Throughout the postwar era until 1995 labor productivity grew faster in Europe than in the United States. Since 1995, productivity growth in the EU-15 has slowed while that in the United States has accelerated. But Europe's productivity growth slowdown was largely offset by faster growth in...

Affirmative Action is not only supposed to help move minorities and females into employment, it is also supposed to help move them up the job ladder, and it is this second goal that is perhaps the more controversial. Studies of Affirmative Action during thel ate 1960's and early 1910's found it...

Using comparable data for 24 countries since the 1970s, we document gender convergence in schooling, employment and earnings, marriage delay and the accompanying decline in fertility, and the large remaining gaps in labor market outcomes, especially among parents. A model of time allocation...

What causes adverse policing outcomes, such as excessive uses of force and unnecessary arrests? Prevailing explanations focus on problematic officers or deficient regulations and oversight. Here, we introduce a new, overlooked perspective. We suggest that the cognitive demands inherent in...

We develop a real options model of R&D valuation, which takes into account the uncertainty in the quality of the research output, the time and cost to completion, and the market demand for the R&D output. The model is then applied to study the problem of pharmaceutical under-investment in R&D...

How can we allow patent examiners to effectively distinguish between patentable and unpatentable inventions, without slowing the process to a crawl or wasting a bunch of money? This essay reviews the recent literature and considers a number of proposals and their limitations. It concludes that...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...

This paper models complexity in social programs as a byproduct of efforts to screen between deserving and undeserving applicants. While a more rigorous screening technology may have desirable effects on targeting efficiency, the associated complexity introduces transaction costs into the...

I explore the equilibrium value implications of economic models that incorporate reactions to a stochastic environment. I propose a dynamic value decomposition (DVD) designed to distinguish components of an underlying economic model that influence values over long horizons from components that...

I argue for thinking of program evaluation as a decision problem. In the context of California's GAIN experiment (a randomized trial of a welfare-to-work alternative to AFDC), I show that GAIN first-order stochastically dominates AFDC when considering the choice between the treatment and control...