and the value of health. Discussed shortcomings have focused on how...

Recursive utility models of the type introduced by Kreps and Porteus (1978) are used extensively in applied research in macroeconomics and asset pricing in environments with uncertainty. These models represent preferences as the solution to a nonlinear forward-looking difference equation with a...

An impatient, risk-neutral monopolist must sell one unit of an indivisible good within a fixed number of periods and privately informed myopic buyers with independent values enter the market over time. In each period, the seller can either run a reserve price auction incurring a cost or post a...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 marked a substantial shift in US healthcare policy. We create an event study observing the returns of healthcare stocks in the S&P 500 when on June 28, 2012 the US Supreme Court very unexpectedly ruled that the individual mandate, a...

This paper examines the different policy rules proposed by Henry Simons, who, beginning in the mid-1930s, advocated a price-level stabilization rule, and by Milton Friedman, who, beginning in the late-1950s, advocated a rule that targeted a constant growth rate of the money supply. Although both...

This paper considers a dynamic economy in which agents are repeatedly matched with one another and decide whether to enter into profitable partnerships. Each agent has a physical colour and a social colour. The social colour of an agent acts as a signal about the physical colour of agents in his...