We study the social welfare implications of early termination fees in the US wireless industry. It is hypothesized that the elimination of long-term contracts at the end of 2015 was a transition from one market equilibrium to another. We use a theoretical model to illustrate that the endogenous...

This paper develops and estimates a model of firm-level fixed capital investment when firms face borrowing constraints. Dynamically optimal investment functions are derived for the firms with and without financial constraints. These policy functions are then used to construct the likelihood of...

Modeling and estimating persistent discrete data can be challenging. In this paper, we use an autoregressive panel probit model where the autocorrelation in the discrete variable is driven by the autocorrelation in the latent variable. In such a non-linear model, the autocorrelation in an...

This paper shows that real effective exchange rate (REER) regressions, the standard approach for estimating the response of aggregate exports to exchange rate changes, imply biased estimates of the underlying elasticities. We provide a new aggregate regression specification that is consistent...

Given that China accounts for about half of global copper consumption, it is reasonable to expect that any significant change in Chinese copper consumption will have an impact on the global market. This paper examines the likely impact of the rebalancing of the Chinese economy on its copper...

The selection of upper order statistics in tail estimation is notoriously difficult. Methods that are based on asymptotic arguments, like minimizing the asymptotic MSE, do not perform well in finite samples. Here, we advance a data-driven method that minimizes the maximum distance between the...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) resolves insolvent banks using an auction process in which bidding is multidimensional and the rule used to evaluate bids along the different dimensions is proprietary. Uncertainty about the scoring rule leads banks to simultaneously submit...

The market for payment cards is inherently two sided. Consumers benefit from increased merchant acceptance of payment cards and vice versa. To quantify the interdependence of consumer and merchants or network externalities, we construct and estimate a structural two-sided model of a payment...

We document a substantial positive correlation of employment status between mothers and their children in the United States, linking data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults. After controlling for ability, education and wealth, a...

Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows...