In many cities, restaurants and retail establishments are spatially concentrated. Economists have long recognized the presence of demand externalities that arise from spatial agglomeration as a possible explanation, but empirically identifying this type of spillovers has proven difficult. We...

"Changes in technologies for reproducing and redistributing digital goods (e.g., music, movies, software, books) have dramatically affected profitability of these goods, and raised concerns for future development of socially valuable digital products. However, broader illegitimate distribution...

Economists have long been puzzled by event-ticket underpricing: underpricing both reduces revenue and encourages socially wasteful rent-seeking by ticket brokers. This paper studies the introduction of auctions into this market by Ticketmaster. We first show theoretically that Ticketmaster's...

This paper studies the identification problem in infinite horizon Markovian games and proposes a generally applicable estimation method. Every period firms simultaneously select an action from a finite set. We characterize the set of Markov equilibria. Period profits are a linear function of...

We present a structural model of firm growth, learning, and survival and consider its identification and estimation. In the model, entrepreneurs have private and possibly error-ridden observations of persistent and transitory shocks to profit. We demonstrate that the model's parameters can be...

We examine an untested hypothesis that posits that null results in early studies examining the economic impacts of smoking bans were driven by sample selection. Early adopters could better absorb the shock of bans, but among worse selected late adopters bans would adversely impact bars and...

Can open tournaments improve the quality of city services? The proliferation of big data makes it possible to use predictive analytics to better target services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities...

This paper examines the role of repetition in government regulation using Florida restaurant inspection data from 2003 to 2010. In the raw data, inspectors new to inspected restaurants tend to report 27% more violations than repeat inspectors. After ruling out regulatory capture and endogenous...

We study the effects of receipts that include personalized ordering suggestions designed to reduce fat and calorie consumption on purchasing behavior at a restaurant chain. We find that customers, in the aggregate, made most of the item substitutions that were encouraged by the messages, such as...

In this article, we show that a small innovation in inspection technology can make substantial differences in inspection outcomes. For restaurant hygiene inspections, the state of Florida has introduced a handheld electronic device, the portable digital assistant (PDA), which reminds inspectors...