While much is known about the impacts prices and tobacco control policies have on smoking participation and frequency of cigarette use, little is known about their impacts on smoking cessation. This paper addresses the dynamics of smoking cessation using longitudinal data on young adults from...

The initial banking crisis of the Great Depression has been the subject of debate. Some scholars believe a contagious panic spread among financial institutions. Others argue that suspensions surged because fundamentals, such as losses on loans, drove banks out of business. This paper nests those...

We develop a dynamic model of transitions in and out of employment. A worker finds a job at an optimal stopping time, when a Brownian motion with drift hits a barrier. This implies that the duration of each worker's jobless spells has an inverse Gaussian distribution. We allow for arbitrary...

This paper considers models for unobservables in duration models. It demonstrates how cross-section and time-series variation in regressors facilitates identification of single-spell, competing risks and multiple spell duration models. We also demonstrate the limited value of traditional...

We give a thorough analytic characterization of a large class of sticky-price models where the firm’s price setting behavior is described by a generalized hazard function. Such a function provides a tractable description of the firm’s price setting behavior and allows for a vast variety of...

We present a model of endogenous institutional change that rationalizes reforms that have taken place in the context of economic crisis and drastic political change. Most of the reforms have been initiated by powerholders, even though they have ended worse off relative to the status quo. The...

During the period 1929-34 a campaign forcing the repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans was carried out in the U.S. by states and local authorities. The claim of politicians at the time was that repatriations would reduce local unemployment and give jobs to Americans, alleviating the...