Economists have devoted substantial attention to firms’ supply of variety, but little to consumers' demand for variety. Employing the framework of home production, we trace differences in demand to differences in the opportunity costs of activities, which are associated with investments in...

We take U.S. and Israeli household data on expenditures of time and goods, generate an exhaustive set of commodities that households produce/consume using them, and calculate their relative goods intensities. Leisure activities are uniformly relatively time intensive, health, travel and lodging...

We illustrate problems of measuring discrimination using elections to AEA offices. With a new econometric technique, we find female candidates have a much better than random chance of victory. This advantage is either reverse discrimination or reflects beliefs that women are more productive. The...

We link information on graduates from many cohorts to their high-school and college records and demographics to infer the impact of college major on earnings. We develop an estimator to handle potential non-response bias and identify non-response using an affinity measure--the potential...

We link ATUS 2003-04 to March CPS data and examine market work's effects on non-market activity. In a structural model fixed time costs of work generate a utility-equivalent of 8% of income to be overcome before working becomes optimizing.

Economists have devoted substantial attention to firms' supply of variety, but little to consumers' demand for variety. Employing the framework of home production, we trace differences in demand to differences in the opportunity costs of activities, associated with investments in human capital....