We still know very little about the incentives of police, often due to data constraints and the underlying policy environment. Using geocoded crime data and a novel source of within-city spatial and temporal variation in punishment severity, I am able to shed light on enforcement behavior. I...

Using a novel geospatial panel combined with data from the 2015 American Community Survey (ACS), we investigate the effect of topography – altitude and terrain unevenness – on income segregation at the neighborhood level. Specifically, we perform large-scale counterfactual simulations by...

Until the modernizing reforms of the 19th century, the Islamic waqf played a massive role in the economy of the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa. Formally, it was a trust founded by an individual; income from the endowed assets financed designated services in perpetuity. The largest...

I provide a selective review of recent developments in financial econometrics related to measuring, modeling, forecasting and pricing “good” and “bad” volatilities based on realized variation type measures constructed from high-frequency intraday data. An especially appealing feature of...

We develop a framework for natural resource valuation that directly addresses the fundamental collective action problem in environmental protection. Our framework uses the lessons of behavioral economics to create values that individual decision makers find credible and relatable, in addition to...

This paper solves the canonical dynamic rational inattention problem of Sims (2003) by formulating it in the frequency domain. The solution complements and extends existing results, which have been derived in the time domain. The paper provides a simple algorithm that quickly and accurately...

Agents have foresight when they receive information about a random process above and beyond the information contained in its current and past history. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic measure of the quantity of foresight in an information structure, and show how to separate...

Andrew Lo in his book, Adaptive Markets, advocates an investment product that he names a “dynamic index.” He has facilitated the operation of a variant of this dynamic indexation, “dynamic allocation,” by founding a company, AlphaSimplex. Another dynamic investment is GMO’s Benchmark...

We study the role of global trade imbalances in shaping the adjustment dynamics in response to trade shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multi-country, multi-sector model of trade with two key ingredients: (a) Consumption-saving decisions in each country commanded by...