Data on housing costs and rental markets for the early modern period are notoriously scarce. We build a database of rent paid on 183 properties belonging to the Cathedral Chapter of Toledo between 1489 and 1600. Using detailed information on location, physical characteristics of the property,...

The paper considers some of the problems associated with the indirectly measured components of financial service outputs in the System of National Accounts (SNA), termed FISIM (Financial Intermediation Services Indirectly Measured). The paper characterizes FISIM by a user cost and supplier...

The first part of the paper reviews the methodology developed by Sydney Afriat for determining whether a finite set of price and quantity data are consistent with utility maximizing behavior by a consumer. Some extensions of his basic model to models of consumer behavior where the structure of...

Inventors and users of technology often enter into cooperative agreements for sharing their intellectual property in order to implement a standard or to avoid costly infringement litigation. Over the past two decades, U.S. antitrust authorities have viewed pooling arrangements that integrate...

Abstract Suppose that the econometrician is interested in comparing two misspecified moment restriction models, where the comparison is performed in terms of some chosen measure of fit. This paper is concerned with describing an optimal test of the Vuong (1989) and Rivers and Vuong (2002) type...

We study the optimal auction problem with participation costs in the symmetric independent private values setting, where bidders know their valuations when they make independent participation decisions. After characterizing the optimal auction in terms of participation cutoffs, we provide an...

I study a multi-player mechanism design problem where the players are able to collude. I characterize the extent that the principal can link the compensation level of one of these players to the production performance of the other. I use this characterization result to identify the optimal...

The paper explains new methodology that was used in the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP) that compared the relative price levels and GDP levels across 146 countries. In this round of the ICP, the world was divided into 6 regions: OECD, CIS, Africa, South America, Asia Pacific and West...

This paper shows that (firm-level) competition has a positive impact on (individual-level) trust. Using US states’ banking de-regulation from the mid 1970s, we first show that an increase in competition had a causal impact on trust, measured in the General Social Survey (GSS). We develop...

We use a large, rich Canadian micro-level dataset to examine the channels through which family socio-economic status and unobservable characteristics affect children's decisions to drop out of high school. First, we document the strength of observable socio-economic factors: our data suggest...