This paper investigates the welfare costs of urban traffic by considering its implications on good-level prices. Using price data for 40 products from 70 cities (covering 47 countries) for multiple years, the estimation results suggest that the elasticity of good-level prices with respect to the...

The strongest predictor of changes in the Fed Funds rate in the period 1982–2008 was the layoff rate. That fact is puzzling from the perspective of representative-agent models of the economy, which imply that the welfare gains of stabilizing employment fluctuations are small. This paper...

The author investigates the welfare cost of business cycles in an economy where households have heterogeneous trading technologies. In an economy with aggregate risk, the different portfolio choices induced by heterogeneous trading technologies lead to a larger consumption inequality in...

I show that British electricity tariffs create substantial welfare loss, equivalent to between six and eighteen percent of domestic consumption value. Losses are greater than unpriced distributional and environmental counter effects. Expected technological change will increase this welfare loss....

We estimate the marginal external congestion cost of motor-vehicle travel for Rome, Italy, using a methodology that accounts for hypercongestion (a situation where congestion decreases a road’s throughput). We show that the external cost – even when roads are not hypercongested...

We study trading in over-the-counter (OTC) markets where agents have heterogeneous and private valuations for assets. We develop a quantitative model in which assets are issued through a primary market and then traded in a secondary OTC market. Then we use data on the US municipal bond market to...

This paper proposes a simple index of the welfare significance of uncertainty in the public goods resulting as policy outcomes. Our measure is the ex ante compensation an individual would require to accept an uncertain level of service compared to receiving the expected value of the distribution...

We study the relative benefits of taxation versus market structure regulations for distilled spirits. One popular regulation, called post and hold, helps wholesalers set collusive prices as the competitive equilibrium of a single period game. Assembling new datasets of wholesale and retail...

To mitigate adverse selection in insurance markets, individuals are often mandated to buy at least a baseline plan, but may choose to opt into a premium plan. In some markets, such as US health exchanges, each plan is responsible for the full expenses of those who buy it (“total pricing”)....

Using plausibly exogenous variations in the ethnicity-specific assigned birth quotas and different fertility penalties across Chinese provinces over time, we provide new evidence for the transferable utility model by showing how China's One-Child Policy induced a significantly higher unmarried...