Affordable higher education is, and has been, a key element of social policy in the United States with broad bipartisan support. Financial aid has substantially increased the number of people who complete university - generally thought to be a good thing. We show, however, that making education...

Affordable higher education is, and has been, a key element of social policy in the United States with broad bipartisan support. Financial aid has substantially increased the number of people who complete university—generally thought to be a good thing. We show, however, that making education...

We present a model to address in a unified manner four ways in which a monopolist can interfere with secondary markets. In the model, consumers have heterogeneous valuations for quality so that used-good markets play an allocative role. Our results are the following: (1) In contrast to Swan's...

Since World War II, the United States government has made improved access to higher education a priority. This effort has substantially increased the number of people who complete college - generally thought to be a good thing. We show, however, that such policies can actually increase income...

This paper develops a model of nonlinear pricing of storable goods. We show that storability imposes novel constraints on a monopolist's ability to extract surplus. We then show that the attempt to relax these constraints can generate cyclical patterns in pricing and sales, even when consumers...

We document the evolution of productivity in a steel mini mill with fixed capital, producing an unchanged product with Leontief technology working 24/7. Despite?almost?unchanged production conditions, output doubled within the sample period (12 years). We decompose the gains into downtime...

We discuss a class of markets for durable goods where efficiency (or approximate efficiency) is obtained despite the presence of information asymmetries. In the model, the number of times a good has changed hands (the vintage of the good) is an accurate signal of its quality, each consumer...