People are heterogenous in the skills by which they turn eort into output. A central question in normative public economics is how to redistribute resources from more- to less-skilled individuals eciently. In addition to income taxation, this paper considers another policy tool of redistribution...

Software piracy remains rampant despite the successful measures the Hong Kong government has taken to eradicate street piracy. This is because most people prefer substituting a counterfeit copy of a software CD (street piracy) with an illegal download of the software (Internet piracy). To...

Polygyny rates are higher in Western Africa than in Eastern Africa. The African slave trades explain this difference. More male slaves were exported in the trans-Atlantic slave trades from Western Africa, while more female slaves were exported in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea slave trades from...

Do homeowners prefer living in an area with a more equal distribution of income? We answer this question by estimating a semi-parametric hedonic pricing model for about 90,000 housing units transacted in Hong Kong between 2005 and 2006. We first identify a hedonic price function by locally...

Can the slave trade explain Africa's propensity for conflict? Using variation in slave exports driven by the interaction between foreign demand shocks and heterogeneity in trade costs, we show that the slave trade increased conflict propensities in pre-colonial Africa and that this effect has...

Music piracy is a double-edged sword for the music industry. On the one hand, it hurts record sales. On the other hand, it increases sales of its complements. To quantify the effect of music piracy, I construct a unique survey data set and use a Bayesian method to estimate the demand for music...

We construct a structural model that allows us to jointly estimate the demand for smartphones and paid apps using a Bayesian approach. Our data comes from more than 500 college students in Hong Kong and Shanghai. We find that the moral cost rather than the monetary cost of jailbreaking...

This paper documents the variation in economic characteristics across voyages during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Dispersion in output, measured as slaves disembarked, is highest across Portuguese voyages, lower across French voyages, and lowest across British voyages. We use a structural...

Hollywood blockbusters are usually released in the U.S. before other foreign markets. The release gaps have declined significantly over time and varied greatly across countries. While movie piracy has been suggested as an important determinant for the release gap decision of distributors, theory...

We use slave voyage data from 18th century Great Britain and France to answer two questions: 1) How important was the managerial quality of owners and captains in slave trading? and 2) What explains the substantial variation in managerial quality? Utilizing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade...