The Great Migration–the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West–was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth...

Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation: employees are "rational cheaters," who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs. We investigate the "rational cheater model" by observing...

We analyze the effect of search frictions in the market for commercial health insurance. Frictions increase insurance premiums (enough to transfer 13.2 percent of consumer surplus from fully insured employer groups to insurers—approximately $34.4 billion in 1997); and increase insurance...

A theoretical and computational model with tax-financed, tuition-free public schools and competitive, tuition-financed private schools is developed. Students differ by ability and income. Achievement depends on own ability and on peers' abilities. Equilibrium has a strict hierarchy of school...

Dating to the classic works of Alonso, Mills, and Muth, the production function for housing has played a central role in urban economics and local public finance. This paper provides a new flexible approach for estimating the housing production function which treats housing quantities and prices...