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Customization in an Endogenous-Timing Game with Vertical Differentiation
(Department of Economics, 2008)
We study customization in a duopoly game in which the firms' products have different qualities. Whether customization choices are made simultaneously or sequentially is endogenously determined. Specifically, the customization ...
Welfare to Temporary Work: Implications for Labor Market Outcomes
(Department of Economics, 2003)
We explore the effects of temporary help employment on welfare recipients' subsequent employment and welfare dynamics. We find that any employment-in temporary help services or other sectors-yields substantial benefits ...
The Welfare Caseload, Economics Growth and Welfare-to-Work Policies: An Analysis of Five Urban Areas
(Department of Economics, 2000)
This paper uses quarterly data on AFDC (later TANF) recipients in five major urban areas to examine the relative importance of policy reform and economic conditions in explaining the dynamics of the welfare caseload and ...
The Effect of Monetary Policy on Economic Output
(Department of Economics, 2003)
There is substantial research effort devoted to identifying a sufficient statistic for monetary policy. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the scope of the on-going investigation along three dimensions. First, we ...
Income and Substitution Effects of Increases in Risk when Payoffs are Linear in the Random Variable
(Department of Economics, 2000)
Payoff functions that are linear in the random variable arise in a wide variety of decision models under uncertainty. The decomposition of the effect of increased risk on decisions into income and substitution terms for ...
Inequality, Nonhomothetic Preferences, And Trade: A Gravity Approach
(Department of Economics, 2006)
We construct the first direct classification of goods as luxuries or necessities that is compatible with international trade data. We then use it to test an idea that has not been tested directly in the literature: countries' ...
Supply Constraints and Housing Prices
(Department of Economics, 2006)
This paper analyzes the effects of land use constraints on housing prices. We provide a new framework for evaluating policy when mobility across regions is allowed but limited. A key result is that loosening regulatory ...
Competing or Collaborating Siblings? Industrial and Trade Policies in India
(Department of Economics, 2006)
This paper investigates the link between economic de-regulation-domestic as well as trade de-regulation-and firm-level productivity using two unique data sets. We use the industrial licensing regime in India (operating ...
Incentive Schemes in Peer-to-Peer Networks
(Department of Economics, 2008)
In this paper we use mechanism design approach to find the optimal file-sharing mechanism in a peer-to-peer network. This mechanism improves upon existing incentive schemes. In particular, we show that peer-approved scheme ...
Information Variability Impacts in Auctions
(Department of Economics, 2009)
A wide variety of auction models exhibit close relationships between the winner's expected profit and the expected difference between the highest and second-highest order statistics of bidders' information, and between ...
The Impact of Welfare Reform on Leaver Characteristics, Employment and Recidivism: An Analysis of Maryland and Missouri
(Department of Economics, 2007)
State and federal reforms of the 1990s transformed the U.S. cash assistance program for single parents and their children. Despite an extensive literature examining these changes and their impacts, there have been few ...
Testing the Bounds: Empirical Behavior of Target Zone Fundamentals
(Department of Economics, 2009)
Standard target zone exchange rate models are based on nonlinear functions of an unobserved economic fundamental, which is assumed to be bounded, similarly to the target zone exchange rates themselves. A violation of this ...
Asymmetric Information and Bank Runs
(Department of Economics, 2007)
It is known that sunspots can trigger panic-based bank runs and that the optimal banking contract can tolerate panic-based runs. The existing literature assumes that these sunspots are based on a publicly observed, extrinsic ...
Welfare and Work in the 1990s: Experiences in Six Cities
(Department of Economics, 2004)
Our study examines the dynamic structure of welfare participation and the labor market involvement of recipients starting in the early 1990s and extending through 1999 in the core counties containing six major urban areas: ...
TELRIC Pricing with Vintage Capital
(Department of Economics, 2001)
This paper studies the effect of technical progress on competitive equilibrium prices in a formal dynamic setting that includes the dynamic effects of business income taxes. The model is designed to facilitate comparison ...
A Role for Sunspots in Explaining Endogenous Fluctutations in Illegal Immigration
(Department of Economics, 2003)
In this paper we provide an alternative explanation for why illegal immigration can exhibit substantial fluctuations despite a constant wage gap. We develop a model economy in which migrants make decisions in the face of ...
Alternative Bayesian Estimators for Vector-Autoregressive Models
(Department of Economics, 2002)
This paper compares frequentist risks of several Bayesian estimators of the VAR lag parameters and covariance matrix under alternative priors. With the constant prior on the VAR lag parameters, the asymmetric LINEX estimator ...
Price Uncertainty and Consumer Welfare in an Intertemporal Setting
(Department of Economics, 2000)
In this paper we examine how increases in intertemporal price uncertainty affect the welfare of a consumer. In the preference structure of the consumer the coefficient of relative risk aversion and the elasticity of ...
On the Use of the Inflation Tax when Non-Distortionary Taxes are Available
(Department of Economics, 2000)
If a inflation tax base has been created via a fixed reserve requirement, will a benevolent government use the inflation tax as a (partial) source of revenue even though a non-distortionary revenue source is available? ...
Crony Capitalism and Financial System Stability
(Department of Economics, 2001)
With the Asian financial crises, people identified crony relationships as the ultimate cause of bank instability. We examine the issue of crony capitalism in the context of model economy in which cronies are a class of ...