Proposed "delinking" legislation would prohibit Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) from being remunerated based on the rebates and discounts they negotiate for drug insurance plans serving Medicare beneficiaries. This policy would significantly change drug pricing and utilization and shift...

Prices are regulated in many markets, ranging from healthcare to labor to telecommunications. This paper reinterprets the variables in the basic supply-demand model so that both product-definition and quantity are equilibrium outcomes. Specifically, compliance with price controls is achieved by...

A popular view about social security, dating back to its early days of inception, is that it is a means for young, unemployed workers to 'purchase' jobs from older, employed workers. The question we ask is: Can social security, by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the...

Empirical distributions of election margins are computing using data on U.S. Congressional and state legislator election returns. We present some of the first empirical calculations of the frequency of close elections, showing that one of every 100,000 votes cast in U.S. elections, and one of...

I suggest that the aggregate implications of indivisible labor are few, and subtle. First, I model behavior in an 'indivisible labor' environment like those of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992) and show that aggregate behavior in...

Do studies of time use interfere too much in the lives of the subjects? As a result are those who agree to participate a biased sample of the population? We examine the characteristics of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) adolescent sample from the Alfred P. Sloan Study of Youth and Social...

A common view in public finance is that there is an efficiency-redistribution tradeoff in which distortions are tolerated in order to redistribute income. However, the fact that so much public- and private redistributive activity involves in-kind transfers rather than cash may be indicative of...

It has long been suggested that trade unions take actions and favor public policies that reduce the quantity of labor so that union members might enjoy greater labor incomes. Can this explain the prevalence of generous public pension programs inducing retirement? I suggest not, by formalizing...

Does Social Security redistribute across cohorts? Or is it a program for purchasing the jobs' of the elderly? I formalize both models, showing how they have some predictions in common the most important of which is that generational accounts have the appearance of a pyramid scheme.' I also...

Some of the important implications of the parental investment model of intergenerational mobility have been derived under the assumption that parental income is the main source of heterogeneity. We explicitly model the variability and inheritability of innate' earnings ability and the...