This is a discussion of Ratfai (2007), presented at the 2007 Macroeconomics Workshop of the Rimini Center for Economic Analysis on "The Macroeconomics of Price Setting," May 10-11, 2007, University of Bologna, Rimini, Italy.

We study the economic structure of the life of Harry Potter and his co-actors as an economic model that governs the social organization of their economic activities. Our goal is to study and understand the internal consistency of the Potterian economic model and explore the relationships between...

There is evidence that 9-ending prices are more common and more rigid than other prices. We use data from three sources: a laboratory experiment, a field study, and a large US supermarket chain, to study the cognitive underpinning and the ensuing asymmetry in rigidity associated with 9-ending...

We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers—a very explicit form of an implicit contract. The...

If producers have more information than consumers about goods’ attributes, then they may use non-price (rather than price) adjustment mechanisms and, consequently, the market may reach a new equilibrium even if prices don't change. We study a situation where producers adjust the quantity per...

This is a discussion of the manuscript "Local News Online: Aggregators, Geo-Targeting and the Market for Local News" by L. George and C. Hogendorn, presented at the 11th Workshop on Media Economics, which was held at the Recanati Business School, Tel-Aviv University, October 9-10, 2013.

This is a discussion of "Change at the Checkout: Tracing the Impact of a Process Innovation" by Emek Basker, at the December 24, 2013 Israeli I.O. Day at Tel-Aviv University.

Higgins et al. (2006) report several statistically significant partial correlates with U.S. per capita income growth. However, Levine and Renelt (1992) demonstrate that such correlations are hardly ever robust to changing the combination of conditioning variables included. We ask whether the...

We use Mississippi county-level data on (per capita) income and the percentages of populations that are Black (henceforth "Black") to examine the relationship between race and economic growth. The analysis is also conditioned on 40 other economic and socio-demographic variables. Given a negative...

In this paper we outline (i) why sigma-convergence may not accompany beta-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of beta-convergence in the U.S., and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that sigma-convergence cannot be detected at the...