This paper uses a new dataset on child-adoption matching to estimate the preferences of potential adoptive parents over US-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption. We identify significant preferences favoring girls and against African American children put up for adoption. These...

This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against...

This paper uses a new data set on child-adoption matching to estimate the preferences of potential adoptive parents over U.S.-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption. We identify significant preferences favoring girls and unborn children close to birth, and against African-American...

This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against...

The restructuring of a bankrupt company often entails the sale of such company. This paper suggests a way to sell the company that maximizes the creditors 91% proceeds. The key to this proposal is the option left to the creditors to retain a fraction of the shares of the company. Indeed, by...

The restructuring of a bankrupt company often entails a change of control. By efficiency of a bankruptcy procedure it is usually meant that the control is allocated into the hands of those who can maximize its value. In this paper we focus instead on how to allocate control with a procedure that...

This paper suggests a framework to analyze the efficiency properties of bankruptcy procedures, distinguishing between ex-ante and ex-post efficiency. Ex-post efficiency consists in maximizing the ex-post value of the insolvent firm, whereas ex-ante efficiency consists in maximizing the proceeds...

We measure the impact of a drastic new technology for producing steel--the minimill--on industry-wide productivity in the US steel industry, using unique plant-level data between 1963 and 2002. The sharp increase in the industry's productivity is linked to this new technology through two...

Plant level productivity in the ready-mix concrete sector is highly dispersed, whereby a plant in the 90th percentile of the distribution produces twice the value added than a plant in the 10th percentile. Is the magnitude of this dispersion real or simply an artifact of mea- surement error?...