Gary Becker's contribution to labor economics can be highlighted by contrast to his predecessors and critics. Human capital analysis was not much developed before Becker, although the concept was recognized by such prominent figures as Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, and John Bates Clark....

We characterize the set of solutions for the many-to- many matching problem with quotas using centralized and decentralized mechanisms. Decentralized mechanism is a simple bargaining game in which courses proposes to the students they want and students choose the most preferred courses from the...

Context: Despite governmental and international failures, concession firms in Liberia helped to prevent Ebola during the 2014-2015 epidemic. This essay explains the conditions under which these firms responded to the epidemic and helped to mitigate its spread. Focus is placed on the extent to...

What is the place of political parties within a democratic system of political economy? Parties are often described as intermediaries that lubricate the political process by facilitating the matching of voter preferences with candidate positions. This line of analysis flows from a bi-planar...

We report data from double-auction experiments in China and the U.S. using groups of exclusively females, exclusively males and mixed gender participants. We find that female groups in China generate price bubbles statistically identical to those produced by exclusively male groups in both China...

This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a...

There are many instances in nature of animals having a form of property rights, a respect for mine and thine. This paper addresses the question of how a norm of respecting property rights can emerge within a group of individuals without access to third party enforcement. Building upon work in...

Should projects funded with taxpayer money be discounted at a lower rate than privately funded projects? I analyze the discount rate applied to long-term cash flows in public (in-house) versus private (contracting out) provision of public goods subject to regulatory burdens. I develop a model...

The gender composition of teams, and the way it impacts economic outcomes, has attracted increasing attention in the media and the economics literature. Nonetheless, past research has left open the question of how a group's gender composition impacts group performance. In this paper, we propose...

This paper reviews the economic literature on epidemiology, explores the collective action problem associated with disease prevention, and highlights the diverse formal and informal institutions that encourage preventative behavior. Within institutions of private sector firms, liability law, and...