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William S. Vickrey
(Department of Economics, 2005)
Entry for William Vickrey, prepared for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
Brand Familiarity and Product Knowledge in Customization
(Department of Economics, 2009)
This paper challenges the assumption commonly used in the theoretical literature
on customization that consumers always get their ideal varieties when they purchase a customized product. The author adopts Hotelling's ...
Exact FGLS Asymptotics for MA Errors
(Department of Economics, 2004)
We show under very parsimonious assumptions that FGLS and GLS are asymptotically equivalent when errors follow an invertible MA(1) process. Although the linear regression model with MA errors has been studied for many ...
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 key assumption is a basic...
Does a Seller Really Want Another Bidder?
(Department of Economics, 2007)
Jeremy I. Bulow and Paul D. Klemperer (AER, 1996) argue that the usual concerns of auction design miss the big picture, and show that a simple English auction without a reserve price and N + 1 bidders attains expected ...
Increasing Outer Risk
(Department of Economics, 2004)
Recent empirical research has established that the distributions of a wide range of economic variables are kurtotic in that they have higher peak(s) in the neighborhood of the mean and greater elongation in the tails than the normal distribution...
Ex-Post Full Surplus Extraction, Straightforwardly
(Department of Economics, 2005)
Consider an estimate of the common value of an auctioned asset that is symmetric in the bidders' types. Such an estimate can be represented solely in terms of the order statistics of those types. This representation forms ...
Estimating the Impact of State Policies and Institutions with Mixed-Level Data
(Department of Economics, 2006)
clustered standard errors as a more straightforward, feasible approach, especially when working with large datasets or many cross-level interactions, our purpose in this Practical Researcher piece is to draw attention to the issue of clustering in state...
When Do Input Prices Matter For Make-Or-Buy Decisions?
(Department of Economics, 2007)
informationally-demanding way to ensure efficient make-or-buy decisions is to price inputs at marginal cost. The extent to which input prices can depart from marginal cost while still inducing efficient make-or-buy decisions depends on the relative efficiency...
An Experimental Study of the Effects of Inequality and Relative Deprivation on Trusting Behavior
(Department of Economics, 2005)
Several non-experimental studies report that income inequality and other forms of population-based heterogeneity reduce levels of trust in society. However, recent work by Glaeser et al. (2000) calls into question the reliability of widely used...
Did the Devil Make Them Do It? The Effects of Religion in Public Goods and Trust Games*
(Department of Economics, 2008)
We test whether religious affiliation and participation in religious services are associated with behavior in public goods and trust games. Overall, religious affiliation is unrelated to individual behavior. However, we ...
Do Liberals Play Nice? The Effects of Party and Political Ideology in Public Goods and Trust Games
(Department of Economics, 2004)
We test the conventional wisdom that political ideology is associated with generosity or compassion by comparing the behavior of experimental subjects in public goods or trust games. We find that self-described liberals ...
Estate and Capital Gains Taxation: Efficiency and Political Economy Considerations
(Department of Economics, 2004)
In this paper a simple dynastic overlapping-generations model with homogeneous agents is used to analyze the optimal use of capital income tax, labor income tax and estate tax. The results of this analysis add to the conventional wisdom about...
Optimal Commodity Taxation When Land and Structures Must Be Taxed at the Same Rate
(Department of Economics, 2005)
We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California's high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing ...
How Do States Formulate Medicaid and SCHIP Policy? Economic and Political Determinants of State Eligibility Levels
(Department of Economics, 2009)
We exploit the existence of substantial variation in state policies toward public health insurance for children between 1990 and 2002 to estimate the economic and political determinants of state eligibility levels. Controlling for state and year...
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 follow up the Rudebusch...
Asymmetric Information and Bank Runs
(Department of Economics, 2007)
. In this paper, I extend the analysis of panic-based runs to include an asymmetric-information, extrinsic randomizing device. Depositors observe different, but correlated, signals on the stability of the bank. I find that if the signals that depositors obtain...
The Effects of Campaign Finance Laws on Turnout, 1950-2000
(Department of Economics, 2006)
Scholars have proposed many routes by which campaign finance laws may impact turnout. For instance, laws restricting campaign spending may decrease mobilization, resulting in lower turnout. Alternatively, such laws might ...
State Social Capital and Individual Health Status
(Department of Economics, 2004)
Recent studies have found that two state-level measures of social capital, average levels of civic participation and trust, are associated with improvements in individual health status. In this study we employ these measures, ...
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 employment experiences...