Using administrative, longitudinal data on felony arrests in Florida, we exploit the discontinuous increase in the punitiveness of criminal sanctions at 18 to estimate the deterrence effect of incarceration. Our analysis suggests a 2 percent decline in the log-odds of offending at 18, with...

The available estimates of the wage elasticity of male labor supply in the literature have varied between -0.2 and 0.2, implying that permanent wage increases have relatively small, poorly determined effects on labor supplied. The variation in existing estimates calls for a simple, natural...

In 1979 the United States and China established normal diplomatic relations, allowing me to visit China and study the Chinese economy. After doing so for thirty years since and advising the government of Taiwan in the 1960s and the 1970s and the government of the People’s Republic of China in...

It is common observation that many individuals vote despite the fact that in elections with even a moderate number of voters, the probability their vote will be pivotal is quite small. The theoretical solutions of positing that individuals receive utility from the act of voting itself "explains"...

The paper provides a simple theoretical model for understanding how the difference in the level of intellectual property rights protection determines trade patterns. In particular, I examine how countries ?levels of patent rights protection affect exports in industries with different degrees of...

How might bounded rationality shape decisions to spend? A field experiment verifies a theory of bounded rationality as deliberation costs that can explain findings from previous experiments on pricing in developing countries. The model predicts that (1) eliminating deliberation costs will...

The severe world-wide recession of 2008-09 has focused attention on the role of asset-price bubbles in exacerbating economic instability in capitalist economies. The boom in house prices in the United States from 2000 through 2006 is a case in point. According to the Case-Shiller 20-city index,...

New goods play a central role in many trade and growth models. We use detailed trade and firm-level data from a large developing economy - India - to investigate the relationship between declines in trade costs, the imports of intermediate inputs and domestic firm product scope. We estimate...

A long literature in empirical finance has isolated both a value and a small-capitalization effect in asset pricing. This study confirms the existence of these style effects both in new types of equity indexes and in the stocks of Chinese companies traded in international markets. We then...

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...