We study determinants of market organization of local public services by an empiricalexamination of one of the most visible municipal services, residential waste management. Usinga multinomial logit model and data for 1,000 U.S. communities, we explore the effect of politicalinfluence, voter...

We consider a health authority seeking to allocate annual budgets optimally over time to minimize the discounted social cost of infection(s) evolving in a finite set of R = 2 groups. This optimization problem is challenging, since as is well known, the standard epidemiological model describing...

We show that oil production from existing wells in Texas does not respond to price incentives. Drilling activity and costs, however, do respond strongly to prices. To explain these facts, we reformulate Hotelling's (1931) classic model of exhaustible resource extraction as a drilling problem:...

We consider a health authority seeking to allocate annual budgets optimally over time to minimize the discounted social cost of infection(s) evolving in a finite set of groups. This optimization problem is challenging since the standard SIS epidemiological model describing the spread of the...

We document a strong correlation in the brand of automobile chosen by parents and their adult children, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. This correlation could represent transmission of brand preferences across generations, or it could result from correlation in family...

Ethanol and methyl-tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) were close substitutes in the gasoline additives market until MTBE was banned due to the concerns about groundwater contamination, leading to a sudden and dramatic substitution toward ethanol as an alternative oxygenate and octane-booster. We use...

This paper estimates household preferences for ethanol (E85) as a gasoline (E10) substitute. I develop a theoretical model linking the shape of the ethanol demand curve to the underlying distribution among households of willingness to pay for ethanol. I estimate the model using instrumental...