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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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' ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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? ...

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 ...